Cable at Harvard

Seth Cable is giving a colloquium talk at Harvard University on Friday, April 20. The title of his talk is "Beyond the Past, Present and Future: Towards a Semantics of 'Graded Tense' in Gikuyu."

Last Call for papers for Workshop on Information, Discourse Structure and Levels of Meaning: tomorrow!

Call for papers for the workshop on Information, Discourse Structure
and Levels of Meaning (IDL 12)
25-26 October 2012  in Barcelona

More info: http://blogs.uab.cat/idl12/
Deadline for abstracts submissions: 16-Apr-2012

Information and discourse structure, and the analysis of different levels of meaning (conventional and conversational implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been two of the most fruitful areas of research in the semantics-pragmatics interface in the last decade. This workshop aims to study the interactions between these two areas. Thus, the questions that this workshop will address go in two
directions.

1. How does information and discourse structure affect the different
levels of meaning? Can we obtain a better understanding of, for
instance, conversational implicatures or presuppositions, once the
topic-focus structure is taken into account?

2. How do the dimensions of meaning affect the information structure
of discourse? Can we obtain a better understanding of concepts such as
topic, focus, contrastive topic, background or QUD, once the
properties of the different levels of meaning are taken into account?

Invited speakers:
Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
Bart Geurts (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Craige Roberts (Ohio State University)
Gregory Ward (Northwestern University)

We invite contributions for 30′ oral presentations.
Abstracts should conform to the following guidelines:

-Abstracts must be submitted electronically via Easychair:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=idl12
-Abstracts should be anonymous.
-Abstracts should not exceed two pages, including examples and references.
-Submissions are restricted to one single-authored or one co-authored
abstract at most.
-The conference language is English: abstracts and talks will be in English.
-Page format: A4, 2.5 cm margins on all sides, at least 12 pt Times
New Roman font, single line spacing.
-File format: .pdf
-File name: surname.pdf

Call for papers: Texas Linguistics Conference

13th Texas Linguistics Society (TLS) Conference
June 23-24, 2012
University of Texas at Austin

TLS is a graduate-student run conference in linguistics organized by the Texas Linguistics Society and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. This year's TLS is co-located with the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information and associated workshops and symposia.

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~tls/

TLS 13 will be structured around two para-sessions: (1) the semantics and pragmatics of questions and question-based models of discourse, and (2) signed languages and meaning. While we encourage submissions related to these themes, we are also interested in submissions on topics of general linguistic interest. Papers on language related topics from disciplines including anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy of language, and psychology will also be considered.

--- Keynote Speakers ---

Nicholas Asher (IRIT, CNRS/Université Paul Sabatier)
Erin Wilkinson (University of Manitoba)

--- Invited Talks ---

Kathryn Davidson (University of Connecticut)
Jeroen Groenendijk (University of Amsterdam)
Katrin Erk (University of Texas at Austin)
Richard Meier (University of Texas at Austin)
Josep Quer (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Craige Roberts (The Ohio State University)

--- Submission Information ---

One page abstracts (plus references) should be submitted in PDF or DOC format in 11-12 point font through EasyChair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tls13

Authors whose abstracts are accepted are encouraged to submit a short paper (10-20 pages). These will be collected into an edited volume for publication.

--- Important Dates ---

* Abstract Submission Deadline: May 5, 2012
* Notification of Acceptance: May 12, 2012
* Pre-proceedings Paper Submission Deadline: June 10, 2012
* Final Draft Submission Deadline: August 31, 2012

Luiz Amaral speaks in the LARC/Acquisition Lab

Tomorrow, April 9, at 5:20 PM in the Partee Room (301 South College), Luiz Amaral will give a talk entitled "Experimental ideas to test recursion and verb morphology in Wapichana," at the LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting.

All are welcome!

Syntax Guru, Hamida Demirdache, takes up residence

Hamida Demirdache, director of the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nante and professor of linguistics at University of Nantes, will be taking up her guru duties on Monday, April 9th, until Thursday, April 26th. Professor Demirdache has done extensive work on resumptive pronouns and, in recent years, has worked on the syntax and semantics of questions and on the first language acquisition of constituent questions. She is also known for her work on tense, and its interaction with modals and aspect.

You can find her hanging out in the guru office (aka Barbara Partee's office), on the third floor of South College. If you'd like to make an appointment with her, she can be emailed at hamida.demirdache@univ-nantes.fr

Hamida is wonderful to talk to. Take advantage of her guruness early and often!

Yangsook Park speaks at PsychoSyntax meeting on Friday

Brian Dillon writes:

The PsychoSyntax meetings ride again for a final time this semester on 4/13. Yangsook will be talking to us about "Embedded Topic in Korean". The meeting time is the usual time / place: 10am in the Partee room.

See you there!

Alice Harris speaks at Undergraduate Ling Club

Jeremy Cahill writes:

Prof. Alice Harris will be speaking on Georgian on April 11. All undergrads are invited and pizza will be provided.

Alice Harris (UMass Amherst)
"Georgian Language Case-Marking Systems"
Wednesday, April 11 at 5:15 PM
301 South College (across from DuBois Library)

RSVP, please: jccahill@student.umass.edu

Hamida Demirdache speaks at department colloq

The syntax guru, Hamida Demirdache, will be speaking at the department colloquium this Friday, April 13, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37.

The title of her talk is "Crossover and reconstruction resumptive puzzles. Wholesale VERY late merger."

Final Call for Papers: ESSLLI 2012

Final Call for Papers
ESSLLI 2012 STUDENT SESSION

Held during
The 24th European Summer School
in Logic, Language and Information

Opole, Poland, August 6-17, 2012

EXTENDED DEADLINE: APRIL 30, 2012
http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/

ABOUT:

The Student Session of the 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Opole, Poland on August 6-17, 2012. We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic & Computation. 

Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and will appear in the student session proceedings. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

ESSLLI 2012 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. Consult the main ESSLLI website (link below) for further information.

SPRINGER PRIZES FOR BEST PAPER AND BEST POSTER

In 2012, Springer has again continued its generous support for the Student Session by offering € 1000 in prizes. These include a a € 500 for Best Paper and € 500 for Best Poster. The prizes are awarded best on the reviews of the submission as well as the oral presentation.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:

Authors must be students, i.e., may not have received the Ph.D. degree before August 2012. All submissions must be in PDF format and be submitted to the conference EasyChair website. Submissions may be singly or jointly authored. No one may submit more than one singly and one jointly authored paper.

There are two types of papers. Long papers of up to 8 pages will be considered for both oral presentation and the poster session. Short papers of up to 4 pages will be considered as submissions for the poster session.
We strive for posters getting the longest possible exposure during ESSLLI 2012.

Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information ready for blind peer review, and must be must be received by April 30, 2012.

More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website:http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/
Links to previous years' proceedings are also available there.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission of papers: April 30
Notification deadline: June 10 (in time to make early registration for ESSLLI with reduced fee)
Submission of camera-ready papers: July 1
Conference dates: August 6-17

PROCEEDINGS
All accepted papers will be available in online proceedings.
A Springer volume in the LNCS series with the best papers of 2008-2009 have been published, and a similar volume for 2010-2011 is in preparation. We aspire to a forthcoming volume for 2012-2013.

FURTHER INFORMATION:
Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to esslli2012stus@loriweb.org.

For general inquiries about ESSLLI 2012, please consult the main ESSLLI 2012 page,http://esslli2012.pl/.

Call for papers: Mass/Count

First call for papers
International Multidisciplinary Colloquium:
Mass/Count in Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognitive Science

December 20-21, 2012
ENS-Paris, France

The aim of this colloquium is to provide a platform of exchange between linguists, philosophers and psychologists, working the different aspects of the mass/count distinction. Such a resolutely interdisciplinary approach is indeed necessary to fully apprehend the new questions that are presently arising in connection to the mass/count distinction. This multidisciplinary conference aspires to move this scientific debate forward, and contribute to the evolution of current methodology.

A more detailed description of the scientific scope of this colloquium is available at: http://mass-count.sciencesconf.org/

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

-       Alternative approaches to standard extensional mereology
-      Analysis of the (quasi-)classifier role on nouns in constructions like “the town of Paris”
-      The mass/count distinction in connection to non-sortal nouns like “the kind” of “the type”, etc.
-       Plurality and individuation of reference
-       Syntactic mapping
-       Experimental psychology and assessment of theoretical analyses

SUBMISSION DETAILS

We invite submissions of anonymous two-page abstracts including references, for a 30-minute talk.

All submissions must be made exclusively electronically via the website:
http://mass-count.sciencesconf.org/
The heading “Submission” appears only after having registered on the SciencesConf website.
Important: for authors affiliated to a French institution, during the submission procedure, under the heading “Affiliation”, the authors will necessarily have to provide the EPST code of their laboratory (e.g. for the CNRS and the university, it will be of the form UMRxxxx, EAxxxx, etc.).

INVITED SPEAKERS:
• David Barner (UCSD)
• Almerindo Ojeda (UCDavis)
• Beyon-Uk Yi (Toronto University)
• Anne Zribi-Herts (Paris 8 University)

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submissions: June 29, 2012

Notification: September 3, 2012
Conference: Paris, December 20-21, 2012

Fernanda Mendes at LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting

On Monday, April 2, in the Partee Room (South College 301) Fernanda Mendes will present "Inalienable Possession: Possessor's' Plurality Effects and Determiner Status." The meeting begins at 5:20PM. Everyone is welcome!

Semantics guru, Judith Tonhauser, speaks at SRG

Judith Tonhauser will be speaking at the Semantics Reading Group on Thursday, April 5. She will present research concerning the temporal interpretation of noun phrases. Hannah hosts the reading group at Barbara and Volodja's place. For more information, contact Anisa Schardl.

ECO 5 at UMass on Saturday, April 7

Anisa Schardl writes:

ECO5 is coming to UMass!

UMass is delighted to host ECO5, a graduate student workshop on
syntax.  All are welcome to attend!  Here are the essential details:

Time: Saturday, April 7th, 10:00am -- 5:00pm
Location: Herter Hall, room 301 (also known as the French Lounge)
Afterparty: 7:00pm dinner party at the home of the incomparable Rajesh Bhatt

If you attend ECO5, you will probably hear talks from the following people:
Lauren Eby (Harvard)
Yuki Ito (Maryland)
Jungmin Kang (UConn)
Nick LaCara (UMass)
Carolina Peterson (Maryland)
Jose Riqueros Morante (UConn)
Peter Smith (UConn)
Edwin Tsai (Harvard)
Andrew Weir (UMass)
...and possibly others!

Getting there is easy!  Herter Hall may be found on the following map:
http://goo.gl/DArui
There are metered parking spots along Presidents Dr. and there are
parking lots along Swift Way (Mass Ave.)  Since it is the weekend, you
don't need to pay the meters or have the correct parking permits.  If
you are coming by PVTA bus, the UMass/Haigis Mall stop is right in
front of Herter.

We'll start with a breakfast of bagels and coffee at 10, with talks
starting at 10:30.  At noon, we'll have a pizza lunch courtesy of
UMass and then resume talks during the afternoon.  Then on to
Northampton for the afterparty!

The afterparty will feature dinner, home-cooked by grad students!  In
the tradition of UMass colloq dinners, we hope that guests will bring
drinks.  If you feel so inclined, bring a beverage to share.

We are excited to be hosting ECO5 and we hope to see you there!

For more information about the program, see: http://people.umass.edu/aschardl/eco5.html

2nd Annual ICESL Workshop on Friday, April 6

The second annual workshop sponsored by the Institute for Computational and Experimental Study of Language will take place this Friday, April 6. The speakers include Luiz Amaral (Languages, Literature and Cultures), Jacquie Kurland (Communication Disorders) and David Smith (Computer Science). For more information, see

/http://www.umass.edu/linguist/icesl/events/2nd-annual-icesl-workshop-april-6th/

Andrew McKenzie goes to Kansas

Andrew McKenzie has accepted a tenure track position in the Linguistics Department at the University of Kansas. He will start his duties there in the Fall 2012.

Congratulations Andrew!

UMass at CUNY

The 25th Annual meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing was held March 14 through 16 at the CUNY Graduate Center. UMass showed up in force.

Lyn Frazier, an invited speaker, delivered a paper, entitled "Two Interpretive Systems for Natural Language," an abstract of which follows.

The desiderata for a theory of language interpretation include at least the following: explaining how humans compute the meaning of novel sentences, including implausible ones; characterizing the incrementality of interpretation; accounting for how interpretation processes relate to conscious awareness; explaining the existence and nature of widespread context effects, characterizing the complexity profile of interpretation (e.g., why DE contexts are more complex than non-DE contexts) and accounting for semantic illusions. The field of psycholinguistics is making successful forays into various aspects of interpretation, e.g., semantic ‘coercion,’ compositionality, scalar meanings, focus and the role of alternatives, implicatures, presupposition, counterfactual contexts, and the rapid impact of various types of stereotypical knowledge, to give only a few examples. I will argue that we also need to recognize the existence of two distinct systems for pairing form and meaning. One is the familiar type-based system that operates whether a sentence has an interpretation that describes a plausible real world situation or an implausible one. The other is token-based and involves the interpretation of repaired utterances, producing plausible meanings only; it depends on details of particular utterances as well as an implicit knowledge of the performance systems. Understanding the ‘performance pairing’ of form and meaning removes the need for the grammar to explain certain puzzling linguistic facts, and it helps to explain certain semantic illusions.

Alumnus Florian Schwarz presented, with Sonja Tiemann, "Presuppositions and projection in processing."

The poster session had many presentations by current and former UMass denizens. Posters from present members of the UMass linguistics community were:

"Ungrammatical interpretations of reflexive anaphors: Online or offline interfence? -- Brian Dillon

"PRO beats gap, revisited: Eyetracking evidence" -- Dan Petty, Mara Breen and Adrian Staub

"Eye-tracking Evidence for Implicit Prosodic Phrasing of Unambiguous Sentence" -- Mara Breen, Alexander Pollatsek and Adrian Staub

"Quantity judgments in Yudja (Tupi)" -- Suzi Lima

"Memory for words in sentences: The influence of word frequency and fixation time" -- Angela M. Pazzaglia, Adrian Staub, Caren Rotello and William Shattuck

"Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment" -- Mara Breen and Chuck Clifton

"Syntactic Probability Influences Duration" -- Claire Moore-Cantwell

And from the large diaspora of UMass alumni were the following:

"On the processing of epistemic modals" -- Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz and John Trueswell

"Neurolinguistic evidence for independent contributions of verb-specific and event-related knowledge to predictive processing" -- Michael Walsh Dickey and Tessa Warren

"Question structure and ellipsis" -- Christina Tim, Timothy Dozat and Jeff Runner

"Domain Restriction and Discourse Structure: Evidence from Processing" -- Florian Schwarz

"Quantifier Scope Ambiguity and the Timing of Algorithmic Processing" -- Veena Dwivedi

"Brain responses to negation: an fMRI study with Japanese negative polarity items" -- Masako Hirotani, Angela Friederici, Hiroki Tanabe, Koji Shimada, Mika Yamazaki-Murase and Norihiro Sadato

"The Collective Bias? Using eye movements to examine collective vs. distributive interpretations of plural sets" -- Christine Boylan, Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz and John Trueswell

Notable quote from the conference:

"Which conference is Janet's city really, really great to hold in? -- Chuck Clifton

Seth Cable's book reviewed in Language

An excellent, if short, review of Seth Cable's book, "The Grammar of Q," by Sandy Chung has appeared in the latest issue of Language.  In it, Professor Chung reports "There is much to admire in the theoretical reach and empirical depth of this book. Cable shows an impressive command of the literature on WH-movement, pied-piping, and the syntax and semantics of questions. He is willing to engage very broad theoretical issues (e.g. the nature of WH-effects in English multiple WH-questions). The claim that the syntax of constituent questions is transparently reflected by Tlingit, not English, is thought provoking. Overall, the book does indeed, as Cable hoped, 'offer yet another object lesson in the importance of endangered and understudied languages in the development of linguistic theory.'

Pearson and Roeper at the AAAL

WHISC has learned that Barbara Pearson and Tom Roeper presented their paper "Two Children found Four Caterpillars: Distributively and/or Collectively?" at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference which met in Boston last weekend.

For information, go to:

http://aaal.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=64

CGSW program out

The 27th annual Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, which will take place May 31 to June 1 at Yale, has just published its program. In addition to former syntax gurus Caroline Heycock and Klaus Abels, who will be presenting "Hierarchy and order in verb clusters," our own Angelika Kratzer is among the invited speakers.

For more information, go to: http://whitney.ling.yale.edu/cgsw27/CGSW_27/Home.html

Bhatt and Keine at FASAL

The second meeting of "Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages" (FASAL), a conference that started at UMass, met at MIT March 17-18. Rajesh Bhatt was one of the invited speakers, and he delivered a paper entitled "Complex Predicates, Agreement, and Case Licensing. Stefan Keine was also on the program, his talk was "Linearity-based reference restrictions in Hindi." A schedule, and more information about the conference, can be found at http://fasal.mit.edu/.

Rajesh and Stefan dominate the photos posted from the conference, no doubt because of their movie-star photogenicness. Here are two representative examples.