10-14 Aug 2015
Barcelona, Spain
Call for Papers Empirical Advances in Categorial Grammar (ESSLLI 2015 Workshop) Dates: August 10-14, 2015 Location: Barcelona Workshop Webpage: http://www.u.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kubota.yusuke.fn/cg2015.html Contact email: cg2015@easychair.org Submission deadline: February 15, 2015 Submission webpage: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cg2015 Organizers: Yusuke Kubota, University of Tsukuba Robert Levine, Ohio State University Workshop information: This workshop provides a forum for discussion of recent empirical advances in categorial grammar (CG). After the revival of interest in CG in linguistics in the 80s, various extensions to the Lambek calculus (in the Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (TLCG) tradition; Morrill 1994, Moortgat 1997) and an early version of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; Ades and Steedman 1982, Steedman 2000, Baldridge 2003) have been proposed. But the fundamental question of whether CG constitutes an adequate linguistic theory still seems to be wide open. Moreover, there are now numerous variants of CG, both in the TLCG tradition and in CCG (Oehrle 1994, Jacobson 1999, Moortgat 2007, Pollard and Mihalicek 2010, Morrill et al. 2011, Barker and Shan 2015, to name just a few). Which of these theories constitutes the most adequate version of an empirical theory of natural language? Logical, mathematical, and computational analyses have tended to take precedence over empirical ones in the past 30 years in CG research. These are all important and very illuminating, but at the same time we may now want to pause and reflect on the question of just where we are in terms of empirical adequacy. In this connection, it is, we believe, instructive to remind ourselves that the most profound areas of mathematics, such as analysis, are those which first emerged in the course of investigations into the properties of the natural universe by physicists (Boyer 1949). There probably is a similar relation between formal and empirical investigations in our field as well, and we think that the time is ripe to critically scrutinize the empirical consequences of the various formal techniques/frameworks proposed in the literature in the past 30 years, as well as ones that are being developed at this very moment. The following is a list of topics which naturally fit the theme of the workshop, but this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list; we welcome any submission whose topic pertains to the empirical adequacy of CG. - What are the empirical advantages of CG as compared to other grammatical theories? A classical case is coordination (Steedman 1985, Dowty 1988), but is coordination the only empirical domain in which CG can claim advantage over other theories? - Are there any major relative advantages/disadvantages among different variants of CG? For example, Kubota and Levine (2014) and Moot (2014) have recently argued that Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG; de Groote 2001) and related approaches cannot deal with coordination; is such a claim justified, or can one extend ACG to respond to this criticism? - Almost all variants of CG countenance much more flexible notions of constituency than other theories, and this has been seen as a (potential) weakness of CG by researchers outside of the CG community. How can one respond to this concern? - There is much rethinking on the nature of so-called 'syntactic islands' in the recent linguistic literature (Kluender 1992, 1998, Hofmeister and Sag 2010). The processing-based alternatives of these phenomena are however typically stated in terms of configurational properties. Is there a natural translation of such conditions to CG-based grammars? - Can progress be made in relatively underdeveloped areas of CG? For example, there were some early explorations of 'categorial morphology' back in the 80s (Moortgat 1984, Hoeksema 1984, Hoeksema and Janda 1988), but this line of work did not develop into a major research program. Can we gain new insights on questions in such areas by building on the advances in CG research since then? - Can CG incorporate recent results in other grammatical theories, such as the notion of 'constructions' in construction grammar (Goldberg 1995)? - Any improvements on the syntax-semantics interface? CG is known for its transparent syntax-semantics interface. But incorporating recent advances in formal semantics, especially, the tradition of dynamic semantics in a fully compositional manner, still seems to be an ongoing effort. Has any progress been made in this domain? Submission: We invite submissions of anonymous abstracts of up to five pages, including examples, references, and figures. Usual spacing, font and margin should be used (single-spaced, 11pt or larger, and 1 inch margin on A4 or letter size paper). Abstracts should be submitted by February 15, 2015 as pdf files through the EasyChair conference system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cg2015 Reviewing: Abstracts will be reviewed by members of the program committee, and, where appropriate, outside reviewers. The organizers will be responsible for making decisions partly in consultation with the program committee. Notifications will be made by April 15, 2015. Workshop format: We expect to allot 45 minutes for each accepted paper (30 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for questions and discussion). The exact format of the workshop may be slightly adjusted depending on the number of submissions we receive. Proceedings: We plan to put together electronic proceedings by the time of the workshop. We will ask authors of accepted papers to submit full papers (max. 20 pages) by May 22, 2015. We are also planning to publish an edited volume after the workshop. There will be a separate reviewing process for this. More information will be provided in due course. Important dates: February 15, 2015: Submission deadline April 15, 2015: Notification of acceptance May 22, 2015: Proceedings paper due August 10-14, 2015: Workshop (at ESSLLI 2015 in Barcelona, Spain) Program committee: Chris Barker (New York University) Daisuke Bekki (Ochanomizu University) Pauline Jacobson (Brown University) Yusuke Kubota (University of Tsukuba, co-chair) Robert Levine (Ohio State University, co-chair) Michael Moortgat (Utrecht University) Glyn Morrill (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya) Richard Oehrle (OS Foundation) Carl Pollard (Ohio State University) Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh) Yoad Winter (Utrecht University)