The 2015 meeting of the Semantics Workshop of the American Midwest and Prairies (SWAMP) was hosted by our Department on Saturday, October 31. SWAMP (in their own words) “is a student-led conference designed primarily to provide an opportunity for graduate students to present original work, collaborate with those from other departments and universities, and hear from leaders within the field of semantics. SWAMP presentations are focused on natural language semantics and related areas such as syntax-semantics interface, pragmatics, philosophy of language, computer science, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive psychology”.

SWAMP was very well attended this year, with presentations by students from as far afiled as MSU, Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota, OSU, University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. Our own Department was also represented, with presentations by: Ariana Bancu (Semantic shift in Romanian: the case of decât) and Marjorie Herbert (Towards a Polycomponental Verb Analysis of Classifier Constructions in ASL: the Agentive/Non-agentive Distinction of Handshape).