Workshop on Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of Agreement

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Workshop on Morphology and Underspecification in the Morpho-Semantics of Agreement (MUMSA) will bring together researchers from two disciplinary areas of Linguistics (Morphology and Semantics) and from typological and formalist backgrounds, who are united by both their object of study (grammatical agreement) and their approach (appeal to competition via underspecification), but who in practice have little opportunity for cross-pollination. The workshop will make steps towards filling the voids among these active research domains. Significant advances have been made in the understanding of both the morphology and semantics of agreement in recent years. For example, the last five years have seen, on the one hand, publication of the major new treatments of the range of variation in the morphological expression of person marking, and on the other, some of the first new discoveries about the formal semantics of personal pronouns and person agreement. Yet the results of the two disciplinary areas have been largely isolated from one another, in part as a result of the increasing degree of sub-specialization within the field. MUMSA will provide for a balance of speakers representing morphology and semantics, typology and formal theory. Roughly two-thirds of the speakers are invited participants, selected from the cutting edge in each area. The workshop will have a presentation plus invited commentary format to ensure the highest level of integration among the invited participants. Additional talks selected by refereed abstract will ensure broad participation. More broadly, the workshop will contribute to both semantics and morphology by making results in each area more prominently and readily accessible to researchers in the other. At the same time, the workshop will serve as an example of the synergistic possibilities afforded by dialogues among formal-oriented and typologically-oriented research traditions within the field.