Perspectives on English Language Studies:
A Symposium in Honor of Richard W. Bailey

Saturday, December 6th, 9:15-4:15
3222 Angell Hall

The Department of English Language and Literature is pleased to host a
symposium in honor of Richard W. Bailey, Fred Newton Scott Professor of
English Language and Literature in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

For more information, see the symposium schedule below and visit our website:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/bailey/. All events are open to the public.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

PANEL 1 
(9:15-10:30)
Lessons Learned: Perspectives on the Past Forty Years in English Language Studies
Chair: Joshua Miller

Amy Devitt, “Studying Writing”
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., “Forty Years of English Dialects”
John Smith, “The Computer as a Catalyst for Scholarship”

PANEL 2 
(10:45 – 12:15)
Puzzles that Remain: Perspectives on the Questions that Face English Language Scholars
Chair: Robin Queen

Sonja Lanehart, “Diversity and Intersectionality”
Colette Moore, “Renewed Philology”
Anne Curzan, “Does Prescriptivism Really Fail?”
Dennis Preston, “What Will English Be Next?”

ROUNDTABLE 
(2:00 – 3:15)
Getting the Message Out: English Language Scholars Talking with the Public
Chair: David W. Brown

Dennis Baron, “Let’s Go to the Phones”
Susanmarie Harrington, “Everyday Language Scholars”
Erin McKean, “Keeping it Simple (and Interesting)”

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD W. BAILEY 
(3:30 – 4:15)
Interviewer: Michael Adams

The event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, the Language
and Rhetorical Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop, the Office of the Vice
President for Research, Rackham Graduate School, and the College of LSA.

On Nov. 13, the Department held its annual Ling Bling Bash for potential concentrators.  A grand time was had by all.

The annual University of Michigan Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics will be held Nov. 21-23.  This year’s topic is implicature.

Friday sessions (which begin at 4 pm) will be held in 2271 Angell Hall

Saturday and Sunday sessions will be held in Conference D Room of the Michigan League

Ezra Keshet gave the colloquium talk on Friday, Nov. 14 for Wayne State’s Colloquium series.  The talk was entitled:  Split Intensionality:  A New Theory of De re/De dicto Distinction.

Abstract

The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) is inadequate, as evidenced by the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bauerle (1983), and Percus (2000). For instance, the STI predicts (1) to mean something like “each democrat is such that if s/he were a republican, there would be only one political party” — clearly the wrong meaning for this sentence.
(1) If every democrat were a republican, there would only be one political party.
This talk will therefore propose a replacement for the STI, called split intensionality. Compared to an earlier replacement for the STI, the situation pronoun theory, split intensionality represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator’s quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ^ (after Montague 1970). This move proves enough to solve the problems of the STI without overgenerating — as the situation pronoun theory does. In particular, the talk will focus on new data involving island constraints and negative polarity items that supports the split intensionality system over the situation pronoun system.

Robin Queen and Chris Odato attended the 37th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation sponsored by Rice University in Houston, TX, Nov. 6-9.

Chris Odato and Deborah Keller-Cohen presented Relevance in the eye of the beholder: How, and when, does age matter in evaluating speech?

Robin Queen presented What voicing non-human animals reveals about the connection between linguistic variation and social meaning.