HPSG 2025

Call: 32nd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

Submission Deadline: 15th March 2025

Invited speakers: tba

Program Committee Chair

Shûichi Yatabe (University of Tokyo)

Venue

Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa"

Local Organizing Committee Chair

Jakob Maché, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (orcid, researchgate)

Meeting Description:

The HPSG 2025 conference will be a two-day main conference (2nd September -. 3rd September), followed by a one-day (4 September) workshop, entitled "Minor sentence types--–their form and its impact on grammar", which has been announced separately. The conference is a hybrid format inviting both in-presence and virtual participation.

Submission

Anonymous abstracts are invited that address linguistic, foundational, or computational issues relating to or in the spirit of the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Submissions should be 4 pages long, + 1 page for data, figures & references. They should be submitted in PDF format. The submissions should not include the authors’ names, and authors are asked to avoid self-references. Please specify whether you intend to present your paper in person, online, or have not decided yet.

All abstracts should be submitted by 15th March, 2025, via Easychair:

https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=hpsg2025"

Important Dates

Deadline for abstracts: 15th March 2025 (anywhere on Earth)

Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2025

Conference proceedings submission: 15th October 2025

All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers. Each accepted abstract will be given 30 minutes for presentation. Additionally, 10 minutes will be reserved for discussion.

A call for contributions to the proceedings will be issued after the conference. The proceedings are going to be an indexed publication; the contributions will undergo a separate round of reviews. The proceedings of previous conferences are available at: https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/

Contact information

For general questions, please contact the Program Chair Shûichi Yatabe hpsg2025@easychair.org

Main conference

Program committee

Anne Abeillé	Anthony Davis	Nurit Melnik	Sanghoun Song
Sascha Bargmann	Jonathan Ginzburg	Stefan Müller	Frank Van Eynde
Emily M. Bender	Fabiola Henri	Tsuneko Nakazawa	Elodie Winckel
Felix Bildhauer	Anke Holler	Joanna Nykiel	Shûichi Yatabe
Olivier Bonami	Jong-Bok Kim	Petya Osenova	Eun-Jung Yoo
Francis Bond	Jean-Pierre Koenig	Rainer Osswald	Olga Zamaraeva
Rui Chaves	Andy Lücking	Gerald Penn
Berthold Crysmann	Antonio Machicao y Priemer	Frank Richter
Luis Morgado da Costa	Jakob Maché	Manfred Sailer

Workshop call: Minor Sentence Types – their form at its impact on grammar

The large bulk of research in syntax and sentential semantics focuses on assertive declarative clauses, information seeking interrogative clauses, and, to a much lesser extent, imperatives. A key concept forthe understanding of word order variation and prosodic prominence was introduced by Roberts (2012) and Ginzburg (1996) in form of the Question Under Discussion (QUD). As has been shown on various occasions, different word order permutations and stress patterns express different focus placement. Focused constituents typically occupy a prominent position in the clause or exhibit more prominent prosodic features. The placement and the prosodic properties of focussed constituents is determined by QUD.

To gain a deeper understanding of these major sentence types and their interaction with the discourse, it is often productive to analyse the internal structure of minor sentence types. Minor sentence types frequently differ from major ones in that they (i) lack features that are characteristic of major sentence types such as overt subjects, finite verbs—or verbs all together; (ii) exhibit unusual word order and/or prosody, as seen in English exclamatives (What small hands!), (iii) or they exhibit segmental material, such as particles or markers, that does not occur in other sentence types.

Questions of interest may involve, but are not limited to, various aspects of the relationship between form and meaning, as illustrated below:

1. What is the role of finiteness in determining the illocutionary force? Are certain speech acts dependent on the presence or absence of finiteness (cf. Nikolaeva 2007, Truckenbrodt 2006, Klein 2008)?
2. What is the role of the QUD in minor sentence types? Is it necessary to assume QUDs to account for prosodic prominence and/or word order variation?
3. Do minor speech acts or sentence types involve a communicative intention or deontic speech act operator as proposed by Truckenbrodt (2006:268–278)? (e.g. assertion as SPKR wants ADDR to add p to the common ground, questions as SPKR wants ADDR to extend to the common ground with respect to p or ¬p)
4. Which impact does the marked form of minor sentence type have on what kind of at-issue and/or non-at-issue meaning it may convey (cf. Potts 2005, Potts 2015)?
5. What is the underlying syntactic representation of defective minor sentence types? Is their any empirical evidence for covert verbs, subjects or matrix predicates?
6. Is there any empirical evidence to determine which approach to the relationship between sentence type and illocutionary force is more adequate: correspondence approach or derivational approach as proposed by Reis (1999) and Meibauer (2013)?

This workshop follows the annual HPSG-colloquium but warmly welcomes contributions from any theoretical framework including constraint-based theories such as GPSG, HPSG, LFG, CG, CxG and derivational approaches such as Minimalism. Submissions related to the application of theoretical linguistics in NLP, as relevant to the workshop’s theme, are also encouraged. The workshop aims to provide a forum for proponents of diverse theoretical approaches who are open to learning from one another. This one day long workshop is going to be held as an hybrid event welcoming submissions for in-presence and online presentations.

Extended call with full bibliography

Workshop: Minor Sentence Types – their form at its impact on grammar

Program committee

Diti Bhadra	Bart Geurts	Manfred Krifka	Oliver Schallert
Cleo Condoravdi	Jonathan Ginzburg	Andy Lücking	Heiko Seeliger
Peter Culicover	Eleni Gregoromichelaki	Victor Manfredi	Vesela Simeonova
Marcel den Dikken	Bozhil Hriztov	Alda Mari	Tue Trinh
Masha Esipova	Lukasz Jedrzejowski	Rui Marques	Andreas Trotzke
Renate Finkbeiner	Beste Kamali	André Meinunger	Giuseppe Varaschin
Jan Fließbach	Jongbok Kim	Joanna Nykiel	Nigel Vincent
Hans-Martin Gärtner	Espen Klævik-Pettersen	Edgar Onea-Gaspar	Kilu von Prince
			Martina Wiltschko

About HPSG

HPSG is a well-developed, precisely formalized theory of grammar whose architecture is based on the notion of constraint satisfaction. Linguistic objects are modeled as feature structures organized via a system of types and constraint inheritance, drawing key insights from research in object-oriented paradigms. The HPSG community values explicit, large-scale grammar development and explores psycholinguistic models, as well as the development of efficient computational systems for processing natural languages using HPSG grammars.

For more information about HPSG:

• http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/research/hpsg/
• http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/hpsg/"