Maria Turrero in Acquisition Lab/LARC

Maria Turrero will present the following paper in the acquisition lab / LARC meeting:

"Spanish L2 speakers and wh- island constraints: experimental ideas"

The meeting is Monday, October 15, in Herter 301 at noon.

Everyone is welcome!

Poole at SRG

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG will be meeting this Thursday at 6:30pm at the home of Partee et
al., 50 Hobart Lane in Amherst.  Ethan Poole will be talking about
partitive case in Finnish.  Bring money for pizza or BYOD.

Pater talks at McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting

Joe Pater will present on "learning probabilities over derivations" at the next McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting, Friday, October 19,  in the Partee room at 11. He'll be talking about the work on Harmonic Serialism in the paper below, and will also discuss the general approach, including  about how it can be applied to other derivational approaches to OT, with a summary of some work on learning in stratal OT that Alex Nazarov and he did last semester.

Staubs, Robert and Joe Pater. To appear. Learning serial constraint-based grammars. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press. http://people.umass.edu/pater/staubs-pater-serial-learning.pdf

UMass at NELS

The annual North East Linguistics Society meeting takes place October 19-21 at the City University of New York. UMass will be well represented:

Papers:

Andrew Weir (graduate student) "Why-stripping targets Voice Phrase"

Seth Cable (faculty) "Distance distributivity and pluractionality in Tlingit (and beyond)"

Elliott Moreton (alumnus) with Katya Pertsova "Pastry phonotactics" (delicious!)

Michael Becker and Maria Gouskova (alumni) "Source-oriented generalizations as grammar inference in yer deletion"

Posters:

Maria Biezma (alumna) (with Daniel Siddiqi and Andrew Carnie) "Counterfactuality in non-standard subjunctive conditionals"

 

Call for papers: LSALAA 2013

Workshop on Languages with and without articles 2013

The workshop will be held Feb 28 - March 1st 2013
Salle de conférences, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris.

Invited speakers :

- Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
- Östen Dahl (Stockholm)

Call deadline : November 25, 2012.

The workshop is organised by the project "Calcul de la référence nominale: langues avec et sans articles" of the Fédération Typologie et Universaux du Langage (CNRS FRE 2559) which aims to bring together researchers in

-- L1 and L2 language acquisition,
-- sign language linguistics and
-- comparative syntax and semantics.

We encourage submissions exploring the linguistic means used to establish the reference of a nominal expression, including, but not limited to, the following questions:

- what is the role of definite and indefinite articles in establishing the
reference of the DP?

- how are the effects of definite and indefinite articles achieved in
languages that lack those articles?

- what are the semantic distinctions involved in languages that
distinguish two distinct definite articles (see Ebert 1970, Löbner 1985
and much subsequent literature) or two indefinite articles (see von
Heusinger, Klaus & Klein, Udo (to appear) The Distribution of two
Indefinite Articles in Uzbek and references cited there)?

- what is the difference between definite and demonstrative determiners?

We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics, L1 and L2 acquisition of (in)definiteness in spoken and sign languages.

We invite submissions for 25-minute presentations (plus ten-minute
discussions).

Abstracts should be at most 2 pages in length (including examples and
references) written in French or English.

Abstracts must be anonymous and should be sent by e-mail (plain ASCII, rtf, ps or pdf) to : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Please write the (first) author's name plus the word 'abstract' in the
subject line of your message (e.g., 'Dupont abstract'), and include author name(s), affiliation, contact information and the title of the abstract in the body of the email. For co-authored papers indicate the email address that we should use for correspondence.

Website :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Journees-LSALAA-2013-Workshop-.html E-mail : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Abstract Submission Deadline : 25 nov / 25 Nov 2012
Notification of Acceptance : 20 déc / Dec 20th, 2012
Workshop :  Thur 28 Feb and Fri 1st March 2013

PhD position at Brandeis University

The Linguistics faculty of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University invites applications for a Ph.D. position under the supervision of Dr. Sophia A. Malamud, starting in September 2013. In addition to tuition remission, there is a stipend of $22,000 renewable for 4 years.

Individuals are encouraged to apply who have an interest in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, computational approaches to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, and/or linguistic annotation for meaning-related phenomena. The research topic will lie in the overlapping areas of modality, mood, sentence type, speech act modifiers, modelling of dialogue, and indirectness.

Applicants should have a Bachelor's or Masters degree or equivalent in linguistics, computational linguistics, speech technology, cognitive science, computer science, or a related discipline.

For more details on the linguistics faculty at Brandeis Computer Science, or on Dr. Malamud specifically, see

Sophia Malamud, Assistant Professor (website)
Brandeis Research Lab for Linguistics and Computation faculty (website)

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the project. Please contact Sophia A. Malamud (smalamud at brandeis.edu), attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV.

Details regarding the PhD program can be found at http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/computerscience/phd.html

For more information on the application procedure, please see the Graduate School website (http://www.brandeis.edu/gsas/apply/index.html) 

In order to ensure full consideration for funding, applications (including all supporting documents) need to be received by January 15, 2013.