Starting this academic year, Magda Oiry has joined the Linguistics Department faculty. Magda completed a dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance dependencies by French learners at the University of Nantes in 2008, and is an expert on both the syntax of questions and their acquisition. She will have a joint appointment with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
Welcome Magda!
Magda Oiry writes:
The Thirty Fourth annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics meets this March in Potsdam. They have a special workshop on "Parenthesis and Ellipsis" that will include papers by Nick LaCara and Tracy Conner. Mr LaCara's paper is entitled "Inversion, Deletion, and Focus in "as" Parentheticals," and Ms Conner's paper is "Overt Functional Heads License Ellipsis: A Unified Account of VP-Ellipsis and Ellipsis in Possessive DPs."
Congratulations Tracy and Nick!
The fourth annual Tampa Workshop in Linguistics will take place at the University of South Florida in Tampa on March 21 and 22. The keynote speaker this year is former UMass syntax guru Jason Merchant. The deadline for abstracts is December 31. For more information, see http://www.tampalinguistics.org
Andrew Weir's poster "Article drop in headlines: failure of CP-level Agree" was accepted to the LSA's meeting this January in Boston.
Congratulations, Andrew!
Anisa Schardl and Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will give a post at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America meeting this January in Boston. Its title is: "Expressing uncertainty with `gisa' in Tshangla."
Congratulations Anisa and Elizabeth!
Nicholas LaCara will give a series of presentations in the upcoming months. He will give "Comparative deletion in "as" parentheticals" at the Ellipsis 2012 conference in November at the Universida de Vigo, Spain. (For more information, see http://webs.uvigo.es/ellipsis2012/index.php). And he will give a poster at the LSA's meeting in Boston this January, which, rumor has it, might be entitled "On the table lay a book, and on the sofa did too: Ellipsis, locative Inversion and why they are bad together."
Congratulations Nick!
To be, or to be with atelicity,
That is the question:
Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
In fits and starts with countless pains and strife,
Or to take Arms against the dogged Fates,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
Forever; and by sleep, to say we end
All relapse of the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to. ‘Tis an intermission
Devoutly to be wished? To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of telic death, alas,
What dreams may come amount to only one.
Would we expect that dreams come frequently
And often? In those dreams that kids jump rope,
And ample teeth fall out of bloody throats?
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
There is but one event for us in store:
To dream of nothing evermore.
--Joshua Levy