FARKAS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND BEYOND

Donka Farkas, who is on sabbatical this quarter, has also been on the road. She reports:

Between September 3 and October 12 I visited the Inquisitive Semantics group at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, as a Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) visiting professor. I worked with former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen on a paper we had started during his last visit to UCSC, in February. The goal was to get it ready for submission and, after intense work, we managed to reach it. Floris was recently awarded a five year ERC grant, so things are looking up for the Inquisitive Semantics group there.

From Amsterdam I flew to Tel Aviv for the 31st annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, where I gave an invited talk based on the work done with Floris, entitled “Assertions, polar questions and the land in-between”. The conference was extremely enjoyable: high quality talks, lively discussion, collegial atmosphere. It was small enough not to need parallel sessions and so I had the pleasure of listening not only to the many excellent talks on semantics and pragmatics but also to great work in other subfields. Former LRC visitors Nomi Erteshik-Shir, Outi Bat-El, and Olga Kagan send their warm greetings to the department. Next week I will be on the road again, for a workshop at Yale organized in honor of Larry Horn. But after that I won’t have to get on a plane for quite some time.