Conference 2002

 

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7th International Columbia School Conference on the Interaction of Linguistic Form and Meaning with Human Behavior

Columbia University, February 16-18, 2002

The latest edition of the Columbia School Linguistics Conference returned to its roots, to Columbia University. In his opening words, Dean Andrew Lloyd Sunshine remembered the days when Columbia University had its own Linguistics Department and expressed his hopes that the Department might be revived within the years to come.
Melissa Bowerman, keynote speaker for the first day, spoke on the acquisition of spatial semantic categories among languages. Her main conclusion was that probably all children may distinguish between different spacial constructions, but that these distinctions may diminish in time, when learning their mother tongue.

The rest of the first day offered a varied view of Columbia School advances in research, such as the talk by Ellen Contini, on particles expressing possessed animates in Swahili; Nancy Stern on the invariant meaning of self, indicating insistence on a referent; Bob Kirsner on Dutch and Afrikaans demonstratives with or without locative meanings; Jung Hee Park on locative/directional particles in Korean indicating that also here we have unique, invariant meanings; Kryztov Urban, who is working on a computational model for Columbia School Analysis resulting in so-called Self Organizing Maps which may eventually be indicative of the relatedness of meanings. The day was closed by Radmila Gorup, one of the organizers of the Conference, with a new analysis of Serbo-Croatian se.

The second day was opened by the second keynote speaker, Joan Bybee, who spoke on the relation between frequency of occurrence, morphology and sound change. As can be expected, there is a relation between frequently occurring patterns, such as in morphology, and sound change, as she very convincingly demonstrated.

This talk opened the floor for more phonology, such as Yishai Tobin, who introduced a new field for Phonology as Human Behavior, namely PHB in inflectional morphology. Gina Joue and Nikolinka Nenova spoke on meaningful sound patterns in (nonlexical) interjections; Haruko Miyakoda argued that the sound pattern of Japanese loanwords also follows the principles of PHB; Bob de Jonge (and Adriaan Dekker) spoke on a particular distributional problem in modern Peninsular Spanish which in the end could be explained recurring to PHB. Joseph Davis argued that in fact, PHB does not need the phoneme and may be taken as the relation between phonetics and the human factor. Thomas Eccart introduced semiotics as a possible new field for Columbia School analysis. Ricardo Otheguy discussed the relation between the grammatical structure of languages and the possibility of inverting constituent order across languages. Phrasal length appeared to be an important means to demonstrate the hypotheses.

The second day was closed by the third keynote speaker, Alan Huffman who eventually had the shortest title for the longest talk on the Conference: -s, which was a work-in-progress account of the interactional meanings of noun-plural –s and third person singular verb ending –s, and which included an original diachronic analysis to account for the skewed synchronic paradigmatics of -s.

The last day started with Wallis Reid, speaking on the differences, but also, and mainly, the relation between Columbia School and Saussure’s langue.

Yishai Tobin read the paper of Igor Dreer, who unfortunately could not make the Conference, due to visa problems. His subject was a Columbia-School-type meaning for the opposition between French indicative and subjunctive moods. Benjamin Rosenthal introduced meanings in grammatical elements in Japanese cognate clusters, and Hidemi Sugi discussed a number of Japanese inferential auxiliaries. The day, and with it the Conference, was closed by a most entertaining, but not less serious, talk by Charlene Crupi on the differences in meaning among yet, but and still.

In the conference business meaning the plans for the next Conference were discussed. The next one will again take place in New York, on President’s Weekend in 2004. As for now, the organizing committee will consist of Nancy Stern, Radmila Gorup, Joseph Davis, Yishai Tobin and Bob de Jonge (in arbitrary order).