CSSP 2017

Laia and Elena are back from Paris, where they have presented their recent work on so-called ‘Premise Conditionals’ (aka ‘Factual Conditionals’). The Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris takes place every other year and gathers formal linguists interested in phenomena that concern form and meaning.

This year, the invited speakers were Regine Eckardt (Konstanz), who talked about deliberative questions, Stephen Wechsler (U. Texas at Austin), who discussed various forms of v

erb alternations in relation to polysemy, and Marco Baroni (Facebook), who introduced the audience to terms such as neural networks and artificial children.

Paris is always a good idea, and so were the name tags that the organizers devised 🙂

 

Hizkuntzaren zientzia @ Zientzia Astea 2017

From November 9th to November 12th, 2017, the Hizkuntzalaritza Teorikorako Taldea (HiTT) participated in the Science Week (Zientzia Astea) with a stand in the Bibat museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz. This year, the title of the stand was “Hizkuntzaren Zientzia” (The science of language), and it gathered citizens who listened to our presentation and/or played games about polysemy, articulation of sounds and the world’s languages. I think we did a good job at spreading the word about what linguists do and entertain at the same time. Thanks go to Laura, Marina, Lucía, Bryan, Aitor and Haizea!

Aside from the stand in Vitoria-Gasteiz, this year we also participated in the Zientzia Astea in Barakaldo with a workshop-talk entitled “Guk hitz egiten dugu. Baina, hitz egiten ote dute haiek? Giza-hizkuntzaren ezaguera” (We speak. But do they also speak? The human language). Myriam gave a very nice talk for 13-year olds at the Centro Clara Campoamor, who learned that some animals have very sophisticated communication methods, but cannot generate sentences that they have never heard before.

 

SigGram Meeting in V-G

On October 5th and 6th, the Hizkuntzalaritza Teorikorako Taldea (HiTT) held the first meeting of the second edition of the thematic network ‘Significado y Gramática‘ (SigGram, MEIC FFI2016-81750-REDT, PI. M.Teresa Espinal, UAB).

In this meeting, we had the chance to learn about many participants’ ongoing work, including Katie, who presented on extra arguments in English. Elena had the opportunity to present the MEAT project, under the HiTT umbrella, and Zoltan was part of the local organization, along with the rest of the HiTT students (thanks, Laura and Marina!).

The next event in the series of activities that will happen as part of the SigGram iniciative is a semantics winter school at UPF, Barcelona.

It was very nice to have UAH-ers, UPF-ers and UAB-ers with us! We hope to see you soon in Vitoria-Gasteiz!