Welcome the Guru Event: Monday (tomorrow!) March 21

There will be a welcoming event for the Semantics Guru, Malte Zimmermann on
MONDAY, March 21 at 7:00 PM at Angelika and Lisa's place.

Note the new time!

Angelika writes:

There will be fake champagne and a cake. Please drop me a quick note if you are coming so that I know how big the cake needs to be. I am also still soliciting requests for appointments with Malte. This is the first year we have semantics gurus. It's a way to make up for our unfilled semantics position. Gurus don't teach classes since they are only here for a short time, but they give a couple of talks and are there to advise graduate students and faculty about their work in semantics - whatever it may be.

Anne-Michelle Tessier visits

John McCarthy writes:

Anne-Michelle Tessier, who received her doctorate from our department in 2007, will be visiting over the next two weeks. She is eager to talk with our current students. Below I've pasted a summary of her research interests from her web page, http://www.ualberta.ca/~annemich/.

To set up a meeting, please contact her directly at amtessier@ualberta.ca

From her webpage:

Research Interests

Note that all my papers and most of my handouts are downloadable in some 
way on the Downloadable Papers page.

My research focuses for the most part on issues of formalism and 
learning in phonological theory, usually in Optimality Theory. Here are 
some of the research questions I am most interested in:

Phonological Acquisition and Grammar
:: What kinds of learning algorithms cn model attested intermediate 
stages of acquisition? at what costs?
:: More generally, how does the choice of grammar affect the options for 
learning?
:: Relatedly, what properties of observed language acquisition reveal 
the nature of the grammar vs. the nature of learning mechanisms?
:: For example: is variation in child phonology a result of a variable 
grammar, or a variable learner?
:: What about lexical exceptions, apparent regressions, and other quirky 
data?
:: How does children's morphological awareness affect their phonological 
acquisition?

Other Aspects of My Research
:: How and when do speakers generalize in artificial learning?
:: How are phonological speech errors related to phonological grammar - 
conceptually, causally or otherwise?
:: How does or should a theory of phonological grammatical competence 
make predictions about phonological performance?

Malte Zimmermann talks on Friday, March 25

Semantics guru, Malte Zimmermann will give the department colloquium on Friday, March 25 at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. The title and abstract of his talk are:

Focus Realisation and Association with Focus in Ngamo (West Chadic) (with Mira Grubic)

In this talk, I discuss the realisation of focus in Ngamo, which like many (West) African languages does not require the explicit marking of focus on non-subjects in terms of absolute prominence (pitch, movement, markers). I discuss various analyses of the realisation of focus in Ngamo and show that only two are compatible with the observable facts: (i) Analysis I assumes that focus in Ngamo is consistently marked on all constituents, but not in terms of absolute prominence, but in terms of alignment with major prosodic phrases(Féry , submitted); (ii) Analysis II assumes an asymmetry in the focus marking system of Ngamo in that only subject foci must be marked. In the final part of the talk, I show that the association behaviour of focus-particles (exclusive 'only' vs additive 'also') provides us with evidence in favour of analysis I.

St. Petersburg summer Institute for linguistics undergraduates

From John Bailyn at SUNY Stony Brook:

I am writing now to let you know about NYI (the NY-St. Petersburg
Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture) - the ongoing St.
Petersburg summer institute I have co-directed since 2003 which will be
held this year from July 18-August 5, 2011 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
NYI's website is http://www.nyi.spb.ru

NYI is a phenomenal way for advanced undergraduates and beginning
graduate students to have an eye-opening overseas experience, while
continuing their focus on Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

*The school is a 3-week Institute, held in beautiful St. Petersburg, Russia, at
which students choose 4 seminars in a range of fields, especially
Linguistics.

*Faculty are from a wide range of US institutions, and this year's Linguistics program features, among others:

*Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh)

*Nina Kazanina (Bristol)

*Roumyana Pancheva (USC)

*Maria Polinsky (Harvard)

*John F. Bailyn and Julie Weisenberg (Stony Brook)

*All classes are in English.

* NYI is a superb way to spend 3-4 weeks of summer 2011!

There are two ways US students can participate:

(i) *For credit* through Stony Brook's 4-wk Study Abroad program to St.
Petersburg, for which they get 6-9 transferrable credits and pay SUNY
(low) tuition and a program Fee. For this option, which includes study
of beginning Russian and group excursions, a cultural program and so on,
the deadline is April 1, and interested students should go to the Stony
Brook Study Abroad website for application details.
http://www.stonybrook.edu/studyabroad/shorts_russia.html

(ii) Students can *attend NYI directly*, without receiving any US-side
credit (just our Certificate of Completion) and without paying US
tuition for the program, just a reduced Program Fee. For this option
interested students should contact me directly
at jbailyn@notes.cc.sunysb.edu. 

Richard Heck: "What is Context Dependence?"

Richard Heck is giving a talk to the Philosophy department on Friday, March 25 at 3:30 in Bartlett 206 entitled "What is Context Dependence?."

The paper can be found at:

http://www.umass.edu/philosophy/events/papers/Heck%20-%20Context%20Dependence.pdf

(Thanks Gary Hardegree .)

Call for Posters: LSA Summer Institute Workshop on Testing models of Phonetics and Phonology

Workshop at the Linguistic Institute 2011: Language in the WorldUniversity of Colorado at Boulder Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Co-sponsored by

Northwestern Department of Linguistics

Stanford Department of Linguistics

National Science Foundation

Workshop website

http://groups.linguistics.northwestern.edu/lsa2011-workshop/

This single day workshop aims to build connections between computational, experimental, and grammar-based research on phonetics and phonology. Studies using each of these general methodologies often have similar goals and produce mutually informing results, but they are usually presented in distinct journals and conferences, creating a barrier to their integration. The workshop brings together researchers in the areas of speech production, speech perception, and modeling of language acquisition.

**Spoken sessions**

*The balance between the gradient and the discrete in language production*

Gary Dell (U Illinois Urbana Champaign)

Implicit learning of artificial phonotactic patterns in the production system:

Connections to the perceptual system and to real phonotactic knowledge

Matt Goldrick (Northwestern)

Gradient symbol processing in speech production

*Listener adaptation to variation*

Jennifer Cole (U Illinois Urbana Champaign)

Modeling listener variability in prosody perception using transcription and

imitation as indirect measures of linguistic processing

Meghan Sumner (Stanford)

Variation-driven speech perception

*Acquisition biases and typological patterns*

Andrew Wedel (U Arizona)

Extending computational models into the laboratory:

Usage biases and the development of contrastive phoneme inventories

Joe Pater (U Massachusetts Amherst)

Formally biased phonology: Complexity in learning and typology

**Call for poster submissions**

In addition to the spoken session, a poster session will be held during the workshop.  We invite submission of abstracts reporting computational, experimental, and grammar-based research on phonetics and phonology.

Abstracts should be a one-page .pdf file, formatted at minimum 12-point single-spaced with 1 inch margins.  Tables, graphs and references can be on a separate page.  Abstracts must be submitted electronically to lsa2011-workshop@ling.northwestern.edu.  Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2011.

Accepted abstracts will be posted to the workshop website.

Note: Participants may also be interested in the workshop on "Information-based approaches to linguistics" to be held the following weekend (July 16-17). See https://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/workshops/WS5.html for more details.

Call for papers: workshop on argument structure Call for papers: An interdisciplinary workshop on argument structure September 2011 Paris

A  multidisciplinary workshop on the mental representation of verbal argument structure

Location: Paris
Dates: 5-7 of september 2011 (following Amlap)

website: http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Structuring-the-Argument.html

Location: CNRS,  Centre pouchet Paris 75017

Invited speakers:
John Beavers (University of Texas, http://comp.ling.utexas.edu/~jbeavers/)
Alec Marantz (NYU, http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ma988/)
Josep Quer (ICREA, http://www.icrea.cat/Web/ScientificStaff/Josep-Quer-Villanueva-131)
Jesse Snedeker (Harvard, http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?snedeker.html)
Cynthia Thompson (Northwestern, http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=CynthiaThompson )

Call for papers:
The aim of this workshop is to bring together scientists working in different fields and with different methodologies to discuss the mental representation of verbal argument structure. This topic has been addressed by work in a variety of fields (language and conceptual development, theoretical syntax and semantics, lexicology, linguistic typology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, etc.). In this workshop we hope to create a cross-disciplinary  platform to discuss ongoing research. We believe that an open exchange between scientists using different methods, working with different populations and within different theoretical frameworks will be of great benefit to the community. To this end we have invited speakers from different fields (language acquisition, neuro-imagery and aphasiology, theoretical syntax, theoretical semantics, sign language), each to be commented upon by a researcher from another discipline. A selection of papers presented in the workshop will be published in a special issue of Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes (RLV). 

We invite submissions for 30min talks. We especially encourage submissions reporting  inter-disciplinary (or inter-disciplinary motivated) work but will consider any submission (from any field) dealing with verbal argument structure. Sign language (LSF, BSL, ASL) interpreters will be available. Participation in the workshop is free.


Abstracts should be not longer than 500 words
Submissions:https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=strucarg2011
Abstract submission deadline: May 20th  2011
Notification: by june 15th 2011

Organizers:

Asaf Bachrach (umr 7023, CNRS) asaf,bachrach@sfl.cnrs.fr
Isabelle Roy  (umr 7023, CNRS & Paris 8) isabelle.roy@sfl.cnrs.fr
Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary, University of London) .stockall@qmul.ac.uk

__._,_.___

CUNY Conference meets this week

The 24th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will be held March 24-26 at Stanford University. The schedule is full of papers from past and present members of the linguistics department, including:

papers:
"Pragmatic Constraints Influence the Restoration of Optional Subjects" by Jennifer Mack, Charles Clifton, Jr. and Lyn Frazier

"Processing contrast versus implicature: the role of intonation and discourse" by Heeyeon Y. Dennison and Amy J. Schafer

posters:

Aging effects and working memory in garden-path recovery

Hyunsoo Yoo and Michael Walsh Dickey

Contrasting interference profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence

Brian Dillon, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett and Colin Phillips

Processing and Domain Selection: Quantificational Variability Effects

Jesse Harris, Charles Clifton, Jr. and Lyn Frazier

Does semantic focus influence lexical processing? Evidence from eye movements

Ashley Benatar, Charles Clifton and Adrian Staub

Parallelism and the Incremental Processing of Ellipsis

Masaya Yoshida, Katy Carlson and Michael Dickey

The where and when of anticipatory eye movements in the visual world paradigm

Adrian Staub, Matthew Abbott and Richard Bogartz