WORKSHOP ON LOCALITY AND DIRECTIONALITY AT THE MORPHOSYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE

Stephanie Shih and Vera Gribanova (UCSC PhD 2010) would like to announce the Workshop on Locality and Directionality at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface, which will take place at Stanford University on October 12-14, 2012. The workshop’s agenda grows directly out of the collaborative research undertaken by UCSC and Stanford linguists in the research cluster, Crosslinguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology (CrISP).

This workshop aims to address the interconnectedness of phonology and syntax by pursuing two lines of inquiry: (1) locality and cyclicity in morphophonology, and (2) the impact of phonology on syntactic operations. The first line of inquiry explores how far morphosyntax reaches into phonology: how are the domains for morphophonological processes (e.g., allomorph selection) determined? Are they derived from morphosyntactic domains, and, if so, how rigidly do these domains determine what happens in phonology? The second line of inquiry questions the strong claim that phonology is purely interpretive, exploring the possibility that phonological information plays a crucial role in influencing certain morphosyntactic processes, and trying to establish the degree and nature of that influence.

We invite paper and poster submissions addressing the two topics of the workshop. More information can be found on our call for papers and the workshop website.