06 May 2013

Field Methods presentations tomorrow

Alice Harris and Kristine Yu write:

Faculty and grad students are invited to hear talks on Dzongkha, the language we focused on this semester in field methods.  Talks will be in Dickinson 206, beginning at 12:00 tomorrow, May 7.

12:00   Nick LaCara, "The Structure of Nominal Phrases in Dzongkha"

12:30   Mike Clauss, “Converbs in Dzongkha”

1:00   Kristine Yu, “Tone and voice quality in Dzhongka + building a speech corpus”

1:30   Alice Harris, “Preliminary description of comparatives and of relative clause constructions”

Please feel free to bring a brown-bag lunch.  Homemade desserts will be available.

Yu gets a Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant

Kristine Yu has been awarded a 2013-14 Mellon Mutual Mentoring grant that will be used to build a prosody team among many  faculty spread across the Five Colleges, including: Brian Dillon, Jeremy Hartman, Magda Oiry, Luiz Amaral, Mara Breen, Emiliana Cruz, Gwyneth Rost, Adrian Staub, Mary Andrianopoulos, Seth Cable, Chuck Clifton, Lyn Frazier, LIsa Green, Angelika Kratzer, Lisa Green and John McCarthy.

Congratulations Kristine!

Call for Papers: Phonology 2013

Joe Pater writes:

We are seeking high quality unpublished research in all areas of phonology for presentation at Phonology 2013, to be held November 8-10 on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is planned to be the first in an annual series of general phonology conferences, to be held at a different location each year. In addition to the invited speakers, there will also be oral and poster presentations selected through abstract review. All oral presentations will be published in an on-line conference proceedings. Abstracts should be anonymous, and a maximum of 2 pages in 12 point font, figures and references included. They can be submitted at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/phonology-2013. The deadline is midnight US EST, Wednesday July 1. 

Invited Speakers
John McCarthy, UMass Amherst
Sharon Peperkamp, LSCP Paris
Kevin Ryan, Harvard University

The research presentations will take place November 9-10. On November 8, we will hold a tutorial workshop on "Computational and Experimental Methods in Phonology". The full schedule is TBA, but we are pleased to announce three of the tutorials now:

John Kingston, UMass Amherst "Octave/Matlab scripting for Psychtoolbox" 
Lisa Sanders, UMass Amherst "ERP methods for phonology"
Brian Smith, UMass Amherst "Corpus phonology in R"

Kingston gets CHFA grant for fieldwork

John Kingston got a CHFA grant to fund fieldwork on the Otomanguean languages, Chatino and Chinanteco, of Oaxaca this June and July. He'll be working closely with Emiliana Cruz of our Anthropology Department and Tony Woodbury of the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas, Austin on the phonetics and phonology of tone in Chatino, and with Mario Chavez Peon of CIESAS-DF on the same phenomena in Chinanteco.

Congratulations John!

New Linguistics Blog

Barbara Partee writes:

There’s a new blog, “History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences”, edited by James McElvenny at the University of Sydney. I’m the invited author of the third post in it, ‘On the history of the question of whether natural language is “illogical”’, which came out on May 1. For now, new posts are planned weekly. Here’s the blog address: http://hiphilangsci.com/.

Call for Papers: Old World Conference in Phonology

11th Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP 11)
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Meertens Instituut Amsterdam
22-25 January 2014

Invited Speakers:

Adamantios I. Gafos (University of Potsdam)
Silke Hamann (University of Amsterdam)
Alan Prince (Rutgers University)

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Meertens  
Instituut Amsterdam are proud to announce that the eleventh Old World  
Conference in Phonology (OCP 11) will take place in Leiden and  
Amsterdam from 23 to 25 January 2014. It is organised by a group of  
local phonologists and follows in the line of previous OCP  
conferences, which have been held in Leiden, Tromsø, Budapest, Rhodes,  
Toulouse, Edinburgh, Nice, Marrakech, Berlin, and Istanbul.

The conference will be preceded by a workshop on the relationship  
between phonetics and phonology on 22 January. Everyone attending the  
conference is very welcome to attend the workshop, too.

Pre-Conference Workshop on the Relationship between Phonetics and Phonology:

During the last years a special attention has been devoted to the  
relationship between phonetics and phonology. However, most of the  
questions dealing with the role of phonetics in formal models of  
phonology are still unanswered. As a matter of illustration, some of  
these questions are the following: are phonological features grounded  
in phonetics, or are they substance-free? If features are grounded in  
phonetics, are they based on articulation or acoustics? Is the mapping  
between the phonological output and phonetics a direct or an indirect  
one? Should functional explanations of phonological patterns be  
included in formal phonology, or are synchronic phonological patterns  
just phonetically arbitrary, meaning that those explanations do not  
belong to grammar but to other theories such as sound change? How is  
metrical structure reflected in phonetics? (How) should phonetic  
variation in the speech signal be captured in phonological theory?

Local Organizers:

Chair: Björn Köhnlein
Bert Botma
Ben Hermans
Frans Hinskens
Claartje Levelt
Kathrin Linke
Etske Ooijevaar
Marc van Oostendorp
Marijn van ?t Veer
Secretary: Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Call for Papers:

Abstracts for presentation as either talks or poster papers can be  
submitted on any phonological issue (theoretical or empirical).

For the main conference, we invite abstracts either for an oral  
presentation of 20 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of discussion) or  
for poster presentation.

For the workshop, we invite submission of abstracts for an oral  
presentation of 20 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of discussion).

Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than two pages, including  
examples and references. Submissions are restricted to one  
single-authored and one co-authored abstract. The conference language  
is English: abstracts and talks will be in English.

Page format: A4, 2,54 cm (one inch) margins on all sides, 12-point  
font, single line spacing
File format: .pdf

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2013
First call for papers: 29 April 2013
Second call for papers: 15 July 2013
Last call for papers: 1 September 2013
Notification of acceptance: 1 November 2013
Main conference: 23-25 January 2014
Pre-conference workshop: 22 January 2014