Niagara Linguistic Society (NLS). The NLS Conference was held at SUNY Buffalo from September 30 till October 2. The NLS is a student-run organization and the conference is held almost every year. It accepts papers from various fields and methods in linguistics and the presenters are mostly students. This year there were talks on indigenous language maintenance in Latin America, discourse analysis, politeness theory, dialectology and contact languages, etc. along with the more theoretical presentations in syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics and phonology. Some of the talks were both a novelty and a challenge to us as the faculty and students at the University at Buffalo seem to explore mostly non-generative approaches.

Papers. One paper that we liked was on politeness theory and police interrogations showing how politeness can be used to minimize suspect resistance, exercise power, and potentially obscure civil rights. Another very interesting presentation was about the development of a morphologically new type of non-evidentials in Quechua, reflected in traditional story telling. It seems that in this language the non-evidentials are recovering through a new consistent affix, after years of disintegration. The most controversial talk was called ‘Construal, processing, and word order typology in an OT framework’ where the speaker proposed that language is ultimately based on semantics and there is no need for syntax… Finally, there was a very good talk discussing the issue of compatibility between Chomskyan Minimalism and Distributed Morphology. For more details on the presentations you can have a look at the complete program or read most of the handouts in the computer lab.

The City. Contrary to what we had heard about Buffalo, it turned out to be a nice and safe city. Its pleasant downtown area featured a few buildings with interesting architecture as well as some nice bars and restaurants. They also have light rail connecting UB’s South Campus to downtown, and if you want to use the train only in its short downtown section, it’s free! And listen to this, Canadians, they have Tim Horton’s in Buffalo !!

Pros. This is a fairly small conference, so it’s an excellent choice for a first presentation or a practice run for a bigger event. A great place to get an idea of what’s out there in linguistics that we don’t necessarily do at our department. The atmosphere is very informal and friendly, and the organizers very helpful. We were offered free accommodation at two UB students’ place, we went out with other presenters, and we made some new friends.

Cons. Almost none. Perhaps the one thing that we didn’t like that much was that because this is a student conference, some of the profs at UB took the floor too often after each presentation and somehow there was more ‘lecturing’ than true questions and discussion. Also, because it is a conference covering a wide variety of fields, you may not be able to find (m)any other people who have similar interests and do work relevant to yours. However, meeting with and talking to people from different backgrounds is always interesting and can help generate new ideas.

Galia & Nikolay

Futuristic Paris VII

Report from York

by Christina Manouilidou

The International Conference on Greek Linguistics (ICGL) takes place every two years. The idea is to bring together linguists who work on every aspect of Greek, experimental or theoretical, synchronic or diachronic in order to get to know each other, benefit from each other’s work and set the bases for future collaborations. The host for this year was the University of York in England. So, Greek and non-Greek linguists from around the world took planes, trains, busses and all of us showed up for the appointment right on time (with the exception of those who opted for Olympic Airlines...who never made it - among them one of the two invited speakers, Angela Ralli). Also, the ‘high spirits’ of the local organizers gave the conference an informal character that contributed a lot to its relaxing (without being disorganized) character. There were many highlights that worth mentioning but the most important took place at the business meeting. It was there where we all decided to found the International Greek linguistics Society! Our unanimous vote should be on the picture which I don’t have yet! Instead, a bottle of ouzo says it all! See you in two years in Ioannina! A few words about the place: York is a nice medieval town, two hours by train from London. Although we were in Britain and weather was fairly ‘dry’. It only rained one evening, but, nonetheless, it was enough to create a confusion with respect to our evening outing. The Conference itself was very successful. The biggest part of its success was due to the high quality presentations from known and less known linguists. It’s amazing how many things I’ve learned about Greek! An equally important factor was its friendly and relaxing atmosphere. The presence of many young people who either have an academic position or still doing their studies in a Greek or foreign university was particularly encouraging for the future of Greek linguistics.