Recently, the plans for a Museum of Linguistics have been widely spread through the (social) media. In winter 2019, Planet World has been announced to open as the first interactive museum on language in the USA.
There are already a number of similar musea, maybe you will have the opportunity to visit one of them in the near future. Please drop a comment, if you know of other such places or if you would like to report on your visit in one of them!
The murder of Richard Montague, disruptive innovator in the thriving field of formal semantics (as he might be called by advertising companies today), is an unsolved police case. His theories of natural language, and their many successors, are of course still taught today, as any student in our semantics courses can tell you. For taking some time off from the intellectual effort that it takes to come to grips with logical languages, without leaving the topic altogether, there is an exciting option: A few years ago, Aifric Campbell published a murder mystery, The Semantics of Murder, which is constructed around the real-world events surrounding the life of Richard Montague. Here’s your exceptional chance to enjoy a structural analysis of a higher-order quantificational formula in a relaxing environment – as a student of semantics you might want to check out page 58 of the 2008 softcover edition right away!
Manfred Sailer gave a talk at the one-day workshop on “The Syntax of Idioms”, organized by the Leuven & Utrecht project of the same name. In the morning, project members presented their results and the database of idioms in Dutch dialects. In the afternoon, there were invited talks by Julia Horváth (Tel Aviv) on “Idioms and ‘Constructions’: Implications for the architecture of grammar”, Martin Everaert (Utrecht) on “Idioms: what you see is what you get?”, and Manfred on “The meaning of `meaningless’ idiom parts”.
Utrecht, January 2017. (Photo: M. Sailer, BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Manfred’s talk was based on joint work with Sascha Bargman on how to model the syntactic flexibility of non-decomposable idioms such as kick the bucket `die´.
The open access publisher Language Science Press has just announced a new series, Phraseology and Multiword Expressions (PMWE). This series grew out of the activities of the COST Action Parseme, in which several members of our IEAS group have participated.
The series will publish monographs and edited volumes relating to computational, formal, and/or grammar-theoretical approaches to all types of phraseological units/multiword expressions.
Monica presenting in Tübingen, December 2016. (Photo: M. Sailer, BY-NC-ND 3.0)
One of the aims of this cooperation is an update of the Romanian part of the Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items (CoDII), which was initiated by Frank and Gianina and which is now being updated by Monica.
Castle Hohentübingen, December 2016 (Photo: M. Sailer, BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Manfred Sailer gave an invited talk at the workshop “Recent Trends in Figurative Language Research”, Tübingen, December 8&9. The workshop brought together researchers from theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, first and second language acquisition research, medicine, and computational linguistics.
Dianne Jonas is again heading north to Iceland, where she will be giving a talk on `The Morphosyntax of the verb tykja in Faroese – a Diachronic and Comparative Perspective’. Her presentation is part of a meeting organized by Háskóla Íslands og Fróðskaparseturs í
Færeyjum (University of Iceland and University of the Faroe Islands).
