Puzzles of Agreement:

 Syntactic, Semantic, and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Online Conference (October 24-25, 2024)

Organizers: University of Bucharest, University of Toronto, UMass Amherst, ZAS Berlin

This conference addresses the phenomenon of agreement and, in particular, agreement puzzles that arise from interactions with logical operators (such as conjunction, disjunction, negation, quantifiers, modals, etc.) or with special kinds of nouns (such as collectives). We will hear from a number of experts on the topic. We also welcome abstract submissions adopting theoretical and/or experimental approaches, from various linguistic domains (syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, etc.).

We are particularly interested in how speakers and listeners handle cases where multiple types of agreement are possible. For example, in the sentence The cats or the dog {is/are} resting in the sun, agreement can occur either with the closest disjunct or the entire plural disjunctive phrase the cats or the dog. Other topics of interest include the interaction between agreement hierarchies and logical operators, situations where a single morpheme can express multiple agreement features (number, person, etc.), the role of agreement in ambiguity resolution, agreement attraction errors of the type The cat near the dogs are resting in the sun, and agreement as a helpful cue in language acquisition. 

The conference will take place online via zoom. The invited speakers (30-minute talks), listed in alphabetical order, are:

Anne Abeillé (Université Paris Cité)

Faruk Akkuş (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Sakshi Bhatia (University of Delhi)

Christopher Davis (University of the Ryukyus)

Imke Driemel (University of York)

Anna Gavarró (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Anke Himmelreich (Bielefeld University)

Dalina Kallulli (University of Vienna)

Manfred Krifka & Fereshteh Modaressi (ZAS Berlin)

Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Zheng Shen (National University of Singapore)

Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August-University, Göttingen)

Authors are invited to submit a one-page abstract (Times New Roman 12, single spaced) and an additional page with graphs, figures and references to adina.bleotu@lls.unibuc.ro by September 20, 2024. 

Organizers:

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Gabriela Bîlbîie (University of Bucharest)

Lyn Tieu (University of Toronto)

Deborah Foucault, Tom Roeper, Faruk Akkuş (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Anton Benz, Andreea Nicolae (ZAS Berlin)