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2005-2006 Workshops

Construction of Meaning

Web site:
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/linguistics/semgroup/

Schedule

Faculty Coordinators:

Graduate Student Coordinator:


Description

The Construction of Meaning Workshop provides a forum for addressing new developments in the treatment of meaning in linguistic theory. The workshop has three components: quarterly themes, each addressed by several invited speakers; a one-day mini-conference–the Semantics Fest–celebrating local research on semantics and pragmatics; and presentations of ongoing graduate student and faculty research, interspersed throughout the year. The first theme for academic year 2005/06,“Time”, examines how certain parts of the continuous chain of happenings in the real world are construed by languages as events and how language locates such events in time. Along with an event’s time, its location has been considered the other major factor in its definition. The second theme, “Space” addresses the central–even, foundational–place that spatial notions have been considered to play in the semantic organization of language. The third theme, “Order” turns to larger units of meaning, asking how speakers of a language manipulate the order of words in a sentence so that it fits coherently into the larger discourse.