The Resolving Conflict Across Borders Conference (RCAB) and SinFonIJA 10 will be held together on October 20-24, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Academic Studies (CAAS) in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/rcab-sinfonija10

Invited speakers:
RCAB (Oct 20-22)
Ray Jackendoff (Tufts University)
Greville G. Corbett (University of Surrey)
Eulàlia Bonet (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

SinFonIJA 10 (Oct 22-24)
Iliana Krapova (Università Ca’Foscari Venezia)
Berit Gehrke (CNRS, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7)
Gereon Müller (Universität Leipzig)

Program: https://sites.google.com/view/rcab-sinfonija10/program

Abstracts submission
Abstracts are invited for either an oral presentations (20 min + 10 min) or a poster presentation.

Abstracts may not be longer than 2 pages in A4 format (including references) with 2.5 cm margins on all sides, single-spaced with a font size not smaller than 12pt. Examples, tables, graphs et cetera are to be intertwined in the text in the appropriate place and not collected at the end.

Submissions are restricted to a maximum of one single-authored and one co-authored abstract (or two co-authored abstracts) for both events.

The abstracts must be anonymous and not identify the name or affiliation of the author(s) in the abstract, the title, or the name of the document. Abstracts should be submitted as .pdf files with one word from the title as the file name.

Submissions will be anonymously refereed.

Please submit your abstract by Wednesday March 1, 2017 Wednesday March 15, 2017 via Easychair by using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcab_sinfonija10.

Important Dates
abstract submission deadline: March 1, 2017 March 15, 2017
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2017
Program publication: July 1, 2017
Early registration ends: September 1, 2017
Conference: October 20 – 24, 2017

For any queries please contact the conference organising committee via email at rcab.sinfonija10@gmail.com.

RCAB 
Resolving Conflicts Across Borders Conference 2017, like the Agreement ABC 2015 (Zadar) and the Ellipsis ABC 2016 (Sarajevo) that preceded it, is organized as part of the project Experimental Morphosyntax of South Slavic languages, where agreement patterns are studied with a uniform methodology in six locations across the Western Balkans. This project has both a scientific and social agenda. On one side, it aims to investigate First and Last conjunct agreement in South Slavic languages and thus contribute to the currently debated topic (Bošković 2009, Marušič et al. 2015) which revolves around the need for clearer descriptions of the data. On the other side, the project aims to propagate psycholinguistic studies of South Slavic languages through cooperation between linguists across the borders of the former Yugoslavia.

One of the areas where conflict resolution is very clearly observed is agreement. As a syntactic operation it is best understood when it operates between a probe and a goal (or between a target and a controller) that carries a single set of features, which can be easily identified and copied to the probe/target. However, goals/controllers don’t always have a single gender or number feature that could be shared with the probe/target. For example, when two noun phrases of different (or conflicting) genders are conjoined, verb cannot agree with both of them at the same time (unless it is a case of syncretism). This “conflict” can be resolved in a number of ways. For conjunct agreement three strategies have been observed across languages: verb agrees with only one of the two conjuncts, verb shows default value for agreement, verb agrees with the “winner” of the conflict, i.e. with the resolved value.

Similar conflicts do not occur only with coordinations, a single noun phrase can have two conflicting gender or number features, e.g. words like “team” are morphosyntactically singular, but semantically plural, while words like “scissors” are morphosyntactically plural, while semantically singular or plural (can be used for a single entity, a single pair of scissors). Similarly the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian noun ‘budala’ (idiot) is morphosyntactically feminine, but can easily denote male individuals in which case it is semantically masculine. Still within the realm of phi-features, conflicts arise in free relative configurations (Groos & van Riemsdijk 1981), where a relative pronoun cannot simultaneously realize two different cases one assigned from the main clause and the other assigned from inside the relative clause.

In fact, conflict resolution occurs also in many other areas of grammar. In principle every interaction of more than one grammatical element has potential to result in a conflict that needs some kind of resolution (where one of the grammatical principles wins over the other). We wish to cross the borders traditionally bounding research on conflict resolution and bring together both theoreticians and experimentalists conducting research on phenomena where conflict resolution is observed, not only in syntax but also on the interfaces, e.g. syntax-phonology interface, syntax-morphology interface (deponency), syntax-semantics interface, phonology-morphology interface, and at the information structure – phonology interface. In addition to identifying the domains in which conflict resolution occurs, of equal interest are the architectural mechanisms for deciding among alternative outputs, a process that finds resonance in closely related domains such as music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983).

With this broad set of approaches in mind, we invite submission of clearly written and theoretically innovative abstracts for talks on topics on conflict resolution in all areas of theoretical linguistics (across any theory), comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and clinical linguistics.

SinFonIJA 10
SinFonIJA is a traveling conference that covers the area of two former countries – the Austro-Hungarian empire and Yugoslavia. In the previous years SinFonIJa was organized in Nova Gorica (Slo), Sarajevo (BiH), Novi Sad (Srb), Budapest (Hu), Vienna (Aut), Niš (Srb), Graz (Aut), Ljubljana (Slo), and Brno (Cz). The theme of SinFonIJA is wide and spans all areas of formal linguistics.

Abstracts are invited on any topic from all areas of theoretical linguistics, comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition.

Organized by EMSS and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.