The 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society

Call for Papers

14-16 February 2009

The 35th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society will take place at the University of California, Berkeley on February 14-16, 2009. The meeting will consist of a General Session, a Parasession, and a Special Session.

GENERAL SESSION

The General Session will cover all areas of linguistic interest. We encourage proposals from diverse theoretical frameworks and also welcome papers on language-related topics from disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, literature, neuroscience, and psychology.

PARASESSION

Negation

The Parasession invites papers on negation from various theoretical perspectives (cognitive, historical, typological, generative, functional, etc.) and in relation to any linguistic sub-domain (semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, morpho-phonological, lexical). Submissions that introduce new data from understudied languages are especially welcome.

SPECIAL SESSION

Non-speech modalities

The Special Session will explore non-speech linguistic modalities such as sign language and gesture, whether independently or in relation to spoken language. We invite papers on grammatical topics as well as those dealing with issues of language acquisition, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science. Papers with historical and typological perspectives are also encouraged.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Deadline

  • Abstracts must be received electronically by
  • No late submissions can be accepted. Authors will be notified of (non-) acceptance by mid-December.

    Guidelines

    An author may submit at most one single and one joint abstract. In the case of joint authorship, one address should be designated for communication with BLS. Abstracts should be as specific as possible, with a statement of topic, approach, and conclusions, and must fit on one page in 12-point font with 1" margins. So that the review process may remain anonymous, authors should not include their names or otherwise reveal their identity anywhere on this page. Data and examples must be given within the body of the text rather than at the end, though references may be included on a separate page if necessary.

    Submissions

    All abstracts must be submitted electronically as PDF documents. Further instructions for electronic submissions are available here.

    Presentation and Publication

    Presentations are allotted 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions. Presented papers are published in the BLS Proceedings. Authors agree to provide camera-ready copy (up to 12 pages) by 15 May 2009.