Kingston at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology

John Kingston presented a talk, along with UMass alumnus Shigeto Kawahara, on "The Phonological Consequences of Geminate Phonetics," at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology on December 11 at NINJAL in Kyoto.

Other talks at the conference by UMass alumni are:

Shigeto Kawahara (Rutgers University)?
"Lyman's Law is active in loan and nonce words: Evidence from judgement studies"

Mariko Sugahara (Doshisha University)
"Variations in the shiki domain formation of Kinki Japanese compound words: A pilot study"

Junko Ito and Armin Mester (UC Santa Cruz, ICU/UC Santa Cruz, NINJAL)
"Non-prominent positions"

The full program link is:

http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/phonology/InternationalConference/icpp/program/

Tanja Heizmann defends her dissertation!

Tanja Heizmann will defend her dissertation,

Acquisition of Exhaustivity in Clefts & Questions; and the Quantifier Connection - A Cross-linguistic Study of English and German on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 3:00 in Bartlett 206

Last Call for abstracts to: Optionality in Syntax and Semantics

Workshop: Properties and Optionality in Syntax and Semantics
13-14 February 2012
Utrecht University, The Netherlands

http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/h.devries1/poss2012.htm

Submission deadline: 10 January 2012

Invited speakers:
Philippe de Groote (INRIA)
Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)

Description
Much research in linguistics over the last decades has involved various procedures of syntactic optionality, which work in parallel to intensional phenomena in semantics. Certain phenomena of optionality, e.g. of unspecified objects or by-phrases in passives, have been treated by assuming empty syntactic positions (Bach 1980, Landau 2010).
Other optionality phenomena, e.g. of verbal adjuncts, were traditionally treated in Montague Grammar using intensional properties, but are more standardly treated as involving modification in event semantics (Parsons 1990, Landman 2000). Even some cases of adjectival modification (e.g. skillful doctor, beautiful dancer) that were traditionally analyzed as involving properties have been argued to involve event modification (Larson 2002). Both theories of intensionality and event semantics take the modification process to be purely semantic and avoid any empty syntactic positions. 

The variety of optionality and modification phenomena, and their intricate relations with intensional properties, lead to some hard puzzles about syntax and semantics:
1. Should there be a unified grammatical framework for analyzing phenomena of optionality?
2. Is there still a role for intensional properties in accounting for optionality effects?
3. How precise and elegant are current hypotheses about optionality in natural language grammar?

The workshop will examine these questions from the perspectives of formal syntax and semantics, and the formal philosophy of intensional properties. 

Invited speakers:
Philippe de Groote (INRIA): TBA
Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt): TBA
Contributed Talks:
- Chris Blom (Utrecht): ACG fragment for verbs with optional arguments
- Hanna de Vries (Utrecht): Group distributivity and property-denoting indefinites
- Marijana Marelj (Utrecht): Optionality and argument structure
- Reinhard Muskens (Tilburg) and Noor van Leusen (Nijmegen): Events, Time, Worlds, Roles, Linking, and Variable Management
- Yoad Winter (Utrecht): Property descriptions in locative PPs
- Joost Zwarts (Utrecht): The role of events in adjective modification

In addition, there will be a number of slots reserved for solicited papers.

Reimbursement: Depending of funding restrictions, presenters of selected talks may expect partial reimbursement of their trip and staying expenses. 

Procedure
We invite authors to submit an abstract (1 or 2 pages including references) for a 30-minute presentation (+10 minute discussion). Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=poss2012

Submission deadline: 10 January 2012

Notification:17 January 2012.

Call For Abstracts: ESSLLI in Opole 6-17 August 2012

First Call for Papers

ESSLLI 2012 STUDENT SESSION

Held duringThe 24th European Summer Schoolin Logic, Language and Information
Opole, Poland, August 6-17, 2012

Deadline for submissions: March 20, 2012http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/

ABOUT:
The Student Session of the 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Opole, Poland on August 6-17, 2012. We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic & Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and will appear in the student session proceedings. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.
ESSLLI 2012 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. Consult the main ESSLLI website (link below) for further information.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
Authors must be students, i.e., may not have received the Ph.D. degree before August 2012. All submissions must be in PDF format and be submitted to the conference EasyChair website. Submissions may be singly or jointly authored. No one may submit more than one singly and one jointly authored paper.
There are two types of papers. Long papers of up to 8 pages will be considered for both oral presentation and the poster session. Short papers of up to 4 pages will be considered as submissions for the poster session.

Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information, and must be must be received by March 20, 2012.

More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website: http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/

Links to previous years' proceedings are also available there.

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to esslli2012stus@loriweb.org

For general inquiries about ESSLLI 2012, please consult the main ESSLLI 2012 page, http://esslli2012.pl/

 

Call for abstracts: LabPhon 13 in Stuttgart 27-29 July 2012

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2012

Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2012

Abstracts are solicited for contributed papers for presentation as 20-minute oral contributions or as posters. Contributions relating to the conference themes are especially encouraged; there will also be sessions for non-thematic papers.The overall theme for the conference is “Phonological and phonetic computations: between grammar and neural activity.” Our goal is to bring together researchers from phonology, phonetics, and adjacent psycho- and neurosciences and to seek to advance these disciplines by encouraging the joint pursuit of interdisciplinary research questions.

Specific topics that address this theme are the following:Simulation as a research method in Laboratory Phonology.Temporal mechanisms in neural processing of sounds and prosodies.Rhythm and Temporal Structure.Rich memory for rich phonology.Non-thematic sessions (both oral and poster) will include contributions to other topics of interest to the LabPhon community.

For more information:

http://www.labphon13.labphon.org/callforpapers.html

Roeper in the United Kingdom

Tom Roeper gave one of the two public lectures at "The Image of the Child's Mind in Grammar," at "The Past and Future of Universal Grammar," at Durham University in Durham, UK on December 17th. Jill de Villiers was also  a speaker at this conference. For more information, go to http://www.dur.ac.uk/whatson/event/?eventno=11318

While overseas, Tom also gave a talk at University College London entitled "Internal Merge and Avoid Phase in Acquisition," and a talk at St Mary's College, "Building Nodes: Recursives and Possessives in AAE and acquisition."

North American Summer School in June in Austin

The fifth North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information,
NASSLLI  2012, will be hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, on June
18-22, 2012.

http://nasslli2012.com/

NASSLLI is a one-week summer school aimed at graduate students and advanced
undergraduates in Philosophy, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology and
related fields, especially students with interdisciplinary interests or whose
research crosses traditional boundaries between these subject areas. The summer
school is loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe and will
consist of 5 sessions of 90 minute courses each day during the week of June
18-22, followed by a Turing Symposium on June 23 celebrating the first
centenary of Alan Turing's birth, and the 13th Texas Linguistics Society
conference on June 23, 24.

Courses

* Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam / Stanford University): Logical
Dynamics of Information and Interaction
* Craige Roberts (The Ohio State University): Questions in Discourse
* Noah Goodman (Stanford University): Stochastic Lambda Calculus and its
Applications in Semantics and Cognitive Science
* Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh): Combinatory Categorial Grammar:
Theory and Practice
* Chris Potts (Stanford University): Extracting Social Meaning and Sentiment
* Catherine Legg (University of Waikato): Possible Worlds: A Course in
Metaphysics (for Computer Scientists and Linguists)
* Adam Lopez (Johns Hopkins University): Statistical Machine Translation
* Eric Pacuit (Stanford University): Social Choice Theory for Logicians
* Valeria de Paiva (Rearden Commerce) & Ulrik Buchholtz (Stanford University):
Introduction to Category Theory
* Adam Pease (Rearden Commerce): Ontology Development and Application with
Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)
* Ede Zimmermann (University of Frankfurt): Intensionality
* Thomas Icard (Stanford University): Surface Reasoning
* Nina Gierasimczuk (University of Groningen): Belief Revision Meets Formal
Learning Theory
* Robin Cooper (Göteborg University) & Jonathan Ginzburg (University of Paris):
Type Theory with Records for Natural Language Semantics
* Jeroen Groenendijk (University of Amsterdam) & Floris Roelofsen (University
of Amsterdam): Inquisitive Semantics
* Shalom Lappin (King's College London): Alternative Paradigms for
Computational Semantics
* Tandy Warnow (University of Texas at Austin): Estimating Phylogenetic Trees
in Linguistics and Biology
* Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart / University of Texas at Austin) & Mark
Sainsbury (University of Texas at Austin): Vagueness and Context
* Steve Wechsler (University of Texas at Austin) & Eric McCready (Osaka
University): Meaning as Use: Indexicality and Expressives

Special Presentations

* Pranav Anand (University of California at Santa Cruz)
* Nicholas Asher (IRIT, CNRS/Université Paul Sabatier)
* Martin Davis (Emeritus NYU)
* Robert King (University of Texas at Austin)
* Oleg Kiselyov (FNMOC)
* Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute)
* Sarah Murray (Cornell University)
* Chung-chieh Shan (Cornell University)
* Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh)
* More to be announced...

Events

* Turing Symposium: June 23
* Texas Linguistics Society Conference: June 23, 24
* More to be announced...

Registration fees: academic discount rate $175; professional rate $400. Student
scholarships will be available for 50 students
(http://nasslli2012.com/scholarships; application deadline: February 29).
Scholarships include registration and may include a further subsidy for travel
and accommodation.

More information is available at:

http://nasslli2012.com/