The 40th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
15-17 April 2004 at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Chicago Linguistic Society, this year's meeting will focus both on the progress which the field of linguistics has made, and on the need for unification within the field. To that end, the Main Session will highlight our past as an organization and a discipline, while our Panel Sessions will address areas of the field that are underrepresented. In addition to these scheduled sessions, there will also be special readings of classic CLS papers from the past four decades.

Invited Speakers to the Main Session
Haj Ross, University of North Texas
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University
Bill Darden, University of Chicago

The Panels this year are:

Afro-Asiatic: Its Implications for theory
This panel will look at the ways in which Afro-Asiatic languages pose difficulties for current synchronic linguistic theories, as well as how their relationships to one another diachronically are currently understood. Contributions on languages from the five less well studied branches -- Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Omotic -- are greatly encouraged.
Invited Speaker: Gene Gragg, University of Chicago

Linguistic Theory and Its Applications
This panel aims to explore the complex and varied links between Linguistics and related disciplines. The scope includes any subfields of computational linguistics and areas of applied linguistics that involve major formal linguistic theories. Papers should be explicit in explaining the ways in which theory and application interact, and should support arguments with concrete research findings.
Invited Speaker: John Goldsmith, University of Chicago

'What we talk about when we talk about nothing': The experience of absence in linguistics
From the syntax and semantics of anaphora, to underlying representations, to downstep phenomena in the analysis of tone, 'absence' is postulated to be everywhere. The goal of this panel is to make the linguist's own assumptions explicit by convening a discussion addressing whether or not, and to what extent, missing material can be said to exist.
Invited Speakers: Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Andrew Barss, University of Arizona

Dispensing with Derivation: Monostratal Theories of Grammar
This panel will collect papers addressing current problems in syntax/semantics, employing monstratal frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Autolexical Grammar, etc. Approaches to this topic will include:

• Alternate approaches to thorny problems which have resisted explanation within derivational accounts.
• Advantages of monostratal theories in addressing issues of processing (i.e. consideration of the production bias of derivational theories), including research on pragmatics and discourse analysis.