Class of 2016 Announced

Alice Harris writes:

It’s a great pleasure for us to welcome the students listed below into the graduate program.

Michael Clauss, mclauss@hawaii.edu, is finishing an M.A. at the University of Hawaii, where he’s working on differential case marking in Tamil, Hind, other  SE Asian languages, serial verbs, pro-drop, and other issues in syntax.

Hannah Greene, Osmiroid@gmail.com, is finishing an M.A. at the University of British Columbia, where she has done fieldwork fieldwork on Kwakwala; she is interested in event semantics.

Stefan Keine, stkeine@uni-leipzig.de, we all know already.  He is back at the University of Leipzig, working on formal syntax and semantics, with special interests in Chinese and in case and agreement.

Jérémy Pasquereau, jepasque@hotmail.com, is completing an M.A. at the University of Lyon and is interested in documented under-studied languages, especially languages of the Caucasus.

Shayne Sloggett, shayne.sloggett@gmail.com, graduated from UCSC and is working as a research assistant in Colin Phillip’s lab at the University of Maryland, with interests in syntax, psycholinguistics, and their interaction.

We look forward to seeing all of them in August or September.

Amanda Rysling, ajrysling@gmail.com, who is completing her B.A. at NYU, has also been accepted into the Fall class, but she will defer matriculation until the fall of 2012 so that she can accept a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland for 2011-12.  Ms. Rysling is interested in experimental approaches to phonology and phonetics, and in Polish.

 

 

Summer Research for Undergraduates

John McCarthy writes:

Joe Pater and I have a NSF grant that includes funding to provide 
summer research experience for undergraduate linguistics majors. It pays 
a stipend of $1500. To participate, you would need to be living in the 
area for most of the summer.

To apply, write to Joe and me listing the linguistics courses you've 
taken, the grades you've received, and the names of one or two of our 
faculty who are most familiar with your work. If you have computer, lab, 
or statistics skills, please include that information with your 
application.

The deadline for applications is April 26. Students graduating or 
leaving at the end of this semester are ineligible -- sorry.

Alice Harris at the psycholinguistic group on Monday

Alice Harris will be presenting to the psycholinguistics group Monday April 25th at 6 pm in rm. 301 of South College. The title and abstract are below. All are welcome - pizza will be served at 6, and the talk will get underway shortly thereafter. The acquisition group will also be meeting that evening starting at 5:15, and the groups will merge over pizza. 

Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi:  Functional or Incidental?

Alice C. Harris (work done with Arthur Samuel)

The term “exuberant exponence” refers to the occurrence of more than two markers (exponents) of a feature or bundle of features within a single word, as in this example from Batsbi (Nakh-Daghestanian, severely endangered):  d-ex-d-o-d-anŏ  ‘evidently they are tearing down’, where each instance of d- realizes the gender and number of the object. While multiple exponence is seen in this example, some verbal lexemes in the language govern no gender-number marking at all, some one exponent, and some two. In a series of three experiments, we compare verbs that have no agreement marker with ones that have a single marker, and we compare verbs with one agreement marker with ones that have two.  We find that word recognition is slower with agreement than without it; words with two agreement markers are recognized more slowly and with more errors relative to verbs with a single marker.  For grammaticality judgments, subjects were generally slower to respond when the verb carried more markers.  For verbs with no marker versus verbs with one marker, this extra cognitive effort yielded improved accuracy; however, this advantage did not extend to multiple exponence, as the extra processing time did not produce much improvement in accuracy. In cued recall, the presence of one marker conferred a clear advantage in accuracy, but the presence of two agreement markers actually resulted in decreased accuracy.  Overall, multiple exponence was found not to confer a functional advantage.

McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting and Experimental Phonology Working Group

Joe Pater writes:

On Tuesday April 26th the McCarthy-Pater grant group will meet at 4 pm in SC 301 to discuss goals for future development of OT-Help. For those of you who have been working with the software, please classify your suggestions on the 6-point scale below.

On Tuesday May 3rd at 10 am the Experimental Phonology Working Group will hear a presentation by Michael Becker and Lena Fainleib on "The naturalness of product-oriented generalizations". A draft of the paper can be found here (http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1036).

OT-Help Wishlist

1 - I needed this feature for something and was inconvenienced by not having it.
2 - I wanted this feature but got by without it
3 - I want this feature
4 - I think this feature is a good idea
5 - I need this feature but I can get it elsewhere
6 - I want this feature but I can get it elsewhere

Lynne Murphy has new book: Lexical Meaning

Lynne Murphy, University of Sussex and former UMass undergraduate, has a (almost new) book on Lexical Meaning, published by Cambridge University Press. You can find out more about Prof. Murphy from her blog:

http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

 

 

Tom Ernst at Dartmouth

Local adverb expert and independent linguist, Tom Ernst, will be teaching two undergraduate courses at Dartmouth in the Fall: "Syntax" and "Words."

Call for abstracts: BUCLD 36

THE 36th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY
CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract submissions are now open

NOVEMBER 4-6, 2011

Keynote Speaker:
Sandra Waxman, Northwestern University
"What's in a word? Links between linguistic and conceptual organization in infants and
young children"

Plenary Speaker:
Cornelia Hamann, University of Oldenburg
"Bilingual development and language assessment"

Lunch Symposium: "Morphology in second language acquisition and processing"
Harald Clahsen, University of Essex/University of Potsdam
Holger Hopp, University of Mannheim
Donna Lardiere, Georgetown University
Silvina Montrul (organizer), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submissions that present research on any topic in the fields of first and second language acquisition from any theoretical perspective will be fully considered. Eligible topics include: Bilingualism, Cognition and Language, Creoles and Pidgins,Dialects, Discourse and  Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input and Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics, Pragmatics,Pre-linguistic Development, Reading and Literacy, Signed Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception and Production.

A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-format/

We have begun accepting abstract submissions.
Please check http://www.bu.edu/bucld/ for a link to the submission form and any important updates.

DEADLINE: All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EDT, May 15, 2011.

FURTHER INFORMATION
General conference information is available at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld/
Boston University Conference on Language Development
96 Cummington Street, Room 244
Boston, MA 02215
U.S.A.
Questions about abstracts should be sent to abstract@bu.edu

Syntax and Semantics Colloquium at Paris: call for papers

CSSP 2011
Le neuvième Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris
21-23 septembre 2011 à l'université Paris-8

Conférenciers invités :

Cleo Condoravdi (PARC/ NLTT & Stanford)
Danièle Godard (CNRS UMR 7110 / Paris 7)
Jean-Pierre Koenig (Buffalo)
Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz)

DATE LIMITE DE SOUMISSION : 30 avril 2011

Le neuvième Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP 2011) aura
lieu à l’Université Paris-8 du 21 au 23 septembre 2011.

Le colloque a pour vocation de permettre la présentation de travaux qui
articulent recherche empirique et explicitation formelle ; il vise par
ailleurs à favoriser la comparaison de recherches menées dans des cadres
théoriques divers.

CSSP invite des communications qui portent sur des questions

-- de syntaxe,

-- de sémantique,

-- ou d'interface entre syntaxe et sémantique.

Nous invitons toutes les personnes intéressées à soumettre des résumés
pour une présentation de 30 minutes (plus dix minutes de discussion). Les
résumés doivent être anonymes. Ils ne doivent pas dépasser deux pages,
exemples et indications bibliographiques inclus. Le même auteur peut
soumettre un résumé comme seul auteur et un résumé comme co-auteur. On
favorisera les travaux qui n’ont pas déjà été présentés dans un colloque
majeur.

Les résumés (en Anglais ou en Français) seront évalués anonymement par un
comité de sélection international. Ils doivent être soumis par
l’intermédiaire du système Easychair, à l’adresse suivante :

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cssp2011

Date limite de soumission : 30 avril 2011
Notification d'acceptation : 1er juillet 2011
Programme : 15 juillet 2011

Comité d’organisation

Bridget Copley (CNRS UMR 7023 - Paris 8), Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (CNRS
UMR 7023 - Paris 8 / SMG), Léa Nash (Paris 8 - CNRS UMR 7023) Milan Rezac
(CNRS UMR 7023 - Paris 8), Isabelle Roy (Paris 8 - CNRS UMR 7023 - chair),
Elena Soare (Paris 8 - CNRS UMR 7023)

Comité scientifique

Anne Abeillé (Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7), Patricia Cabredo
Hofherr (CNRS/Université Paris 8 & Surrey Morphology Group - chair),
Brenda Laca (Paris 8 - UMR 7023) Alda Mari (Institut Jean Nicod ;
CNRS/ENS/EHESS), Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona),
Christopher Piñon (Université Lille 3), Henk van Riemsdijk, Jesse Tseng
(CLLE, Toulouse)

Pour plus d'information :

Site web : http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/cssp2011/index.html

Page de soumission :

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cssp2011

Karen Jesney goes to USC

Karen Jesney (http://people.umass.edu/kjesney/) has accepted a tenure-track position in phonology at USC. She'll be starting there in September.

Congratulations Karen!

 

Call for posters: Workshop at LSA Institute

Second call for posters at the Testing Models of Phonetics and Phonology

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

**Deadline for submissions: May 1st**

Co-sponsored by

Northwestern Department of Linguistics

Stanford Department of Linguistics

UMass Institute for Computational and Experimental Study of Language

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.

In addition to the spoken sessions (see below), 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 http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/LSAinfotheory/ for more details.

Call for papers: 18th Amsterdam Colloquium

--------------------------------------------

18th Amsterdam Colloquium

19/21 December 2011

--------------------------------------------

 

Invited Speakers

• Irene Heim (MIT)

• Donka Farkas (University of California, Santa Cruz)

• Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley)

• Chung-chieh Shan (Rutgers University)

 

Workshop on formal semantics and pragmatics of sign languages

• Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris and New York University)

 

Workshop on inquisitiveness

• Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University, Berlin)

 

Workshop on semantic evidence

 

• Richard Breheny (University College London)

• Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen)

 

Abstracts are due September 1, 2011.  For submission details:

http://www.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2011/

 

Organizing Committee 18th Amsterdam Colloquium

ILLC / Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam

Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands

tel: +31 20 5254537, fax: +31 20 5255206, mailto: m.d.aloni@uva.nl