This year’s HPSG conference took place in Bucharest, Rumania, July 24-26. It was very well organized and included a rich and interesting sightseeing program. Gert Webelhuth and Manfred Sailer were the

only participants from Frankfurt at HPSG 2019. Gert presented joint work with Olivier Bonami on syntactic haplology in Dutch and Manfred gave a joint talk with Monica-Mihaela Rizea on emphatic NPIs in result clauses in Romanian.

The papers presented at the main conference and at the pre-conference workshop on the syntax-morphology interface in Romance included talks on Romance and Germanic languages, on Welsh, Hebrew, and Kasem. There were three invited talks: Anne Abeillé (Paris) spoke about closest conjunct agreement in French. Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) raised foundational issues in his “Remarks on what grammars are or ought to be”.  Stephen Wechsler (Austin) presented his recent work on linking.

A big thank to all the local organizers, in particular to Gabriela Bîlbîie!

Links

• Web site of the International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG 2019), Bucharest: https://conferences.unibuc.ro//hpsg2019/index.html
• Monica-Mihaela Rizea (Bucharest) & Manfred Sailer: Representing scales. Degree result clauses and emphatic negative polarity items in Romanian: abstract; slides
  
• Gert Webelhuth & Olivier Bonami (Paris): Syntactic haplology and the Dutch proform ‘er’: abstract