Magda Oiry will give the talk “How Children Deal with Contextually Canceled Presupposition” in LARC’s meeting this week: Wednesday, February 10, at 12:15 in ILC N451. This is the talk she will present at the meeting of DGfS at the end of this month. An abstract can be found here.
07 February 2016
Sam Bowman talks at Computer Science
Sam Bowman of Stanford University will be giving the talk “Modeling Natural Language Semantics with Learned Representations” on Thursday, February 11, at 4PM in CS room 151. An abstract of his talk follows
The last few years have seen many striking successes from artificial neural network models on hard natural language processing tasks. These models replace complex hand-engineered systems for extracting and representing the meanings of sentences with learned functions that construct and use their own internal vector-based representations. Though these learned representations are effective in many domains, they aren't interpretable in familiar terms and their ability to capture the full range of meanings expressible in natural language is not yet well understood.
In this talk, I argue that neural network models are capable of learning to represent and reason with the meanings of sentences. First, I use entailment experiments over artificial languages to show that existing models can learn to reason logically over clean language-like data. I then introduce a large new corpus of entailments in English and use experiments on that corpus to show that these abilities extend to natural language as well. Finally, I briefly present ongoing work on a new model that uses the semantic principle of compositionality to more efficiently and effectively learn to understand natural language.
SRG this week
Leland Kusmer writes:
The results of the poll indicate that we're going to be reading Williams 2003 this semester! We'll start discussing the book this week — please try to read pp. 5-23 (up to section 1.5) for this meeting.
Our next meeting is this coming Thursday, the 11th; at that meeting, we'll hear from our visitor Polina and also discuss the part of the reading mentioned above. Location is TBA.
Howard Karloff speaks in Computer Science
Variable Selection is Hard
Who: Howard Karloff
When: Feb 9, 1-2pm
Where: Computer Science Building, room 150/151
Website: https://www.cics.umass.edu/event/theory-speaker-variable-selection-hard
Abstract:
Consider the task of a machine-learning system faced with voluminous data on m individuals. There may be p=10^6 features describing each individual. How can the algorithm find a small set of features that “best” describes the individuals? People usually seek small feature sets both because models with small feature sets are understandable and because simple models usually generalize better.
We study the simple case of linear regression, in which a user has an m x p matrix B and a vector y, and seeks a p-vector x *with as few nonzeroes as possible* such that Bx is approximately equal to y, and we call it SPARSE REGRESSION. There are numerous algorithms in the statistical literature for SPARSE REGRESSION, such as Forward Selection, Backward Elimination, LASSO, and Ridge Regression.
We give a general hardness proof that (subject to a complexity assumption) no polynomial-time algorithm can give good performance (in the worst case) for SPARSE REGRESSION, even if it is allowed to include more variables than necessary, and even if it need only find an x such that Bx is relatively far from y.
This is joint work with Dean Foster and Justin Thaler and was done when all coauthors were at Yahoo Labs.
Bio: After receiving a PhD from UC Berkeley, Howard Karloff taught at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech before leaving Georgia Tech to join AT&T Labs–Research in 1999. He left ATT Labs in 2013 to join Yahoo Labs in New York, where he stayed till February, 2015. Now he does data science for Goldman Sachs in New York.
A fellow of the ACM, he has served on the program committees of numerous conferences and chaired the 1998 SODA program committee. He is the author of numerous journal and conference articles and the Birkhauser book “Linear Programming.” His interests include data science, machine learning, algorithms, and optimization.
AIX Summer School on Prosody
AIX SUMMER SCHOOL ON PROSODY 2016:
Methods in Prosody and Intonation Research: Data, Theories, Transcription
Laboratoire de Parole et Langage, Aix Marseille Université, France.
September 6-9, 2016
http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/
We are pleased to announce the "Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 " tobe held from September 6-9, 2016 in Aix en Provence (France).
The Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 will bring together experts ontheoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody. The school will be organized around morning lectures and afternoon tutorials (where participants will practice concepts and skills discussed in lectures) and data clinics (where participants can bring together their own data and questions for discussion).
The school is intended for post-graduate students and researchers interested in all the theoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody and intonation. The school will be suitable bothfor researchers already working on intonation and prosody, and wishingto learn more about specific topics, and for researchers who wish tobetter understand how to incorporate and control prosody in their own work.
Topics will include (but not limited to): theoretical models on prosody and intonation; perception of intonation; prosody and language pathologies; prosody, semantics, and discourse; prosody and L2;prosody and neurolinguistics; transcription of intonation and prosody;statistical methods in prosody research; and preparation of stimulifor perception studies.
The confirmed invited speakers are:
Amalia Arvaniti (Kent University): Theoretical models of prosody
Mariapaola D'Imperio (Aix-Marseille Université - IUF): Tonal alignment: perception and production
Laura Dilley (Michigan State University): Prosody and perception methods
Janet Fletcher (The University of Melbourne): Transcription of under-described languages
James Sneed German (Aix-Marseille Université): Prosody and discourse
Kiwako Ito (Ohio State University): Prosody and acquisition, prosody and eye tracking
Jelena Krivokapić (University of Michigan): Prosody and articulatory phonology
Oliver Niebuhr (University of Southern Denmark): Prosody and experimental methods in acoustics
Bert Remeijsen and Otto Gwado Ayoker (University of Edimburgh):Typology and field methods in prosody research: Shilluk prosody workshop
Annie Tremblay (Kansas University): Prosody and L2
Application deadline: May 31st 2016
For more information, please visit http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/
A number of scholarships will be offered for PhD students andpostdocs. For more information about registration and scholarships, go to http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/registration.html
Call for papers ESSLLI
*2nd Call for Papers*
*ESSLLI 2016 STUDENT SESSION*
Held during the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language andInformation
Bolzano, Italy, August 15-26, 2016
*Deadline for submissions: March 10th, 2016
*https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2016
*ABOUT:*
The Student Session of the 28th European Summer School in Logic,Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Bolzano, Italy, August 15th to 26th (http://esslli2016.unibz.it). We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at theintersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic &Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in thefield, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters andselected papers will appear in the Student Session proceedings bySpringer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedbackfrom expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.
*ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS:*
Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for oral presentations and one for posters. This means that papers are directly submitted either as oral presentations or as poster presentations. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present smaller research projects and research in progress.
*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*
Authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Each author may submit at most one single and one jointly authored contribution. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages foran oral presentation or 4 pages for a poster presentation (including examples and references). Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information. More detailed guidelines regarding submissioncan be found on the Student Session website: http://www2.sfs.unituebingen.de/esslli-stus-2016/.
*SPONSORSHIP AND PRIZES*
As in previous years, Springer has kindly agreed to sponsor the ESSLLI student session. The best poster and best talk will be awarded Springerbook vouchers of 500€ each.
*FURTHER INFORMATION:*
Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to marisa.koellner@uni-tuebingen.de andrziai@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de.
ESSLLI 2016 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. For further information, including registration information and courselistings, and for general inquiries about ESSLLI 2016, please consult the main ESSLLI 2016 page: http://esslli2016.unibz.it.
PhD positions and Postdocs in Amsterdam
There are a number of vacancies for PhD students and Postdocs in the inquisitive semantics group in Amsterdam. The projects are briefly described below. The deadline for applications is 15 March 2016, and the projects will start in the fall.
If you are interested in one of these positions, please get in touch with:
- Floris Roelofsen (floris.roelofsen@gmail.com)
- Ivano Ciardelli (i.a.ciardelli@uva.nl)
Project 1 (PhD, 4 years): First-order inquisitive logic
This project is intended for a PhD student with a background in logic.Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.Apply through the UvA website.
One important novelty of the inquisitive approach is that it brings out the fact that questions have an important role to play in logic. For instance, suppose we know that Alice and Bob live in the same city. Then, information about Alice’s city of residence yields information about Bob’s city of residence. In inquisitive logic, this takes the form of an entailment:
Alice and Bob live in the same city, where Alice lives |= where Bob lives
Thus, in inquisitive logic we can reason not only, as usual, with particular pieces of information (e.g., that Alice and Bob live in the same city), but also with information types (e.g., Alice’s city of residence), which may be instantiated by multiple pieces of information (that Alice lives in Amsterdam, that Alice lives in Paris, etc). Thus, bringing questions into play leads to an exciting generalization of the fundamental notions of classical logic.
The aim of the project is to explore the consequences of this new perspective, carrying out a thorough investigation of first-order inquisitive logic. What makes this especially urgent is that an extremely broad range of questions are expressible by means of a first-order logical language.
Understanding how to reason with these questions is not only important from a mathematical and philosophical point of view, but also stands to have impact in applications, since question entailment generalizes the notion of functional dependency which is central to database theory and dependence logic. Thus, an axiomatization result would provide effective methods to reason about first-order dependencies.
Project 2 (PhD, 4 years): An inquisitive perspective on quantification in natural language
This project is intended for a PhD student with a background in formal semantics.
Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.Apply through the UvA website.
On the standard view, quantifiers like every man and many students are treated as operators that map properties to truth-values. While this approach allows for an insightful characterization of quantifiers’ truth-conditional contribution, it also has some important limitations. First, interrogative quantifiers like which men and how many students are squarely beyond its scope. Second, even quantifiers like every man are problematic when they occur in questions. For instance, to interpret the question What did every man eat? as ‘for every man x, what did x eat?’, the quantifier needs to scope out of the question; but this is impossible, if its argument is required to be a property.
Inquisitive semantics suggests a simple shift in perspective that simultaneously addresses both these issues. It becomes possible to pursue an account of quantifiers that captures (i) their potential to generate inquisitive content, which is necessary to deal with interrogative quantifiers like which men, and (ii) their ability to propagate inquisitive content, which is necessary to deal with quantifiers scoping out of questions.
We also expect inquisitive semantics to enable us to decompose quantifiers into semantically more primitive parts. A key observation in this regard is that, across languages, quantifiers are often built up from question words. We aim to explain this connection and to show how the meaning of quantifiers can be derived in a systematic way from the inquisitive elements they contain.
Project 3 (Postdoc, ~2.5 years): Applications in computer science and experimental ratification
This project is intended for one or two Postdocs with a background in logic and/or formal semantics/pragmatics, preferably with a particular interest in one or both of the following: (i) computational applications of logic in computer science, in particular in database systems, (ii) experimental semantics/pragmatics.
Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.
Apply through the UvA website.
Inquisitive semantics has so far been used to shed new light on theoretical issues in semantics, pragmatics, logic, and philosophy of language. The aim of this project is to broaden this scope in two directions. First, we will explore practical applications of inquisitive logic in computer science, in particular in database systems. Suppose we have a database and we get a new query. Then instead of looking at the database itself, we may look at the already stored queries, and see whether they entail the new query (in the inquisitive sense). If so, it may be possible to resolve the new query without having to re-consult the database itself, with a substantial gain in efficiency. This is a widely used technique in database systems, but inquisitive logic may make it possible to deal with a much wider range of queries than current systems do.
Second, we want to carry out a number of experiments to corroborate the empirical predictions that are made by linguistic theories formulated in inquisitive semantics, and to further develop these theories guided by the obtained empirical results. Relevant phenomena include (but are not restricted to) the interpretation of disjunction, questions, question-embedding verbs, and other operators that arguably generate and/or propagate inquisitive content, such as quantifiers, modals, and conditionals.
Project 4 (Postdoc, ~2.5 years): A fully compositional dynamic inquisitive semantics
This project is intended for a Postdoc with a background in formal semantics, preferably with a particular interest in compositionality and dynamic semantics.
Intended starting date: 1 October 2016.
Apply through the UvA website.
Most work on inquisitive semantics so far has focused on InqB, the inquisitive counterpart of classical first-order logic. In order to obtain a full-fledged inquisitive framework for natural language semantics, this basic system needs to be extended in two ways. First, we need to allow for meaning composition at the sub-sentential level. Second, we need to capture dynamic aspects of meaning, e.g., cross- and inter-sentential anaphoric dependencies and presuppositions. The goal of this project is to develop a fully compositional dynamic inquisitive semantics, and to apply this framework to a number of linguistic phenomena involving inquisitiveness below and beyond the sentence boundary.
31 January 2016
For Sophomores and Juniors: Linguistics Field School
The Linguistics Department of Swarthmore College and Haverford College will host a 5-week Linguistics Field School consisting of two weeks at Haverford College and three weeks of community-based work in Mexico (with Prof. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen) or in the Navajo Nation (with Prof. Ted Fernald).
Host Institutions: Swarthmore College and Haverford College. In Oaxaca: Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova and Centro de Estudios Tecnológicos, industrial y de servicios (CETis) #124. In the Navajo Nation: Navajo Technical University (NTU)
Dates: May 23 through June 25, 2016
Locations: Haverford, PA; Oaxaca, Mexico; Crownpoint, New Mexico
Description: The program will recruit a cohort of 12 undergraduates who have shown a strong interest in and commitment to linguistics, digital tools, and/or related fields. Students will being the program at Haverford College, where they will receive ten days of intensive training in linguistic field methods, digital recording, data analysis, field ethics, and allied disciplines. Students will then join local community language revitalization projects in Oaxaca, Mexico and the Navajo Nation for three weeks (6 students at each site), where they will work closely with language activists and scholars on a variety of projects. For the Navajo project, students will work on programming and testing a web-based application for generating Navajo verbs. The last 5 days will take place at Haverford College where students will receive follow-up training and process their field data.
Interested students may find the NSF REU Linguistics Field School Facebook group useful in getting a sense of the experience. The Twitter hashtag is #LingFieldSchool.
Funding: All travel and living expenses will be covered, and students will also receive a generous weekly stipend.
Qualifications: Applicants should be currently enrolled undergraduates who have completed at least one year of college level studies. Students who will complete their B.A. by June 2016 are not eligible. We especially welcome applications from students of community colleges, tribal-affiliated colleges in the US, and institutions where no linguistics major is available. Fluent or heritage speakers of Zapotec or Navajo are especially encouraged to apply. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program (grant #1461056), which limits applicants to US citizens or permanent residents. Students should have experience (such as course work) in at least two of the following areas and demonstrated interest in others: linguistics, languages indigenous to the Americas (including Zapotec and Navajo), programming, web design, and digital humanities. For Oaxaca: applicants must have a valid passport at the time of application; competency in Spanish is necessary and programming experience with Android apps or iPhone apps is an asset. For the Navajo Nation: an introductory computer science course or data structures course is desirable, or programming experience with Python or a web framework like Django.
Application Instructions: The application is available here. Applications will require one letter of recommendation which must be emailed directly from the recommender to linguistics@swarthmore.edu by the application deadline. The selection process is highly competitive and detailed letters that address the student’s potential for success in this type of program will be most helpful in determining the final cohort.
Application deadline: February 15, 2016.
Syntax Workshop meets tomorrow
Thuy and Rodica will give a report on ConSOLE in Syntax Workshop tomorrow, February 1. Syntax Workshop meets on Mondays from 4:30-5:30 in ILC N458.
Tom and Rebecca at LARC
LARC will meet this Wednesday (Feb. 3) at 12:15 in ILC N451. Tom Roeper and Rebecca Woods will be give their forthcoming DGfS talk (Separating Tense and Assertion: Evidence from Embedded V2 and Child Language). All are welcome!
UMass at BLS
The 42nd meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society meets February 5-7 at UC, Berkeley. Joe Pater is one of the invited speakers — he is giving the talk “Learning in Typological Prediction: Grammatical Agent-Based modeling.” UMass is also represented by:
Alumnus Michael Becker, who is giving (with Honaida Ahyad) the talk “The predictability of vowel alternations in Urban Hijazi Arabic imperfective nonce forms” and (with Paola Cepeda) the talk “Sonority restricts laryngealized plosives in Southern Aymara"
Kristine Yu and Deniz Ozyildiz who are giving the talk “Emergence of tonal absolutive Case marking in Samoan.” (The abstract is at the end of this post.)
For more information, go here.
Emergence of tonal absolutive Case marking in Samoan
In Samoan, it appears that absolutive arguments are marked by a tonal case morpheme: A high tone (H-), aligned with the final mora of the phonological material preceding the argument. We propose that H- emerges from the segmental elision of the absolutive preposition `ia,' and the reassociation of ia's pitch accent with the left adjacent tone bearing unit. Indeed, absolutive H- and ia have similar distributions. Moreover, ia is sometimes so reduced that only a pitch accent remains of its exponence. Ergative and oblique case marking is not tonal. These segmental morphemes are monomoraic and unstressed, hence unable to provide a source tone, even when reduced.
Call for papers: New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling
We are very pleased to announce the first edition of the new series New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling 2016 (NISM2016), which will take place in Paris, September 7 and 8, 2016.
The conferences New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling resume the Journées de Sémantique et Modélisation (JSM 2003-2010), targeting the renewed community in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. Papers from any theoretical framework are welcome, granted that new empirical data are clearly complemented with a formal analysis.
This year, the conference will feature a thematic session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms, in honor of Francis Corblin, founder of the JSM.
Invited Speakers
Elizabeth Coppock (Gothenburg University & Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
Henriette de Swart (Utrecht University)
Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)
Organizers
Claire Beyssade (Structures Formelles du Langage, Paris 8 University)
Alda Mari (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)
David Nicolas (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)
Talks and posters
Talks will be 35 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.In addition to the general session, submissions are also invited for the special session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms.The conference will also feature a poster session.
Abstract submission
Papers in formal semantics and pragmatics are welcome. Experimental papers are welcome, granted that they provide a formal analysis of the data. Abstracts (neither submitted nor published elsewhere) are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. Abstracts, including references and data, should be limited to two single spaced pages (A4 or US Letter) with one inch margins, minimum font size 12pt (Times New Roman). They must be in PDF format. Examples should be interspersed throughout the text. Abstracts can be submitted in English or French, but the language of the conference will be English. Anonymous abstracts must be submitted online at http://nism2016.sciencesconf.org, by March 31, 2016. Abstracts will be triply blind-reviewed.
Proceedings
We plan to publish the proceedings of the conference.
Schedule
Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2016
Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2016
Conference : 7-8 September 2016
SpectroLunch
Leland Kusmer writes:
We're going to start SpectroLunch for the semester, and you should come!
For those who don't know: Once a week, a bunch of us get together and eat snacks while practicing our spectrogram reading. It's a lot of fun, and a good way to practice this important skill and to learn weird things about English phonetics. (Did I mention there are snacks?) It's totally informal and you don't need any prior knowledge of spectrogram reading — just come and join in! We meet at 10AM on Fridays.
Call for papers: IATL
We are pleased to announce the 32nd annual conference of the Israel
Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL), which will take place
at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, October 25-27, 2016. The conference will consist of a
general session as well as a special session on experimental and
historical approaches to semantics.
General Session:
We invite submissions of abstracts for 30 minute presentations of
previously unpublished research in all areas of theoretical
linguistics.
Special Session – Experimental and historical approaches to semantics:
Research into issues in natural language semantics from experimental,
on the one hand, and historical perspective, on the other hand, has
been gaining in prominence in recent years, not least because it
provides new ways of evaluating extant linguistic hypotheses as well
as impetus for the development of new ones. We invite submissions of
abstracts on experimental and historical studies that will expand the
empirical domain of, and be informed by, formal semantic theory.
Invited Speakers:
Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford)
Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
Abstract Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts should be no longer than two pages, including examples and
references. Page format: A4, 2,54cm (one inch) margins on all sides,
12-point font, single line spacing. Submissions are restricted to at
most one single-authored and one co-authored abstract.
Please submit abstracts to the IATL EasyChair site:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iatl32
Please register at the site as an author, and when you receive a
password, you can enter the site and submit your abstract. The
abstract should be submitted in PDF format through the 'Upload Paper'
section near the bottom of the page. (Note: Higher up on the page, in
the 'Title and Abstract' section, there is a box for a plain-text
abstract. Since we do not require a shorter abstract, you may simply
retype the title of the paper in the abstract box and the intended
session.) When submitting your abstract, please indicate on the top of
the abstract whether you intend your paper to be considered for the
general session or the special session (or both) (say, in parentheses
following the title).
Deadline: March 31, 2016
Important Dates:
March 31, 2016: Abstract submission deadline
Late May, 2016: Notification of acceptance to authors
October 25-27, 2016: IATL 32 Conference
IATL 32 web site: http://www.iatl.org.il/?page_id=970
If you have questions or encounter any problems, please contact
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal ebas@mail.huji.ac.il or Luka Crnic
luka.crnic@mail.huji.ac.il.
Call for papers: AAA
The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 32nd Call for Papers
Date: July 6-8, 2016
Call deadline: February 8, 2016
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Website: http://semanticsofaaa.wordpress.com/
::: Meeting Description :::
The TripleA workshop series aims at providing a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages. Its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.
::: Invited Speakers :::
Sigrid Beck (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
(UMass alumnus) Chris Davis (University of the Ryukyus)
Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers University)
Letuimanu’asina Emma Kruse Va’ai (National University of Samoa)
Jenneke van der Wal (University of Cambridge)
::: Call for Papers :::
We invite submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Submissions should present original formal work on any interpretive aspect of the languages under discussion which should have originated from own fieldwork or experimentation.
We particularly encourage Ph.D. students to apply. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via Easy Chair no later than February 8, 2016.
::: Abstract Submission Link :::
Elements of Hittite
Seth Cable writes:
I wanted to let you all know that Dean Rex Wallace of the Classics Department is organizing a reading group this semester focused on the Hittite language. The plan is to work through Theo van den Hout’s “The Elements of Hittite”, covering as much of the text and the exercises as possible. Anyone who might be interested is very welcome to come. The meetings will be on Thursdays from 9 to 10AM in Herter 546.
Events in Language and Cognition
Registration is now open for the Events in Language & Cognition workshop taking place March 2nd, right before (and a few blocks away from) the CUNY Sentence Processing meeting (March 3-5).
The workshop will take place from 8:30am-6pm, and is located at the Hilton Garden Inn in Gainseville, FL, a *different* but close by Hilton from the one that CUNY is taking place in.
A description of the workshop and a list of speakers is given below, and details about the workshop can be found at our website.
We hope you will be able to join us!
- Melissa Kline, Eva Wittenberg, & Josh Hartshorne
Workshop Description:
Understanding how speakers wrap event conceptualizations into linguistic descriptions is crucial for both linguistic theory and psychology. A number of rich linguistic theories have been proposed to account for the observed ways in how meaning maps to syntax within and across languages, but their psychological status remains unclear. These theories often propose specific representational architecture, ranging from prototype theories to predicate decomposition. How are these conceptual models and mappings grounded in non-linguistic cognition? On the side of cognitive science, our understanding of event representation, especially in infancy, has advanced dramatically in the past several decades, potentially opening up new possibilities for evaluating the plausibility of proposed argument structure theories. What can the understanding of event perception and cognition teach us about the nature of semantic representations for language, and how can psycholinguistic evidence contribute to research on event structure?
In this workshop, we want to both foster an exchange of recent work, and set a possible agenda for psycholinguistic research on event structure as conveyed by language.
Invited speakers/discussants
Elsi Kaiser (USC)
Jesse Snedeker (Harvard)
Elliot Saltzmann (Haskins Laboratories)
Jeremy Skipper (UCL)
Second Annual UMass Cog Sci Workshop
The linguistics department hosted the Second Annual Cognitive Science Workshop last Friday (January 29) from 2:30-5:00. Recent UMass faculty Gaja Jarosz (Linguistics), Brendan O’Connor (Computer Science) and Christopher White (Music) gave presentations.
24 January 2016
Linguistics Club meets tomorrow
The first meeting of the Linguistics Majors Club meets tomorrow, January 25, at 4PM in the Integrated Learning Center N400. If you are interested in any of the linguistics majors, or in linguistics or linguists, come!
SSRG meets tomorrow
Leland Kusmer writes:
SSRG will have it's first meeting of the semester next Monday, January 25th, at 7:30pm. We'll meet at my place. This will be an organizational meeting to plan the rest of the semester — we'll talk about when we'd like to meet, who'd like to present, whether we want to do more journal overviews, and whether / how we'd like to read a book together this semester.
As always, please remember to RSVP so I know how much food to buy:
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