SRG events this week: Andrew on Thursday, Gennaro on Saturday

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG is having a busy week this week!  On Thursday, Andrew will be talking
about modality in English double object constructions, at Rajesh's house,
starting around 6:30pm.  There will be dinner.

Then, on Saturday, Gennaro Chierchia will be visiting us at Barbara's house
at 10am.  Topics of discussion are TBD, but we believe there will be coffee
and bagels.

Food at SRG: We determined last week that we like to have dinner-type food
at SRG.  However, since SRG has no budget, we ask that SRG attendees who
intend to eat please bring a small amount of money to pay back the food
buyers.  BYO dinner is also perfectly acceptable.  Thanks!

Special Lecture in Semantics Seminar on Tuesday

Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Spanish "algunos" and dependent plurality

Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill), Paula Menéndez-Benito (Göttingen)

2:30 p.m., Herter 209

Special invited lecture for LINGUIST 720 Semantics seminar. Everyone is welcome.

Ling Club Interest Meeting: This Thursday

Jeremy Cahill writes:

The first Ling Club meeting is going to be Thursday, 9/29, at 6 in the
linguistics lounge. There'll be pizza.

It won't be particularly long -- we don't have any programming yet,
we're just going to be talking about club ideas, organizational stuff,
and all that. We can talk about better times and sexier spots for
meetings, but only if you show up to this one.

Email me at jccahill@student.umass.edu about pizza preferences and any
topics you want brought up in the meeting. You obviously don't need to
RSVP, but if you do, I'll have a better idea of how much pizza to get
and we won't run out.

To get to the linguistics lounge after hours:

Come in Entrance A (the one on the right if you're looking at South
College from the library) and head upstairs. Turn right at the top of
the stairs. You should already have your animal sacrifice prepared at
this point for safe passage. Take the next set of stairs to the third
floor and go down the hallway. The lounge is at the end, most of the
time.

Some doors might be locked; I'm told they sometimes respond to sweet
nothings whispered into their doorknobs.

If you can't get in, don't know where to go, or find yourself in a
field of poppies instead of the linguistics lounge, my phone number's
857 201 9473. You could also shout really loudly to nobody in
particular. Throwing rocks at windows is discouraged.

LARC/Acquisition Lab Meeting tomorrow!

The next LARC/Acquisition Lab Meeting is Monday Sept 26, in the Partee Room at 5:15.  The presentations are:

"A new approach to preschool language assessment"
Jill deVilliers

"An overview of the LARC-UFRJ-UFRR (Brazil) collaboration in two
projects with native Brazilian languages"
Luiz Amaral


There is a potluck afterwards at Tom Roeper (and Laura Holland's) house
149 High ST Amherst--- bring something if you'd like--but we will
have plenty of food--

All are welcome!

(rides should be available--it is about a 15 minute walk--directions
at the meeting)

Chierchia talks at the department colloq on Friday

On Friday, September 30, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37, Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University) will present:

Title: Some parameters of epistemic and free choice indefinites

Abstract: In this talk I explore a quadrant of the system of polarity sensitive
items, namely the existential one, that includes items like Italian 'uno
qualunque' and 'un qualche', German 'irgendein', Spanish 'algun', Rumanian
'vreun'. The attempt is to identify the generative matrix at the basis of
typological generalizations on the behavior of such items. The concept of
'implicature' and a characterization of the ways in which implicatures may get
'grammaticized' through an alternatives based semantics play a key role in this
attempt.

Join us at Barbara's house (50 Hobart Ln.) for dinner afterwards.

PHLING at University of Maryland

PHLING, a graduate student research group in philosophy and linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, is hosting its first interdisciplinary research symposium, PHLINC (Philosophy & Linguistics Colloquium) on //events//. 

We hope to bring together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. We aim to relate the discussion of events in these fields, bringing into conversation the work in ontology, logic, semantics, and perception. We will also have two invited speakers: Achille Varzi, of Columbia University, and Paul Pietroski, of the University of Maryland.

Submissions are open to graduate student researchers only. 10 students will have 30 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes for round-table discussion. The symposium will take place over the weekend of the 31st of March and the 1st of April, in College Park MD. Each day, we will reserve some time for closing discussion.

We are accepting two varieties of submissions for consideration to participate in the symposium, depending on the author's preferences:

TYPE 1 - Abstract - maximum 1 page of text single-spaced, 12pt font, with 1 additional page for examples, figures, and references.

TYPE 2 - Paper - maximum 4000 words, double-spaced, 12pt font, suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please include references.

All abstracts/paper submissions will be considered by an interdisciplinary audience. Ideally, the composition of speakers will reflect in equal parts contributions from Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. As the goal of the symposium is to bring together researchers with a strong focus on interdisciplinary cognitive science, reviewers will be looking for evidence in abstract/paper submissions that the author(s) are able to communicate effectively to individuals outside of their primary field.

We will be accepting abstract/paper submissions until January 7th, 2012, and final selections will be made by February 4th, 2012. Abstracts/papers should be sent to phling@umd.edu, with "Events - Abstract" or "Events - Paper" as well as your name in the title of the email.

Note that as this is a graduate student symposium, we will make special efforts to help with accommodations in College Park or Washington, D.C., and transportation to the university. Details will be provided closer to the date on our website,http://phling.umd.edu/symposia.html

Richard Schmierer is Ambassador to Oman

Peggy Speas writes:

Oh the places you might go - Belated kudos to alumnus Richard Schmierer, who
we recently learned was appointed US Ambassador to Oman in 2009.  After
receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics at UMass in 1977, Dr. Schmierer embarked
on a career in the foreign service, which has taken him to Germany, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Washington DC and now Oman.  In addition to being a diplomat,
he has taught at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and
is the author of the 2007 book *Iraq:  Policy and Perceptions.*  Next time
someone asks what one can DO with a degree in Linguistics, point them to Dr.
Schmierer's Wikipedia page!

Acquisition Lab/LARC Meeting on Monday

Everyone Welcome!

September 19, 2011

Monday 5: 15

Partee Room

Gustavo Freire [University of Sao Paolo]

"Perception and Causative Verbs and their Acquisition"

UMAFLAB meets this Thursday

Seth Cable writes:

The first full meeting of UMAFLAB (UMass Funny Languages Breakfast)  
will take place *Thursday*, September 22 at 9AM in *Bartlett 11* (note  
day and room change).

At this meeting, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will present some of the  
results of fieldwork this summer, examining modals in Navajo.

As noted above, the day and location of our meetings have changed. In  
order to accommodate everyone's schedule, our meetings will take place  
*Thursday* mornings at 9AM. Unfortunately, this means we won't be able  
to meet in the Partee room, since the McCarthy-Pater grant group meets  
there at that time. However, Brian Dillon has very generously offered  
up his lab meeting room, which is in Bartlett 11.

At today's organizational meeting, we put together the following  
schedule of meetings for the remainder of the term:

Thursday 9/22 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (Navajo Modals)

Thursday 10/6 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Rex Wallace (A puzzle concerning Etruscan)

Thursday 10/20 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Suzi Lima (Projects on Yudja and Kawaiwete)

Thursday 11/3 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Jérémy Pasquereau (Projects on languages of Caucasus)

Thursday 11/17 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Seth Cable (Tlingit Distributive Numerals or Multiple Tenses in Kikuyu)
[note: I'm happy to drop my slot if another student would like to  
present]

Thursday 12/1 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Emiliana Cruz (Projects on Chatino language)

Thursday 12/15:
Possible extra date, if we'd like to do it.

If you'd like to get on the e-mail list for future meetings, please  
just drop me an e-mail letting me know.

Psycho/Syntax Lab meetings

Brian Dillon writes:

This is just a quick note to announce that the Psycho/Syntax lab meetings for the semester have been scheduled, and that anyone who is interested in attending any or all of the meetings is more than welcome to come! Meetings are at 9am in 11 Barlett (space permitting). The schedule for Fall 2011 is:

9/29: Jason Overfelt (Tigrinya wh-in-situ, visual world eye-tracking)

10/13: Meg Grant (Extraction from comparatives)

10/27: Shayne Sloggett (German case attraction)

11/10: Magda Oiry (French wh-in-situ)

12/8: Rajesh Bhatt / Brian Dillon (Hindi agreement, Mechanical Turk for judgment studies)

The list can also be found at the XLUM blog: http://blogs.umass.edu/XLUM. Reminders will be sent to the "linguist-experimental" list, so if you'd like to continue getting more messages like this one, sign up for that list here: http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php.

 

Robots start talking in Australia!

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/16-robots-invent-their-own-language

NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes

Brian Dillon writes:

The NSF's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for US graduate students program (EAPSI; http://www.nsfsi.org) is now accepting applications for their 2012 institute. The grants from this program support graduate students who want to go perform research in East Asia (construed very broadly, it includes Australia and New Zealand), and provides funding, travel and host arrangements, and good beginning experience with grant-writing for the NSF. Compared to other NSF programs there is a pretty high rate of success. I got a grant through this program to go to China for a summer to do research and it was definitely among the most useful things I did to advance my doctoral research. For linguists who want to work on East Asian/Pacific/Australian languages, it's usually fairly straightforward to put together a statement saying why Asia/the Pacific would be a good place to do research. I'd be happy to talk to people who are interested in pursuing one of these about how to put together an application.

The official call is copied below.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION EAST ASIA AND PACIFIC SUMMER INSTITUTES FOR U.S. GRADUATE STUDENTS - 2012 APPLICATION NOW OPEN

The National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students (EAPSI) is a flagship international fellowship program for developing the next generation of globally  engaged U.S. scientists and engineers knowledgeable about the Asian and Pacific regions. The Summer Institutes are hosted by foreign counterparts committed to increasing opportunities for young U.S. researchers to work in research facilities and with host mentors abroad. Fellows are supported to participate in eight-week research experiences at host laboratories in Australia, China, Japan (10 weeks), Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan from June to August. The program provides a $5,000 summer stipend, round-trip airfare to the host location, living expenses abroad, and an introduction to the society, culture, language, and research environment of the host location.

The 2012 application is now open and will close at 5:00 pm proposer’s local time on November 9, 2011. Application instructions are available online at www.nsfsi.org. For further information concerning benefits, eligibility, and tips on applying, applicants are encouraged to visitwww.nsf.gov/eapsi or www.nsfsi.org.

NSF recognizes the importance of enabling U.S. researchers and educators to advance their work through international collaborations and the value of ensuring that future generations of U.S. scientists and engineers gain professional experience beyond this nation's borders early in their careers. The program is intended for U.S. graduate students pursuing studies in fields supported by the National Science Foundation. Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply for the EAPSI. Applicants must be enrolled in a research-oriented master's or PhD program and be U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents by the application deadline date. Students in combined bachelor/master degree programs must have matriculated from the undergraduate degree program by the application deadline date. 

The first Summer Institutes began in Japan in 1990, and to date over 2,400 U.S. graduate students have participated in the program.

Should you have any questions, please contact the EAPSI Help Desk by email at eapsi@nsfsi.orgor by phone at 1-866-501-2922.

Postdoc in Semantics and Pragmatics at University of Amsterdam

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research fellow to work in the project "Indefinites and beyond: Evolutionary pragmatics and typological semantics" at the ILLC-Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam

For information on the project please visit the website at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~maloni/Indefinites/

Qualifications: The candidate must have a PhD in linguistics or philosophy or a related area
Starting date: Preferably 1 January  2012, but extensible to 1 March  2012
Total duration: 6-8 months
Closing date for applications:  1 November 2011

The gross monthly salary will be between €3195 and 4374 [‘Onderzoeker 3’; salary scale 11] in the case of a full-time position (38 hours/week). Depending on experience and date of completion of the PhD an appointment as ‘Onderzoeker 4’ (salary scale 10) may be necessary. Secondary benefits at Dutch universities are attractive and include holiday pay and an end of year bonus.

Interested candidates are encouraged to get in touch at their earliest convenience with Maria Aloni  (m.d.aloni@uva.nl)

Please include the following documents in your application: CV, list of publications, names and contact details of two personal references

Our Worst Building is better than MIT's Worst Building

In the widely touted CNBC lists of worsts, UMass ranks better than MIT.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44231749/?slide=8
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44231749/?slide=9

(Thanks to David Pesetsky and Angelika Kratzer for bringing this contest to WHISC's attention.)

Festschrift for Jorge Hankamer

Nick LaCara writes:

After nearly two years in the making, I am pleased to inform WHISC about a working papers/festschrift volume for which I was one of the editors. The volume is entitled Morphology at Santa Cruz: Papers in Honor of Jorge Hankamer (or MASC, for short). MASC grew out of the morphology seminar that Jorge Hankamer organized and taught in the fall of 2009 at UCSC which itself developed from the department's long-running morphology reading group. Many of the papers in the volume are revised versions of those originally written for that seminar. In addition to these, several others were solicited from UCSC alums and associates. A number of the papers, though not all them, are written in or about Distributed Morphology, and they focus on languages from Arabic and Bulgarian to Icelandic and Luiseño.

The volume has been published by the Linguistics Research Center at UCSC through the University of California's eScholarship website. It is available in its entirety and it's absolutely free: http://escholarship.org/uc/lrc_masc

Complexity Workshop

Fritz Newmeyer writes:

We are organizing a conference in Seattle next March on a topic that will be of interest to many of you. It's on 'Formal Linguistics and the Measurement of Grammatical Complexity'. Here's the url:

http://depts.washington.edu/lingconf/index.php

The basic idea is to probe whether 'formal linguistics' (broadly defined) has anything to contribute to the topic of relative overall complexity of languages.

First Meeting of Acquisition Lab/LARC this Monday

Tom Roeper writes:

The First Meeting of  Acquisition Lab/LARC  (Language Acquisition Resource Center) will be at 5:15 this Monday, September 12, in the Partee Room (301 South College). Everyone is Welcome!!

On this week's agenda:

1. Organization: introductions, future meetings, experimental plans

2.  Magda Oiry: "Exploring the pragmatics of long-distance questions"

If you are interested in language acquisition, this is an excellent way to
learn about ongoing work at UMass and Smith, present your own ideas, and get feedback for planned projects.

SRG starts up

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG (the Syntax/Semantics Reading Group) had a brief planning meeting on Friday.  This is how it went:

We would like SRG to continue to exist.  The plan is that most of the time, S-side members of the department will offer informal, low-key presentations of the work they've been doing in the past year or so, and the group will be there to provide feedback and ideas.  This way, S-siders will be more in touch with each other's work.  SRG will continue to be a place where people can give practice talks, we will continue to invite S-side colloq speakers and gurus to talk to us, and if anyone actually wants to read something to discuss, we can do that too.  If you want to present or you have an idea of what to read, email me (Anisa).

We're sticking with Thursday evenings, every two weeks or so, and we'll be alternating between Northampton and Amherst locations.

The first real meeting will be this coming Thursday, September 15th, at Barbara's house (50 Hobart Lane in Amherst.)  It will be at 6pm, and we'll order some dinner in so we don't starve.  Stefan will be presenting his work on long-distance agreement in Hindi.

The next few scheduled meetings are as follows, locations TBA:

Sept 29 -- Andrew W.

Oct 27 -- Jason

... plus hopefully some presentations by gurus and colloq speakers during that time.

As far as the SRG traditions of cocktails and other fancy edibles, we hope that this will emerge organically.  If someone wants to provide a fancy edible, we will be happy to consume it.

SRG has a Google calendar!  You can access it in any of the following ways:

As a website: 
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

In iCal format: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

By pasting this link into a feed reader: https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

 

Roger Levy speaks Friday, September 16

Joe Pater writes:

The Institute for Computational and Experimental Study of Language (suggested pronunciation: ['aisəl]) welcomes Roger Levy of the University of California, San Diego, who will present on "Probabilistic Knowledge and Uncertain Input in Rational Human Sentence Comprehension" on at 3:30, Friday September 16th in Machmer E-37. A reception will follow in South College.

Roger will be available for meetings on Friday morning from 9-12. Graduate students and post-docs are especially encouraged to meet with him. To sign up for a meeting, please indicate your available times here:

http://www.doodle.com/hqzwkrnacz4k79az

An abstract of Professor Levy's talk follows:

Considering the adversity of the conditions under which linguistic communication takes place in everyday life — ambiguity of the signal, environmental competition for our attention, speaker error, our limited memory, and so forth — it is perhaps remarkable that we are as successful at it as we are. Perhaps the leading explanation of this success is that (a) the linguistic signal is redundant, (b) diverse information sources are generally available that can help us obtain infer something close to the intended message when comprehending an utterance, and (c) we use these diverse information sources very quickly and to the fullest extent possible. This explanation suggests a theory of language comprehension as a rational, evidential process. In this talk, I describe recent research on how we can use the tools of computational linguistics to formalize and implement such a theory, and to apply it to a variety of problems in human sentence comprehension, subsuming both classic cases of garden-path disambiguation and syntactic processing difficulty patterns in the absence of structural ambiguity. In addition, I address a number of phenomena that remain clear puzzles for the rational approach, due to an apparent failure to use information available in a sentence appropriately in global or incremental inferences about the correct interpretation of a sentence. I argue that the apparent puzzle posed by these phenomena for models of rational sentence comprehension may derive from the failure of existing models to appropriately account for the environmental and cognitive constraints — in this case, the inherent uncertainty of perceptual input, and humans’ ability to compensate for it — under which comprehension takes place. I present a new probabilistic model of language comprehension under uncertain input and show that this model leads to solutions to the above puzzles. I also present behavioral data in support of novel predictions made by the model. More generally, I suggest that appropriately accounting for envir
onmental and cognitive constraints in probabilistic models can lead to a more nuanced and ultimately more satisfactory picture of key aspects of language processing and of human cognition.

UMass Morphologists at the LSA Institute

A workshop, "The Challenges of Complex Morphology to Morphological Theory"
was organized at this summer's Linguistic Institute in Boulder by Alice
Harris, Farrell Ackerman, and Gabriela Caballero.  Presentations included
Robert Staubs' "Operational Exponence: Process Morphology in Harmonic
Serialism", Minta Elsman's "Multiple Plural Exponence in Maay: An Optimality
Theoretic Account", and Alice Harris's "Exponent Adjacency in Multiple
Exponence."