The 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
3-5 May 2007 at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Call for Papers

The 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society will be held May 3-5, 2007 at the University of Chicago. This year's conference will include a main session, focusing on the issue of gradience in grammar, and three parasessions described below.

Main Session: Gradience In Grammar

This year, the Main Session will focus on the issue of gradience in grammar, and consider the implications of gradience for linguistic theory more generally. Some of the myriad issues involved include:

• the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality;
• the status of the grammatical component as a distinct cognitive system;
• the tension between observed gradience as a property of the grammar versus a reflection of speaker variation;
• the range of empirical evidence that bears on these issues.

While we especially encourage submissions touching on the topic of gradience, equal consideration will be give to papers from all major linguistic subfields and frameworks, as well as from related cross-disciplinary areas, regardless of focus.

Invited Speakers:
R. Harald Baayen - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Chris Kennedy - University of Chicago
Tom Wasow - Stanford University

Parasession: Cross-linguistic variation in semantics

This session invites papers investigating aspects of cross-linguistic semantic variation involving less commonly studied languages or under-documented dialects of more commonly studied languages.

Invited Speaker:
Lisa Matthewson - University of British Colombia

Parasession: The Syntax of Wh-structures

This parasession will focus on the syntactic properties of so-called wh-structures, such as questions, topicalization, clefts, relative clauses, and other types of (unbounded) dependencies. Submissions from all theoretical and empirical perspectives are encouraged.

Invited Speaker:
Jim McCloskey - University of California, Santa Cruz

Parasession: Gaps, exceptions and paradigm defectiveness

Papers in this parasession will explore the nature of gaps and exceptions in phonology and morphology and the range of motivations that can account for defective behavior.

Invited Speaker:
Kie Zuraw - University of California, Los Angeles

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.