Katie in Belgium

Last week, Katie went to Brussels to give a talk in the CRISSP research seminar. Her talk described the latest developments of her dissertation work: the grammaticalisation of posture verbs in English and how the semantics of the locative use interacts with aspect. She reported her most recent corpus data and proposed the beginnings of a theory about the differences between ‘to sit’ and ‘to lie’ when they are used with inanimate subjects. Thanks to the audience for really helpful feedback!

Also in Belgium: Katie  was able to attend a lecture series by Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. The lectures were about tense from a morphosyntactic and semantic perspective. Bronwyn is a very good teacher and she presented the various puzzles of tense in an interesting way. Overall very enjoyable! During the week, Katie and her co-author Cora had the chance to talk to Bronwyn about their work on the grammaticalisation of Dutch and Afrikaans posture verbs (+ the motion verb ‘to walk’), more specifically on their use as aspectual markers in the periphrastic progressive. Bronwyn gave them some nice suggestions for future avenues. Thanks for a nice week in Brussels!

 

 

 

Springer book published!

We are very excited to let you know that the book entitled The Semantics of Gradability, Vagueness, and Scale Structure: Experimental Perspectives, co-edited by Elena Castroviejo, Louise McNally and Galit W. Sassoon, and partially supported by the MEAT project, is finally out! The volume has been published in the Springer series “Language, Cognition, and Mind”, and it was inspired by the talks presented at the workshop of the same name that took place at the Instituto de Lengua, Literatura y Antropología of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid on May 28th and 29th, 2015.

We hope you find it interesting. Don’t hesitate to spread the word!

MEAT goes to Bremen!

The program of the forthcoming 41.Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, which will take place in Bremen on March 6-8, 2019, is now published. Among the Arbeitsgruppen, you can find two workshops organized by MEAT-ers!

Katie is co-organizing the Workshop “Encoding emotive attitudes in non-truth-conditional meaning” along with Curt Anderson.

Berit, Elena and Laia are co-organizing the Workshop “Concessives vs. Adversatives: Opposing opposition“.

Too bad we can’t attend each others’ workshops!!!

Don’t miss the deadlines and submit your abstracts this summer.

Questions and summer time in Konstanz

Elena has finished her spring tour in Konstanz, where Andrea Beltrama, María Biezma, Erlinde Meertens, Maribel Romero and Ramona Wallner from the DFG funded research unit (FOR2111) Questions at the interfaces organized the workshop “Meaning in non-canonical questions.”

Elena presented recent work on Catalan interrogative tag “eh?”, which has two pragmatic uses which have not been adressed from a formal perspective. This talk was interspersed with other presentations on various types of biased questions, modal particles in questions, prosody or scope-marking in interrogatives across languages.

 

 

 

 

Konstanz welcomed us with a summer-like weather, which permitted nice strolls along the river, by the lake and through the old town.

 

 

CGG at URV (Tarragona)

Elena participated in the 28th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, which took place at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona, and was organized by former colleague and friend, Isabel Oltra-Massuet (see a report from URV’s digital journal here). The conference was preceded by a workshop on argument structure from the perspective of processing, and joined various invited presenters besides the CGG’s invited speakers (Loes Koring, Alec Marantz, Jaume Mateu, Colin Phillips, Gillian Ramchand, Linnaea Stockall, Andrew Nevins and Elena Castroviejo). As always, there was a selection of papers from international researchers.

 

 

Elena presented recent research based on her collaborative work with Berit on the intensification semantics of evaluative and manner modifiers.

 

 

The nice scientific program was accompanied by a fantastic social program, including a walk through Roman Tarragona on Wednesday and a walk through Medieval Tarragona on Thursday. Moreover, the conference signed up for COSWL pop-up mentoring event for the first time in Europe. In this event, senior women linguists spend some time with junior women linguists adressing questions, fears and sharing experiences. In fact, there will be another pop-up mentoring event at Sinn und Bedeutung 23 in Barcelona, so if you are not familiar with this program, don’t miss the chance and sign in!