MEAT in UC San Diego

From September to December 2016, Laia will be doing a research stay at the University of California San Diego. Last Thursday, November 10th, she had the opportunity to present the joint work she is doing with Elena on echoic contrastive condicionals at Semantics Babble. Echoic contrastive condicionals are constructions such as “Si tu estás cansada, yo estoy muerta” (“If you are tired, I’m exhausted) which show interesting properties, such as echoicity, scalarity and lack of condicional interpretation. Elena and Laia aim to analyze this construction with concepts at the heart of the MEAT project, such as their peculiar discourse structure.

Word meaning workshop

On November 2 and 3, 2016, Zoltan and Elena were lucky enough to attend the workshop ‘Word meaning: Interdisciplinary Themes‘, organized by Ikerbasque Professor Agustín Vicente and his group of researchers (Marina Ortega, Begoña Vicente and Dan Zeman). This event, held at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, gathered topnotch linguists, philosophers, and psychologists (see here) to discuss how rich the meaning of words is and how to account for the lack of a one-to-one mapping between lexical items and meanings.

Zientzia Astea 2016

The Hizkuntzalaritza Teorikoko Taldea (HiTT) ‘Basque Research Group of Theoretical Linguistics’ was present at the Zientzia Astea (‘Science Week’) in Vitoria-Gasteiz on November 3-6 2016. Maia Duguine, Lucía Masa, Marina Ortega and Laura Vela-Plo put together a stand that welcomed high school students and other interested citizens that wanted to know what it meant to be a linguist and how linguists study human language. Elena had the pleasure to participate in this outreach event as a HiTT member, and talk to several students and teachers. We also had the chance to spread the word about GrOC-Euskadi, an initiative that builds on GrOC in Barcelona and that the HiTT is starting soon, with the purpose of bridging the gap between linguistic research and grammar teaching in high schools.

Cfp: PartFUM (Participles: Form, Use, Meaning)

Berit and Olga Borik are organising a workshop as part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in Zürich, September 10-13, 2017 (pending acceptance). The theme of the workshop is Participles: Form, Use, Meaning (PartFUM). Submit your abstracts by November 20, 2016!

Cfp: 18th Szklarska Poreba Workshop

Berit is co-organising the 18th Szklarska Poreba Workshop, to be held March 2-6, 2017 on top of Polish/Czech mountains. The main themes of this year’s convention are The role of context and reasoning in communication and Logic and natural data and the invited speakers are Gemma Boleda, Katja Jasinskaja, Salvador Mascarenhas, and Eric McCready. Submit your abstracts by December 10, 2016!

MEAT in Moscow

On September 30 / October 1 Berit participated in the HSE Semantics & Pragmatics Workshop, held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She presented joint work with Olga Borik (UAB) on Imperfective past passive participles in Russian.

MEAT in Paris

On September 7 and 8, Laia and Elena participated in the conference “New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling” (NISM2016) held at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris with the poster “Deriving at least from IF MORE NOT”. The invited speakers were Paul Portner, Henriëtte de Swart and Elizabeth Coppock. We celebrated the revival of the previous Journées Sémantique et Modélisation and the retirement of Francis Corblin. On September 9, Berit and Heather Burnett organized the Meaning, Optimization and Interaction Workshop at the Université Paris Didérot.