Date: 15-16 July, 2020
Venue: Online webinar (Day one: 15/07, Day two: 16/07)
Organization: Anne Abeillé (U. Paris), Gabriela Bîlbîie (U. Bucharest) & Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee U.)
EasyChair Website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecbae3
Keynote speakers:
- Philip Miller (U. Paris Diderot)
- Jeffrey Runner (U. Rochester)
- Susanne Winkler (Tübingen U.)
Ellipsis is a central phenomenon at the interface between syntax, semantics, phonology and discourse. It has been, and continues to be, the focus of numerous publications (van Craenenbroeck & Temmerman 2018). Despite a huge amount of theoretical work (from, e.g., Hankamer & Sag 1976 to current work by van Craenenbroek 2010, Ginzburg 2012) and a long tradition in psycholinguistic experimentation (from Murphy 1985 and Tannnenhaus & Carlson 1990 to current work by Kim & Runner 2017, Poppels & Kehler 2019), major questions remain open, most centrally the question of whether it is necessary to hypothesize the existence of unpronounced syntactic structure at the ellipsis site. The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers who have been working on elliptical phenomena with special emphasis on methodologies aiming to improve the empirical foundations of the discussion, specifically psycholinguistic experimentation (acceptability and eye-tracking experiments, in particular) and corpus investigations. Contributions will be welcome concerning (i) the specific experimental methodologies being used in psycholinguistics, and how they can be improved to give more reliable and interpretable results; (ii) the way corpus data can be brought to bear on theoretical questions; and (iii) how corpus data can be used to improve the results of psycholinguistic experiments, specifically by increasing the naturalness of the materials by providing new hypotheses. This two-day conference will lead to publication and continues the theme initiated by preceding ECBAE conferences during the 2017 and 2019 LSA Linguistic Institutes.