Frana gets the De Vincenzi prize

Ilaria Frana has received the Marica De Vincenzi prize for best paper by an Italian researcher selected for IGG (Incontro Grammatica Generativa). The paper was “Mica as a Common Ground Management operator” (collaborative work with Kyle Rawlins). The prize is offered by “Fondazione Marica De Vincenzi Onlus”. WHISC as acquired the celebratory group picture from the event (from left to right: Nino Grillo, Francesca Foppolo, me and Carlo Gerace.)

Conner and Park get Dissertation Fellowships

Congratulations to Yang-Sook Park and Tracy Conner who have each been awarded a Summer 2016 Dissertation Fellowship. Congratulations!

AAUW dissertation fellowships

The American Association of University Women has dissertation fellowships designed to help pay for living expenses in the year that a woman is writing her dissertation. The fellowships are available to citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. They are due on November 15, 2015. You can learn more here.

Christopher Baron gets Baggett

Graduating linguistic major Christopher Baron has been awarded the highly prestigious Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland. Baggett Fellowships are full-time post baccalaureate research positions and many illustrious linguists have started their careers as Baggett Fellows. For more about the Baggett programs, go here, and for past fellows, research assistants and summer scholars, go here.

Congratulations Christopher!

XPrag.de fellowships

XPrag.de offers four fellowships to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each starting between October 2015 and April 2016.

Application deadline: June 20th, 2015.

 

In the  priority program SPP 1727 "New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental evidence (XPrag.de)" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience are collaborating in 16 individual scientific projects at eight different German institutions.

 

Experimental Pragmatics is a new interdisciplinary field of research which has emerged within the last decade. It combines research in Gricean pragmatics with the formal models of modern grammar and the powerful experimental methods of psychology and neuroscience. As a result, Experimental Pragmatics can theoretically state and then empirically test much more precise hypotheses than research in pragmatics previously could. Experimental Pragmatics is thereby expected to lead to a new theory of mechanisms involved in language understanding. Four starting points make substantial progress in pragmatics possible, namely Pragmatic Theory, Formal Models, Embodied Cognition and Experimental Methods.

 

Experimental Pragmatics fruitfully connects the four starting points, and it already has shown its potential to go beyond these starting points to establish new insights in all four areas. 

 

XPrag.de offers a Start-up Funding program to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each. Each funded fellow will join an individual XPrag.de project to prepare her/his own research proposal for the second funding period of XPrag.de (May 2017 - April 2020), which usually is an application for the fellow's own funding. The research proposal is supposed to be submitted to the DFG by end of October 2016.

 

The applicant must choose a suitable post doctoral supervisor for the time of the fellowship in advance.  Any PI of a current XPrag.de project in Germany is eligible to act as supervisor. Beyond the support by the supervisor on a regular basis successful candidates will be offered additional support in the form of research training opportunities, funds for pilot experiments, workspace, etc.  Fellows can also participate in the bottom-up programs of XPrag.de such as the workshop program as well as the mentoring program and the emergency daycare program. Fellows will receive a grant of 1400 € per month. 

 

For more information about XPrag.de, an overview of participating projects and contact data of principal investigators visit our website: www.xprag.de.

 

Requirements:

 

Applicants must hold a Ph.D. degree by the start of the fellowship. 

 

Please submit a 2-page (maximum) outline of your project idea and lay out your career planning. Additionally, please provide your CV, sample writings, contact details of two references, and two letters: one letter of commitment of the potential hosting institution in which the host commits to provide adequate workspace.

 

In a second letter the potential supervisor needs to affirm that s/he will act as supervisor and hold at least monthly meetings with the fellow and that s/he will provide access to equipment and funding for necessary pilot experiments. 

All application documents must be submitted as a single pdf to xprag.de@gmail.com. The application deadline is June 20th, 2015 and applicants will be notified by July 15th, 2015.

 

Proposals are evaluated and ranked by the steering committee of XPrag.de with respect to their potential to be accepted by the DFG as XPrag.de project for the 2017-2020 funding period. 

Roeper and Pearson get NSF

An NSF Grant titled “Science Live” Workshop on the Acquisition of Recursion Across Languages” ( $29000) has been awarded to Tom Roeper (in collaboration with Bart Hollebrandse and Barbara Pearson) to work on a museum exhibit and related experimentation on recursion (based on the work of Ana Perez, Terue Nakato, Luiz Amaral, Jon Nelson and Anca Sevcenco). The museums include  the Dutch National Science Museum local Massachusetts museums and then others. The project will engage graduate and undergraduate collaborators as well.

Ivy Hauser is a Bloch Fellow

Our own Ivy Hauser has been selected as the Bloch Fellow by the Linguistic Society of America. The Bloch Fellowship includes tuition, travel, and subsistence money for the recipient to attend the Linguistics Institute this summer at the University of Chicago. The Bloch Fellow is an important position, since she is an ex-officio member of the Executive Committee of the Society with full voting rights and is the Chair of the LSA’s Committee on Student Issues and Concerns. Thus, the Bloch Fellow represents student members in important ways. Ivy will begin in May by attending a meeting of the Executive Committee, and she will serve for two years in this capacity.  For more information see the LSA web site.

Postdoc at Leiden University

Aniko Liptak from Leiden University writes:

For the NWO project ‘Ellipsis licensing beyond syntax’, which will start later this year in Leiden, Lisa (Cheng) and me are looking for a PhD student and a postdoc in the field of syntax & prosody – see the two job advertisements on the Leiden University website, here and here .

Fellowships for the LSA Linguistic Institute

The LSA Institute is being hosted by the University of Chicago this summer, from July 6 to July 31. The LSA provides fellowships to help defray the costs for students who wish to attend the Institute. Here is a description of these fellowships:

Ordinary fellowships provide full tuition for the Institute, and a small number of "named fellowships" provide additional funds. All student members of the LSA (apart from previous fellowship recipients) are eligible to apply.  Non-members may join here.  

To begin the application process, student members may click here (login required) or, if already logged in to the LSA website, click here to access their user profile and then click the large green "Submit Fellowship Application" button.  More information about the Institute and the fellowships is available here. While Institute fellowships are restricted to students, anyone may attend the Institute.

For more information about this year’s LSA Institute, go here.

Plan for a Fulbright

Planning for Fulbright - presentation by the Office of Professional Development

Tuesday, December 2, 4:30 pm, Goodell Hall - Graduate school lobby

UMass graduate students have done very well in Fulbright applications.  Last year all eight who applied won the award.  This panel will assist graduate students contemplating a Fulbright year abroad for research or further study.  Participants include Professor David Mednicoff, a Fulbright scholar and Director of Middle Eastern Studies; Kathryn Julian, a PhD candidate in History and Fulbright student in Germany last year; and John Dickson, advisor in the Office of National Scholarship Advisement.  While applications are due in September of each year, understanding the criteria and timetable for Fulbright will assist those interested in applying.  Light refreshments will be served.

Register here: Fulbright for Grads

Chateaubriand Fellowship - Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)

HSS Chateaubriand is a fellowship program offered by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US.

It targets outstanding Ph.D. students from American universities who seek to engage in research in France, in any discipline of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

HSS Chateaubriand fellows are selected through a merit-based competition, through a binational collaborative process involving expert evaluators from both countries.

HSS Chateaubriand grantees are applicants who answer the program’s criteria of excellence and whose sojourn in France will support the program’s philosophy. The HSS Chateaubriand fellowship program’s purpose is to foster bilateral cooperation at Ph.D. and research level, and to build and strengthen bridges between our two nations.

All application materials are due on January 20th 2015 for the following academic year - 2015/2016.

For more information, go here: http://humanities.chateaubriand-fellowship.org/

Writing Effective Grant Proposals: Part 1

On Friday, October 31, the Office of Professional Development is giving the first of a two-part workshop on writing effect grant proposals. This two-hour workshop starts at 10AM in 917 Campus Center. The second session takes place on November 7, and participants are expected to attend both sessions. Pre-registration is required.

For more information, and for the other events that the Office of Professional Development has this week, go here.

EAPSI Fellowship Program

The National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) Fellowship Program provides U.S. graduate students in science and engineering with an opportunity to spend 8 weeks (10 weeks for Japan) during the summer conducting research at one of the seven host locations in East Asia and Pacific: Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and Taiwan. The program is a collaboration between NSF and counterpart agencies in each host location.

EAPSI is open to graduate students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents and are enrolled in a research-oriented Masters or Ph.D. program in science or engineering. Applicants must propose a research project in a field of science, engineering or STEM education supported by NSF, including Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences (Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Materials Science); Biological Sciences; Geosciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Education (STEM); and Multidisciplinary Research in these fields. Applicants identify and contact host researchers on their own, prior to submitting their EAPSI proposal; lists of prospective host institutions are available at the end of each Handbook. 

NSF provides EAPSI Fellows with a $5,000 stipend and roundtrip airplane ticket to the host location. Our foreign counterparts provide in-country living expenses and accommodations (arrangements vary by host location). Please see www.nsf.gov/eapsi for additional information for the Program Solicitation (NSF 13-593); host location-specific Handbooks; How to Apply Guide; and Helpful Tips Applicants.

In 2015, approximately 215 EAPSI Fellows travel to seven locations in the East Asia and Pacific:

Australia – 30

China – 40

Japan – 65

Korea – 25

New Zealand – 15

Singapore – 15

Taiwan - 25

The application submission deadline for the Summer 2015 is November 13, 2014.  

Workshop on Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships this Thursday

The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for students in the humanities and social sciences offers up to $38,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.  The Graduate School Office of Professional Development is hosting a panel session and optional proposal writing workshop to help students take control of the application process and develop a competitive application.
 
Panelists include:

·        Dr. Nick Bromell, Professor of English, who has served on fellowship faculty review panels
·        Dr. Emiliano Ricciardi, Assistant Professor in Music History and recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
·        Heidi Bauer-Clapp, Coordinator of Grants and Fellowships, Office of Professional Development
·        Kathleen Baldwin, Coordinator of Graduate Writing, Office of Professional Development
·        Lauren Goodman, Graduate Writing Consultant, Office of Professional Development
 
The optional workshop (1:30-2:30 pm) will focus on developing the proposal portion of the application. Participants will have the opportunity to receive peer feedback on a proposal draft, which could include anything from the full five-page proposal to a list of bullet-points to address in the proposal. To participate in the writing workshop, bring a hard-copy of the proposal draft on Sept. 11th.
 
Fellowship applications are due October 22nd.  For more information see their website:

https://www.acls.org/programs/dcf/
 
Sessions later this month will target fellowships from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Ford Foundation – stay tuned!

Dissertation Research Grants

The Graduate School is now accepting Spring 2014 proposals for the Dissertation Research Grant program for doctoral students who have achieved candidacy. The program offers up to a maximum of $1,000 fordissertation research related expenses. Grants are awarded once per semester through a competitive proposal process. The submission deadline for fall semester is Tuesday, 14th October 2014. A subcommittee of the Graduate Council will review proposals and determine awards. Detailed information on the program including allowed and prohibited expenses, submission and eligibility requirements and process can be found here.

Commonwealth College grants

Grants of up to $1,000 are available to junior and senior Commonwealth Honors College students, with priority given to seniors working on honors thesis research.  Applicants must have a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher and must submit a six-page proposal outlining their project accompanied by an endorsement from their faculty sponsor. Every recipient is asked to present his or her work at the statewide Undergraduate Research Conference in spring
2015. These grants of up to $1,000 are for direct costs only and do not provide a stipend or wage.

For application guidelines and a link to the online application system
(FGS), please go to the Commonwealth Honors College website or paste the
direct link into your browser:

https://www.honors.umass.edu/scholarship/honors-research-grants

Students must work with their faculty sponsor on their proposal and submit the completed proposal online.  Proposals may not be revised online, therefore, students and their faculty sponsors must communicate regarding revisions before the student submits the proposal.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 7, 2014.

CEU fellowship applications

The CEU Institute for Advanced Study (CEU IAS) is pleased to invite applications for its fellowships for the academic year 2015/2016. CEU IAS fellows spend 6-10 months in Budapest and pursue their own research in the lively intellectual community of the other fellows, the university and the city of Budapest. CEU IAS Fellowships are highly competitive and will be awarded on the basis of scholarly excellence.

Calls are open for the fellowships listed below. You may apply for all or any of the fellowships at the same time but the application process and the requirements are not the same.

SENIOR AND JUNIOR CORE FELLOWSHIPS- about 15 awarded each year

HUMANITIES INITIATIVE JUNIOR FELLOWSHIPS- 2 awarded each year

THYSSEN@CEU IAS FELLOWSHIPS - 2 awarded each year

Application deadline for all three is October 19, 2014.

More information can be found here.

McCarthy/Pater NSF

Joe Pater writes:

John McCarthy and I are very pleased to be able to announce that the NSF has awarded a grant of $305,613 to support a project entitled “Computing constraint-based derivations: Phonological opacity and hidden structure learning”, starting September 1, 2014, and lasting for 3 years. John and I will direct the grant, and the other senior personnel will be Robert Staubs (UMass) and Mark Johnson (Macquarie). The grant will support a graduate student RA, and also includes a Research Experience for Undergraduates component that will involve two undergraduates every semester. This coming semester, Presley Pizzo will be an RA on the grant, and Amanda Doucette and Stephanie Rich will  participate in the REU program. All are welcome to participate in grant activities, including our weekly meetings which will take place at 10 am Thursdays this semester. We will announce grant meetings on the ling-phonology mailing list (https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-phonology). Students interested in future RA-ships or the REU program are especially encouraged to attend grant meetings, and also to talk with John or me.

The project plans include the creation of a publicly accessible database on instances of phonological opacity, development of accounts of opacity in Harmonic Serialism and comparison with other approaches, implementation of computational tools for working with derivational versions of OT and Harmonic Grammar ("OT-Help 3"), and research on the learning of hidden structure in a Maximum Entropy framework, including learning of derivations (the goals of the project will undoubtedly evolve as we pursue this collaborative work).

NSF Graduate Student Fellowships

Congratulations to Ivy Hauser and Leland Kusmer who have been awarded graduate student fellowships by the National Science Foundation. There were only 10 of these fellowships awarded to students at UMass. For more information about the program and awardees, go here.

Linguistics Outreach Fund

Lisa Selkirk writes:

The Linguistics Outreach Fund (LOF) provides small grants to support research on understudied and/or endangered languages that contributes to a theoretically informed description or analysis of the language, and is carried out under the mentorship of faculty in the Linguistics Department at UMass Amherst. To be eligible for LOF grants, you must be:

(i) a recent or current undergraduate, M.A. or Ph.D. student, either at UMass or elsewhere, who is a native speaker of an understudied language or dialect or member of an understudied language community OR

(ii) a graduate student in the Linguistics Ph.D. program at UMass who intends to carry out original field research on an understudied language or dialect in the community where the language or dialect is spoken.?

If you are interested, you should continue reading the full LOF.

Students and faculty are urged to think about the availability of funding through the Linguistics Outreach Fund in connection with relevant research plans for coming years.

Interested students and faculty who would like to apply in Spring 2014 for funding for a project to be carried out in the next half year or so should contact me. The March 15 deadline for applications mentioned in the document will be extended to April 15 this year, to facilitate planning for an application.