Caroline Heycock speaks tomorrow

Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh, and inaugural syntax guru) will speak in Rajesh Bhatt’s seminar tomorrow (Monday, April 28) in the Partee room at 4PM. The title of her talk is “What copular clauses might tell us about agreement (and vice versa).” An abstract follows. 

In Andrea Moro's influential 1997 book on copular clauses, the
agreement found in English specificational copular clauses was
contrasted with that in their Italian counterparts:

1. a.  The culprit *am/is me.
   b.  Il colpevole sono/*è io
        the culprit    am/*is I

Moro attributes this difference to the pro-drop status of Italian, but
den Dikken (1998) already showed that this explanation would not
extend to what appears to be a similar pattern in Dutch and German.
In more recent work (den Dikken 2013) it is argued that obligatory
agreement with the second DP in Dutch in number, but not person,
follows from—among other premisses—the predicate inversion analysis of
specificational copular clauses, given the assumption that predicates
do not have phi-features.

In this talk I will present current work, most of it done in
collaboration with Jutta Hartmann (Tübingen), in which we have begun
to explore the agreement possibilities of these sentences in a number
of different Germanic languages. I will discuss some of the variation
that we have found within Dutch, German, and Faroese, some of which we
attribute to the possibility of an agreement probe in C that is
independent of the probe in T. I will also present evidence that the
agreement facts actually do not support an predicate inversion
analysis—but that at least under one analysis they do support the
involvement of inversion.

PRG tomorrow evening

Ivy Hauser and Carol Hughto write:

The last PRG meeting of the semester will take place this coming Monday, 4/28 at 7p.  We plan to have an informal gathering at Amanda's house and we can discuss last week of class p-side related things (final projects, what happened at RUMMIT, etc.).  We will of course have dinner.  As always, everyone is welcome!

Deniz Ozyildiz at WAFL 10

Graduate student Deniz Ozyildiz has a poster at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, which meets this weekend (May 2-4) at MIT. His poster is entitled “Turkish possessives are not exceptional.” For more information, go here.

Ricki Cohen in the digital Humanities

Linguistics major Ricki Cohen was featured at a showcase of student work on the digital humanities last Thursday, April 23, in Herer Hall. Ms Cohen’s program that analyzes proverbs and generates potentially new ones was one of four projects that were presented.

Pearson at Broader Impacts Summit

Barbara Pearson presented a poster at the Broader Impacts Infrastructure Summit April 16-18 in Arlington, VA. You can learn more here.

Tonal Spaces

Kristine Yu writes:

I'm pleased to announce a workshop on tonal spaces on June 2-3 at UMASS, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation Mutual Mentoring Grant for building a prosody community. We'll have the following invited speakers (with some preliminary talk titles given below):

Christian DiCanio, Haskins Laboratories/University at Buffalo (SUNY)
James Kirby, University of Edinburgh
John Kingston, University of Massachusetts
Jianjing Kuang, University of Pennsylvania
Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania: Tone without pitch
Bert Remijsen, University of Edinburgh: Further evidence for contrastive alignment in falling contours
Yi Xu, University College London: Articulatory dynamics of tone production and articulatory- and learning-based computational modelling

Registration open for ESSLLI 2014

The registration for the 26th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2014) is now open. ESSLLI 2014 will be held in Tübingen, Germany, August 11-22, 2014.

In order to register, go to http://www.esslli2014.info/registration/registration.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. Under the auspices of FoLLI (the Association for Logic, Language, and Information), ESSLLI brings together logicians, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers to study language, logic, and information, and their interconnections. The school hosts approximately 50 courses at both introductory and advanced levels, and brings together around 500 participants from all over the world. Along with the courses, ESSLLI hosts workshops and invited lectures, providing opportunities for in-depth discussion of current research.

The ESSLLI Organizing Committee is pleased to be able to offer a limited number of waivers of participation fees and student travel grants to highly motivated and talented students. Preferences will be given to students who actively participate in the Student Session. See more details at: http://esslli2014.info/registration/grant-information

Lyn Frazier gets Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award

The Graduate School made available this year two new awards, one for graduate faculty and another for graduate staff. It is with great pleasure that WHISC announces that our own Lyn Frazier, along with Eric Decker of Food Science and Erin Baker of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, are inaugural winners of the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. Congratulations Lyn!

Oiry and Hartman at LARC

For the final meeting of the semester, Magda Oiry and Jeremy Hartman will present their ongoing work on the acquisition of factives. Thursday, April 24, at 9:45 in the Partee room.

Veneeta Dayal gives department colloq on Friday

Veneeta Dayal will present “What Polar kayaa tells us about Speech Acts” in the department colloquium this Friday, April 25, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. An abstract of her talk follows.

I first present the findings of Bhatt and Dayal (2014) about a wh expression kyaa that optionally occurs with polar and alternative questions, but not wh questions:

1a.  (kyaa) tum cai piyoge

        What  you  tea will-drink     

        “Will you drink tea?”

b.   (kyaa) tum cai piyoge         yaa cofii

       What  you  tea will-drink   or   coffee     

       “Will you drink  TEA or COFFEE?”

c.  *kyaa kaun cai piyegaa

      What who tea will-drink     

       “Who will drink tea?’

Polar kyaa is analyzed as a Speech Act operator QUEST in ForceP, rather than a Y/N question operator.  While this is fairly unremarkable for matrix questions, embedded contexts present a more nuanced picture.  The empirical generalization is that polar kyaa can occur in those embedded contexts in which the embedded question is discourse-active, in the sense of Dayal and Grimshaw (2009).  The second part of the talk draws out the theoretical implications of this generalization, focusing on current approaches to polar questions and embedded speech acts, such as Farkas and Roelofsen (2012), Krifka (2009, 2014), among others.

PSYCH EM on Wednesday

The long-postponed PSYCH EM meeting will take place this Wednesday, April 23, at Brian Dillon’s home at 8PM. 

2014 entering class announced

Please welcome the new members of the graduate program, who will be arriving this Fall.

Thuy Bui, who is from Viet Nam and is currently a student at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She is interested in working on Vietnamese syntax and has worked on adverbs and yes/no questions.

Rodica Ivan, who is from Romania and has studied at the University of Bucharest, as well as in Venice. She is interested in relativization strategies in Romanian, complementizers, and language acquisition, as well as many other topics.

Petr Kusliy, who is from Russia and studied philosophy at the Russian State University and the Institute of Philosophy. He has studied with Barbara in Moscow. He is interested in the semantics of attitude reports and the semantics of tense.

Deniz Ozyildiz, who is from Turkey but studied at Nanterre University in France and at UCLA; he is currently in the cognitive science program at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He is interested in syntax, semantics, and fieldwork, and has worked on tensed verbs in Turkish and on shifting indexicals.

Georgia Simon, who is an American student at Rutgers. She is interested in prosody and pragmatics, and has experience doing research using experimental methods.

RUMMIT on Saturday

The annual RUMMIT meeting is this Saturday at MIT. RUMMIT brings sound scientists from the northeast together to share ongoing research. WHISC has heard that UMass phonologist Robert Staubs will be presenting. As more details become available, they’ll be posted here.

Barbara Partee at Harvard on Monday, April 28

Barbara Partee gives the IX annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Guest lecture at Harvard University on Monday, April 28, in 113 Sever Hall from 4-6PM. The title of her lecture is “The History of Formal Semantics: Changing Notions of Semantic Competence.”  For more information, go here.

Roeper on the road

Tom Roeper writes:

Last week I gave a talk on "Minimal Rules and Unlabelled Nodes in Multi-lingualism: How rules apply across grammars” at a small workshop on Multilingualism at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar organized by Liliane Haegeman and Michel deGraff.

Then this week I was invited to give a plenary keynote lecture at the 10th anniversary of the Experimental Methods in Acquisition Research (EMLAR) conference in Utrecht on "There are No methods, only Theories".

Each of these conferences revealed the burgeoning vitality of empirical research in acquisition---and impressive attention to what the details of bilingualism can reveal, and new projects throughout Europe are being developed, particularly in Norway, England, Greece, Belgium, and China.

Hartman at LARC

Magda Oiry writes:

Jeremy Hartman will present his work on Root infinitives at LARC on Thursday 9:45 in the Partee room. All are welcome!

PRG tomorrow: Speed Presentations

Ivy Hauser and Coral Hughto write:

PRG is scheduled to meet this Monday 4/14 at Brian's place in Northampton. Instead of the usual presentation we will be trying something a little different, a "lightning paper discussion."  The idea is that everyone comes with a paper in mind they have recently read to give a quick 5 minute synopsis of over dinner.  It should be something you have already read for class, your research, etc. (no extra work required) and of course no handout or prepared speech is necessary.  The goal is to share the important points of several papers in the time of a single meeting.  I think ideally fairly current papers would be nice to discuss but anything goes.

Jason Merchant gives department colloquium

Jason Merchant (University of Chicago) will give the department colloquium on Friday, April 18, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. The title of his talk is (the cryptic) “More than one phrasal comparative(*s)."

Field School Program in Peru

Piero Fioralisso, Coordinator of Special Programs of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, writes:

I am writing to you to announce the launch of the Field School Program in Peru 2014. This program, created and developed by PUCP, provides students with the opportunity to carry out practical work in research projects which are directed by some of our most prestigious faculty members and during its ten years of existence the Field School program has received more than 300 students.

We would like you to know that this season the program is offering courses that we believe may be of interest to you:

-Linguistic Summer Field School

-Spanish Language and Peruvian Studies Program

You will find our complete Field School Program offer in the following links:

-Field School Program Brochure
-Spanish Language Brochure
-Website: http://fieldschool.pucp.edu.pe/

Call for papers: Fall Meeting on Formal Linguistics

The 3rd Fall Meeting on Formal Linguistics : Language(s) and Cognition  will be organized by the UMR "Structures Formelles du Langage" Université Paris 8 / CNRS in Paris.

9-10 October 2014

invited speakers

David Barner (University of California, San Diego)

Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)

Jenny Doetjes (Leiden)

Maria Polinsky (Harvard)

Call for Papers Deadline 16 June 2014

Submissions are invited for 30 minute-papers (plus discussion) on all domains of linguistic theory.

Abstracts are invited from all areas (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) of formal linguistics (e.g., generative grammar or related frameworks). Topics may include syntax-semantics interface, syntax-morphology interface and others. Abstracts on language acquisition, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are also particularly welcome in a perspective that relates them to theories of grammar.
We strongly encourage contributions exploring formal approaches to language diversity and typological works (including but not limited to sign languages, creoles, under-represented languages and comparative studies).

Abstract Submission Presentations may be in French or in English. Abstracts should be anonymous and must not exceed 2 pages (A4) (including data and references) with a 2,54 cm (1 inch) margin on all four sides using Times New Roman 12 pt.

Abstracts must be submitted online using the link below. We will accept electronic submissions only (.pdf files). EasyChair link : https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ralfe2014

Calendar Deadline for submission : June 16th, 2014

Notification of acceptance : July 13th, 2014 

Conference dates : October 9th-10th 2014