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Graduate Program in Linguistics at the City University of New York

Showcasing Quirky and Unusual Ideas in Development (SQUID 2006) Conference
(Download the program) ; See the conference photo album

Date: Friday, May 5, 2006
Time: 10:00am-5:10pm
Location: Graduate Center, Rm TBA

Have you been thinking about a problem that’s just, well, too quirky for a standard conference talk? The syntax of obscenities, maybe? Or do you have a crazy idea about a real problem that just couldn’t be right (but what if it were…..?). Or maybe you have some initial ideas on a topic you’re starting to work on, but that you haven’t really developed yet. Now there’s a forum to share your most fun, crazy or just plain preliminary ideas.

Members of the CUNY Linguistics community are invited to participate in the First Annual (we hope!) Showcasing Quirky and Unusual Ideas in Development (SQUID) Conference, on May 5, 2006, at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The format for the conference will be 15-minute talks with 5 minutes for questions. All CUNY linguists are invited to participate, but students, particularly Level 1 and Level 2 students, are especially welcome to take part.

Talks on all aspects of linguistics are welcome, and should be in the not-too-serious spirit that is the theme of the conference.

To participate, send an e-mail to Stephanie Solt (ssolt@gc.cuny.edu) with a BRIEF (3-5 sentence) description of your talk by April 10. We hope to be able to accommodate everyone who would like to present, so there’s no need for a full abstract.

So join us on May 5, get some practice giving a talk, and have some fun!

Program

10:00am-10:20am Coffee, breakfast-like snacks
10:20am-10:30am Welcoming remarks
Session One
10:30am- Number 1? and Number 2? Universals? (Jed Shahar)
10:50am- For the Sake of "Sake": The Mechanisms of Loanword Adaptation (Kent Adams, Ylana Beller, Marisa Monteleone, Mieko Sperbeck)
11:10am- Who Thinks It’s Ellipsis, Who Thinks It’s a Series of Questions... Some Notes on the Who’s… Who’s… Disapproval Construction (Steve LaGreca)
Break and Snacks (11:30am-11:45am)
Session Two
11:45am- Speaker-Oriented Adverbs and Getting Rid of the Speaker (Erika Troseth)
12:05pm- Does Korean Have Passives? (Ji Young Shim)
12:25pm- The Looker, the Blesser, the Fucker: The Hidden Subject of Some Imperative Clauses (Lucia Pozzan)
12:45pm- Fun with Pictures: Rafael and the Linguist's Provenance (Danny Erker)
Lunch! (1:05pm-2:30pm)
Session Three
2:30pm- A Grim(m) Tale (Loraine K. Obler)
2:50pm- Bush's War on Tourism, and Other Mondegreens (Fay Halberstam)
3:10pm- Schizophrenia and Language: Syntactic Comprehension in a Thought-
Disordered Population (Daniel Rubino)
Break and Snacks (3:30pm-3:45pm)
Session Four
3:45pm- Idiom Production and Aging (Inge Anema, Peggy Conner, Mira Goral, JungMoon Hyun, Barbara O'Connor, Loraine K. Obler, Daniel Rubino)
4:05pm- The Semantics of Number and Number Words in Mathematics and Natural
Language: Some Preliminary Ideas (Sherri Bellinger)
4:25pm- My P is Q: A Function-Compositional Approach (Susan Schweitzer)
4:45pm- Nothing Quenches Thirst Better than Gatorade: A Case Study of
Pragmatic Strengthening (Stephanie Solt)
5:05pm-5:10pm Concluding remarks

The 1st SQUID Conference Organizers

Jed Shahar
Stephanie Solt
Erika Troseth

SQUID date: Friday, May 5, 2006
Brief description of talks due: Monday, April 10, 2006