PHLING is an interdisciplinary reading and research group at the University of Maryland, comprising graduate students from the Departments of Philosophy and Linguistics. PHLING was formed due in part to the efforts of the Language and Logic Initiative at Maryland, and through participation in Maryland's IGERT program.

Presently, the group is organized around discussing and conducting research within the domain of events, looking at the intersection of work in perception, language, metaphysics, and ontology. With support from our departments, we have been able to invite speakers, and will be hosting an interdisciplinary symposium on event cognition over the weekend of March 31st and April 1st, 2012. The symposium will feature presentations from graduate students, along with round-table discussions and two guest speakers: Achille Varzi of Columbia University, and our very own Paul Pietroski, who has a joint appointment in our two departments.

You can meet the PHLING students, take a peek at some links to sites we like, and contact us. We are actively seeking professional and research connections with colleagues in other departments or other universities.

2011-12 Meetings

13 February 2012. Reviewing submissions for PHLINc 1 is completed, the experimental wing of PHLING (ePHLING) is presenting a poster at the Mid-Atlantic Colloquium for Studies in Meaning, and we're meeting today to talk about Gillian Ramchand's (2005) article, "Post-Davidsonianism".

30 January 2012. We will regroup: review the graduate student meeting with Chomsky, revisit the big picture, and discuss chapters 1 & 2 of Ann Bunger's (2006) dissertation, "How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic and Conceptual Constraints on Verb Learning".

16 December 2011. That is all for the Fall semester, folks! We will regroup in January to begin planning for PHLINC, and the end-of-January roundtable with Chomsky. Happy holidays!

14 December 2011. We will discuss the draft of a paper by Liverence & Scholl, "Discrete Events as Units of Perceived Time", and thinking about planning for next semester's events. Afterwards, we're throwing an end of semester house party for the philosophy and linguistics grad students.

13 December 2011. The spin-off group we've been calling EPHLING is meeting to discuss winter break goals in getting our behavioral experiment up and running.

14 December 2011.We will discuss the draft of a paper by Liverence & Scholl, "Discrete Events as Units of Perceived Time", and thinking about planning for next semester's events. Afterwards, we're throwing an end of semester house party for the philosophy and linguistics grad students.

23 November 2011. This week we're discussing chapter 6 from the book Event Representation in Language and Cognition, Loucks and Pederson's "Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events".

9 November 2011. Now that the hands-on experimental group is running their own meeting date/times, we'll just update the main group info here. On Wednesday November 9th, we'll be reading "Space and the Vision-Language Interface: A Model-Theoretic Approach", by Francesco-Alessio Ursini and published in the latest issue of Biolinguistics. Note, for all the zillion citations, there are some obvious ones missing.

26 October 2011. We read Goldman's (2007) "A Program for Naturalizing Metaphysics with Application to the Ontology of Events".

19 October 2011. We are reading the chapter "Event Semantics" written by Barry Schein, forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. This will hopefully directly engage the (implicit or explicit) thoughts we've been having on "how many event variables there are" per clause, and the nature of the relevant thematic relations. For the first hour of our meeting, Alexander Williams will be there to clarify any issues we have with Barry's treatment, and raise some of his own.

12 October 2011. We will discuss Paul Pietroski's 1998 Mind article, "Actions, Adjuncts, and Agency".

05 October 2011. We'll be discussing sections 1.6.1, 2.1, 2.2, 7.1, and 7.6 of Jackendoff's 1990 book (Semantic Structures).

28 September 2011. This week we are discussing //variables//, reading pp116-128 of Frege's "Foundations of Arithmetic, and Boolos's "To be is to be a value of a variable (or to be some values of some variables)".

21 September 2011. Some administrative stuff has been cleared up, and we've decided to move to a weekly schedule where on alternating weeks we discuss (1) a couple of readings in depth, and (2) experiment design. On Sept.21 we'll discuss Massad, Hubbard, Newtson (1979), "Selective Perception of Events".

15 September 2011. We have some new members, so today we will be revisiting some basics to get these new folks introduced to some of the main themes from last year. We will be reading Casati & Varzi 2008, on event concepts, and Schwan & Garsoffky 2008, on event segmentation. Please see the bibliography for more details.

01 September 2011. Welcome back! Today we are talking administration and planning for the year. See you in Marie Mount Hall 3416.