LFG BULLETIN
December 2014
** Please send bulletin items to me by email **
** < Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >**
Next issue: March 2015

CONTENTS

1. LFG15: Call for Papers
2. ParGram meeting and INESS workshop
3. New Nominating Committee member
4. xlfg.org
5. Drafts for comments
6. Recent LFG work
7. Online resources
8. Boilerplate

1. LFG15: Call for Papers

The 20th International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference (LFG15)
18 July - 20 July 2015
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Conference website: http://www.lfg2015.org
Conference e-mail (NOT for abstract submission): enquiry [at] lfg2015.org
Abstract submission receipt deadline: 15 February 2015, 11:59 pm GMT
Abstracts should be submitted online using the online submission system at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lfg15

LFG15 welcomes work within the formal architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar as well as typological, formal, and computational work within the 'spirit of LFG' as a lexicalist approach to language employing a parallel, constraint-based framework. The conference aims to promote interaction and collaboration among researchers interested in non-derivational approaches to grammar, where grammar is seen as the interaction of (perhaps violable) constraints from multiple levels of structuring, including those of syntactic categories, grammatical relations, semantics and discourse.

Further information about LFG as a syntactic theory is available at the following site:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/LFG/

Submissions: talks and posters

The main conference sessions will involve 45-minute talks (30 min. + 15 min. discussion), and poster/system presentations. Contributions can focus on results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an emphasis on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives, whether descriptive, theoretical, formal or computational. Presentations should describe original, unpublished work.

Dissertation Session

As in previous years, we are hoping to hold a special session that will give students the chance to present recent PhD dissertations (or other student research dissertations). The dissertations must be completed by the time of the conference, and they should be made publicly accessible (e.g., on the World Wide Web). The talks in this session should provide an overview of the main original points of the dissertation; the talks will be 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute discussion period. The students who present in this session will receive a subvention towards their conference costs from the International LFG Association (ILFGA).

Students should note that the main sessions are certainly also open to student submissions.

Timetable

Deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2015
Acceptances sent out: 30 March 2015
Conference: 18 July - 20 July 2015

Submission specifications

Abstracts for talks, posters/demonstrations and the dissertation session must be received by February 15, 2015. The language of the conference is English, and all abstracts must be written in English. All abstracts should be submitted using the online submission system. Submissions should be in the form of abstracts only. Abstracts can be up to two A4 pages in 10pt or larger type and should include a title. Omit name and affiliation, and obvious self-reference. Note: we no longer ask for a separate page for data and figures (c-/f- and related structures). They can be included in the text of the abstract, obeying the overall two-page limit. Please submit your abstract in .pdf format (or a plain text file). If you have any trouble converting your file into .pdf please contact the Program Committee at the address below. (On the Easychair submission system, if you upload your abstract as a .pdf file, please simply type 'abstract attached' in the abstract box.)

The number of submissions is not restricted. However, the number of oral presentations per participant is limited. Each author can be involved in a maximum of three papers that are presented orally, and can only be the first author of a single paper. The program committee will have discretionary powers to vary these rules in particular situations as they see fit. There are no restrictions on poster presentations. Authors may want to keep this in mind when stating their preferences concerning the mode of presentation of their submissions.

All abstracts will be reviewed by at least three people. Papers accepted to the conference can be submitted to the refereed proceedings, which will be published online by CSLI Publications. Selected papers may also appear in a printed volume published by CSLI Publications.

Organisers and their contact addresses

If you have queries about abstract submission or have problems using the EasyChair submission system, please contact the Program Committee.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Email: lfg15 [at] easychair.org)
John Lowe, University of Oxford
Ida Toivonen, Carleton University

LOCAL CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS (Email: enquiry [at] lfg2015.org)
Ryo Otoguro (Waseda University)
Yasunari Harada (Waseda University)
Akira Ishikawa (Sophia University)
Michiko Nakano (Waseda University)
Sachiko Shudo (Waseda University)
Yoshio Ueno (Waseda University)


2. ParGram meeting and INESS workshop

From Victoria Rosén:

"The Spring 2015 meeting will be held in Warsaw on February 2-4, 2015, followed by a two-day INESS workshop on February 5-6.

Further information is available on the meeting website:

http://pargram.b.uib.no/meetings/spring-2015-meeting-in-warsaw/"


3. New Nominating Committee member

From Tibor Laczkó, Secretary-Treasurer of the ILFGA:

"Ida Toivonen's term on the Nominating Committee has expired. We are grateful to Ida for her efficiently performing this function.

The Executive Committee is pleased to announce that Tracy H. King has accepted our invitation to replace Ida on this committee. Thank you very much, Tracy!"


4. xlfg.org

From Lionel Clément, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux:

The new version of XLFG, quite different from the preceding ones, is available for use at www.xlfg.org

XLFG is a fast, accurate deep parser for LFG grammars.

The front-end of XLFG, available to everyone on the website, is designed to conduct research or teach syntactic analysis. It does not contain grammars nor lexicon, but some examples in English and French are available to start with.

The outputs are word lattices, constituent-structures, functional-structures and argument-structures. The user can toggle through various result views in order to see the details of analysis (compounds, ill-formed FS, ambiguous CS, predicate-argument structure, etc).

Finally, this new version is a useful teaching resource for those who want to organize integrated courses, tutorials and workshops.

For further information consult the documentation on the web site.


5. Drafts for comments

'Drafts for comments' offers bulletin readers the opportunity to submit information about drafts or projects on which they would like to receive comments from the community. This brings work in progress to the attention of the community and plays some of the role that previous incarnations of the archive played.

Please submit basic article/project information and (a) a URL if the item is available online or else (b) your contact email.


6. Recent LFG work

Send details of your recent work to < Louise.Mycock "at" gmail "dot" com >

6.1 Publications

Vigo, E. M (2014). Las oraciones escindidas como casos de inversión copulativa. In N. Celayeta Gil, F. Jiménez Berrio, A. de Lucas Vicente, M. Iraceburu Jiménez and D. Izquierdo Alegría (Eds.), Lingüística teórica y aplicada: nuevas perspectivas. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 219-233. ISBN: 978-3-631-65587-0.

This paper provides a first approximation towards Spanish cleft sentences as cases of copular inversion within an OT-LFG framework. The copula in cleft sentences is claimed to agree with the clefted DP, for which arguments are shown that it is not the subject of the sentence. The main consequence of this analysis is that it provides an extension to the claim that copular inversion is a particular instance of non-subject agreement.

6.2 Conference Proceedings

LFG conference papers are available electronically at:
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/


7. Online resources

LFG website:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/LFG/

International Lexical Functional Grammar Association:
https://sites.google.com/site/ilfgalfg/home

More about LFG:
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt

Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/lfgpage


8. Boilerplate

The boilerplate (standard text) which previously appeared at the end of every bulletin can be accessed at:
http://www.carleton.ca/~asudeh/LFG/more.txt

The LFG website also serves much of the same function as the boilerplate section.