The second Moscow Syntax and Semantics (MOSS 2) conference will be held on April 22-24, 2011 at the Institute of the Russian language of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

MOSS in this format shall take place for the second time. Our young conference is a descendant of two separate conferences that took place in Moscow earlier, the Formal Semantics in Moscow (FSiM) workshop and the Syntactic Structures conference. MOSS's aim is to bring together people working within different theoretical frameworks and to encourage syntacticians and semanticists to have more substantial interaction with each other. The speakers should be prepared to give a talk to an audience that might not share all of their theoretical assumptions. Young researchers and students are especially welcome to apply.

Call for papers

Download call for papers [PDF]

The conference this year will consist of three sessions: a (mostly) syntax session, a (mostly) semantics session, and also a separate thematic session devoted to discourse particles and related phenomena.

The syntactic part of the conference is not limited to any particular framework or any particular topic. We invite papers in syntactic typology and functional syntax as well as in formal syntax, and theoretically and typologically oriented descriptive papers.

The semantic part is not limited to any particular view on the general architecture of the grammar (e.g., direct compositionality, LF semantics, etc.) We invite papers in formal semantics and formal pragmatics, especially welcoming those which stress the interaction of semantics with syntax and the consequences of semantic data and analyses on the choice between different syntactic frameworks.

The special thematic session on discourse particles is designed to bring together researchers working on this topic from both semantic and syntacic perspectives. The issues for discussion at the session include:

-- semantics of discourse particles, and its integration into the semantics at the clause/sentence level;
-- theories which can sensibly deal with the polysemy of discourse particles;
-- syntactic behaviour of discourse particles in phrases and clauses, their fixed or non-fixed linear and structural position in larger constituents;
-- discourse particles having arguments of their own: description and analysis;
-- grammaticalization of discourse particles.

Proceedings of MOSS 2 will be published as a volume in MIT Working Papers in Linguistics series.


Invited speakers:

Chris Barker, New York University
Seth Cable, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Vera Podlesskaya, Russian State University for the Humanities
Malte Zimmermann, Universität Potsdam

Working language: English

Submission guidelines:

An author may submit at most one single and one joint abstract for a 20 minutes' presentation (plus 10 minutes for discussion). Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed 2 pages in length (including examples and references), in PDF, RTF or TXT format, in 12-point font with 2.5 cm margins throughout. Abstracts should be submitted through LinguistList's EasyAbstracts software.

Notification of acceptance: mid-December, 2010

Organizational ("food") fee: € 20

Organizing committee: