CLS 45 Conference Summary

The 45th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held April 16-18, 2009 at the University of Chicago. The theme of this year's conference was "Locality in Language." The conference included a general session as well as a parasession devoted to the theme. The program is available in html and pdf. After you read through our conference summary below, check out our photo album, taken and compiled by CLS Officer Christina Weaver.

main session	parasession: locality in language
Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam	Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts
Lenore Grenoble, University of Chicago	Ivan Sag, Stanford University
Chris Potts, University of Massachusetts	Rachel Walker, University of Southern California

The first day of the conference was our Locality Day as we had four talks on Locality in Phonology, four on Locality in Syntax, and two invited speakers on Locality in Syntax: Ivan Sag, and Kyle Johnson. After the day's activities concluded, grad students got even more local by mixing at the grad student mixer at the University of Chicago Pub. A great time was had by all!



The second day of the conference saw the action pick up as we moved to the second floor of the International House. The day was chock-full of linguistics, with panels on Syntax, Locality in Syntax, Computational Phonology, Pragmatics, Experiments in Structure and Meaning, as well as the widely lauded "Nothing but Nasals" panel. Invited speakers Paul Boersma and Chris Potts gave awesome talks. On Friday night, our visitors wandered the city to take in the sights, while CLS officers collapsed in their beds at seven o'clock.



On Saturday, the third and final day, another full slate of parallel sessions took place. Panels were had on Semantics, Phonology, Language Change, Syntax, Discourse and Interaction, and the cunningly titled "Degrees and More", on the syntax and semantics of degree modification (and more). Invited speakers Lenore Grenoble and Rachel Walker held forth before captive audiences.



On Saturday night we capped off the conference in style with the CLS Banquet in the International House Assembly Hall. We thanked our speakers, guests, and volunteers, and good food and conversation was had by all, at least until the karaoke began. Jason Riggle kicked us off, the CLS 45 officers brought the house down with "Larger than Life", the freshly-minted CLS 46 officers mangled "Roxanne", Peter Graff sang perhaps ten or fifteen times, and many a song was sung before we were asked politely to leave by the International House staff.



Thanks to everyone for making this such a great conference! We couldn't have done it without great presenters, great audience members, and great helpers!

cls 45 officers
Ryan Bochnak	Nassira Nicola
Peet Klecha	Jasmin Urban
Alice Lemieux	Christina Weaver

If you presented at CLS 45, please view the instructions regarding the submission of your paper for publication in our proceedings. We intend to publish our proceedings by the time of the CLS 46 conference.