Below is a summary of the talks presented at this year's CGSW (the abstracts can be downloaded from the CGSW web page). I think everybody agreed that it was an incredibly well-organized conference; I also enjoyed the relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Thanks again to Marcel, Christina, and the local organizers!

Papers presented:
Jan-Wouter Zwart was the first speaker and he presented a new way of looking at verb second. Essentially, verb movement is not triggered by a V2 property but marks a dependency between the fronted XP and its sister. [pdf version of the paper]

Ute Bohnacker showed very convincingly that, contra claims in the L2 literature, V2 is not universally hard to acquire; speakers of a V2 L1 have no problems with this property. Furthermore, transfer from an L2 to a L3 can have an effect on the results which had previously been overlooked.

Markus Bader and Josef Bayer (Tanja Schmid, another co-author of that paper, wasn't there unfortunately) presented the results of a corpus study, a questionnaire-base study, and a self-paced reading study showing that in intraposed infinitival constructions, a mono-clausal construal is preferred over bi-clausal construals. They also compared German infinitival constructions with pre-verbal clauses in Bangla and showed that they show very similar behavior, despite the fact that the latter are finite clauses. [pdf version of the paper]

The last talk of the morning sessions was by Eric Stenshoel who asked whether all particles are equal. Eric covered an impressive amount of data (from English, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish) and his animated powerpoint slides made it very easy to parse the complex trees and "tree surgeries" suggested.

In the afternoon, Marit Julien compared the distribution of postnominal possessors in the Scandinavian languages and provided a refined DP-structure for these constructions.

Dorian Roehrs argued that appositives such as ich armer Idiot in German (and French) do not involve an adjunction structure but are simple DPs (where the pronoun occupies D [or is moved there] and the 'appositive' is the main NP).

Thomas Leu suggested that what for constructions involve a silent "KIND" or "SORT" which is found overtly in Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch, and which makes some of the odd properties of these constructions less odd.

Jonathan Bobaljik proposed that agreement is morphological and not syntactic and looked again of apparent case of intervention in Icelandic.

The final regular talk was by M. Siobhán Cottell and Alison Henry who showed that Belfast English has transitive expletive constructions and that the accounts suggested for these constructions in other Germanic languages cannot be applied to Belfast English. The proposed that one major difference between Standard English and Belfast English is the position where the expletive is merged: Spec,vP in the former, Spec,TP in the latter.

The last talk on Day 1 was the keynote lecture by Alison Henry: Merging, Moving and Word order in a newly recognized Germanic Language: Ullans/Ulster Scots. Alison gave us an overview of the situation surrounding Ulster Scots and the problems linguists are faced with in working with this language. A paper discussing some of these issues will come out in Lingua soon (Nonstandard dialects and linguistic data). Alison then presented various syntactic issues regarding the distribution of have and be and argued that certain head-final orders arise because of leftward movement of the complement of the verb.