ROLC, Special Issue:

Empirical Challenges and Analytical Alternatives to Strict Compositionality

Journal of Research on Language and Computation

Guest Editors: Frank Richter, Manfred Sailer

The Workshop Empirical Challenges and Analytical Alternatives to Strict Compositionality at ESSLLI'05 in Edinburgh brought together linguists working in different grammatical frameworks to discuss current issues of compositionality in semantics. The special issue of the Journal of Research on Language and Computation is planned as a follow-up to this workshop.

Topic

Compositionality has been a key methodological theme in natural language semantics. Recently, a number of innovative systems for combinatorial semantics have been proposed which seem not to obey compositionality at first sight. Such systems are based on unification, underspecification, linear logic, categorial grammar, variable free semantics, extensions of Montague Grammar, dynamic semantics, and Tree Adjoining Grammar, to name the most prominent research areas. The motivation behind these systems is often computational in nature, but the mechanisms they employ also provide new insights and analytical alternatives for outstanding problems in the combinatorial semantics of natural languages. These include scope ambiguities, multiple exponents of semantic operators, cohesion, ellipsis, coordination, and modifier attachment ambiguities.

Papers should address the topic of compositionality either from an empirical or from a logical perspective. We wish to invite papers discussing linguistic data which pose a challenge to compositionality as well as papers presenting new mechanisms for defining a compositional semantics which can address well-known challenges in innovative ways.

Workshop participants are particularly encouraged to develop journal papers based on their contributions to the proceedings. However, we would also like to see new submissions of work that was not presented at the workshop. All papers will be subject to anonymous peer review as arranged by the editors.

Submission Format

Submissions should not exceed 25 pages and should be in LaTeX. Authors are kindly asked to use the LaTeX package from Springer recommended by the Journal of Research on Language and Computation. Please use only the following package (warning: there are outdated versions of this package available elsewhere on the Internet):

At least some versions of Internet Explorer seem to rename the LateX packages for submissions to rolckap-template.tar.tar. If this happens, please rename the file again to its original rolckap-template.tar.gz before unpacking it the usual way. Also, please note that the directory you then obtain contains another *zip file which you have to unpack in order to be able to work with the package.

If you would like to contribute but have a problem with submitting in LaTeX, please contact the editors at the email address given below.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 30th, 2006
Notification: July 7th, 2006
Deadline for revisions: October 15th, 2006

Please send your submissions to Frank Richter at f.richter@em.uni-frankfurt.de.
Submissions should be received before May 1st, 2006.


Reviewing Committee:


In case of problems or for comments, please contact: f.richter@em.uni-frankfurt.de ( Last modified: Mon Nov 5 13:26:54 CET 2007 )