How about that?
Looking through the preliminary program [pdf] for January’s LSA meeting, I noticed an interesting session topic on the 5th. Among the nine parallel sessions, poster sessions, and two special sessions during the afternoon is a three-talk group under the heading “That”. Can’t get much more specific than that.
But in all seriousness, the talks to be presented therein should be very thought-provoking, if I am correct in their topic, namely, various distributional facts regarding complementizer that. Some subset of the work done in particular by the speakers from Stanford has been presented at various meetings around the SF Bay Area, and the sorts of facts that end up accounting for when that gets used turn out to be pretty cool (though I’ll be darned if I can remember exactly what they are…guess that means I’ll be going to that session).
Next year, who knows? Maybe there can be a session on Japanese sentence-final particles (though, on second hand, I’d be willing to bet that any session devoted to “Japanese pragmatics” would basically be about that, if not in name.)