Philosophising in Vitoria-Gasteiz

Local friends Agustín Vicente and Marta Jorba organised a workshop on Language and Mind, so that members of HiTT (the UPV/EHU theoretical linguistics group) and LOGOS (the analytical philosophy research group at the University of Barcelona) can get together and share ideas.

Amid philosophy talks, Katie gave a linguistic talk about the polysemy of posture verbs. Marta discussed the ontology of predicates like understand and see/watch, and how lexical aspect plays a big role there. Marina, another local PhD student, presented a proposal on how to formalise copredication constructions, with a modification on a previous proposal of Pustojevsky. The friends from Barcelona talked about a range of topics, from information theory and signalling theory, to personal identity and experience vs. bodily ownership. Very interesting to hear about topics one might not usually (think to) think about. 🙂

 

Looking forward to future meetings like this!

MEAT dgfs-ing again!

This year’s annual Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) was held in the south, in Stuttgart. Both Berit and Katie presented. Berit’s talk was in Workshop 8, “Reference beyond the DP” and discussed anaphoric reference in Russian (joint work with fellow SIGGRAM-er Olga Borik). Kristine Bentzen and Marcin Morzycki were the invited speakers. Marcin’s talk was especially interesting: he discussed possible solutions to a puzzle of modification conjunction, such as in Donald is ignorant and unpleasant, and his son even more so (i.e., the question is how to deal with the scales involved here).

Katie’s was in Workshop 3, “Evaluative Semantics”, organised by Patrick Grosz and Valentina Bianchi. She presented a talk on scalarity in the swarm alternation (joint work with Daniel Hole). The invited speakers were Andrea Beltrama and Farah Benerama. The workshop was a really nice one, with good discussion and an overall good atomosphere. Stand-out talks were by Elsi Kaiser, who discussed experiments concerning evaluations and how these differ depending on sensory domain and Peter Alrenga, who analysed two different kinds of `at least’.  Also: since Katie did her MA at Stuttgart, she knows the organiser, and got involved in type-setting the conference booklet. Let’s just say she knows a lot more about LaTeX now!

Szklarska Poreba

At the end of February, Berit and Katie went to the best workshop: Szklarska Poreba! Sometimes called the “skiing workshop”, it has a less formal format and takes place in a ski hut. One of my things about the workshop is that it is like the EGG school; that is, it is designed with the idea that everybody should be able to attend, regardless of financial status.  It was suuuper cold this year, even getting below -20 at night, but it was still worth it to be up there.

This year’s theme was ‘plurality’, with a number of cool invited speakers: Henk Zeevat, Karolina Krzyżanowska, Katarzyna Kuś, and Dan Lassiter. This year, Katie presented a poster about work that she, Elena, and another UPV/EHU colleague, Agustín Vicente have been doing. The work is about a new class of pejorative terms (alas, not on plurality), and was well-received. We are looking forward to giving a talk on this project this summer in Paris!