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21-25 February 2008, 9th Szklarska Poreba Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, Szklarska Poreba, Poland

Date: 21-25 February 2008
Location: Szklarska Poreba, Poland
Deadline: 1 January 2008

This is to announce the ninth installment of the workshop that takes linguists and experimental philosophers to the ski slopes. It will be held February 21--25 2008, on the mountaintop Szrenica, Poland (the same location as every year).

Submission of abstracts

We invite authors to submit a one-page abstract to Jakub Szymanik before January 1st, for a talk of between 30 and 45 minutes (including discussion). Authors will be notified of acceptance by January 15th. Very welcome would also be proposals for the non-scientific programme, preferably to Marc Staudacher. (See below for email addresses.)

Workshop themes

The workshop aims to bring together linguists, philosophers, logicians, and all others interested in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. This year the theme is Complexity and Language - as usual this 'hot topic' should not exclude submissions on other subjects, but talks relating typical Szklarska Poreba concerns to complexity are especially welcome. We prefer new and original ideas, even if the material is not fully ripe and the presentation still tentative.

Especially relevant topics include:
* Definitions of complexity relevant to language
* The relation of complexity to markedness
* Pragmatics as a strategy for reducing complexity
* Formal complexity of language learning
* Cognitive complexity of linguistic competence
* Complexity in computational linguistics

And more traditional Szklarska Poreba themes:
* Explicatures and implicatures
* Fossilization theory
* Lexical pragmatics
* Experimental pragmatics
* The architecture of the syntax/semantics interface
* Diachronic aspects of syntax
* Quantum cognition
* Language and computation
* Grammaticalization studies
* Information structure and prosody
* Licensing of polarity elements, quantification, etc.
* The evolution of communication and language
* Language typology
* Evolutionary foundations of general pragmatic principles.

Invited Speakers

* Fritz Hamm
* Laszlo Kalman

Early skiing request

The possibility exists to hire cross-country skis, however we need to know in advance who would be interested and (crucially) how big their feet are.

All the best, and see you on the mountaintop!

Organisation and programme committee:
* Jakub Szymanik (chair) <>
* Reinhard Blutner (accommodation) <>
* Henk Zeevat (finances) <>
* Nina Gierasimczuk (local coordinator) <>
* Marc Staudacher (social programme) <>
* Tikitu de Jager <>

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~sjagerde/szklarska/.

Please note that this newsitem has been archived, and may contain outdated information or links.