The 44th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
24-26 April 2008 at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Short meeting description:

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society will be held April 24-26, 2008 at the University of Chicago. This year's conference will include a main session on modeling language evolution, a general linguistics session, and three parasessions, detailed below and at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/cls/.

Detailed Announcement Information:

General Session

The general session invites papers on any avenue of current research in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. In addition, CLS 44 will include the following topic-oriented sessions:

Parasession: Modeling Language Evolution

This parasession invites current research on models of linguistic change, including both the evolution of individual languages and of the language faculty itself. We look forward to submissions exploring such topics as:

• The role of learning in language change
• The causes and effects of cognitive, physical, and social biases over time
• Mathematical and computational models of language learning and evolution
• Experimentation and empirical surveys of the processes and systems involved in change
• The application of the methods, theories, and metaphors of related disciplines like evolutionary biology, ecology, sociology, complex systems, statistical physics, and agent-based modeling.

Invited speaker: Simon Kirby, University of Edinburgh
Invited speaker: W. Tecumseh Fitch, St. Andrews

Parasession: Non-truth Conditional Facets of Meaning

This session explores the notion that sentence meaning is multifaceted. Topics include but are not limited to: (1) the ways in which expressions that are not traditionally considered as contributing to truth conditions are accommodated in a truth-conditional semantics; and (2) alternative, genuinely non-truth conditional frameworks in which the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth conditional meaning is not basic.

Invited speaker: Gregory Ward, Northwestern University

Parasession: Code-switching

This session explores the linguistic, social and cognitive dimensions of inter-sentential and intra-sentential code-switching. Topics include but are not limited to: syntactic and/or phonological constraints on code-switching, socio-historical factors in the emergence and use of code-switching, code-switching in language change, and conversational analyses of code-switching.

Invited speaker: Jeff MacSwan, Arizona State University

Parassion: Non-verbal Communication

This session explores all forms of non-verbal communication, both within linguistic systems (i.e. sign languages) and the ways in which non-verbal communication interacts with linguistic competency. Possible topics include: the evolution of sign languages, the significance of gesture and other non-verbal communication in studying language disorders and language processing, and the audio-visual interface as it pertains to linguistic performance.

Invited speaker: Carol Padden, University of California, San Diego

Presentation Format:

Each talk will be given 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Presented papers will be published in the CLS Proceedings.

Submission Guidelines:

Anyone may submit one abstract as the sole author and a second as co-author, or two as co-author. All abstracts must be submitted online at http://clml.uchicago.edu/cls44.

Abstracts should conform to the following specifications:

• PDF format, with filename ''Lastname - Paper Title'' (e.g., Asimov - The Morphophonemics of Robojibwe.pdf).
• 12-point font, 1-inch margins.
• Include title and keywords (i.e., CLS session title, language, language family, linguistics subfield).
• Abstract should be no more than 500 words in length. Data, keywords, and references are not included in the final count, but please interleave data with the main body of the abstract if possible. Total abstract (including data and references) should not exceed 2 pages.
• Author name(s) should not appear on the abstract! Only in the filename.

Please note that abstracts submitted to CLS 44 will be evaluated under a two-tiered review system involving both external and internal reviewers.

Deadline:

All abstracts must be submitted by 8pm CST on Friday, January 11, 2008. The authors will be notified of acceptance decisions by mid-February 2008.

For questions not answered in this call, please contact us at cls at uchicago dot edu.