Welcome to Mayfest 2009

Every year the graduate students of the Linguistics Department of the University of Maryland organize a linguistics workshop focusing on a different aspect of language. The goal of this year's Mayfest is to bring together researchers from various disciplines to discuss the ways in which cross-disciplinary research can move the study of semantics beyond truth conditions.

Theme

Talks at this year's workshop will center around the mental representation of meaning. In particular, we are interested in fostering discussion on what kinds of mental computations are involved in representing sentence meanings, how real-time understanding can provide insight into these computations, and the relation between linguistic meaning and extralinguistic concepts. In addressing these issues, we hope that the talks at this year's Mayfest can illustrate that experimental methodology provides more than simple arbitration between competing theories of meaning.

When and where

The workshop will be held May 8-9 on the College Park Campus of the University of Maryland in the Benjamin Banneker Room in the Adele H. Stamp Student Union (see the directions page for more information). Mayfest 2009 has no registration fee and we welcome all visitors to the workshop; however, for organizational purposes we do ask all guests to register.

We urge you to book hotel rooms as soon as possible. Note that as College Park is metro accessible, guests may be able to find suitable accommodation in DC. Students are also offering a limited amount of crash space. Please see our accommodation page for more information.