programme  ||  travel and accommodation  ||  presenter guidance  ||  organisers

Programme

The final version of the programme for the 31mfm, with some information about the venue (and things near the venue), and some maps showing the venue, the restaurants for the evening meals, and the conference pubs, is available here:

31mfm programme

The abstracts booklet for the 31mfm is available here:

31mfm abstracts booklet

Everyone who is registered for the conference should be receiving messages every so often from the 31mfm mailing list.

On-site registration for the 31mfm will begin at the conference venue at 12.30 on Thursday 29th May and the conference will finish around 5.00pm on Saturday 31st May. The time from 12.30 on the 29th till the conference starts (at 1pm) will be just for meeting other participants and chatting (remember: no midday meal is provided on Thursday), although you could use it to put up a poster if you are presenting in the first poster session. Please do arrive before 1pm on the 29th if you can, as we aim to start events promptly then. We will be at the University of Manchester's Core Technology Facility. Details of how to find the CTF are on the 31mfm travel page.

If you're in Manchester on the 28th May, do come to the Fringe Workshop on 'Sublexica Across Languages'. Note that the two events are happening a different venues. The Fringe Workshop will be held in Manchester University's Samuel Alexander building, room A101.

Notes for poster-presenters
The poster displays will be set up before each poster session - there is advice about this on the programme - and please be sure to take down your poster after your poster session. You will be allocated a poster board with these dimensions: 210cm high x 120cm wide. Each person presenting a poster will be provided with the means to affix their posters to the display board. Please feel free to bring handouts with you, so that those viewing your poster also have something to take away. Posters in previous years have taken a wide variety of forms, and there is no one single way to produce a good poster; the important things are that the font size is not too small, that it is easily readable and does not have too much text on it, that it sets out the main points that you want to argue for clearly, and maybe that it's eye-catching, too. Our advice is: don't have too much text, and do include diagrams or other graphics as they can be easier for an audience to take in. Some presenters bring one big poster which takes up all the space (do note the dimensions of the poster board given above if you do this), others bring a series of A3 or A4 sheets of paper which can be fitted together on the poster board. During your poster session, you will be asked to stay by your poster (for at least a fair amount of the session) as other conference participants go around the displays, read your poster and ask you questions about it.

It is not possible to photocopy or print at the CTF itself, but there are a number of options to print posters or photocopy material in Manchester near the CTF. MuPrint (about 15 minutes' walk from the CTF, towards the city centre) has been recommended. We advise you to check with them in advance if you are planning to use them. It may be possible in principle to email or upload a file to MuPrint, so you may be able to arrange to have material ready and waiting for you.

Travel, accommodation and booking

Special Session

A special themed session has been organised for Friday 30th May by members of the organising committee and the advisory board. This will feature invited speakers and will allow for open discussion when contributions from the audience will be welcome.

Prosodic Morphology and Templatic Phonology

This Special Session seeks to discuss the state of our knowledge of the interrelationship between templatic morphophonology and structure (morphology, prosody, segmental structure) on the one hand, and computation (timing, ordering, underlying/output restrictions) on the other. Templatic questions were fundamental in the development of Optimality Theory, considering cases of prosodic morphology (covering phenomena like reduplication, infixation and truncation), and exploring how phonologically-based templates might determine their patterning and whether the templates involved need to be specified or might emerge from other aspects of a language's phonology (and/or be decomposed into multiple constraints on the size, shape, and position of morphemes). Templates have also played a role in a strand of work in Government Phonology, which has argued that templatic relations (in terms of a fixed number of strictly alternating CV units) are fundamental in understanding the patterning of phonological phenomena like vowel harmony, ablaut, and stress (allied to the idea that there are designated portions of a template that are the locus of morphophonological operations). Templatic phonology has been fundamental in work on understanding how segments can be ordered in a morpheme (notably in root-and-pattern morphological systems), and so questions of phonological processes which alter segmental ordering and association are relevant to understanding this aspect of phonology. Understanding prosodic morphology can have big implications - it is an area where decisions about what phonology can and cannot do reverberate throughout the whole grammar. This Special Session asks: where are we now in terms of these issues? And: how do things fit together? Or: should they not fit together and, rather, be treated separately? Do we agree on the fundamental roles/behaviours of templates in phonology? We hope that our invited speakers will address some of these issues (and other related matters) from a range of perspectives in this session.

Invited speakers

Noam Faust (Universite Paris 8) 

Laura Kalin (Princeton University)

Suzanne Urbanczyk ( University of Victoria)