UMass at Speech Prosody 2016

Speech Prosody 2016 was hosted by Boston University from Tuesday, May 31 through Friday 3 in Boston. UMass was represented by 

alumna Emily Elfner, who gave the tale “Subject/Object complexity and prosody boundary strength in Irish"

alumnus Jesse Harris, with Sun-Ah Jun and Adam Joyer, who gave the talk “Implicit prosody pulls its weight: Recovery from garden path sentences.”

Mara Breen, with Sarah Weidman and Katherine Haydon, gave the talk “Prosodic speech entrainment in romantic relationships."

Covadonga Sánchez-Alvarado and Meghan E. Armstrong gave the talk “Pitch scaling and the perception of contrastive focus in L1 and L2 Spanish."

Alumna Amy Schafer, with Múria Esteve-Gibert, Cristel Portes, Barbara Hemforth and Mariapaola D’Imperio, gave the paper “Intonation in the processing of contrast meaning in French: An eye-tracking study."

Meghan Armstrong organized a special session on Rising intonation in English and beyond, and gave a talk, with Maria Del Mar Vanrell, at that session entitled “Intonational polar question markers and implicature in American English and Majorcan Catalan.” She also, with Page Piccinini and Amanda Ritchart, gave the poster “Non-Question rises in narratives produced by mothers and daughters."

UMass at Manchester Phonology meeting

The University of Manchester is hosting the the Twenty-Fourth Manchester Phonology Meeting May 26-28th. UMass is represented by 

alumna Nancy Hall who is giving the talk “A phonetic study of closed syllable shortening in Palestinian Arabic."

Coral Hughto who is giving the talk “Typological prediction of an interactive learning model"

Leland Kusmer and Ivy Hauser who are giving the talk “Wrong side reduplication in Koasat"

For more information, go here.

UMass at WAFL 12

Central Connecticut College is hosting the 12th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics this weekend, May 13-15. UMass is represented by:

Deniz Özyildiz, who is giving the poster “*Say what? A Turkish word order restriction explained by prosody."

and

alumnus Satoshi Tomioka, who is giving the invited talk “Purposeful Questions: A New Embedding Strategy."

For more information, go here.

UMass at FASL

Cornell University is hosting the Twenty Fifth annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics on May 13-15. Gaja Jarosz and alumnus Michael Becker are giving plenary talks. Gaja’s is entitled “Sonority sequencing in Polish: Defying the sttimulus?” and Michael’s is entitled “Inconspicuous unfaithfulness in Slovenian.” For more information, go here.

UMass at SULA

UC, Santa Cruz is hosting the ninth meeting of Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas on May 6-8. UMass is represented by:

Alumna Amy Rose Deal, who is giving the talk “Legacy Documentation: What can we learn?"

Seth Cable, who is giving the talk “Negation and negative antonyms in Tlingit."

Alumna Suzi Lima, who is giving the talk “On the interpretation of object denoting nouns in Yudja"

For more information, go here.

UMass at WCCFL

The University of Utah is hosting the 34th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics this weekend. UMass is represented by:

Ethan Poole, who is giving the talk “The locality of dependent Case,"

Alumna Amy Rose Deal, who is giving the talk “Syntactic Egativity as Case discrimination."

Alumna Karen Jesney, who with Brian Hsu, is presenting the paper “Loanword Adaptation in Quebec French: Evidence for Weighted Scalar Constraints"

Call for volunteers to work at Speech Prosody 8

CONFERENCE: Speech Prosody 8

WHEN: May 31 to June 3, 2016

WHERE: Boston University

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/WHO?

Volunteers should be students (any level) who are interested inattending the conference at no cost.

VOLUNTEER JOB DESCRIPTION:

By volunteering for two 4-5 hour shifts, your registration will be waived for the conference (the banquet fee is separate if interested). Volunteer jobs include registering conference goers, overseeing poster sessions, and helping with technical support.

*PLEASE CONTACT JILL THORSON IF INTERESTED AT: J.THORSON@NEU.EDU

UMass at CLS

The Chicago Linguistic Society will host its 52nd annual meeting Thursday April 21 to Saturday, April 23, 2016. UMass will be well represented:

Luis Alonso-Ovalle has a paper "Spanish siquiera in the even landscape"

David Erschler has a paper "Sluicing beyond wh-questions: Exploring and explaining cross- linguistic variation"

Thuy Bui has a paper "Number agreement in languages with two hierarchies"

Jon Ander Mendia has a paper "Conventionalizing at least some determiners"

The full program is here.

UMass at GLOW

The 39th annual meeting of the Generative Linguistics in the Old World is being hosted by the University of Göttingen April 5-8. UMass is represented by:

Sakshi Bhatia, Leland Kusmer and Ekaterina Vostrikova who are presenting the paper “Indirect interaction of person and number"

Ethan Poole who is presenting the paper “The locality of dependent case."

Jeremy Pasquereau who is presenting the paper “Overt movement of comparative quantifiers in European French."

alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, who is presenting the paper “Clausal determiners and long distance AGREE in Italian."

Jon Ander Mendia who is presenting the paper “Conventionalizing at least some determiners."

Stefan Keine, Jon Ander Mendia and Ethan Poole who are presenting the paper “It’s tough to reconstruct"

You can learn more about GLOW here.

UMass at phoNE

NYU is hosting phoNE this Saturday, April 9. UMass is represented by Deniz Ozyildiz and Alexei Nazarov who are giving talks. A complete schedule follows.

Saturday, April 9

11:30-12      Luca Iacaponi (Rutgers): Non-stringent markednessrelations: evidence from Consonant Harmony

12-12:30      Chris Geissler (Yale): Explaining Vowel Harmony in Lhasa Tibetan

12:30-1:30   lunch

1:30-2           Deniz Ozyildiz (UMass)

2-2:30           James Whang (NYU)

2:30-2:50      break

2:50-3:20       Juliet Stanton (MIT): Trigger deletion in Gurindji

3:20-3:50       Gašper Beguš (Harvard) Unnatural phenomena and gradient phonotactics

3:50-4:10       break

4:10-4:40       Shu-hao Shih (Rutgers)

4:40-5:10       Alexei Nazarov (UMass)

5:10-5:30       break

5:30-6            Erin Olsen (MIT)

6                business meeting

The conference takes place on the first floor of the Linguistics Department, which is at 10 Washington Place in Manhattan.

Tracking the Human Mind

Angelika Kratzer writes:

You are all cordially invited to a symposium featuring some of the fellows of the 2015/2016 SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) Summer Institute. The topic of the symposium is: 

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Saturday, April 16, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Integrative Learning Center N400. The symposium will be followed by a reception.

 A detailed program will follow. 

Being one of the most interdisciplinary working groups of the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute, the group on Attitude Ascriptions & Speech Reports, designed two projects that promise to make a positive contribution to the longstanding communication problem between neuroscience and linguistic research. In her dissertation, the neuroscientist in the group, Jorie Koster-Hale, found that epistemic properties of other people’s beliefs are represented via response patterns of neural populations in canonical belief ascription regions in the brain (so-called ‘Theory of Mind’ regions). These properties relate to the kind of evidence that ground a belief: whether it was good evidence or not, or whether it was visual or auditory evidence. Those kinds of properties do not only play a major role in philosophical discussions of knowledge ascriptions, they are also grammaticalized in verbal inflectional paradigms in many lesser-known languages (so-called “evidentials”). In addition, they trigger a significant dichotomy in the class of attitude verbs across languages: verbs in the believe family (believe that, suspect that, conjecture that) can be used to report false beliefs, while verbs in the know family (know that, discover that, reveal that, hear that, see that) cannot - those ‘factive’ verbs can only describe attitudes that are properly connected to reality. The SIAS Attitude Ascription and Speech Report group recognized those fascinating connections and found a common language to construct  joint projects that will bring together their collective expertise in neuroscience, cognitive development, language acquisition, epistemology, theoretical linguistics and semantic typology under headings like ‘factivity/veridicality’ and ‘knowledge first’.  Projects of this kind could become models for collaboration between researchers in the sciences and the humanities.

More info about the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sias/index.htm

UMass at PLC 40

The University of Pennsylvania hosted the 40th meeting of the Penn Linguistics Conference this weekend. UMass was represented by:

Alumna Gillian Gallagher, who gave the invited talk “Categorical Phonotactics and Language Universals"

Alumnus Martin Walkow, who gave the poster “Syntactic Parallels between Verbal and Nominal phi-Morphology in (Classical) Arabic."

Alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier who gave the talk “Weigh(t)ing the Evidence: Avoidance and Constraint Interaction in Phonological Development."

and 

Brian Dillon, who gave the Keynote Address: “Grammatical Illusions in sentence processing: At the interface of performance and competence."

You can learn more here.

ACAL 47

The 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics is being hosted by the University of California, Berkeley on March 23-26. UMass is represented by:

Rodica Ivan and Deniz Ozyildiz who are giving the paper “The Somali microscope: pronouns, determiners and possession.” (Their abstract is here,)

William Bennett, Kristine Yu and alumnus Wendell Kimper with Christopher Green who are giving the paper “Acoustic correlates of harmonic classes in Somali."

Alumna Rose-Marie Déchaine, who is giving the paper “Shona root classes: implications for the lexicon and beyond,” and, with Herman Keupdjio, “Compound pronouns in Bamileke Medumba"

Lisa Selkirk who is giving the paper “Edge-sensitivity in Bantu sentence topology: Luganda, Xitsonga, Bemba"

Leland Kusmer who is giving the paper “Prosody and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Tshivenda"

Alumna Meredith Landman who is giving the paper “Quantification in Kipsigis"

Alumnus Ken Safir gives the paper “Actual clauses in Lubukusu and what they mean for a symmetric theory of clausal complementation."

You can learn more about the conference here.

SALT 26 program announced

The University of Texas at Austin, who is hosting the Twenty-Sixth meeting of Semantics and Linguistics Theory in early May, has just released the program and UMass is well-represented:

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Jérémy Zehr, Cory Bill, Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli will present the paper “Presupposition projection from the scope of `none’: universal, existential, or both?"

Alumnus Chris Davis who, with Eric McCready, will present the paper “Expressives and Alternatives"

Alumnus Luis Alonso-Ovalle is presenting the paper “Are All Concessive Scalar Particles the Same? Probing into Spanish “Siquiera."

Jon Ander Mendia will present the paper “Reasoning with Partial Orders."

Alumna Suzi Lima will present the paper “On object denoting nouns: defining atoms"

Alumnus Kyle Rawlins, with Aaron Steven White, will present the paper “A computational model of S-selection” and, with Justin Bledin, the paper “Epistemic resistance moves."

For more information, go here.

EvoLang 2016

For the first time in 12 years the Evolution of Language (EvoLang) conference is taking place in the United States. There is still time to register, so don’t let this unique opportunity pass you by. EvoLang 2016 is organized by the University of Southern Mississippi and will take place March 21st-24th in New Orleans, LA at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Tulane University campus. A wide variety of disciplines
will be represented, including: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, primatology, biology, animal behavior, and computer science. The conference opens with a variety of workshops and there is an opening night reception at Mardi Gras World with food and an open bar that is included in your registration. Some notable attendees include Simon Kirby, Tecumseh Fitch, and Terrence Deacon, as well as our plenary speakers. If you are interested in attending please visit our website http://www.usm.edu/gulfcoast/evolang-2016 to register and see the schedule of speakers. Make sure you sign up for the banquet at the Audubon Tea Room on Thursday night. There will be live music and amazing food. Registration is closing soon, so make sure to register ASAP.

UMass hosts FASAL 6 this weekend

The Sixth meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages will meet March 12-13 at UMass. The talks are all held in ILC N400 and there is no registration fee. Everyone is welcome.

UMass is represented by:

Sakshi Bhatia and Ethan Poole who are giving the talk “Deriving subject and anti-subject orientation"

Alumna Amalia Gnanadesikan who will be presenting the poster “Coda-Onset Asymmetries in Dhivehi"

and

UMass visitor Konstantin Sachs who will be presenting the paper “A Movement Approach for Multi-Head Correlatives — Evidence from NPIs and Islands”

For more information, go here.

NEST at UMass

UMass hosted the annual meeting of New England Sequencing and Timing yesterday, March 5. UMass was represented by the paper “Lexical knowledge is available, but not always used, very early,” by Amanda Rysling, John Kingston, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen, Jeffrey Starns and Anthony Yacovone. You can find a full schedule of events here.

DEAFinitions at Hampshire

Hampshire College is hosting a Dear Studies Conference March 25-26. All talks are at Franklin Patterson Hall on the Hampshire College campus. Registration is obligatory, but appears to be free. You can learn more here.

UMass at LabPhon 15

Two submissions from UMass Linguistics to Laboratory Phonology 15, to be held at Cornell University, 13-16 July 2016, have been accepted for presentation as posters:

Kevin Mullin: Phonotactically-mediated compensation for coarticulation

Amanda Rysling, John Kingston, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen and Jeffrey Starns: Lexical knowledge is available, but not always used, very early

Lisa Sanders, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater, Robert Staubs and Benjamin Zobel: ERP evidence for the ecological validity of artificial language learning

29th CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics

The University of Florida Gainesville is hosting the Twenty Ninth meeting of the CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics March 3-5. UMass is represented by:

Lap-Ching Keung and Adrian Staub who are presenting the paper “Closest conjunct agreement in English: A comparison with number attraction."

Alumna Katy Carlson, with Benjamin Lee, Sarah Nelson and Blake Clark, is presenting the poster “Comparative ellipsis has an object bias, though subjects are more frequent."

Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Computation of Agreement is Verb-Centric Regardless of Word Order."

Alumni Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson are presenting the poster “Correlate not optional: PP sprouting in ‘much less’ ellipsis."

Alumnus Greg Carlson, with Thais M. M. de Sa, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima and Micheal Tanenhause present the poster “Experimental evidence that “weak definite” noun phrases are not interpreted as generics"

Jérémy Pasquereau and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Grammaticality illusions are conditioned by lexical item-specific grammatical properties."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Sonia Michniewicz and Jessica Rett present the poster “Incremental interpretation in cases of individual/degree polysemy"

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Alyssa Ibarra, present the poster “Informational focus in Spanish pronoun resolution: answering the QUD"

Brian Dillon, with Akira Omaki and Zoe Ovans, present the poster “Intrusive reflexive binding inside a fronted wh-predicate."

Brian Dillon, Nicolleta Biondo and Francesco Vespignani present the poster “Structural Constraints strongly determine the attachment of termporal adverbs."

Adrian Staub, with Francesca Foppolo, Carlo Cecchetto, Caterina Donati and Vincenzo Moscati present the poster “Minding the gap: The parser avoids relative clause analyses whenever it can."

Alumnus Paul de Lacy, with Karin Stromswold and Gwendolyn Rehrig present the poster “Passive sentences can be predicted by adults."

Shayne Sloggett and Brian Dillon present the poster “Person blocking effects in the processing of English reflexives."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Kelly-Ann Blake and Frederick Gietz present the poster “Prediction and inhibition of syntactic structure: Evidence from either (of the)… or."

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Yahang Xu, presents the poster “Reflexive Retrieval in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the local search hypothesis."

Alumnus Michael Terry and alumna Masako Hirotani, with Erik Thomas and Sandra Jackson present the poster “The processing of third person singular -s by African American English speaking second graders: an auditory ERP study."

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Kyeong-min Kim and Chung-hye Han, present the poster “The syntax of null objects: evidence from inter-speaker variation."

For more information, go here.