The ForEST Society (Formal Explorations of Structural Topics, in Norwegian Skogselskapet) is an informal forum for formal linguistics at the Department of Language and Literature. We are a low-threshold forum for the presentation of members’ own research (at any stage of development, including brainstorming ideas and data) or ‘reading-group’ discussion of research from elsewhere.

Many of our members are syntacticians (hence the name ForEST: lots of trees), but our interests include all of syntax, semantics, morphology, or phonology, or the interfaces between any of these areas – that is, any work focusing on the form and structure of language.

• 23 March: Ingrid M. F. Heiene: Kor sterk er den svake adjektivbøyinga i skandinavisk?
• 20 April: Charlotte Sant (UiT): Mass nouns and gender in Mainland Scandinavian
• 4 May: Ingrid M. F. Heiene: Er fasar ein mekanisme, eller kan det vere berre ein effekt?

Previous activities

• Reading group discussion of two recent articles by Chomsky (Minimalism: where are we now, and where can we hope to go? and Simplicity and the form of grammars) led by Kristin Melum Eide. (Contact Andrew to get PDFs of the articles.)
• The GenVAC project presents some preliminary findings on gender and pronouns in Norwegian.
• Kristin K. Brodahl and Inghild Flaate Høyem: Participial adjunct control: a scope-based approach
• Lia Călinescu: EEG studies on Verb-Noun and Adjective-Noun composition
• Kristin Melum Eide: Tense in Germanic languages
• Andrew Weir: John and possibly Mary: a conjoined free relative analysis

All talks take place on Thursdays, 12.15-14.00, room 4402D