Meaning in Flux 2019: Connecting development, variation, and change
Yale University, New Haven, CT
October 10th -12th, 2019
Linsly-Chittenden Hall (63 High St.)
REGISTRATION IS CLOSED
Description:
The connections between meanings and the pronunciations through which they are linguistically conveyed vary systematically within a speech community and change systematically over time. Many synchronic and diachronic patterns that instantiate such dynamics have been well described, yet the cognitive and communicative forces that support them—including their discourse-based, linguistic, conceptual, and cognitive components—remain poorly understood. The focus of this conference is to bring together researchers working on one or more of these facets with the aim of connecting development, variation, and change.
We invite abstracts for talks at the intersection of semantics/pragmatics, information/discourse structure, phonetics/phonology (of spoken and signed languages), language variation, language change, and language and cognitive development. We highly encourage submissions presenting in-progress results, covering not only connections between existing analyses and cognitively-grounded explanatory models but also the methodological challenges that arise.
Specifically, in this workshop we would like to address the following questions:
(a) to what extent are trajectories of meaning-pronunciation dynamics construable as dynamics that emerge from and are guided by real-time implementation of the architecture of language and the larger cognitive system?
(b) how are the actuation and propagation of these dynamics driven by discourse context and other communicative constraints?
(c) how are the causal relations between the arcs of acquisition/development and change in meaning-pronunciations informed by processing constraints?
We are planning this very much as a retreat, with discussion driven by foundational questions on meaning -pronunciation development, variation, and change, as well as the struggle of messy data. We are seeking to bring together all kinds of perspectives on meaning and phonetics/phonology representation, as well as all experimental and empirical approaches, as exemplified by our invited speakers.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Susan Carey, Harvard U. Psychology
Herbert Clark, Stanford U. Psychology
Jennifer Cole, Northwestern U. Linguistics
Veneeta Dayal, Yale U. Linguistics
Susan Carey, Harvard U. Psychology
Herbert Clark, Stanford U. Psychology
Jennifer Cole, Northwestern U. Linguistics
Veneeta Dayal, Yale U. Linguistics
Deadline: 11:59 PM of your local time zone on Monday June 10th, 2019: Extended: Monday June 17th
REGISTRATION IS CLOSED
Notification: Monday July 15th, 2019
Format: Two pages, 8.5” x 11” or A4, comprising text, figures, tables, references, etc., as needed. Please maintain 1” margins on all sides, and use at least size 12 font. Abstracts should be headed by the title in bold, and should not contain any author information.Please submit your abstracts using the form at: http://tinyurl.com/meaningflux and address any questions to meaninginflux@gmail.com.
Confirmed scientific committee:
Claire Bowern, Yale U. Linguistics
António Branco, U. of Lisbon Informatics
Kathryn Davidson, Harvard U. Linguistics
Ashwini Deo, The Ohio State U. Linguistics
Kathryn Franich, U. of Delaware Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Roberta Golinkoff, U. of Delaware Education/Psychology/Linguistics
Argyro Katsika, UC Santa Barbara Linguistics
María Mercedes Piñango, Yale U. Linguistics/Psychology
Jennie Pyers, Wellesley C. Psychology
Federico Rossano, UC San Diego Cognitive Science
Paula Rubio-Fernández, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Petra Schumacher, U. of Cologne German
Jason Shaw, Yale U. Linguistics
Heike Wiese, Humboldt U. Linguistics
Alan Yu, U. of Chicago Linguistics
Organizing committee:
Catalina Mourgues*, Emanuel Souza de Quadros, Garima Chopra*, Jason Shaw*, Jisu Sheen*, Joshua Phillips, Kate Stanton , María Mercedes Piñango*, Martín Fuchs*, Muye (Andy) Zhang*, Nanyan Wu*, Randi Martinez, and Sarah Babinski*
(*-Executive Committee)
Videos from the conference can be accessed here
Program:
|You can find further details and abstracts in the program booklet, attached at the bottom of this page|
| Thursday October 10th, 2019 | ||
| 14:30 – 15:30 | Registration & Snacks (LC Lobby) | |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Welcome | Remarks by Alan Gerber, Dean of Social Sciences
Yale University & María Mercedes Piñango Yale University |
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Plenary Talk I (LC 102) | |
| Meaning in the Moment | Herbert Clark
Stanford University |
|
| 17:00 – 18:40 | Session 1 (LC 102) | |
| Moderator | Veneeta Dayal
Yale University |
|
| 17:00 – 17:20 | Real-time methods for diachronic semantics: the PROG-to-IMPF shift in Spanish | Martín Fuchs & María Mercedes Piñango
Yale University |
| 17:20 – 17:40 | Interpreting semantic judgment tests on subjectivity and intersubjectivity | Sayaka Abe
Middlebury College |
| 17:40 – 18:00 | Two cross-linguistic studies on the acquisition of definiteness and Theory of Mind | Paula Rubio-Fernández, MIT
Vishakha Shukla, Shroff Hospital Delhi Madeleine Long , University of Oslo Fatoumata Jallow, The Gambia College Marta Bialecka-Pikul, Jagiellonian University Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University |
| 18:00 – 18:40 | Discussion | |
| 18:40 – 20:30 | Reception (LC Foyer) | |
| Friday October 11th, 2019 | ||
| 8:30 – 9:20 | Breakfast (LC Foyer) | |
| 9:20 – 10:20 | Plenary Talk II (LC 102) | |
| Genericity and (In)Definiteness: A Cross-linguistic Perspective | Veneeta Dayal
Yale University |
|
| 10:20 – 11:30 | Session 2 (LC 102) | |
| Moderator | Josh Phillips
Yale University |
|
| 10:20 – 10:40 | Pragmatic and semantic influences on nominal morphosyntax in Kwéyòl Donmnik: Insights from information status, specificity, and deixis | Joy Peltier
University of Michigan |
| 10:40- 11:00 | Exemplar-Driven Categorial Grammar as a Framework for Studying the Dynamics of Semantic Change | Emanuel Quadros
Yale University |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Discussion | |
| 11:30 – 12:00 | Lunch (LC Foyer) | |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Plenary Talk III (LC 101) | |
| When meaning changes reflect conceptual change; the possibility (and actuality) of episodes of conceptual construction over time | Susan Carey
Harvard University |
|
| 13:00 – 13:20 | Coffee | |
| 13:20 – 15:00 | Session 3 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | María Mercedes Piñango
Yale University |
|
| 13:20 – 13:40 | Social meaning in sales interaction at a multilingual urban street market | Britta Shulte & Irem Duman
University of Potsdam |
| 13:40 – 14:00 | Acquiring sociophonetic variation in the globalized world: style-shifting and metalinguistic awareness of Polish-English-speaking adolescents in the UK | Kinga Kozminska & Hua Zhu
Birbeck College, University of London |
| 14:00 – 14:20 | Comprehension of underspecified meaning and the impact of individuals’ autistic traits | Yao-Ying Lai, Michiru Makuuchi National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Japan
María Mercedes Piñango, Yale University & Hiromu Sakai, Waseda University |
| 14:20 – 15:00 | Discussion | |
| 15:00 – 15:20 | Coffee & Desserts | |
| 15:20 – 16:30 | Session 4 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | Paula Rubio-Fernandez
MIT |
|
| 15:20 – 15:40 | Toddlers both hear and recognize polysemous word meanings: corpus and eye tracking evidence | Sammy Floyd, Princeton University
Libby Barak, Rutgers University Adele Goldberg & Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University |
| 15:40 – 16:00 | The effect of bilingualism and bi-dialectalism on irony comprehension | Kyriakos Antoniou & George Spanoudis
University of Cyprus |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | Discussion | |
| 16:30 – 16:50 | Coffee & Snacks | |
| 16:50 – 18:00 | Session 5 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | Susan Carey
Harvard University |
|
| 16:50 – 17:10 | The development of metonymic comprehension as the growth of context-construal ability | Muye Zhang, María Mercedes Piñango & Jisu Sheen
Yale University |
| 17:10 – 17:30 | Partial Meanings | Eve Clark
Stanford University |
| 17:30 – 18:00 | Discussion | |
| 18:30 – 20:30 | Dinner (Luce Hall) | |
| Saturday October 12th, 2019 | ||
| 8:30 – 9:00 | Breakfast (LC Foyer) | |
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Plenary Talk IV (LC 101)
The listener’s dilemma: interpreting speaker meaning from posody under variable encoding |
Jennifer Cole
Northwestern University |
| 10:00 – 11:40 | Session 6 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | Jason Shaw
Yale University |
|
| 10:00 – 10:20 | The relationship between syntactic distributions and prosodic position | Nick Lester, University of Zurich
& Argyro Katsika, University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 10:20 – 10:40 | Prosodic de-emphasis under non-identity: In support of a pragmatic account | Jeffrey Geiger & Ming Xiang
University of Chicago |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | Meaning-intonation mapping in flux: Navigating variability through talker-sensitive adaptation | Andrés Buxo-Lugo & Chigusa Kurumada
University of Rochester |
| 11:00 – 11:40 | Discussion | |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Coffee & Snacks | |
| 12:00 – 13:10 | Session 7 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | Sarah Babinski
Yale University |
|
| 12:00 – 12:20 | Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in an alien language | Lacey Wade & Gareth Roberts
University of Pennsylvania |
| 12:20 – 12:40 | Behavior of homophones does not support irregular phonological change | Chelsea Sanker
Yale University |
| 12:40 – 13:10 | Discussion | |
| 13:10 – 13:30 | Lunch (LC Foyer) | |
| 13:30 – 14:40 | Session 8 (LC 101) | |
| Moderator | Jennifer Cole
Northwestern University |
|
| 13:30 – 13:50 | Negation in flux: a negative concord stage in child English | Kathryn Davidson
Harvard University |
| 13:50 – 14:10 | Does a communicative partner’s behavior affect children’ s informativeness? | Myrto Grigoroglou & Patricia Genea
University of Toronto |
| 14:10 – 14:40 | Discussion | |
| 14:40 – 15:00 | Coffee & Dessert | |
| 15:00 – 16:00 | Panel | |
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Conclusion | |
| 17:00 – 21:00 | Party (Pierson College Fellow’s Lounge) | |