The new deadline for abstract submission is November 18, 2016.

Anne Wienholz, Derya Nuhbalaoglu, Annika Herrmann, Nivedita Mani, Edgar Onea and Markus Steinbach from project “SignRef” are organizing the workshop “Anaphora Resolution in Sign and Spoken languages – Theoretical and Experimental Dimensions (ARISAS)” to be held at the University of Goettingen, Germany, February 20-21, 2017. The workshop’s webpage, which includes translations of the call into International Sign Language can be found here: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/call-for-papers/548659.html

Call for abstract submissions:

Linguistic fields: Syntax, (Experimental) Semantics, (Experimental) Pragmatics, Information Structure, Discourse Structure, Theoretical Linguistics, Experimental Sign Language Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics.

Invited speakers:
Petra Schumacher (University of Cologne, Germany),
Emar Maier (University of Groningen, Netherlands)

Meeting description:
One important aspect in spoken, written and signed discourse is the proper management and interpretation of discourse referents. Consequently, the resolution of co-reference has been one of the most investigated and at the same time most challenging topics in linguistic research on spoken languages. Anaphora resolution has been addressed from various perspectives such as formal and functional linguistics, psycholinguistics as well as corpus and computational linguistics. By contrast, research on anaphora resolution in sign languages is still relatively new and scarce compared to the amount of studies on spoken languages.

Since there are many different morphosyntactic, prosodic, semantic, and pragmatic factors, which play an important role in anaphora resolution, it is crucial to approach this issue from different linguistic perspectives. The potential universality and the interaction of these factors have been at the center of interest to researchers for a long time. Moreover, the modeling of anaphoric relations both within and across sentences has challenged both theoretical and functional linguists. In recent years and especially with the rise of experimental pragmatics and semantics, the principles of anaphora resolution have been revisited from an experimental and cognitive perspective. Such studies also include less investigated languages such as sign languages.

Earlier research on sign languages has shown that the anaphoric links – due to the peculiarities of the visual-gestural modality – can be established overtly in the signing space and therefore leave little space for ambiguities in anaphora resolution. However, with a semantic and pragmatic turn in sign language linguistics and a growing interest in discourse analysis, it has recently been shown that the ambiguities attested for spoken languages exist in sign languages as well. This opens a number of new questions and methodological issues for investigating anaphora in the visual-gestural modality both from theoretical as well as experimental perspectives.

This workshop combines theoretical approaches with typological and experimental ones in order to yield a better understanding of anaphoric relations across languages and language modalities. It aims at bringing together junior and senior researchers from different sub-fields of linguistics, gestural research and cognitive science working on anaphora resolution from various perspectives. We welcome submissions addressing anaphora resolution and reference tracking from formal, functional, typological and experimental perspectives in sign and spoken languages. The topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

§ Formal and functional analyses of anaphora resolution in sign and spoken languages
§ Typological descriptions of anaphora resolution across languages
§ Modality-specific and modality-independent aspects of anaphora resolution
§ Psycho- and neurolinguistic aspects of anaphora in discourse
§ Acquisition of anaphora in sign and spoken languages
§ The impact of discourse structure and perspective on anaphora resolution

The languages of the workshop are English and ASL/IS. Interpretation between English and ASL/IS will be provided.

We invite abstracts for sign/spoken presentations. Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed two pages, including examples and references. Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf- or doc-format to arisas2017@uni-goettingen.deand include your name, affiliation, the title of the abstract and the presentation type you would prefer in the body of the e-mail.

Student (poster) session abstract submission:
We invite graduate students to submit abstracts for a “Junior researchers poster session”. There will be a best-poster award for the most outstanding poster. Note that the abstracts can be only submitted either for a talk or a poster session.

New deadline for abstract submission: November 18, 2016
Notification: December 14, 2016

Contact: Derya Nuhbalaoglu arisas2017@uni-goettingen.de

On November 18th, XPrag.de members Kazuko Yatsushiro and Jack Tomlinson will give talks each at the “International Workshop on Experimental Pragmatics” at Waseda University, Japan. The workshop is jointly organized by the JSPS Germany-Japan Bilateral Joint Research Project, in which several XPrag.de members are involved (PIs: Uli Sauerland, ZAS and Yoichi Miyamoto, Osaka U.) and the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) at Waseda University. Kazuko Yatsushiro will talk on “Plural markedness across languages: Experimental evidences” and Jack Tomlinson will talk on “Lack of commitment: How speakers reduce epistemic stance and how listeners integrate this into utterance interpretation”.

The workshop “XPrag meets Historical Pragmatics” in Cologne starts today. More details can be found here!http://idsl1.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/26723.html

XPrag.de coordinator Uli Sauerland will give a talk together with Kazuko Yatsushiro (ZAS Berlin) and Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin) at THE 41st ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT to be held at George Sherman Union, Boston University, 4-6 November, 2016. On Friday 4th at 2 p.m. they will talk on „The Unmarkedness of Plural: Crosslinguistic Data”.
In addition, Uli Sauerland and Kazuko Yatsushiro will present a poster on “Conjunctive Disjunctions in Child Language: A New Account” at the poster session Friday afternoon.

XPrag.de coordinator Petra Schumacher will give a talk at the Workshop on Word Meaning to be held at University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2-3 November, 2016. She will talk on „Online composition and reconceputalization“.

There are three talks by XPrag.de members at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics to be held on October 25-26, 2016 at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

On Tuesday October 25 at 10:20-11:20, Uli Sauerland will give an invited talk on “The Syntax and Semantics of Complementizers in Teiwa”. In the afternoon at 14:30-15:10, XPrag.de associate Stephanie Solt will talk on “Proportional Comparatives and Relative Scales”.
On Wednesday October 26 at 17:50-18:30, Uli Sauerland and Kazuko Yatsushiro will give a talk on “Conjunctive Disjunctions: Evidence for the Ambiguity Theory”.

On March 3-5, 2017 the workshop “Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Presuppositions” will take place at the University of Genoa, Italy. The workshop is organized by XPrag.de associate Filippo Domanschi from project “EXPRESS”, Uli Sauerland from project “SSI” and Edgar Onea from project “ExCl”. Deadline for submissions is December 4th. More details and the call for papers can be found here!

There are two talks and a poster by XPrag.de members at The 47th Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) which will be hosted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 14–16 October 2016.

At the poster session on Friday, October 14 at 13:00, Kazuko Yatsushiro and Uli Sauerland from project SSI will present a poster together with Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin) on “Testing Plural Unmarkedness Across Languages”.
On Saturday, October 15 at 14:30–15:00 Marie-Christine Meyer and Uli Sauerland from project SSI will give a talk on “Covert Across-the-Board Movement Revisited”. At 15:45–16:15 Maribel Romero and Bettina Braun from project “BiasQ” will give a talk together with the former project members Anja Arnhold and Filippo Domaneschi on
“Negative Polar Question Types in English”.

New deadline is November 18th!

Anne Wienholz, Derya Nuhbalaoglu, Annika Herrmann, Nivedita Mani, Edgar Onea and Markus Steinbach from project “SignRef” are organizing the workshop “Anaphora Resolution in Sign and Spoken languages – Theoretical and Experimental Dimensions (ARISAS)” to be held at the University of Goettingen, Germany, February 20-21, 2017. The workshop’s webpage, which includes translations of the call into International Sign Language can be found here: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/call-for-papers/548659.html

Call for abstract submissions:

Linguistic fields: Syntax, (Experimental) Semantics, (Experimental) Pragmatics, Information Structure, Discourse Structure, Theoretical Linguistics, Experimental Sign Language Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics.

Invited speakers:
Petra Schumacher (University of Cologne, Germany),
Emar Maier (University of Groningen, Netherlands)

Meeting description:
One important aspect in spoken, written and signed discourse is the proper management and interpretation of discourse referents. Consequently, the resolution of co-reference has been one of the most investigated and at the same time most challenging topics in linguistic research on spoken languages. Anaphora resolution has been addressed from various perspectives such as formal and functional linguistics, psycholinguistics as well as corpus and computational linguistics. By contrast, research on anaphora resolution in sign languages is still relatively new and scarce compared to the amount of studies on spoken languages.

Since there are many different morphosyntactic, prosodic, semantic, and pragmatic factors, which play an important role in anaphora resolution, it is crucial to approach this issue from different linguistic perspectives. The potential universality and the interaction of these factors have been at the center of interest to researchers for a long time. Moreover, the modeling of anaphoric relations both within and across sentences has challenged both theoretical and functional linguists. In recent years and especially with the rise of experimental pragmatics and semantics, the principles of anaphora resolution have been revisited from an experimental and cognitive perspective. Such studies also include less investigated languages such as sign languages.

Earlier research on sign languages has shown that the anaphoric links – due to the peculiarities of the visual-gestural modality – can be established overtly in the signing space and therefore leave little space for ambiguities in anaphora resolution. However, with a semantic and pragmatic turn in sign language linguistics and a growing interest in discourse analysis, it has recently been shown that the ambiguities attested for spoken languages exist in sign languages as well. This opens a number of new questions and methodological issues for investigating anaphora in the visual-gestural modality both from theoretical as well as experimental perspectives.

This workshop combines theoretical approaches with typological and experimental ones in order to yield a better understanding of anaphoric relations across languages and language modalities. It aims at bringing together junior and senior researchers from different sub-fields of linguistics, gestural research and cognitive science working on anaphora resolution from various perspectives. We welcome submissions addressing anaphora resolution and reference tracking from formal, functional, typological and experimental perspectives in sign and spoken languages. The topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

§ Formal and functional analyses of anaphora resolution in sign and spoken languages
§ Typological descriptions of anaphora resolution across languages
§ Modality-specific and modality-independent aspects of anaphora resolution
§ Psycho- and neurolinguistic aspects of anaphora in discourse
§ Acquisition of anaphora in sign and spoken languages
§ The impact of discourse structure and perspective on anaphora resolution

The languages of the workshop are English and ASL/IS. Interpretation between English and ASL/IS will be provided.

We invite abstracts for sign/spoken presentations. Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed two pages, including examples and references. Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf- or doc-format to arisas2017@uni-goettingen.deand include your name, affiliation, the title of the abstract and the presentation type you would prefer in the body of the e-mail.

Student (poster) session abstract submission:
We invite graduate students to submit abstracts for a “Junior researchers poster session”. There will be a best-poster award for the most outstanding poster. Note that the abstracts can be only submitted either for a talk or a poster session.

New deadline for abstract submission: November 18, 2016,
Notification: December 14, 2016

Contact: Derya Nuhbalaoglu arisas2017@uni-goettingen.de

On September 10th, Marie-Christine Meyer from project SSI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk at the MIT Workshop on Exhaustivity 2016. The title of the talk is “Grice and Grammar: How cooperative are weak sentences?”

Abstract
In this talk we are going to explore the relation between grammatical ignorance implicatures and Gricean pragmatics. We argue that the maxims of Brevity and/or Quantity+Relation force us to assume that language, i.e, grammar, can encode not only lower-bounded meanings like “at least some”, but also upper-bounded meanings like “some but not all”. Crucially, grammar must even be able to encode the speaker’s ignorance about the upper bound if Grice’s maxims are valid at all. We arrive at the conclusion that syntactic operators like exh and K (be certain) make language highly suitable for cooperative communication in Grice’s sense — more suitable than a language without these operators.