Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Angelika Kratzer writes:

You (and your friends, students, colleagues) are all invited to a symposium on:

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Saturday, April 16 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Integrative Learning Center, N 400 

Please spread the word! Catered reception starting at 1:00 PM. This might or might not be a substitute for lunch. 

9:30

Coffee, settling down

10:00  - 10:55

Kate Davidson, Linguistics Department, Harvard University 

Our cat went "meow" and my dog was like "feed me!": iconic attitude reports in spoken and sign languages.

Hadas Kotek, Linguistics Department, McGill University Chair & last question or comment. 

11:05 - 12:00

Jonathan Phillips, Moral Cognition Lab, Psychology Department, Harvard University

Factive Theory of Mind

Angelika Kratzer, Department of Linguistics, UMass AmherstChair & last question or comment. 

12:10 - 1:05

Shevaun Lewis, Language & Cognition Lab, Cognitive Science Department, Johns Hopkins University

The Role of Pragmatics in Language Development and Processing

Amy Rose Deal, Linguistics Department, UC BerkeleyChair & last question or comment. 


The Symposium is offered and organized by members of the 2015/2016 SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) Summer Institute. Financial support for the symposium comes from Research and Professional Development Funds provided by UMass Amherst, which are gratefully acknowledged.  More information about the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute: 

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sias/

UMass at ECO 5

MIT is hosting the Graduate Student Workshop this Saturday, April 16, from 9:15 to dinner. UMass is represented by:

Deniz Ozyildiz who is giving the talk “Factivity alternates, at least in Turkish."

Nadine Balbach, Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper, who are giving the talk “Everyone but me — Children Acquiring the different notions of `but’ in Quantified Sentences."

Polina Berezovskaya will present the talk “Processing Ambiguous Degree Constructions Cross-Linguistically"

For more information, including a schedule and how to register, go here.

Hammerly at Syntax Workshop

Syntax Workshop on Monday (4:30 in ILC N451) will feature a talk by Chris Hammerly entitled: (Un)interpretability and the representation of morphosyntactic features. Here’s an abstract:

In the talk, I argue that the distinction between uninterpretable and interpretable features is unnecessary. All of the functions that have been attributed to this distinction can either be derived directly from mechanisms of the grammar, or subsumed under other independently motivated representational properties of features. I focus particularly on deriving facts regarding the interpretation of features at LF, with a keen eye towards the use of interpretability in agreement systems. This is very much work in progress, so I ask people to bring their favorite instance of where the interpretability distinction has been used to see if my claim holds up.

Woodbury at Sound Workshop

John Kingston writes:

Tony Woodbury will present his joint work with Stephanie Villard on tone in Zacatepec Chatino in Sound Workshop on Friday 26 February 1-2 in ILC N451.

Syntax Workshop meets tomorrow

Thuy and Rodica will give a report on ConSOLE in Syntax Workshop tomorrow, February 1. Syntax Workshop meets on Mondays from 4:30-5:30 in ILC N458.

Joint Syntax Phonology Workshop on Friday

Joe Pater will present joint work with Jennifer Culbertson, Coral Hughto and Robert Staubs at a joint meeting of the syntax and phonology workshop this Friday at 2:30 in ILC N458. A title and abstract of his talk follow.

Title: Typological Prediction with Learning: Grammatical Agent-Based Modeling of Typology

Abstract: What effect does learning have on the typological predictions of a theory of grammar? One way to answer this question is to examine the output of agent-based models (ABMs), in which learning can shape the distribution over languages that result from agent interaction. Prior research on ABMs and language has tended to assume relatively simple agent-internal representations of language, with the goal of showing how linguistic structure can emerge without being postulated a priori (e.g. Kirby and Hurford 2002, Wedel 2007). In this paper we show that when agents operate with more articulated grammatical representations, typological skews emerge in the output of the models that are not directly encoded in the grammatical system itself. This of course has deep consequences for grammatical theory construction, which often makes fairly direct inferences from typology to properties of the grammatical system. We argue that abstracting from learning may lead to missed opportunities in typological explanation, as well as to faulty inferences about the nature of grammar. By adding learning to typological explanation, grammatical ABMs allow for accounts of typological tendencies, such as the tendency toward uniform syntactic headedness (Greenberg 1963, Dryer 1992). In addition, incorporating learning can lead to predicted near-zeros in typology. We show this with the case of unrealistically large stress windows, which can be generated by a weighted constraint system, but which have near-zero frequency in the output of our ABM incorporating the same constraints. The too-large-window prediction is one of the few in the extant literature arguing for Optimality Theory’s ranked constraints over weighted ones.

Syntax Workshop

Lisa Green writes:

The schedule for the remaining activity is below.

November 6th: Discussion of "How to Neutralize a Finite Clause Boundary:Phase Theory and the Grammar of Bound Pronouns: by Thomas Grano and Howard Lasnik

November 13th: David Erschler talks

November 20th: Open

November 27th: Thanksgiving break (We will not meet.)

December 4th: Rodica Ivan talks

Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Agreement at UMass

The departments of Linguistics and Psychology are hosting a workshop on Agreement Thursday and Friday of this week (Oct. 28 and 30). Registration is free, but if you plan on attending, you should rsvp here. Thursday’s talks are on “Agreement and Linear Order,” and Friday’s on “Experimental and theoretical approaches.” Thursday’s talks are in ILC N400 and Friday’s talks are in ILS S211.

For a schedule and more information, go here.

Andrew Murphy in Syntax Workshop this Friday

Andrew Murphy will give a talk this Friday in Syntax Workshop, which meets in N458 at 2:15. The title of his talk is "Cumulativity and Opacity in Syntactic Derivations: Arguments for Weighted Constraints."

Sound Workshop on Mondays

John Kingston writes:

Sound Workshop will meet Mondays 11:15-12:05 in N451, starting this Monday, September 14.

Semantics Workshop

Seth Cable writes:

I’m writing to let you all know that the meetings of the Semantics Workshop this fall will be at the following time-space coordinates:

Wednesdays, 12:20 - 1:10

Room N451 (of the Integrative Learning Center)

Our first meeting will be Wednesday (September 9th). We’ll discuss our general goals for the semester, and set a preliminary agenda.

Psycholinguistic Workshop

Amanda Rysling writes:

The Psycholinguistics Workshop this semester will meet on Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 in N400.
There are also going to be some talks or events not at that time, which will be announced on the ling-psych mailing list. Anyone who wants to present something, whether at a daytime meeting or during a special evening/reading group session, should let me know. 

Syntax Workshop

Rajesh Bhatt and Lisa Green write:

The Syntax Workshop this semester will meet on Fridays from 2:15 to 3:05, location TBA. Our first meeting will be on Friday September 11. We will attend to organizational matters and then we already have a speaker lined up for the meeting! An announcement will be forthcoming.

Call for papers: TbiLLC 2015

On Septemer 22, the Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be hosting a workshop entitled: “How to make things happen in the Grammar — the implementation of Obligatoriness.”  The workshop is organized by our own Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt. Talks are 45 minutes in length, and the two-page abstracts are due May 21, 2015. For more information, go here.

Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The program for the eleventh Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics has been announced. The Workshop will be at the University of York on June 4-6. UMass is represented by Deniz Ozyildiz, who is presenting the paper "Move to mI, but only if you can."

Caroline Andrews in Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

This week we'll be hearing from Caroline Andrews in the Psycholing workshop. She will be presenting on her first GP in preparation for the second year mini conference in a few weeks. The title of her talk is "Predictive Parsing in Licensor-Licensee Dependencies".

As usual for afternoon meetings, we'll be convening at 2:30 on Thursday in N400. 

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten at Semantics Workshop

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will be presenting in the Semantics Workshop, which meets this week tomorrow, Monday, April 13, at 9AM in N451.

Dissertation Writing Retreats

Dean John McCarthy writes:

I am writing to you to draw your attention to the dissertation writing retreats that will be offered this summer under the joint sponsorship of the Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development and the University Writing Center. These week-long workshops offer extensive structured time to write, receive feedback, and develop effective writing strategies. Doctoral students who have already begun writing or who will be ready to begin writing by summer are welcome to apply. Three workshops are currently planned:

June 1-5, 2015 from 9am-4pm (CNS, Engineering, SPHHS, Nursing)

June 15-19 from 9am-4pm (SBS, Education, HFA, ISOM)

August 3-7 from 9am-4pm (Open to all disciplines) 

This is the second summer in which we have offered these workshops, and the results from last summer – writing blocks overcome, chapters finished, dissertations defended – demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. These workshops offer more than just a quiet place to write; they also provide expert guidance in the process of writing and how to increase productivity. 

Please urge your advisees to apply by April 17. They can find the application materials and further information here: http://www.tinyurl.com/summerdissretreats.

There is, of course, no charge to participants, and the Graduate School provides childcare scholarships of up to $150 to participants who need them.

Anna Howell speaks at the Semantics Workshop

UMass visitor from Tübingen, Anna Howell, will be presenting at the Semantics Workshop this Thursday, April 9, at 1PM in N451.

Nick LaCara speaks in the syntax workshop

The syntax workshop meets on Thursdays at 10AM in ILC N451. This Thursday, April 2, Nick will narrowly miss giving an April Fool’s presentation of his paper “Ellipsis is not Spell-Out: What Scandinavia tells us about ellipsis and phrases.” 

Abstract

This paper investigates two contemporary theories of ellipsis licensing from the perspective of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Scandinavian languages exhibit verb movement in main clauses in the form of verb-second order, but contrary to the predictions of Goldberg (2005) they do not show verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis in VPE contexts. I argue that phase-based approaches to ellipsis (Gengel 2007, Holmberg 2001, Rouveret 2012, a.o.) cannot adequately capture this fact. Instead, following Sailor (2014), I argue in favor of Aelbrecht’s (2010) derivational approach to ellipsis, which captures the facts in Scandinavian languages straightforwardly.