09:45-10:00

Welcome and registration

10:00-11:00

Evaluating Large Language Models as LinguistsDr Itamar Kastner (University of Edinburgh)

11:00-11:15

Break

11:15-12:00

Meaning and Mathematics in Artificial IntelligenceRepresentatives from Unlikely AI

12:00-12:15

Social meaning and identity construction in game-theoretic pragmatics Dr Heather Burnett (Research Director, Formal Linguistics Laboratory, Paris Diderot University)

13:15-14:00

Lunch

14:00-15:30

Perspectives in Language AcquisitionProf Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Prof Ben Ambridge (University of Manchester)

15:30-15:45

Break

15:45-17:00

Inferential Statistics for Linguists: Revealing Underlying Mechanisms and Making Them Work for YouDr Lauren Ackerman (Research Associate and LingLab Manager, Newcastle University)

17:15-18:00

Break

17:15-18:30

Careers Talks:(1) A Career After Linguistics: Perspectives from graduates - Dr Ben Naismith (Senior Assessment Scientist from Duolingo), Anthony Verardi(Research Program Manager from Duolingo), Noriyasu Li (Principal Product Manager from Moderna), and Tynisha Brice (Assistant Director for International Career Development from Davidson College)(2) Getting Career Opportunities at a Linguistics Student - Dr. Abdesalam Soudi (Project Manager of Humanities @ Work in the Community, Health & Tech Industries from University of Pittsburgh)

18:30

Informal social gathering 

French gender inclusive doublets and the fine structure of the nominal domain

Collaborative work with Caterina Donati (LLF, CNRS - Université Paris Cité) and Marie Flesch (LLF, CNRS - Université Paris Cité)

In this presentation, we present a formal syntactic analysis of gender inclusive doublets in spoken French. In a gender inclusive doublet construction, constituents containing overt (i.e. pronounced) gender marking can be doubled, where one occurrence has masculine marking and one has feminine marking. Consider the example in (1), spoken by the the feminist journalist, Victoire Tuaillon, on French television:

(1) De toute façon, en tant que humain humaine, on peut pas vivre seul, non? On est forcément en relation les uns les unes avec les autres.

"In any case, as humans (human_M human_F), we can't live alone, no? We are necessarily in a relation with each other (lit. the ones_M the others_F)"

Gender inclusive doublets are instances of an innovative linguistic practice coming from feminist and LGBT+ activism and has been studied in the sociolinguistics literature (see, for example, Elmiger 2015, Abbou 2017, Burnett & Pozniak 2021). As these works describe, the doublets are used as a way of avoiding having a single masculine marked expression referring to people of all genders, i.e. avoiding en tant que humain `as a human_M'. Although many francophones are supportive of gender inclusive language, others are skeptical or even critical.  While much of the criticism is clearly related to the social and political questions that this linguistic practice aims to address (reducing gender equality and/or deconstructing the gender binary), it is true that the sentences in (1) have a property that is unusual for French: there are two nominal predicates (humain humaine) and two DPs (les uns les unes) where we normally find only one. From a theoretical perspective, gender inclusive doublets thus raise questions with respect to how syntactic selection works in such utterances, possibly challenging Chomsky (1986)'s Projection Principle.

The main goal of this presentation is to argue that French gender inclusive doublets are not only of interest to sociolinguists, but also to theoretical syntacticians. We will show that, despite their roots in feminist linguistic activism, these constructions not only obey general grammatical constraints that have been observed cross-linguistically, but also reveal new properties of the fine-grained structure of the spoken French nominal domain.  We claim that, contrary to appearances, gender inclusive doublets do not challenge the Projection Principle since, as we will argue, a doublet contains only a single noun phrase. We propose that the illusion of multiple noun/determiner phrases in utterances like (1) arises from the doubling of interpretable phi features, which are then spelled out as chunks of nominal (or other) structure. We arrive at this proposal through a study of grammaticality and interpretation judgements with native speakers and a quantitative study of linguistic variation in the Cartographie linguistique des féminismes (CaFé) spoken corpus (Abbou & Burnett 2024).

References

Abbou, J. & Burnett, H. (2024). Devenir féministe à Paris et Montréal: Récits de vie dans le corpus CaFé. in press in H. Blondeau, M. Laforêt & W. Remysen (eds). 80 ans des corpus montréalais. Presses Universitaires de l'Université de Montréal.

Abbou, J. (2017). (Typo) graphies anarchistes. Où le genre révèle l’espace politique de la langue. Mots. Les langages du politique, 53-72.

Burnett, H., & Pozniak, C. (2021). Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian universities. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(5), 808-831.

Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Praeger.

Elmiger, D. (2015). La répétition de noms communs de personnes pour éviter le masculin à valeur générique. Le discours et la langue, 7(2), 97-112.



Savio Meyase (University of York, UK)Michael Ramsammy (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Tonal and laryngeal contrast in Jokha Tenyidie

Susan Lu (University College London, UK)

Gradient Phonotactics in Rotokas

Lauren Ackerman (Newcastle University, UK)

Name Explorer App: A Resource for Rigorous and Replicable Stimulus Design

Keisuke Kume (Nagoya University, Japan)Heather Marsden (University of York, UK)

Acceptability judgement satiation after sentence processing task: Evidence from Japanese

Christianna Antonopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)Vassilios Spyropoulos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)

A typology of coordinate compound structures with special reference to Greek

Yiwei Si (University of Oxford, UK)

Still a preposition: on aspectual properties of verbal particles in German

Clare Patterson (University of Cologne, Germany)Andrew Kehler (University of California San Diego, United States)Petra B. Schumacher (University of Cologne, Germany)

Interpretation Strategies for Complex Anaphora

Izabel Ilie (University College London, UK)Juliette van Steensel (University College London, UK)Andrew Lamont (University College London, UK)

Sticking point: Structural Optimality cannot model tone bunnies

Fumio Mohri (Fukuoka University, Japan)

Reduplicated plural nouns in Japanese and their ‘many’ readings

Reverse language transmission, intergenerational attrition and language change

Reverse language transmission, intergenerational attrition and language change Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois - Urbana Champaigne) Some long-term immigrants may undergo native language attrition after several years of residence in the host country. Second generation immigrants, or heritage speakers, are known to display significant structural variability in their grammars in some of the same areas that are vulnerable to subtle attrition effects in long-term immigrants (gender agreement, case marking, verbal morphology, pronominal reference, etc.). Given these two sets of findings, to what extent are these patterns related, and if so, in what way? It has been suggested that because first generation immigrants are the main source of input to the heritage speakers, they may be responsible for directly transmitting attrited patterns or “errors” to the heritage speakers, who then amplify them. This position is consistent with some diachronic models of language transmission. In this talk, I will provide a different interpretation of the relationship between attrition in first generation immigrants and partial acquisition in heritage speakers, based on recent empirical evidence from different languages. I suggest that the linguistic changes observed in the adult immigrants and the heritage speakers may be independent (unrelated) and internally motivated, because they also occur in L2 acquisition. Alternatively, if related, I argue that reverse transmission may be at play instead, when the young adult heritage speakers might be influencing the language of the parents; rather, than the other way around. Bringing together insights from diachronic language change, sociolinguistics and bilingualism, I base my proposal on the purported timing of attrition in adults and partial/protracted acquisition in child heritage speakers as a function of age. Theoretical and empirical evidence for reverse language transmission may explain the emergence of the variety of Spanish spoken in the United States.