We are glad to announce that the Ninth Students’ Conference of Linguistics in India (SCONLI-9) will be held at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi on 14th and 15th March 2015.

A two-day event comprised of two panel discussions, a workshop and student presentations, SCONLI-9 aims at providing a platform for consolidating and initiating discussion on ongoing research in theoretical as well as applied linguistics in the Indian sub-continent. To this end, we invite students working on different languages and within different theoretical paradigms to talk about their current research, and present novel empirical and theoretical observations. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Submissions are encouraged in the area of theoretical linguistics, i.e., syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology, as well as applied fields, specifically, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and learning, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

In addition, submissions are invited for a workshop on ‘Case and Agreement in South Asian Languages’. Abstracts for talks in the workshop must address at least one of the following questions on case and agreement.

A. An ongoing debate in literature concerns itself with the directionality of Agree. While Chomsky (2000, 2001) defines Agree as a syntactic operation with uninterpretable features agreeing downwards in the c-command domain with a matching active goal; Zeijlstra (2012), Bhattacharya (2013) among others argue for upward agree such that interpretable features c-command the uninterpretable features. What questions does this debate raise about the status of Agree and c-command in grammar? Could the flexibility in direction of valuation posit the existence of Concord, a mechanism different from Agree? Further, what consequences does this debate have for checking/valuation of case which is considered to be a free-rider on phi-feature checking?

B. Agree (a la Chomsky 2000, 2001) considers phi features to be unstructured bundles. However, languages manifest agreement patterns where individual features (person, number, gender) seem to agree separately (Bejar, 2003; Amritavalli, 2013).For instance, in Hindi, all nouns trigger gender agreement on the attributive adjective. Number agreement, however, is triggered only by masculine nouns. What do such agreement patterns suggest about the internal structure of phi? Is there an internal feature geometry/hierarchy? Do individual phi-features interact with each other? Is the internal structure visible to syntactic computations?

C. Ergative case has been analyzed as an inherent case, assigned to the external argument in spec, vP (Legate 2008, 2012; Udaar, Kaur & Chandra, 2014). Problematically, in Nepali, ergative subjects agree with T, without being nominative case valued by it. On the other end, in Marwari, null marked nominative look-alike subjects do not agree with T. What do these facts tell us about the status of ergative as an inherent case? Is ergative as an inherent case assigned in Narrow Syntax or post syntax? Are similar facts observed for other inherent/lexical cases like dative? What are the theoretical implications of such empirical facts for structural v/s inherent case distinction?

Submission Guidelines:

Abstracts, including references and data should be limited to 2 single spaced A4 size pages, with one inch margins on all sides and minimum font size 11pt (Times New Roman). Submissions are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored.

Please submit your abstracts through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sconli9) no later than 23:59 hours on 15th September, 2014. Acceptance will be notified by 31st October, 2014.

Deadline for abstract submission has been extended to October 7, 2014.

Acceptance will be notified by November 30, 2014.