BCGL 10

At the beginning of December, Katie attended the annual BCGL conference, hosted by the CRISSP research group of KU Leuven. Each year, the conference has a different theme; this year’s was The morphology and semantics of person and number. Although not Katie’s main topic, the programme was full of interesting talks— plus Martina Wiltschko was an invited speaker, and she is not soo often in Europe. Martina presented new research with E. Ritter on pragmatic person. Valentina Bianchi discussed kaplanian contexts when anchoring person and Thomas McFadden compared allocutive agreement accounts of Basque with his Tamil data. Overall, there was a lot of nice typological empirical data.

Between lunch and the afternoon session, we took a quick peek at the Grand-Place. Insider’s tip: there are free samples at the chocolate store on the corner. 😀

While in Belgium, Katie was also able to do some work with her co-author, Cora Pots, on their project about motion verbs as progressive markers in verb clusters of Dutch and Afrikaans. This fall, Cora has been developping a syntactic analysis for her dissertation (on te-drop in Dutch verb clusters) that they will be able to use for the cross-linguistic look at the progressive markers.

Also: good news! Katie and Cora were good this year and got some goodies from Sinterklaus. 🙂 

 

Event semantics: Advent Workshop

After Oslo–and a snow-delay–Katie stopped in Cologne for a workshop on event semantics, organised by Carla Umbach and Stefan Hinterwimmer at Universität zu Köln . There she presented a new version of the work she’d presented in Zurich and Lagodekhi, about locative subjects in an English change-of-state construction, and received a lot of good feedback. With this feedback, she’ll hopefully be able to start writing it all down. 😉

The invited speaker was Alte Grønn, who told us about viewpoint from a slavic perspective. Other speakers were mainly from German universities, and included Jens Fleischhauer & Thomas Gamerschlag on scalarity and telicity in fictive motion, Frauke Buscher on whether sound emission verbs can be analysed as motion verbs, and Katja Gobrovska on the German adverb sorgfältig. And although there were no Christmas market visits, the participants enjoyed some of the famous, tiny Kölsch beers. 😉

CoPo 2017

Katie and some colleagues from the UPV/EHU went to the Workshop on Approaches to Coercion and Polysemy in Oslo, Norway. Organised by Alexandra Spalek and Matthew Gotham, the workshop was a nice gathering of semanticists, philosophers, computational linguists, and even a psycholinguist. Katie presented a part of her MA thesis, about the polysemy of one English posture verb and discussed whether or not coercion is at play, and Bryan Leferman of his dissertation, which examined evaluative adjectives and the status of events in our ontology.

https://www.instagram.com/k.k.k.katie/

https://www.instagram.com/k.k.k.katie/

The invited speakers were Nick Asher and Robin Cooper, and there were many discussions about dependent type theory.  🙂

katie, begona, marina, bryan

It was a super cold time to be in Norway (read: snow!!), but the sun was shining and we even got some daylight to explore the town.  😀 Thanks for the laughs Begoña, Marina, and Bryan!