The 12th MACSIM will be held at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick on Saturday, October 3rd, 2026. We look forward to seeing you soon in New Brunswick!

Questions: Please contact Dorothy Ahn at dorothy.ahn(at)rutgers.edu if you have questions.

Keynote speaker: Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland)

Modal force in acquisition

In this talk I will present various studies that converge in showing that children master the force of possibility modals as early as age 2, but struggle with necessity modals until they’re at least 4- or 5-year-old, seeming to understand them as if they expressed possibility. I will discuss potential sources for their difficulty (linguistic, pragmatic, and conceptual), and speculate on what might be particularly challenging about universal quantification in the domain of modality.

Program

The full program can be found here.

Location

Academic Building East (ABE) 4th floor 15 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1796 [Google Map]

  • Talks will take place in Room ABE-4225
  • Registration, coffee breaks, lunch (noon), and dinner (6pm) will take place in the lobby of the 4th floor

Travel to New Brunswick

Our venue is within walking distance (around 10 minutes) of the New Brunswick train station [Google Map], which is served by both NJ Transit and Amtrak.

Parking: Our venue is on the College Ave Campus, which is part of the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University. While there is street parking generally available on campus, we recommend that you purchase a visitor permit prior to the event to ensure a lower priced parking. The total cost of parking will be $10 for the entire day.

In order to purchase a visitor permit, you must create a guest account from the Rutgers Parking Portal. Please see below for instructions:

  1. Go to https://ipo.rutgers.edu/parking/permits/visitor 
  2. Click “Visitor Permission”
  3. Next to “New Brunswick Campus”, click “Rutgers Parking Portal”
  4. Click “Don’t have an account? Sign up”, “Visitors”, and create your account (please note that the code they send when you create an account may be filtered as spam)
  5. You can follow the step-by-step guide here to purchase your daily permit.

With your daily parking permit, you can park in Lot 505/ College Ave Parking Deck (622 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ), which is a 10 minute walk from the workshop venue (Academic Building East).