About NWLC
The Northwest Linguistics Conference (NWLC) is an annual conference hosted on a rotating basis by the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University. The conference brings together research in theoretical and applied linguistics by graduate students from around the world. The 2008 NWLC will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 3-4, 2008, in Seattle at the University of Washington campus on the first floor of Thomson Hall (rooms 101, 119, 125).

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Conference Information
The conference will run from 9:00am to 5:30pm on Saturday May 3 and from 9:00am to 2:30pm on Sunday May 4. Registration tables will be open each day at 8:30am. Click on "Schedule" above to see the tentative conference schedule.

Conference attendees are advised that a limited number of rooms have been volunteered by members of the UW Linguistics community, and are available to conference attendees at no cost. These rooms are available on a first-come, first served basis, with preference given to attendees who are presenting papers at the conference. Inquiries should go to uwnwlc [AT] u [DOT] washington [DOT] edu. Other housing options are listed on the Directions and Local Info page of this website.

Conference attendees needing visas to enter the United States should contact the NWLC Committee immediately regarding any letters of invitation or other documentation required for their visa. In most cases, attendees will need a B-1 visa, but in all cases you are advised to check with your local US Consulate to determine the best course of action.

Presenters are advised that laptops and projectors will be available in all conference rooms for those who wish to accompany their talk with slides. Laptops will be equipped with Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Reader. Presenters are urged to omit any unnecessary animations or graphics, as there will be little or no time for testing and troubleshooting presentations on the conference computers. Presenters whose slides contain foreign scripts or IPA transcriptions are advised to bring PDF slides rather than PowerPoint slides to avoid any possible font display problems.

Presenters wishing to distribute handouts with their talk must supply the handouts themselves. A 24-hour duplication facility is located within ten blocks of campus if needed. Presenters will be informed sometime in late April what the expected conference attendance will be and can make handouts accordingly.

Finally, all attendees (including presenters) who have not already done so are asked to pre-register through the online registration tool (click on "registration" at the top of this page. This is our only means of estimating attendance and is important for planning purposes, and it only takes a few seconds, so please register now.

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Saturday	Session 1	Session 2		Session 3
8:30 - 9:00	Registration
9:00 - 9:30	Thuan Tran (UC San Diego): Wh-Quantification: A Vietnamese Perspective	Jong-Bok Kim and Jeeyoung Ann (Kyung Hee University, Seoul): English Tag Questions: Corpus Findings and Theoretical Implications		Han Ye (University of Florida): Do you understand or not — An examination of a comprehension check question in CSL classroom
9:30 - 10:00	Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (Simon Fraser University): The Distribution of Reflexive Pronouns in English	Nyurguyana Petrova (SUNY, Buffalo): A Corpus Study of Sakha (Yakut) Coverbs		Brad Larson (University of Washington): Agnostic Leftward Movement Explains Roll-up Effects in Malagasy Focused Predicates
10:00 - 10:30	Youssef A. Haddad (Florida State University): Why Movement in Control: Evidence from Telugu	Andrea L. Berez and Stefan Th. Gries (UC Santa Barbara): In defense of corpus-based methods: A behavioral profile analysis of polysemous 'get' in English		Hsia Ai-Wen (National Taiwan Normal University): Third Tone Sandhi in Mandarin Chinese: Ambiguous Tone Processing in Sentence Context among Non-native Speakers
10:30 - 10:45	Break
10:45 - 11:15	Shakthi Poornima and Jean-Pierre Koenig (SUNY, Buffalo): Reverse Complex Predicates in Hindi	Anita Szakay (University of British Columbia): The Effect of Speech Rate on the Rhythm of English Dialects		Emily Nava and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (USC): The Modularity of Nuclear Accent: Evidence from L2 Speech
11:15 - 11:45	Galen Basse (University of Washington): Factives and Phases	Pauliina Saarinen (University of Victoria): The Finnish Language in Post-utopian Sointula: The effect of frequency on consonant gradation		Shu-min Huang (University of Victoria): English Onset and Coda Substitution Patterns by Native Mandarin Speakers
11:45 - 12:15	Kristi Krein (University of Washington): Prosodic Licensing of French Wh in-situ: An Agree-based Approach	John Lyon (University of British Columbia): Against Categorical Consonant Deletion: Evidence from Icelandic Preterites		Heather Bliss (University of British Columbia):Place Markedness and Dorsal Defaults: Snapshots of the Acquisition of Phonological Features
12:15 - 1:30	Lunch
1:30 - 2:30	Plenary Session: Edith Adridge
2:30 - 2:45	Break
2:45 - 3:15	David Potter (Simon Fraser University): Serbo-Croation Wh-Words in Tree-Adjoining Grammar	Elizabeth Rogers (University of British Columbia): Can two become one? NC sequences in Shona		Hyuna B. Kim (USC): Temporal dependency in extensional contexts in Korean
3:15 - 3:45	Mario E. Chávez-Peón and Calisto Mudzingwa (University of British Columbia): Shona Auxiliaries: rí, vá, nga and tě	Murray Schellenberg (University of British Columbia): Oplimalitetoque: Optimality Theory and Largonji des Loucherbems		Emrah Gorgulu (Simon Fraser University): The Implications of Definiteness in Turkish for the Givenness Hierarchy
3:45 - 4:15	Thomas J. Magnuson (University of Victoria): What liquids look like in a leaky phonology: Phonetic realizations of /r/ in near-natural Kansai Japanese conversation	Michael Grosvald (Dept. of Linguistics & Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis) and David Corina (Dept. of Linguistics, Dept. of Psychology, & Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis): Location-to-Location coarticulation: A phonetic investigation of ASL		Sonja Thoma (University of British Columbia): To p or ¬p-the semantics of the Bavarian particle 'fei'
4:15 - 4:30	Break
4:30 - 5:00	Peter Glanville (University of Texas, Austin): Word order and Subject-Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic	Scott Moisik (University of Victoria): An interactive 3D model of the laryngeal constrictor mechanism: extracting movement data from laryngoscopic videos		Suwon Yoon (University of Chicago): From Non-specificity to Polarity: a compositional account of even and NPIs
7:00	Conference Dinner
Sunday	Session 1		Session 2
8:30 - 9:00	Registration
9:00 - 9:30	Greg Coppola (Simon Fraser University): Surface Structure Constraints and Wh-Questions in English		WITHDRAWN
9:30 - 10:00	Jerid Francom (University of Arizona): Is Lexical Access Mediated by the Syllabic and/ or CV Structure of Words? Exploring Transposed-Letter Priming Effects		Erika Troseth (CUNY Graduate Center): Argument Spreading and Lessons from Non-3rd Person Middle Voice Sentences
10:00 - 10:30	Aleksandra Zaba (University of Utah): Relation between frequency and learnability of phonological harmony directionalities		WITHDRAWN
10:30 - 10:45	Break
10:45 - 11:15	Steve Moran (University of Washington) and Naomi Fox (University of Utah): Non-traditional Dissemination of Language Research: from the field to the world		Yasuko Sakurai (Simon Fraser University): Japanese particle -wa as the contrastive marker: A solution in centering framework
11:15 - 12:15	Plenary Session: Betsy Evans

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Registration
Attendance at the conference is free (donations to help offset room rentals and conference costs will be accepted on-site). It is not necessary to submit a paper in order to attend the conference.

Pre-registration is requested for all attendees to ensure that adequate facilities are reserved for the event. Registration can be accomplished via the form below:

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Number of guests (spouse, parent, etc.):  
(only include guests who are planning to attend one or more conference sessions)
 

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Conference Proceedings
Proceedings from this conference will be published in a special edition of UW Working Papers in Lingusitics. Final copies of papers must be received by 5:00pm PST, May 30, 2008, and should be submitted electronically to uwnwlc [AT] u [DOT] washington [DOT] edu.

Additionally, the papers must conform to certain formatting guidelines in order to be published. Guidelines are a subset of the LSA requirements for submissions to Language and will be posted here soon, along with formatting templates.

Finally, all presenters wishing to be included in the published proceedings will have to submit a signed publication release (available here soon). Like most "Working Papers" publications, the authors will retain future publication rights. Signed forms must be received by 5:00pm PST, May 30, 2008, and should be mailed the address below along with a hard copy of the final paper.

University of Washington
Department of Linguistics
Box 354340
Seattle WA 98195-4340
ATTN: NWLC

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How to Get There
By car: from I-5 northbound or southbound, take the NE 45th Street exit, and turn east on NE 45th St. The main entrance to the campus is on 45th St at 17th Ave NE (about 10 blocks east of the freeway). There is also a parking garage entrance on 15th Ave NE at NE 41st St. The UW Visitor Information website has more information available, including a printable campus vicinity map and a map of campus parking. Stop at the gatehouse on the campus entrance drive to purchase a daily parking pass ($5 for weekend days).

By train: Amtrak operates trains to and from Seattle's King Street Station. Trains from Vancouver, BC or Portland take about 4 hours, trains from Oakland take about 24 hours, trains from Chicago take about 48 hours. Long delays on passenger trains are not uncommon; please plan accordingly.

By plane: SeaTac International Airport is about 18 miles from the University of Washington. A map of airport ground transportation locations is here. Airport taxi stands are found on level 3 of the parking garage. Taxis to downtown will cost about $35, taxis to the University District slightly higher. Airport shuttle buses are also available and will likely cost around $20 to the U-District hotels. Reservations can be made online at the Shuttle Express website.

Metro bus service from SeaTac airport to downtown is available at the south end of the baggage claim level. Note that there are two adjacent bus bays; go to Bay 2 for buses to Downtown Seattle. Between 6am and 9pm route 194 is fastest, at other times take route 174. Fare varies between $1.25 and $2.00 depending on time of day. If your hotel is downtown, you will most likely want to get off at University Street, but check with your hotel to see if this is the closest stop.

If your hotel is in the U-District, get a bus transfer slip from your driver when you pay the fare and get off Downtown at University Street. Depending on the time of day, this stop may be at street level or in the underground bus tunnel. If you're in the bus tunnel, buses 71, 72, and 73 to the University District will serve the University Street stop. If you're at ground level, you'll have to walk one block north to 4th & Union to catch buses 71, 72, or 73 to the University District. You will most likely want to get off at 45th & University Way, but check with your hotel to see if there is a closer stop.

Where to Stay
Locations and contact information for several University District hotels is here. The College Inn offers the closest, and probably the cheapest (and most spartan) accommodations. If you prefer to stay downtown, a list of downtown hotels is here. Alternatively, a limited number of conference attendees may find free accommodation in private homes that have been volunteered by members of the UW Linguistics Department. Those interested should email uwnwlc [AT] u [DOT] washington [DOT] edu to arrange such shared housing.

What to Eat
Light refreshments will be provided during the event, and there are ample affordable restaurants (including vegetarian and vegan options) within a few blocks of the campus. Local students will be on hand at the conference to offer recommendations and directions.

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