SCAMS 3 (The third Southern California Annual Meeting on Syntax) will be hosted in person at the  Pomona College, on November 4, 2023. 

The mission of SCAMS is to be a fairly informal, low-stress meeting that will build camaraderie amongst Southern California syntacticians, while creating an accessible venue for syntacticians of all levels to present their research and learn about what others are working on. We welcome anyone who would like to present their own research and/or be an audience member for the presentations of others.   

If you plan to attend (whether presenting or not) please fill out the SCAMS signup form  which will help us plan for food and seating. Those who intend to present should fill out the form by Saturday, September 1, 2023, so that we can decide how best to accommodate those who have submitted.  A more detailed program will be announced in late September, but you can consult the 2019 conference to get an idea of what the schedule might look like. 

Please contact scamsconference@gmail.com with any questions.  

SCAMS is part of the Robert Efron Lectureship in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, made possible by a generous gift to the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. 

• Where to go for information: There will be no printed conference program, so all relevant information will be posted here.

• Location: The conference will be held at Pomona College,  in the Lincoln-Edmunds building  (185 East Sixth St, Claremont, CA, 91711). The workshop will be in Edmunds 101, with lunch and the poster session/reception on first floor of the adjacent Lincoln building (and on the patio). 

• A Google Map with relevant workshop sites marked is here.

• Weather: Evenings can get a tad chilly here (and the poster reception will be on an outdoor patio) so please bring a sweater or light coat for the late afternoon/evening.

• Parking: Street parking is available on College Ave. and on many (though not all) nearby streets (especially north/west of the conference site). No permit is required, simply watch for "No Parking" signs (e.g. on 6th street in front of our building).  

• Transportation: Please see the schedule of trains arriving at the Claremont Station within walking distance of the college. We have a Google Sheet for people to post carpooling needs/opportunities - contact us for the link.

• WiFi: If your home institution uses Eduroam, you can use Eduroam here using your login credentials from your home campus. Otherwise, you can access WiFi using the "Pomona Guest" network.

• Dinner: Not provided by SCAMS, but we are arranging for a dinner at Espiau's in the Claremont Village

• Handouts: We currently have 32 registered participants, and there may be occasional attendees from Claremont Colleges students as well, so 35 handouts should suffice, 40 if you're a print-more-to-be-safe person. If you need your handouts printed for you, you can send them to michael.diercks@pomona.edu and he can print them for you.

8:00am  Registration and breakfast

9:00am Hunter Johnson (UCLA); Unaccusatives and the active/stative split in Guarani

9:30 Steven Foley (USC); Georgian transitive inversion and case theory

10:00 János Egressy (UCLA); Size- and position-dependent opacity in Hungarian

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 Metehan Oğuz (USC); Clausal Embedding in Turkish: Various sizes of embedded material

11:30 Hilda Koopman (UCLA); Terraling

12:00 SCAMS business meeting

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00 Zhendong Liu (USC); Overlooked properties of Swahili relative clauses

2:30 Rodrigo Ranero (UCLA) & Justin Royer (UC); What you see is not what you get: A Mayan perspective on Null Complement Anaphora

3:00-3:30 Coffee Break

3:30 Vrinda Chidambaram (UCR); Almost Universal: why Macedonian superlatives break the rules.

4:00 Patricia Schneider-Zioga (CSU-Fullerton); The linker and licensing in Kinande

4:30-5:30 Reception (wine and snacks) 

Around 5:30 Dinner at Espiau’s (not provided by SCAMS)