In July, Barbara Partee joined Lila Gleitman, George Miller, Noam Chomsky, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Barbara Landau, Aravind Joshi and a long list of others as fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
Congratulations Barbara!
The newsletter of the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
In July, Barbara Partee joined Lila Gleitman, George Miller, Noam Chomsky, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Barbara Landau, Aravind Joshi and a long list of others as fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
Congratulations Barbara!
Magda Oiry writes:
The First Meeting of the Acquisition Lab/LARC (Language Acquisition Resource Center) will be this Monday, September 10th. New time and place! From 12 to 1:30 in Herter 301.
1. Organization: introductions, future meetings, experimental plans
2. Tracy Conner, back from the Sociolinguistics symposium in Berlin will be presenting 'When it’s Not an Option: Probing the Limits of Variation in Possessive Marking in Child African American English through Multi-method Research'.
On September 22, UMass will host the American International Morphology Meeting. The keynote speaker will be Gregory Stump, who will present "Variable Affix Order and the Amorphousness Hypothesis." There will be opening presentations by UMass alumnus James Blevins and Heidi Harley. For more information, go to:
John Kingston writes:
Phonetics Lab Meetings will be held this semester, every other Monday, starting next Monday, 10 September 2012, from 4-5:30 PM. The meetings are held in the Phonetics Lab, Bartlett 6. Everyone interested in attending and participating is welcome. If you know someone who might be interested but who isn't on this list, please feel free to forward this message to them. Snacks are provided. The topic for each lab meeting will be announced shortly beforehand. Here they are for the first two meetings.
10 September 2012:
A brief review of experiments in progress.
Deciding on the snack menu for the rest of the semester.
Separating lexical from auditory effects on speech perception. A
presentation by Kevin Mullin of the results of a recent phoneme monitoring experiment designed to separate in time the effects of word recognition from the auditory effects of a sound's neighboring sounds on its recognition.
24 September 2012:
Phonotactic biases are fast. A presentation by K. Mullin of a phoneme
identification experiment that pits phonotactic biases against
auditory biases and finds that phonotactic biases are present for
earlier responses but are weakened or absent in later responses.
Filling Sara Vega-Liros shoes in the department office until her replacement is hired is Aaron Walker. He spent last week getting a crash course from Sarah on office managing, and will start up full time Monday. Stop on in and welcome Aaron to the department
Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:
The first meeting of the phonology reading group will be:
Thursday, 13 September
6:30-8:00 at Packards, in Northampton (we'll be in the 'Mahogany room')
(14 Masonic st.)
We'll do a round of about six 'lightning presentations'. Each presenter
will read an article (but no-one else needs to read it), and give a 5-10
minute presentation about it. You can use a handout if you see fit -
try to keep it to a page.
I've created the following google doc, on which you can suggest articles for people to present, or claim ones to present yourself. We can just keep this list going throughout the semester, and continue to add to it and present from it. If you have this link, you should be able to edit the doc - let me know if you have problems.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w_OFy9QeOyobJYbOC5jbvFabA5GJCn0aNJmGLy5loQw/edit
In the future, we'll alternate our meetings between Thursday night in
Northampton, and Friday at 11 on campus. It's confusing, but I'll keep
you all posted.
Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten writes:
Claire and I (your departmental colloquium monsters) are pleased to announce the following speakers for the fall colloquium series:
October 5: Valentine Hacquard
October 19: Daniel Swingley
October 26: John Hale
November 30: Paul Smolensky
A date for one more colloquium, with Jonathan Bobaljik, will be announced very soon.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to let us know. Locations of receptions and information about arranging individual meetings with invited speakers will be announced closer to the date of each talk.
"Reduplication in Harmonic Serialism," by John McCarthy, Wendell Kimper and Kevin Mullin has appeared in volume 22 of Morphology.
Congratulations gentlemen!
Barbara is in Paris at the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, where she gave a paper “Controversies in the History of Formal Semantics: Linguistic Form and Logical Form”; abstract, slides, and the whole program are online here:
https://sites.google.com/site/sinnundbedeutung17/program .
Also on the program are UMass PhDs Florian Schwarz, Roger Schwarzschild, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menendez-Benito, and Dorit Abusch (Philosophy), and UMass visitors (and Hobart Lane residents!) Francesca Foppolo, Floris Roelofsen, and Sonja Tiemann.
Brian Dillon and Rajesh Bhatt write:
The PsychoSyntax meetings ride again! Once again we'll be meeting biweekly to hear from folks about research going on locally in syntax, adult language comprehension, and related topics / issues.
We'll be having an organizational meeting at 11am on Wednesday, 9/12, in Bartlett 11. The goal of this meeting will be just to figure out a meeting time that works for everyone for this semester, and try to hammer out a presentation schedule for the semester. Everyone is invited, and we'd especially like to encourage people to think about coming and presenting unfinished (and maybe even not-yet-begun) projects! If you're in the beginning stages of a project, and just want to talk through your ideas, this is a good forum to get useful feedback.
If you can't make the Wednesday meeting, no worries; just send me a message letting me know when you are available for meetings, and whether you have something you'd like to talk about at one of our meetings. And if you'd like to be added to the PsychoSyntax email list, drop me a line to let me know.
Stefan Keine's paper, "How complex are complex words? Evidence from linearization" was accepted for publication in Lingua over the summer.
Congratulations Stefan!
Seth Cable's paper "EPP in Dholuo" has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, volume 30. Congratulations Seth!
Alumna Ania Lubowicz (University of Minnesota) has published her book "The Phonology of Contrast," in Equinox Publishing's Advances in Optimality Theory series. Congratulations Ania!
In July, Barbara Partee sent to WHISC the following report:
I gave a talk at the conference LOGICA 2012 in the Hejnice Monastery north of Prague June 18-22, “The history of formal semantics”, and Volodja and I spent the following week enjoying time with their colleagues in Prague.
When Rajesh came to Moscow for a conference on his way to St Petersburg, he and I spent Saturday July 7 being tourists in Moscow – my first time inside the Kremlin since 1959! - and then enjoying one of Volodja’s home-cooked meals before Rajesh took the midnight train to St. Pete. We hope to see him in Moscow again after John Bailyn’s New York Institute summer school is over. Tech note: Rajesh did better at figuring out the route on foot from the Kremlin to the Tretyakovsky Gallery with the GPS in his iPhone than I did with my map. I now want an iPhone.
The new crew of work-study student help has arrived in the department. They are:
Krista, who is in the department Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 10-12
Meaghan, who is in the department Monday, Wednesday and Friday:
1:30-5:00
Mike, who is in the department Tuesday and Thursday 9-11.
In addition, the department's new Information Technology guru is on board. His is Ken Ottaviano, and he'll be in the department Monday and Wednesday 3-5, and Friday 10-12 and 3-5. Ken is a junior Computer Science major and will be helping out with various IT issues such as printing problems, email, software issues, viruses, etc.
John McCarthy writes:
GrantSearch for Graduate Students (GSGS) is an office in the Graduate School that helps graduate students apply for grants and fellowships. Examples of successful applications are particularly useful. If you would be willing to share your successful application with other graduate students, please send it as an email attachment to GSGS at gsgs@grad.umass.edu<mailto:gsgs@grad.umass.edu>. Staff will redact your name from the application materials. Applications for all external grants and fellowships are needed: NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants, Ford Foundation, AAUW, SSHRCC, Fulbright, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera (said by a bald man).