In her presentation, Nancy Stern focused on the occurrence of crossed number combinations such as ourself and myselves, seeking to demonstrate that such combinations are not anomalies, but rather are productive and systematic uses of the English linguistic system.

Tanya Christensen used the combination of the imperative form of speech with the use of the modal particles så and bare in Danish as a testing ground for hypotheses about the meaning potential of both forms. She discussed whether the listener chooses between two different senses of the particle, or if the modal particle encodes a single, more abstract meaning which is enriched by the listener with respect to the context. Christensen’s theoretical framework is Danish functional linguistics, a framework that shares key features with Columbia School linguistics.

This presentation highlighted the inadequacies of prevailing explanations for the meaning of the four conditional conjunctions: to, ba, tara, and nara . Riggs sought to provide a more accurate analysis of their meaning by focusing on the contextual environment in which these forms occur. She also examined the ellipsis of the antecedent/consequent.

Ricardo Otheguy discussed the conditioning factors that favor the occurrence or non-occurrence of the Spanish forms called the subject personal pronouns (yo, tú, él, etc.). In particular, he focused on observations of differences between newly arrived immigrants and the children of immigrants, born and raised in the USA, in the extent to which contextual constraints may statistically predict the presence or absence of these forms.

Recent study of various Romance languages has revealed that the basic and most valuable distributional facts that underlie PHB theory may be refined in order to enlarge its explanatory power. Bob de Jonge discussed such problems as the relation between articulator and articulation place, the role of adroitness of the articulator related to the phonological system and the phonetic inventory of a language, focusing in particular on the distribution of plosives in bisyllabic words in Spanish.

Wallis Reid shared his experience speaking at a conference of generative linguistics where he presented the Columbia school approach to the analysis of the English verb number system. When he presented several examples of English usage that may serve as counter-examples to formal agreement, he learned that the syntacticians in the audience did not recognize them as such. Reid extended his argument to address the apparent intractability of such examples to a semantic account, which he contends is due to two analytical wrong turns: the equation of meaning with reference, and the use of fabricated data lacking a communicative context.

In her study, Carol Moder examined the effects of frequency and context on the use of noun-noun combinations versus adjective-noun combinations which were semantically related (health, healthy; dirt, dirty; noise, noisy; sleep, sleepy, etc.) using a corpus of spoken American English and a related written American English corpus. The results indicated distinctive association patterns for noun-noun versus adjective-noun patterns.

Flora Klein-Andreu gave us a sample of the subject matter in her new book, Spanish Through Time. She demonstrated how the imperfect tense in standard modern Spanish developed from the Latin imperfect, and how changes in pronunciation led to the development of modern words from their Latin counterparts. She covered the contributions of phenomena such as phonetic variants and different dialects to the development of modern Spanish, as well as some Romance cognates that are not traceable to Classical terms or pronunciations. She pointed out that many people wish to learn about the origins of various expressions in their respective languages, and furthermore she contended that one needs to be aware of such things in order to be considered educated. This led to a lively discussion about the state of language education.

The theory of Phonology of Human Behavior (PHB), developed by William Diver and his students of the Columbia school combines and expands Saussure’s concept of sign and system, as well as aspects of the “communication factor” inherent in Prague School phonology with aspects of the “human factor” inherent in Martinet’s diachronic phonology. The fundamental axiom underlying the theory is that language represents a struggle between the desire to achieve maximum communication and the use of minimal effort. This is what we call the “Minimax” principle. Wolf and Tobin investigated whether the minimax principle works "across the board” by examining the phonemic systems of 14 diverse languages. Do linguistic communities choose the minimal number of phonemes in the most efficient way possible? The bottom line is, "Yes".

The demonstratives in Chinese (zhe ‘this’, na ‘that’, and their associated phrases) have received much attention from various linguistic theoretical perspectives. Traditional approaches treat demonstratives as referring to either temporal or spatial distances between the speaker and the referent. This explanation does not provide a satisfactory account for the actual use of the two forms. In her analysis, Lin sought to provide a better explanation of these signals and their meaning based on the Columbia School framework.

In this analysis, Robert Kirsner focused on the use of the phrase ho maar to dismiss a possibility as in the conjoined structure: X, maar Y? Ho maar! Roughly translated, the phrase means “Forget about it!” or “Of course not!” He argued that to explain how the dismissive works and to decide whether or not it is an independent synchronic unit as the label “idiom” suggests, one must consider not only the minimal meaning and conceptual metaphor of ho, but also (i) the linguistic context, (ii) the degrees of inferential complexity between ho maar and its paraphrases, (iii) the iconicity as reflected in word order, and (iv) the quotative nature of irony.

Eccardt’s paper investigated the similarities and the differences between pitch and aperture in spoken language and its linguistic analysis. If pitch and aperture are useful scalars, measuring real phenomena, their distributions may be skewed (i.e. non-random). In an analysis of translations of a book of the New Testament in each of three unrelated Asian tone languages plus one Central American tone language, there emerge small negative correlations between aperture and pitch, which are easily statistically significant. This negative correlation may correspond with the apparent positive correlation between tone level and vowel height (aperture’s inverse) already observed by tone specialists.

In his presentation, Joseph Davis gave us an example of hypothesis revision based on the availability of new data and on critical review. William Diver’s reanalysis (1995) of the opposition in Latin between so-called active and passive voice is notable for several reasons: It was the last analysis he presented and so possibly represents his most mature thinking; it illustrates a radical revision of an existing analysis; it represents a coming to terms with recalcitrant data; it has implications for other analyses of the language; and it illuminates the classical text in ways that neither the tradition nor Diver’s earlier analysis had done.

The literature on the distal demonstrative se in Old English as mainly concentrated on its use as a marker of definiteness (referent identifiability) and deixis. Drawing on data from Beowulf, Epstein argued that, at least when used as a determiner, the demonstrative also serves a variety of discourse pragmatic functions, such as indicating the relative importance of referents, topic continuity, or chapter boundaries. While there is plenty of evidence to support the notion that the words thes and se do form a system of high and low deixis, respectively, there are so few examples of the use of thes in Beowulf that they are insufficient to support such a claim.

William Diver developed the outlines of an innovative analysis of the developments in Germanic historical phonology known as Verner’s Law and Grimm’s Law. His analysis represents a synthesis of his interest in general linguistics – specifically, an application of his phonology – and original ideas concerning the reconstruction of Indo-European and Germanic. It begins with a reconstruction of the I-E phonemic inventory that departs from the standard reconstruction and more closely resembles Greek; and it reverses the traditional chronology of the Germanic developments. Diver apparently intended to present these ideas in a paper to the Columbia School conference that took place after his untimely death. He left only some incomplete notes. As part of the project of publishing Diver’s work, Huffman fleshed out Diver’s analysis by organizing his ideas and filling in the missing pieces. This presentation gave us the highlights.

Andrea Tyler began by drawing parallels between cognitive linguistics and the Columbia school. Then she reviewed the basic tenets of cognitive linguistics. She explained the principled polysemy model, and gave us a visual demonstration of how cognitive linguistics establishes the meaning of the word over. Distributed meaning is the notion that sentences with prepositions impute meanings like motion to the preposition, where the context contributes the meaning as in, "The dog jumped over the wall." The purpose of this study was to attempt to apply the principled polysemy model to another language, in this case to the meaning of the word za in Russian. The team selected this particular word because its usage is very complex. The conclusion was that the principled polysemy model can account for the complex semantics of za. The study then proceeded to analyze the interaction of aspect markers with za. Most Slavic studies have ignored the potential relationship between aspect markers and prepositions.

Swahili nouns are divided into classes based in part on noun class markers (NCM’s) attached to noun stems and in part on the co-occurrence between a noun and a particular deictic marker (DM) attached to demonstratives, possessives, verbs, and other elements that relate to the noun. According to an earlier study, each NCM signals that the noun it helps to form belongs to a given class. In this presentation, Contini-Morava discussed what meanings are signaled by the DM.

The internal vowel alternation (IVA) system is considered to be “irregular” because it only appears in a limited number of noun plurals (e.g. goose/geese, mouse/mice) and past tense verb forms (e.g. sing/sang, take/took) that have survived in modern English from a more prevalent and productive process in Old English. Following a sign-oriented analysis of language, Even-Simkin and Tobin postulate that IVA constitutes a meta-system composed of signals (signifiants) that are connected to invariant meanings (signifiés) in a Saussurean sense.

Two cars crash. In one car both people are killed, and the 16-year-old driver of the other is in a coma for weeks. Just prior to the crash, the police find the 16-year-old was texting her boyfriend messages containing “crash my car” and “suicide.” She is charged with deliberate double homicide in adult court, and the prosecution asks for a sentence of 200 years. A linguist is asked by the defense to analyze the texts and other data. The analytic task emerges: to compare two competing hypotheses – whether the texts constitute a suicide note, or an ongoing conversation. The analysis, presented in court and subjected to cross-examination, uses semantics, pragmatics, discourse and conversational analysis, topic analysis, theory of context, conversational turn-taking, power and control, Labovian narrative reportability vs. credibility, and other linguistic theoretical constructs.

Conference participants devoted a separate session to exploring cross-theoretical issues raised by various presentations, especially between Columbia School and Cognitive Grammar.