Invitation for Postproceedings (new 01/01/06)

(See the post-proceedings site for actual information.)

Dear contributors to the MAD'05 post-proceedings, dear MAD '05 organizers
after a regrettable pause, to be explained shortly, I can communicate to you a progress in the post-proceedings issue, discussed with you last year. The time since then has been spent to generally negotiate a promising and rewarding way to publish the talks given at Chorin, in a way that can preserve the overall multidimensional attitude of the workshop.
The idea we discussed last year, i.e. to choose a more specific title under which the papers could be subsumed, certainly had facilitated publication in a corresponding likewise more specific journal. But then, part of the talks would have to be excluded, and the overall purpose of the conference had to be given up. So we looked instead for a place of publication that would respect the different existing perspectives. In fact we found one in the Mouton-de Gruyter series 'Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs' [TiLSM]. As a title for the intended volume we have proposed "Salience. Multidisciplinary perspectives on its function in discourse". The publisher have consented willingly to a publication of such a title, provided the contributions in the proceedings volume would be worked out to longer papers, cf. below. (In fact they mistook the original papers as being intended for a contribution in TiLSM, and hesitated for about half a year, which misunderstanding cost much time.)
A publication in that series has these three advantages:

• papers will be reviewed,
• the series offers a place for volumes like ours, that contains contributions from different authors centering around a given topic, and
• thematic groupings within the volume are explicitly recommended by the editors, which allows to account for the different perspectives.

Ideally, a volume in the TiLSM series has 300-350 pages. With 15 contributions to be expected, each can have about 20 pages.
If this seems a reasonable option to you, I would like to combine it with a second procedure, that has been carried through, e.g., by the 'Constraints in Discourse' conference (CID) in Dortmund, 2005 (Christian has participated in it, like myself). For their post-proceedings, an internal 'reviewing' was carried through, before papers were ventilated further. It seems to me that this is an excellent way, also for us, to strengthen the thematic coherence within the volume, and also to link contributions a bit to the proposed definitions of 'Salience'.
We then propose the following time schedule:

• Internal deadline for contributions (length: ca. 20 pages), 1st version: 30th of April. 07 [= 3,5 months]
• Period of mutual readings among contributors; comments are provided until 31st of May 07 [=1 month]
• Reaction to comments and reworking of papers until 30th of June. [= 1 month] (i.e. contributors have all in all 5,5 months to develop their papers, including a linking to the other contributions)
• Papers are sent to the publisher: 1st of July
• Reviewing of papers by the publisher: until 1st of September [= 2 Mon]
• Possible reworking of papers until 31st of Oct 07 [= 2 Mon]

We will install a domain for the contributions on the server of the Institute of Linguistics at Potsdam University, where only contributors will have access. See the postproceedings site for details.
Some more specificities: As for the thematic subgrouping, we think that the discussion we had last year is still valuable. We will take up the issue at the end of April, when the new versions of the papers are available and new coalitions of interest may become apparent. Also, Berry Claus has consented to contribute an additional paper that is to support the cognitive psychology perspective.
So we hope that you still are ready to contribute, and look forward for the results of a second look.

With best regards,
for the editors,
Michael

For more details about the post-proceedings and the current state, please visit the post-proceedings site.

• Information structure is well known for a wide varitey of competing conceptions, but they all relate to salience in one way or another: focus/background, topic/focus, theme/rheme etc.
• Anaphora resolution (and, in the opposite direction, production of referring expressions) can be modelled using salience, as it has been done in conceptions of referent accessibility (e.g., Prince 1981).
• Choices in sentence structure between coordination, subordination, or nominalization can be claimed to have ramifications for discourse processing, leading to conceptions of foreground/background structures on the text level (e.g., Talmy 2000).
• Similarly, most theories of discourse structure involve salience, e.g.. the notion of nuclearity in 'Rhetorical structure theory' (RST, Mann/Thompson 1988), or the distinction between coordinating and subordinating relations in 'Segmented Discourse Representation Theory' (SDRT, Asher/Lascarides 2003).
• The semantics of definite descriptions and pronouns have been analyzed in terms of salience, for instance by Lewis (1979).
• Other tasks of language processing, such as word-sense disambiguation or metaphor processing (e.g., Giora and Fein 2004), are sometimes modelled with salience-inspired approaches.

Call for Papers: Jan 15, 2005

Submission deadline: June 10, 2005

Notification of acceptance: July 25, 2005

Final papers due: September 02, 2005

Deadline for registration: September 16, 2005

Workshop: Oct 5-8, 2005