19 January 2014

Lyn Frazier: LSA Fellow

At the 88th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Lyn Frazier was inducted into the class of LSA fellows, along with UMass alumnus Gennaro Chierchia. Lyn joins fellow faculty members Emmon Bach, Barbara Partee, Alice Harris, Angelika Kratzer, John McCarthy, Lisa Selkirk and Tom Roeper.

Erschler presents in the Syntax Workshop on Friday

David Erschler will give a practice talk "Relative clauses in Ossetic and the typology of correlatives” in the syntax workshop on Friday, January 24 at 2:30 in the Partee room.

Call for papers: Workshop on the Semantics of Referring Expressions

Workshop on the semantics of referring expressions
Olomouc
June 5, 2014

Deadline: February 10, 2014

This workshop forms part of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2014. For further information please consult this webpage.

Coordinators and discussants: Mojmír Dočekal (Masaryk University, Brno), Berit Gehrke (Université Paris Diderot)

The workshop aims to bring together linguists interested in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, focusing on interpretative issues related to nominal complexes. The theme should not exclude papers on other subjects, but submissions traditionally related to this theme (indefinite/definite NPs, plurality/kind/mass denoting NPs and referential pronouns) are especially welcome.

Call for papers: Workshop on Quantifier Scope

Workshop on "Quantifier Scope: Syntactic, Semantic, and Experimental Approaches"

June 12-13, 2014

We invite 6 papers for 30 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion) that address the topic of Quantifier Scope, either from a syntactic, a semantic, or an experimental approach, or any combination of the previous.

This workshop aims to foster discussion and collaboration among researchers working on quantifier scope, by trying to bring together work from a variety of languages, experimental paradigms, and theoretical perspectives.
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts (2 pages, 12pt font, including references and data) should be emailed to: u.etxeberria at iker.cnrs.fr

Please include title of the proposal, name of the author(s) and affiliation in the body of the email.

Abstract Submission Information:
Abstracts can be submitted from 01-Jan-2014 until 19-Jan-2014.

Deadline for submission: January 19, 2014
Notification of acceptance: March 14, 2014

Invited Speakers (in alphabetical order):
Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)
Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago)
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
Janina Rado (Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt am Main)
Gregory Scontras (Harvard University)
Benjamin Spector (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod)
Georges Tsoulas (University of York)
Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut)

Schedule for Cognitive Colloquium

Alexandra Jesse writes:

Below is a preliminary schedule for our Cognitive Colloquium for this semester. As always, we meet on Wednesdays in Tobin 521B at 12:00 noon. We won't meet every week, since due to our job searches, I have been asked to limit the number of talks. This may also mean that we have to meet occasionally in a different location - look out for room changes in my reminder emails. My apologies to all of you who had suggested someone (or volunteered) who couldn't be scheduled. I will try to consider these suggestions for the Fall.

Feb 5 - Jeff Moher
Feb 19 - Eswen Fawa
Feb 26 - Nathaniel Smith
March 5 - Sean Kang
March 19 - Spring break
March 26 - Katja Poellmann
April 2 - Evan Heit
April 9 - Ben Zobel
April 16 - Lisa Fiorenzo
April 30 - Monica Bennett

If you have suggestions for Fall speakers, please send them to me.

Partee at LSA

In WHISC’s last issue, we neglected to include the talk given by Barbara Partee in our entry about UMass’s presence at the Linguistics Society of  America’s meeting in Minneapolis. She was one of the presenters at the LSA’s 90th anniversary talks. Hers was entitled “Semantics and Pragmatics: then and Now.” The slides for her talk can be found here.

Call for papers: Logic, Grammar and Meaning

The Logic, Grammar and Meaning conference will take place at the University of East Anglia on June 7-9. Keynote speakers include Angelika Kratzer and UMass alumnus Gennaro Chierchia. 

The LGM conference brings together philosophers and linguists in order to investigate and promote fruitful interactions between logic and natural language. Our target audience consists of philosophers, logicians and linguists interested in the application of logic to natural language. We especially encourage  graduate students and young researches to join in. We support the Gendered Conference Campaign.

Submission deadline: March 20, 2014

Notification of decisions: April 10, 2014

For more information, and instructions on submitting abstracts, go here.

Call for papers: Canadian Linguistic Association

The Canadian Linguistic Association will hold its 2014 conference as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, from Saturday May 24 to Monday May 26, 2014. Members are invited to submit abstracts representing all areas of linguistics. Only members in good standing for 2014 may submit an abstract for the main session. (To become a member, you must subscribe to the Canadian Journal of Linguistics via the University of Toronto Press Web site.)

PLEASE NOTE: We strongly encourage all members, especially senior faculty, to submit poster abstracts.

ABSTRACTS ARE TO BE SUBMITTED ELECTRONICALLY, in .pdf format, through EasyAbstracts, at http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/aclcla2014.

Deadline: Saturday, February 1, 2014

For more information, go here.

Spring Colloq calendar announced

The schedule of department colloq talks for Spring 2014 has been released:

2/7 - Ev Federenko (Mass. General Hospital Department of Psychiatry [ICESL talk]

2/28 - Naomi Feldman (Maryland)

3/14 - Jason Merchant (Chicago)

3/28 - Gereon Müller (Leipzig) [Syntax Guru]

4/25 - Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers)

Erschler's entry in Oxford Bibliographies appears

David Erschler’s entry on Northeast Caucasian Languages has appeared in Oxford University Press’s online bibliographies series. Find it here.

WW II Trivia winners announced

WHISC is proud to announce that local favorite “Oh! The Humanities” won three prizes at the World War II club trivia contest, including third place for the coveted “Worst Tiebreakers” trophy. Below is a picture of team members Erik Cheries (Psychology), Brian Dillon (Linguistics), Jeremy Hartman (Linguistics), Tom Maresca (Biology) and Brian McDermott (Journalism). (Picture courtesy of Northampton bureau chief Rajesh Bhatt.)

Trivia

Johnson in Rome

Kyle Johnson will make a (short) presentation with Diane Lillo-Martin and Andrew Nevins on the structure of language at the 2014 Science Festival in Rome on Saturday, January 25. The Festival this year is devoted to linguistics and language, and will include talks by many well-known linguists, including Noam Chomsky who will also be the subject of an “opera” which is described thusly:

A talk-opera by Emanuele Casale for instrumental ensemble, voice, electronics and images Conversations with Chomsky is a musical opera featuring characters who “interpret” themselves, without acting a part, on a virtual stage – the video screen. Various characters follow and interact with one another at the threshold between reality and evocation: the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, an internationally renowned scholar and professor at the M.I.T.; legendary names such as those of Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Salvador Allende; and university students. Far from being a work of political propaganda, Conversations with Chomsky seeks to combine themes related to activism within an audiovisual framework vaguely inspired by melodrama. The central theme is the current contrast between two impulses found within individuals and societies: collectivism and mutual aid on the one hand, and competition and individualism on the other.

Check out the full schedule here.

CoLang 2014

CoLang 2014, the 2014 Institute on Collaborative Language Research (formerly InField) will occur in June and July 2014, hosted by The University of Texas at Arlington, with Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald as Director. CoLang 2014 is funded by a National Science Foundation grant, BCS#263939 and by various units at UT Arlington. The theme of CoLang 2014 is Native American languages, but participants and instructors from countries all over the world are expected to attend.

CoLang offers an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, practicing linguists, and indigenous community members to develop and refine skills and approaches to language documentation and revitalization. The Institute is designed to provide an opportunity for a diverse range of participants to become trained in a wide range of skills in community-centered language documentation.

For more information, including the costs and how to enroll, go here.