We are happy to announce that we have two new GLOW board members. The two have been selected based on the online votes that took place last week and will be taking the positions of early career and semantic focus.
Laura Stigliano (Early career focus)
Daniel Altshuler (Semantic focus)
Welcome, Laura and Daniel!
The GLOWing lecture series is a part of GLOW’s efforts of community-building, outreach, and strengthening of the generative community. The goal of GLOWing lectures is to provide tools, insights, and puzzles that will bring out why generative linguistics is important, invigorating, and relevant.
This year’s GLOWing topic is “How do we learn about language?” Every lecture will feature a speaker and a discussant working with different methodologies on different subfields. The lecture series aims to present diverse perspectives on linguistic research, how different methodologies and foci guide our theories, and how all of them are important for generative grammar and our understanding of natural language.
The lectures will be held on zoom, a YouTube recording will be made available after each lecture. All GLOW members receive the zoom link via email. If you are not a GLOW member, sign up HERE to get free access to the lecture.
All lectures and further information can be found HERE.
Join us for our first lecture on October 11, featuring Andrew Nevins and Jonathan Bobaljik!
After many years on the GLOW board, Caterina Donati has decided to step down and give new people the chance to join the board. We thank her again for all her enthusiasm, wisdom, and outstanding support!
There are currently two openings in the board:
If you are interested in working with the board on developing support for early career researchers or a better integration of semantics into GLOW, please nominate yourself or encourage anyone you know who may be interested in these positions to do so (a quick e-mail is sufficient). Anyone at any stage in their career from anywhere is eligible. The only requirement is that you should love generative linguistics!
Please send your nomination by September 1, 2024. The next step after the nomination stage will then be votes by the membership.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the most recent GLOW vote on the reorganization of the functions and responsibilities of the members of the GLOW board.
The results are as follows (you can also find details here):
The new board assignments can be found HERE
The call for abstracts for GLOW 47 is out and can be found HERE.
The main colloquium will take place in March 2025 in Frankfurt am Main. There will also be one workshop on Negation (Frankfurt) and one workshop on (universal) paradigmatic gaps (Göttingen).
All further information can be found on the conference website.
GLOW 47 will take place in Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen in spring 2025.
Further information will be announced soon – until then, save the date!
Our 4. GLOWing lecture features David Adger, discussing with Heather Newell on what’s exciting about Syntax on May 16, 14:00 CEST (08:00 EST).
Join us on Zoom (sign up HERE for the link) or on YouTube! All further information about the GLOWing lecture series can be found HERE.
Since our membership has been growing, managing the subscription information has become increasingly complex. We have therefore decided that, moving forward, one GLOW board member will act as the membership administrator. For now, this is Markus Pöchtrager, who you can turn to with questions regarding your membership and who will send reminders about membership renewals.
Membership terms:
Starting 2025, the membership year will be the CALENDAR year (1.1. to 31.12). Whenever your membership will expire by the end of a year, you will get an e-mail reminder from the membership administrator to renew.
Transition:
1. Since there is no GLOW colloquium in 2024, all memberships expiring during the calendar year 2024 will automatically be extended to Dec 31, 2024.
2. Ongoing memberships expiring during 2025 or a year afterwards (e.g., for multi-year memberships):
Membership fees:
Starting in 2025, the regular GLOW membership fees will go back to what they have been in the past, but we will offer additional options and we have significantly lowered the student membership fees.
Students:
For anyone having difficulty paying the dues (for whatever reasons), please get in touch with the membership administrator and we will try to find a solution.
As before, memberships have to be paid via the Paypal HERE.
Donations:
A suggestion at the town-hall meetings was to increase the membership for regular members (people said they could pay more), and to make student membership free. We followed the second part, but decided not to raise the regular membership fees, as there are vast differences across countries, positions, and other factors that may affect people’s ability to pay more.
But: We would really love to get (named or anonymous) donations from members who can afford it. It will be put to excellent use! If you would like to support us, you can donate directly HERE on our website!
Prizes:
Starting with GLOW 47 in Frankurt, GLOW will award two prizes of €200 each for the best student presentations.
What does a membership get you?
Please spread the word, and share in particular with your students!
Our third GLOWing lecture will be by Viola Schmitt on March 15, 15:00 CET (10:00 EST, 14:00 BST, 19:30 IST – note the daylight savings change mismatch!) She will be discussing with Marcel den Dikken on what’s exciting about Semantics.
The Zoom-link for the lecture will be distributed to all GLOW members via e-mail a day before the lecture. If you’re not a GLOW member but you still want to attend via Zoom, you can sign up HERE. To make sure you receive the Zoom link, please sign up at least two days before the lecture. Like the previous times, the lecture will also be live-streamed on YouTube!
After two townhall meetings, we decided on a revised format for the GLOW colloquium.
HERE are the new guidelines for organizing a GLOW conference, reached by the GLOW board after taking into consideration the issues and suggestions raised at the town hall meetings. The conclusions reflect, on the one hand, the need to keep up a venue for substantial (and hence long) contributions in generative grammar and, on the other hand, make GLOW significantly more inclusive—make it more accessible to junior scholars and to non-core approaches to generative grammar.
The questionnaire results as well as the town hall discussions have revealed that the community finds it important to have GLOW proceedings. We agree with this assessment, and while no definitive decision has been made, the board has agreed on an initial concept, sketched and motivated below. To develop the details and reach a concrete procedure for the GLOW proceedings, we would like to form a task force to handle this further. If you are interested to be part of the task force (note this will not bind you to be involved in the actual proceedings later), please let us know.
Proposal:
Although Glossa (special collections called “GLOWing papers”) is considered a good venue, there are significant limitations in the number of submissions, which in turn poses a challenge of the selection process; note that the community is skeptical about the GLOW board deciding on which papers should be included in the selected proceedings.
Taking the above into account and considering that GLOW is to become a more inclusive conference, the GLOW board would like to support a more inclusive proceedings model, too, along the lines of SuB, WCCFL, or SALT. More particularly, what we have in mind is a sizeable collection of short papers (say, up to 15 pages), non-reviewed, but copyedited, published online and diamond open access (free to both author and reader, accessible via a stable repository), within about a year from the conference. The publisher would be the organizing institution, the editorial team could be composed of senior and junior scholars; for the latter this would be an opportunity to gain experience. The editors would only check the papers for copyediting and stylesheet adherence, the editing itself would be up to the authors. This is basically the model applied in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung. We are aware that a non-reviewed publication is worth less than a reviewed one, let alone a journal publication. However, as has been pointed out multiple times, good papers have a high chance of finding their way into journals even without GLOW proceedings. And while non-reviewed publications often “score” less points in official evaluation systems, their quality is easily recognized by peer experts, which in turn can translate to higher chances in the job market for junior people. Finally, speed and inclusiveness are the benefits which we think outweigh the downsides.
