LAGB Autumn Meeting 2002: UMIST

First Circular and Call for Papers

The 2002 Autumn Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain will be held at UMIST, from September 17 to 19. The local organiser is Paul Bennett <paul@ccl.umist.ac.uk>.

The Meeting will be immediately preceded by a Workshop on Agreement; for more information, see below.

The conference website is at: http://mull.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/lagb/

Manchester, host of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, is at the heart of the largest urban area in the north of England. Cultural attractions include the recently-refurbished City Art Gallery, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Lowry in nearby Salford. The city centre includes a sizeable Chinatown and the famous Gay Village, plus the renovated canal area of Castlefield. The Peak District and Pennines are areas of natural beauty close by.

Accommodation:

The UMIST campus is fairly compact. Accommodation will be in en-suite rooms just a few minutes' walk away from where the sessions will take place, and also within walking distance of the restaurants, bars and clubs of central Manchester.

Travel:

UMIST is situated on the edge of the city centre, and is very easy to reach. Trains from London Euston take about 2hrs 40mins to Manchester Piccadilly station, which is only five minutes' walk from the campus; there are also regular train services from most major British cities. Manchester is easily accessible via the motorway network (M6, M62). Manchester International Airport is ten miles from the city centre, and is served by flights from most major

European airports and by regular shuttles to Heathrow and Gatwick; there is a train service from the airport station to Manchester Piccadilly (usually at least four trains an hour, taking c. 20 minutes).

 

Events:

The Henry Sweet Lecture 2002 will be delivered by Professor Anthony Kroch (University of Pennsylvania) and is entitled: 'Variation and Change in the Historical Syntax of English'.

There will also be a Workshop on Quantitative and corpus-based perspectives on the morpho-syntactic history of English.

A Language Tutorial on Romani, will be given by Dr Yaron Matras (University of Manchester).

There will be a Session of Linguistics at School on Community languages, organised by Dr Anthea Fraser Gupta (University of Leeds).

Enquiries about the LAGB meeting should be sent to the Meetings Secretary (address below). Full details of the programme will be included in the Second Circular, to be sent out in June.

Call for Papers:

Members are invited to offer papers for the Meeting; abstracts are also accepted from non-members. The LAGB welcomes submissions on any topic in the field of linguistics; papers are selected on their (perceived) merits, and not according to their subject matter or assumed theoretical framework.

How and when to submit an abstract

Abstracts must be submitted on paper (not by email or by fax). FIVE anonymous copies of the abstract, plus ONE with name and affiliation, i.e. CAMERA-READY, should be submitted, and should be sent to the President (address below) in the format outlined below. You must write your address for correspondence (email or surface) on the BACK of the camera-ready copy. (Even if several authors are named on the front, there should be only one name and address for correspondence.)

Abstracts should be accompanied by an indication of any special requirements regarding audiovisual equipment (other than an OHP).

Papers for the programme are selected anonymously - only the President knows the name of the authors. Where possible, authors should supply an email address to which the committee's decision may be sent.

Abstracts must arrive by June 14. Abstracts may also be submitted now for the meeting after the next one, but must be clearly marked as such. (In general the abstract deadlines for the autumn and spring meetings are soon after 1st June and 1st January respectively, so an abstract sent to reach the President by that date will always be in time.)

Format of abstracts

Abstracts must be presented as follows: The complete abstract (i.e. the one containing your title and your name) must be no longer than ONE A4 page (21cm x 29.5cm) with margins of at least 2.5cm on all sides. You may use single spacing but type must be no smaller than 12 point. If the paper is accepted the abstract will be photocopied and inserted directly into the collection of abstracts sent out to participants, so the presentation should be clear and clean.

The following layout should be considered as standard:

Optimality and the Klingon vowel shift (title)

Clark Kent (speaker)

clark@astro.mars.ac.mars (email address)

Department of Astrology, Eastern Mars University (institution)

The normal length for papers delivered at LAGB meetings is 25 minutes (plus 15 minutes discussion).

There is the possibility to submit abstracts for a themed session (or panel), i.e. groups of speakers can ask for a whole 2-hour themed session, and can apportion their time within that as they wish. All the abstracts for such a session will be considered together.

The committee will plan the programme as soon as it has selected the successful abstracts, so please indicate on the anonymous abstracts if you cannot present your paper on either the second or third day of the conference (18th or 19th September). It is very difficult to reschedule papers after the programme has been planned.

Content of abstracts

The following guidelines may be useful:

+ You should clearly describe the paper's general topic. (The topic may be a problem of theory or analysis or set of data which has not previously been analysed.)

+ You should describe your treatment of the topic, and how it relates to previous work on the same topic. (When referring to previous work, it is enough to quote "Author (Date)" without giving full bibliographical details.) It is not acceptable simply to promise a solution.

+ You should explain how you will justify your treatment, and quote crucial evidence - you must trust the committee (and other conference attenders) not to steal your ideas before you have presented them. If you are taking a stand on a controversial issue, summarise the arguments which lead you to take up this position.

Conference Bursaries

Up to 10 bursaries are available for unsalaried members of the Association (e.g. PhD students) with preference given to those who are presenting a paper. Applications should be sent to the President, and must be received by the deadline for abstracts. Please state on your application: (a) date of joining the LAGB (applicants must have been a member at least since the date of the previous meeting); (b) whether or not you are a student; (c) if a student, whether you receive a normal grant; (d) if not a student, your employment situation. STUDENTS WHO ARE SUBMITTING AN ABSTRACT and who wish to apply for funding should include all the above details WITH THEIR ABSTRACT. The bursary normally covers the registration fee and travel within the UK. Those presenting a paper will receive an additional amount of GBP40.

Communications with the membership

Internet home page: The LAGB internet home page can be found at the following address:

www.lagb.org

Electronic network: Please join the LAGB electronic network, which is used for disseminating LAGB information and for consulting members quickly. It can be subscribed to by sending the message "add lagb" to: listserv@postman.essex.ac.uk.

Nominations for speakers: Nominations are requested for future guest speakers; all suggestions should be sent to the Honorary Secretary.

Changes of address: Members are reminded to notify the Membership Secretary of changes of address. An institutional address is preferred; bulk mailing saves postage.

Future Meetings

14-16 April 2003 University of Sheffield

Autumn 2003 University of Oxford

Spring 2004 (provisional) University of Surrey Roehampton

The Meetings Secretary would very much like to receive offers of future venues, particularly from institutions which the LAGB has not previously visited.

Agreement Workshop

The message below has been received from the organisers of the workshop:

Just before the main meeting, on 16-17 September 2002, also at UMIST, the Surrey Morphology Group is organising a workshop on Agreement. This is sponsored by the ESRC, since a main aim of the workshop is to disseminate the results from an ESRC project on agreement carried out by Greville Corbett, Dunstan Brown, Carole Tiberius, and Julia Barron. We are also grateful for LAGB sponsorship. There will be papers by our consultants Nick Evans and Marianne Mithun, and further invited papers on agreement by Bernard Comrie, Maria Polinsky, and Anna Siewierska. The project involves a typological database, which will be of interest to linguists of different persuasions and to psycholinguists. We are keen for people to come to discuss the papers, but we do not have any remaining slots for additional papers. Participants are encouraged to submit abstracts to the main LAGB conference.

Booking information will be available through the LAGB circulars. In the meantime, we welcome expressions of interest (to c.tiberius@surrey.ac.uk)

For more information see our website: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/SMG/projects/agreement/