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Ninth International Columbia School Conference The City College of New York SummaryThe Ninth Columbia School Conference was held at the same site as the Eighth, at City College on 137th Street in Manhattan. Sponsored by the Columbia School Linguistic Society and by the City College School of Education, it ran from February 18-19, 2007. The conference featured two invited speakers: Elizabeth Traugott of Stanford University in California, and Yishai Tobin of Ben-Gurion University at Be'er Sheva in Israel. As Elizabeth Traugott remarked, CSLS conferences are truly confer-ences, in that every talk is allotted time for questions and discussions. At this one, presenters and audiences were not burdened with concurrent program items. A total of twenty talks ranged from text-based empirical research on individual grammatical and phonological phenomena, to more theoretical discussions of Columbia School history and methodology, to the ad-hoc linguistic methodologies of our legal system. Languages analyzed included English and other European languages, Hebrew, Korean, and sign languages. Speakers hailed from four states and four countries - it appears that diversity was diminished by new difficulties in obtaining visas. Nevertheless, other schools of thought were represented, and presenters ranged from esteemed academics to graduate students. In keeping with the empirical traditions of the Columbia School, ad-hoc introspective sentence or non-sentence examples were not cited - the provenance of all data presented was clearly labeled as to the corpus it was found in. In the first morning session, invited speaker Traugott gave a construction grammar analysis of grammaticalization and emergent constructions. Then Ellen Contini-Morava and Ricardo Otheguy formed a panel to discuss Traugott's paper from a Columbia School viewpoint. In the afternoon session on the second day, Yishai Tobin presented his invited talk on Israeli Sign Language. He demonstrated the strong influence of meaning on the form of its gestures, even on its grammar. In the conference room was a display table of CSLS publications for sale at special prices. There were plenty of refreshments, and two included luncheons. On Sunday evening, many of the conference attendees convened for a group dinner at Sezz Medi', a small Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. During the second luncheon, Elizabeth Traugott was asked for her comments and questions about the conference, and then Alan Huffman, Yishai Tobin, Nancy Stern, Wallace Reid, and Robert Kirsner responded. At the business meeting after Monday's presentations, Society members discussed the venue for the next conference and the publication of the next volume with the proceedings of this and the last conference. It was decided that Professor Reid would organize the next conference at Rutgers where he teaches, with the help of Betsy Rodriguez-Bachiller and Charlene Crupi. Bob de Jonge agreed to edit the next volume, along with Charlene Crupi and Thomas Eccardt. The attendees applauded to thank Joseph Davis, Ricardo Otheguy, and Nancy Stern who organized the conference. Thanks are also due to Bob de Jonge, Michael Kaplan, Benjamin S. Kirzhner, Tania Peña, Betsy Rodríguez-Bachiller, and Thomas Eccardt. --Written by Thomas Eccardt ProgramSunday, February 18
Monday, February 19
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