Contents:

• Mini-conference on sign languages, 13 July 2004
• Call for papers International Symposium `The structure of the verb phrase in Afroasiatic: Morpho-phonological and syntactic approaches, 14-16 January 2005

Place: Thomas van Aquinostraat 1, Nijmegen, room 002

Web site: http://www.let.kun.nl/sign-lang/Miniconf13July2004.html

The sign language research group at the Department of Linguistics in Nijmegen is organizing a one-day informal conference on sign languages. Data from 12 sign languages will be discussed in 10 short lectures, with plenty of time for discussion.

Interpreting to Nederlandse Geabrentaal and International Sign will be provided during the whole day.

Organizers: Onno Crasborn (o.crasborn@let.kun.nl) & Els van der Kooij (e.van.der.kooij@let.kun.nl).

CALL FOR PAPERS
International symposium

The structure of the verb phrase in Afroasiatic:
Morpho-phonological and syntactic approaches

Organised by: Chris Reintges & Noureddine Elouazizi
University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics (ULCL) Leiden University, The Netherlands
http://www.ulcl.leidenuniv.nl

THEME DESCRIPTION
The Afroasiatic languages of Africa and the Middle East have a rich morphology for verbal derivation and inflection. Unlike the basically affixal morphological systems of Indo-European languages, Afroasiatic morphology is pervaded by a wide variety of purely morphological alternations that are internal to the stem. In Classical Arabic, for instance, there is a clear sense in which verbs and nouns like kataba 'he wrote', kaataba 'he corresponded', and kitaabun 'book' are morphologically related to one another by means of the consonantal structure of the root, although they do not share discrete strings of segments in concatenated morphemes. In comprising three discontinuous morphological components (the root, the stem template, and the vowel melody) the verb phrase structure in Afroasiatic is radically different from the one in Indo-Eurpoean languages. The study of the root and pattern dichotomy goes back as early as the traditional treatments of medieval Arab and Hebrew grammarians. Within the generative research tradition, research on these morpho-phonological aspects started with McCarthy's (1979) seminal work. Recent advances within the framework of government phonology have shown that the stem template itself has internal structure. Furthermore, verbal derivation follows a systematic and hence predictable apophonic path (Guerssel and Lowenstam 1986; Ségéral 1986, 2000; Bendjaballah 1999, 2001). For the purely syntactic aspect, root-and-pattern morphology poses a challenge, since the basic morphological units do not correspond in any way to distinct syntactic positions.

TOPICS
The purpose of this interdiscipliany symposium is to provide a meeting ground for experts to exchange views and findings on a central topic of comparative and theoretical Afroasiatic linguistics. Within the general theme of verbal configurational structure in Afroasiatic languages, the following questions are of particular interest to the meeting:

• What is the internal structure of the VP/νP? Given the inflectional role of the vowels, how does the structure of the verb relate to the tense/aspect domain?
• How much internal structure is present in templatic morphology and what is its relation to the derivation of VPs? In which respect does apophony reflect syntactic derivation?
• What is the status of stem pattern/binyanim that encode grammatical voice alternations (causative, middle, reciprocal) and situation aspect (stative, inchoative)? Are they listed in the lexicon together with a root entry (Borer 2004) or are they associated with distinct voice heads (Doron 2003).
• What is the position of the subject? Can subjects be licensed within the vP or is subject raising obligatory?
• What are the mirco- and macroparameters of crosslinguistic variation in the verbal domain?

 INVITED SPEAKERS
 

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (plus 10 minutes of discussion). Abstracts should be anonymous and limited to one page (using 1" margins on all sides with at least 11pt font size) with an additional page containing data and references. Non-standard fonts should be avoided. In case used, they should be embedded in a pdf-document. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author.

The abstracts should be sent by e-mail to both of the following email addresses: n.elouazizi@let.leidenuniv.nl and C.H.Reintges@let.leidenuniv.nl. 

All abstracts should be submitted as attachments and the body message includes the following information: title of the paper, author's name(s), affiliation, phone and email address.

Abstracts will be selected on a competitive basis after a review by a reviewing committee. All authors who will be selected to present their work at the conference will be invited to submit their papers for a volume publication.

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

• August 10th, 2004 Deadline to submit the abstracts
• September 05th, 2004 Notifications of Acceptance.
• November 19th , 2004 Early Registration deadline
• January 14th-16th, 2005 Conference dates

 REGISTRATION INFORMATION
All attendees, including speakers, are expected to register for the meeting. For more information, visit ULCL website: http://www.ulcl.leidenuniv.nl.
A conference designated webpage will soon appear on that website. Should you have any other questions or comments, please feel free to contact the organizers.