Workshop on Direct Compositionality, Brown University, June 19-21

Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 18:19:40 -0500 From: Polly Jacobson Subject: Workshop on Direct Compositionality, Providence RI, USA, June 19-21

There will be an NSF-funded workshop held at Brown University on June 19-21 on the topic of Direct Compositionality. The text of this announcement is followed by a brief description of the focus of the workshop. The conference will consist of talks by invited speakers listed below plus up to three additional slots to be decided by anonymously reviewed abstract. Participants whose abstracts are chosen will be reimbursed for at least a portion of their travel expenses and will be fully funded for housing during the conference. In addition, all participants (both invited and those chosen by abstract) will be requested to not only present a paper but to be a discussant on one additional paper. Papers will typically be 35-40 minutes in length, and at least an outline of the paper will be circulated to the other speakers a few weeks before the conference. Those interested in submitting an abstract should submit an anonymous abstract of NO MORE THAN 2 PAGES (please, in a readable font with reasonable margins).

Abstract deadline: April 1; we will aim for notification within 3 weeks after that. Electronic submission (word or .pdf files) is strongly encouraged; electronic files should be sent to pauline_jacobson@brown.edu with the header: Workshop Abstract Submission

Include your contact information (and abstract title) in the body of the e-mail. If electronic submission is impossible, send 5 copies to:

bq. Pauline Jacobson Attn: Workshop Dept.of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Box 1978 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 USA

The conference will be open to all registered participants (registration fee will be announced in the second announcement), and various housing options (including reasonably priced rooms in the Brown dormitories) will be announced then as well.

Invited Speakers

Chris Barker, UC San Diego (confirmed) Rajesh Bhatt, University of Texas Austin (confirmed) Maria Bittner, Rutgers University Daniel Buring, UCLA (confirmed) Ivano Caponigro, UCLA (confirmed) David Dowty, Ohio State University (confirmed) Danny Fox, MIT (confirmed) Daphna Heller, Rutgers University (confirmed) Pauline Jacobson, Brown University (organizer) Christopher Potts, UC Santa Cruz (confirmed) Maribel Romero, University of Pennsylvania Ken Shan, Harvard (confirmed) Yael Sharvit, University of Connecticut (confirmed) Yoad Winter, Technion Institute, Haifa (confirmed)

Workshop Description

This will be a 3-day workshop to be held at Brown University, June 19-21, 2003 on the feasibility of a particular view of the interaction of natural language syntax and semantics. This view the hypothesis of Direct Compositionality - according to which the syntax and semantics work in tandem . Thus the syntactic system of natural language can be seen as a system of rules which “build” (i.e., prove the well-formedness of) linguistic expressions while the semantics works along with this to assign meanings to these expressions. This view was put forth in, among others, Montague (1973) and was highly influential in much research in formal semantics during especially the 1970s and 1980s.

But this approach has been abandoned in a good deal of more modern research, and the debate on whether or not direct compositionality is possible has to some extent receded into the background. It is quite common in much current work to assume a view of the syntax/semantics interaction according to which the syntax works first to “build” syntactic representations which are then “sent” to the semantics for interpretation. Furthermore, it is often assumed that what inputs the actual semantic (model-theoretic) interpretation is not in fact the surface representation of a sentence, but that this is mapped instead to a more abstract level of Logical Form. Yet the direct compositional view is arguably a much simpler conception of the overall organization of the grammar, and the rationale underlying the proposed workshop is the belief that its abandonment in much current research is premature. The workshop is designed to reopen debate on the feasibility of direct compositionality, bringing together researchers who have studied this question and have approached it with a variety of theoretical and technical tools.

In addition to the invited speakers, slots are reserved for a few papers to be chosen by refereed abstracts. Abstract submissions are encouraged from both sides of the debate. The ideal paper will focus on one or more empirical phenomena and will discuss the implications of this/these phenomena for the hypothesis of direct compositionality. For example, a paper might be on a phenomena which has typically been taken to provide a challenge to direct compositionality and show that the relevant phenomena can indeed be given a direct compositional analysis. On the other hand, equally important are papers which argue that certain phenomena cannot indeed be handled under direct compositionality. The goal of the workshop is to stimulate serious discussion on this issue, and so each presenter will also be a discussant on one other paper.

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