News

In place of the general meeting of BLS this February, there will be a workshop on the topic of countability distinctions. Here is the call for papers:

BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions

08-Feb-2019 - 09-Feb-2019 

Countability distinctions and mass nouns are a topic of long-standing interest in semantics, grammar, and the philosophy and psychology of language. Recent work on this topic has pushed our understanding forward in three separate but related directions: 

1. There is more than one type of countability distinction relevant to natural language: nouns like furniture are different from nouns like sand both in how quantity judgments are carried out (Barner and Snedeker 2005) and in which types of adjectival modification are possible (Rothstein 2010, Schwarzschild 2011). 
2. A semantics for mass nouns can be given that captures the many grammatical parallels between water and furniture without ascribing the same status to the minimal elements in their denotations (Chierchia 2010, Landman 2011). 
3. The crosslinguistic picture on countability distinctions is more nuanced than originally thought: there are languages where all nouns combine with numerals in apparently similar ways (Lima 2014, Deal 2017), and in languages where classifiers are necessary to mediate noun-numeral combinations, there nevertheless exist countability-related distinctions among nouns diagnosable by quantity judgments and adjective distribution (Cheung, Li, and Barner 2010, Rothstein 2010). 

For this workshop, held in place of the general meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, we invite submissions for talks on all aspects of countability distinctions in natural language. Submissions may address questions including, though not limited to, the following: 

- What are the ways in which countability distinctions are manifested in particular languages? 
- Are morphosyntactic differences in the distribution of count versus mass nouns traceable directly to their semantics, or to their syntax, or to both? 
- What do countability distinctions show us about nominal semantics? What do they teach us about nominal syntax? 
- How should we choose among theories of mass noun semantics (or syntax) currently on the market? 
- Are countability distinctions a language universal? Which distinctions are subject to variation (if any), and which (if any) are not? 
- How are countability distinctions represented psychologically, and acquired by children? 

Invited speakers (confirmed): 
David Barner (UC San Diego) 
Suzi Lima (University of Toronto) 

Conference website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/
Contact: blsworkshop@berkeley.edu 

Organizing Committee: 
Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Paula Floro, Peter Jenks, Tyler Lemon, Line Mikkelsen, Tessa Scott, Yi-Chi Wu

Call for Papers: 

Submission deadline: November 30, 2018 

Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=blsw1

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (12-point type, Times New Roman, single line spacing, 1 inch margins) including examples and references. 

Submissions must be anonymous and are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author or two joint abstracts per author. 

Reviews and notifications of acceptance will be returned to authors by mid-December. 

The Proceedings of NELS 48 have just been published in a three-volume set. The set contains three papers by faculty and/or alumni: 

• Boris Harizanov and Line Mikkelsen, Resumption and Chain Reduction in Danish VP Left Dislocation
• Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18), Output-Output Correspondence via Agreement by Projection
• Hannah Sande (PhD '17) and Peter Jenks, Cophonologies by phase

Congrats all! 

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, October 22, with a talk by Ashwini Deo from the Ohio State University. Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled "Marathi tense marking: A window into the lexical encoding of tense meanings", and the abstract is as follows:

Partee (1973) first observed that natural language tense expressions are analogous to pronouns in that they can be interpreted indexically, anaphorically, and like bound variables. These referential (i.e. indexical+anaphoric) and non-referential interpretations of tense marking have not been yet shown to have distinct reflexes in natural language temporal expressions – i.e. no language has been claimed to lexicalize these distinctly. I argue that Marathi [mar, 71,700,000 speakers], an Indo-Aryan language of the Southern subgroup, morphosyntactically distinguishes between referential and non-referential temporal meanings. This lexicalization pattern, observed also in several other New Indo-Aryan languages, points the way to a more nuanced understanding of distinctions with respect to temporal reference in natural languages. The second part of the talk traces the diachronic emergence of this encoding pattern in the New Indo-Aryan languages, comparing it to the systems observed in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan. I tentatively suggest that the referential—non-referential contrast in the temporal domain arises due to the emergence of new present and past tense markers (auxiliaries) in a tenseless aspectually-based system.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: 

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm 
  Round robin!
• Phorum - Monday Oct 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
  Kayla Palakurthy (UCSB): The role of similarity in sound change: Variation and change in Diné affricates; Myriam Lapierre & Lev Michael (Berkeley): Nasal harmony in Tupí-Guaraní: A comparative synthesis
• Linguistics Department Colloquium- Monday Oct 15 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-5 pm
  Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz): Demonstrative pronouns and competition
• GAIL - Thursday Oct 18 -  6pm [note: talk begins at 6]
  Andrew Garrett: Yurok rhotic vowels and vowel harmony
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm 
  Susan Steele: The architecture of inflection

Fifth-year grad students Andrew Cheng and Emily Clem were each recognized by the LSA this week in connection with the upcoming annual meeting in New York City.  Andrew was named a finalist for the Five-minute Linguist event, which features short, informative, engaging, and accessible talks about linguistics research on a variety of topics. Andrew's presentation is entitled Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Emily has been named as the third place winner of this year's Student Abstract Award, recognizing "the three best abstracts submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at Annual Meeting". Emily's prize-winning abstract is entitledThe cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes. 

Congrats, Andrew and Emily!