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.

• 5 September, Kristin Melum Eide: A meaningful relation between time and space: potentially universal properties of natural language (and hence the syntactic spine)
• 12 September, Antonio Fábregas: The perks of not having zero morphemes
• 24 October, Kristin Klubbo Brodahl: Hvorfor kan ikke norske partisipper ta objekter?
• 21 November, Andrew Weir: Restitutive again and the semantics of stative predicates (NB: starts 12.30)

Previous activities

• Mass nouns and gender in Mainland Scandinavian
• Kor sterk er den svake adjektivbøyinga i skandinavisk?
• 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.
• Participial adjunct control: a scope-based approach
• EEG studies on Verb-Noun and Adjective-Noun composition
• Tense in Germanic languages
• John and possibly Mary: a conjoined free relative analysis