The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) will have its bi-annual conference this year in Zurich, August 24-27. The meeting will feature two presentations from the IEAS:
Frank Richter will act as local organizer of the 19th conference on Formal Grammar, which will take place at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen on the weekend of August 16th and August 17th. The Standing Committee is particularly excited about the high registration numbers by students attending ESSLLI in the weeks before and after Formal Grammar. Invited speakers this year are Christian Retoré and Thomas F. Icard. The full program can be found at the official website of Formal Grammar 2014.
The second phase of Research Unit 1783 “Relative Clauses” is now approved. The research unit is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The second phase will run from September 2014 to August 2017.
The aim of the research unit is summarized on its web site as:
Continue reading Second Phase of Research Unit “Relative Clauses”
In a recent paper, Jennifer Spenader, Frank Richter and Janina Radó extend previous experimental work by Frank and Janina on negative polarity items in German to parallel data in English. In two experiments they investigated the ability of native speakers to distinguish different groups of NPIs:
J. Spenader, F. Richter & J. Radó (2014): Experimental Investigations of Licensing Environments for NPIs in English. In: Jack Hoeksema & Dicky Gilbers (eds.): Black Book. A Festschrift in Honor of Frans Zwarts. University of Groningen, pp. 301-310
The following text has been posted by Berthold Crysmann:
Following up on the HPSG workshop Gert Webelhuth organised in Frankfurt in May 2012, I am happy to announce that the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle (CNR & U Paris 7) is going to host the second such workshop this coming autumn at Paris-Diderot.
Continue reading HPSG Workshop in Paris, November 17-18.
Application closed!
The following job ad for either 1 postdoc or 2 doctoral positions has appeared on linguistlist.
The Linguistics section in the Department of English and American Studies (part of the College of Modern Philologies) of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) has an opening for either one full postdoctoral or two halftime Ph.D. positions as Wissenschafterliche/r Mitarbeiter/in (E13 TV-G-U). The position(s) start(s) on September 1, 2014 and is/are initially restricted to a duration of 3 years.
Continue reading 1 Postdoc or 2 doctoral positions at IEAS/Linguistics
Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh) is currently visiting the Research Group Relative Clauses.
There will be four talks by her, all in room IG 254, 14.00 (c.t.) – 16.00 o’clock.
by Assif Am-David, Frankfurt a.M.
For the last 150 years the ultimate representation of language change has been the family tree model. I shall start by explaining what the family tree model is. I shall pursue in presenting some major schools raising contention against this model. Finally, I shall discuss these critical voices in light of the progress in historical linguistics. Continue reading Models of Language Change
Assif Am-David published a monograph based on his dissertation “A semantic typology of definiteness”. This book explores the crosslinguistic distributional patterns of definiteness markers. A distinction is drawn between semantic definiteness and morpho-syntactic definiteness marking. The semantic components of definiteness are arranged, similar to semantic maps, and language-specifically assigned to definiteness markers. This model is based on the results of an empirical study of Q’ekchi’, Otomi, Maori and Basque. The choice of a suitable sample for a typological study is also discussed.
Bibliographic information:
Am-David, Assif (2014): A Semantic Typology of Definiteness. Lampert Academic Publishing.
The book can be purchased at:
www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details//store/gb/book/978-3-659-56612-7/a-semantic-typology-of-definiteness