20 January 2013

Phonetics Lab Meeting this Tuesday

John Kingston writes:

Phonetics Lab meetings will start this Tuesday, 22 January 2013, and continue every other week until the end of the semester. The agenda for the first meeting is to assess progress in all the current experiments and make plans for completing them this semester.

ECO 5 at UConn in March

Jason Overfelt writes:

ECO 5, is being held at UConn this year on March 30th.  This is a very friendly environment to present any polished or unpolished work you would like to get some feedback on or get a bit of practice with before presenting it on a larger stage.  The conference is intended primarily for 1st through 3rd year students, but it is open to everyone.  If you're interested in being one of the three UMass representatives, please let me know.  Mamoru Saito will be visiting UConn that weekend and it is (reportedly) highly likely to be in attendance.

Call for papers: Manchester Phonology Meeting

Kristine Yu writes:

Just a quick reminder that abstracts are due for the Manchester Phonology Meeting January 31.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/21mfm.html

Deadline Extended for qUALMS and GLEEFUL

Adam Liter, from Michigan State University writes:
 
I am writing on behalf of the q Undergraduate Association for Linguistics at Michigan State (qUALMS). As you may remember, you received an email from us near the end of 2012 asking for your help in distributing the call for papers for the third annual Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL).
 
We would greatly appreciate your help in distributing another version of the call for papers with an extended deadline. The deadline for submissions to GLEEFUL has been extended February 1. The updated call for papers is attached in PDF format. It can also be viewed on LinguistList, and additional submission information can be found at our website.

Deadline extended: WSCLA 18

WSCLA 18 -- abstract deadline extended by one week

The 18th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Language of the Americas (WSCLA 18) will take place at the University of California, Berkeley on April 5-7, 2013.

New abstract submission deadline: Monday, January 21, 2013

The central objective of this workshop is to bring together linguists who are engaged in research on the analytic study of the Aboriginal languages of the Americas so that they may exchange ideas across theories, language families, generations of scholars, and, importantly, across the academic and non-academic communities that are involved in language maintenance and
revitalization.

The following invited speakers have been confirmed:

- Judith Aissen (UC Santa Cruz)
- Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins (University of Victoria)
- Monica Macaulay (Wisconsin)
- B'alam Mateo Toledo (CIESAS)
- Joyce McDonough (Rochester)
- Andrés Salanova (Ottawa)
- Maziar Toosarvandani (MIT)
- Lorna Williams (University of Victoria)

Abstracts are invited for papers in any area of formal linguistics (including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) within any theoretical framework. We welcome papers that address diachronic, sociolinguistic, or applied topics from a formal perspective, and we are especially interested in papers seeking to relate the interests of formal linguists and the concerns of indigenous communities.

Abstract submission guidelines:

- Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format with the filename PaperTitle.pdf (where PaperTitle is the title or a clear abbreviated version of it. No punctuation or spaces.)

- Abstracts must be anonymous. Author name(s) must not appear on the abstract or file name. In addition, be sure to remove any author name in the document properties of the PDF file.

- Abstracts must not exceed 2 pages in length including references and examples

- Minimum 12pt font size, 1 inch margins

Abstracts should be sent as a PDF attachment to:
wscla18@socrates.berkeley.edu

Abstract submission deadline: January 21, 2013
Contact info: wscla18@socrates.berkeley.edu

For further information, please see the conference website:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~wscla/

McCCLU 2013: Call for Papers

The seventh annual McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates - McCCLU - will be held on March 15th, 2013- March 17th 2013.

It will again be hosted at McGill University, Montreal, by the Society of Linguistics Undergraduates of McGill - SLUM. The aim of this conference is to encourage original endeavors into the world of research as well as to enrich the present academic undergraduate community within the field of linguistics.

We are now calling for undergraduate students to submit abstracts for presentation at the conference on any subject matter within the domain of linguistics. Each abstract should detail material for a 20-minute presentation, with a 10-minute question period on  issues raised afterward. Abstracts should be a maximum of one page in length (12 point font, 1 inch margins) and submitted online to  http:// linguistlist.org/easyabs/mccclu2013 by January 25th, 2013.

For further information, please visit our blog at: mccclu2013.blogspot.com. Should you have any other questions please email us at mccclu2013@gmail.com

PsychoSyntax and CSL Lab meetings on Mondays

Brian Dillon writes:

We're set to have PsychoSyntax on Mondays at 3pm. The first meeting is 1/28, in the Partee Room, and we will meet biweekly after that. The first order of business will be to hammer out a presentation schedule, so come ready to volunteer yourself and your work!

It looks like we'll have time to actually get into some fun science in our first meeting, as well. If so, I'll volunteer myself to present something from one of the in-progress projects going on around here, and so we can hit the ground running.

For CSL Lab RAs (and folks who are interested in hanging out in the CSL lab, seeing ongoing projects, and getting involved!): our meeting times will also be Mondays at 3pm. We will meet on the weeks that PsychoSyntax does not meet, starting Monday 1/22, in Bartlett 11.

Partee Lecture in Mexico

Barbara writes:

Volodja are I are in Mexico for a couple of weeks mixing business and pleasure. I spent Jan 14-17 at El Colegio de Mexico consulting with Josefina García Fajardo and my colleagues in a project on determiners in Spanish and in Yucatec Maya, and with the 7 PhD students of the Linguistics Program about their planned dissertation projects. On Thursday the 17th, I gave a public lecture, “La cuantificación y tipología semántica”. Everything on all four days was in Spanish, though I note that Russian words were continually trying to emerge (and occasionally emerging), even though  Volodja and I tried to keep our own conversations in English. Those work days are being followed by an 8-day trip around the Yucatan, followed by two days back in Mexico City visiting with Josefina before returning to Amherst Jan 28.

UMAFLAB

Seth Cable writes:

Happy New Year! And, with a new year comes a new session of UMAFLAB (the UMass Funny Languages Breakfast)!

What is UMAFLAB, you might ask? Well, the purpose of UMAFLAB is to bring together individuals with a shared interest in puzzling linguistic data, optimally (but not necessarily) from understudied or minority languages.

*Presentations are always informal*. We are *not* looking for polished work or practice talks (though those are welcome). Rather, participants are free to present any puzzles they like. They needn't have any analysis in mind; indeed, part of the fun of the group is hearing other people's thoughts on some difficult problem.

Thus, if all you have is an interesting pattern worth 'boggling at', that's perfect for our group (particularly if it's from an otherwise not-very-much-talked-about language or variety). For example, a run down of all the crazy data obtained during some recent field work (or experimental work, or whatever) would be quite ideal.

As the name suggests, our meetings are typically in the morning, with some breakfast item served. However, the schedule is always flexible, if it turns out that most people can't make it in the morning.

So, if you'd at all be interested in being part of such an endeavor, please let me know! I'd like to begin scheduling soon our first organizational meeting of the semester, so if you could also let me know what days/times would work out best for you, that would greatly appreciated!

Graduate Student Workshop in Memory of Tanya Reinhart

The linguistics department at Tel-Aviv University is proud to announce the 1st graduate student workshop in memory of Professor Tanya Reinhart, which will take place on April 11th, 2013.

MA students and PhD students not having submitted their dissertation in Linguistics by April 2013 are invited to submit abstracts of their research in all areas of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics.

Papers will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion. Invited Speaker: Idan Landau, Ben Gurion University.

Length: Up to two single spaced A4 pages with 2.5 cm margins, typed in 12-point Times New Roman.

Format: Abstracts must be anonymous and in pdf format.

Submission: To submit your abstract, please send it totau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com no later than February 1st. Please state your name and affiliation in the body of the message.

Important dates: Deadline for submission: 1 February 2013 Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2013 Workshop: 16:00 – 19:30, 11 April 2013 

Contact info: tau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com

UMass at the LSA

The annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America met January 3-6 in Boston this year, and UMass were well represented in the poster sessions. These included:

Andrew Weir, poster: "Article drop in headlines: failure of CP level Agree"

Anisa Schardl, poster: "Simple partial movement and clefts"

Nick LaCara: "*On the table lay a book, and on the sofa did too: ellipsis, inversion and why they are bad together"

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten and Anisa Scheardl "Expressing uncertainty with "gisa" in Tshangla"

and


Jeremy Hartman, with Paul Marty, Peter Graff, Steven Keyed: "Biases in word learning: the case of non-myopic predicates"