Walter Sistrunk at acquisition lab/LARC tomorrow

Walter Sistrunk will present "The Syntax of Zero in African America Relative Clauses" (abstract below) at the lab acquisition/LARC meeting tomorrow, Monday October 29, in Herter 301 at noon. Everyone is welcome!

Relative clauses in African American are distinct from those used in Standard English. The purpose of this study is to give a description of the observed patterns and to discover the principles at work which explain why these distinct patterns exist in both African American and Standard English. Pesetsky & Torrego’s (2003) (P&T) analysis of relative clause subject-nonsubject asymmetry accounts for zero object relatives while restricting zero subject relatives. However, an analysis that restricts zero subject relatives poses a problem for African American English (AAE), where zero object relatives and zero subject relatives occur. I argue P&T’s (2003) analysis can still account for zero subject relatives if we considered other move operations in AAE.

Nick LaCara at SRG on Thursday

Nick Lacara will present a paper at SRG this Thursday, October 31, at dinnertime. SRG meets at Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten's house in Northampton. Bring $5 for pizza, or your own dish!

One Year Scholarships for PhD students in Berlin

Luis Vicente writes:

SFB632, a research center integrating several dozen people from the
University of Potsdam, the Free University of Berlin, and Humboldt
University, is offering 4 one-year scholarships for visiting PhD students
whose research focuses on Information Structure (no pun intended). The grants will cover the period April 2013 to March 2014. The prospective students will be affiliated to one or two of the SFB subprojects, for which see http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de . Please refer to the attached document for more details. The deadline for application is December 18.

Barbara's colloq at Rutgers

Barbara Partee gave a colloq talk at Rutgers on October 23 that can be heard at:

https://ruccs1.rutgers.edu/talks/20121023_talk.html

The title of her talk is "Psychologism and anti-psychologism in the history of formal semantics."

Anisa Schardl in Barcelona

Anisa gave a talk yesterday, October 26, at Information, Discourse Structure, and Levels of Meaning (IDL12) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her talk was entitled "Common ground mismatch: evidence from a discourse particle."

Congratulations Anisa!

Workshop on Phylogenetics at Yale

Ryan Kasak from Yale writes:

We would like to invite you to a workshop on the uses of phylogenetics in linguistics to be hosted at Yale University on Friday, December 14, 2012 in New Haven, Connecticut. Speakers will include Charles Nunn (Harvard University), Erich Round (University of Queensland), and Claire Bowern (Yale University). The workshop will take place on-campus in room 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), located at 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511. This workship is being offered at no cost to attendees, and is especially pertinent to those in the area of linguistics, ecology, and anthropology. Please contact Sean Gleason (sean.gleason@yale.edu) or Ryan Kasak (ryan.kasak@yale.edu) to RSVP. 

Please see http://pamanyungan.sites.yale.edu/phylogenetics for more information.

Oppan Chomsky Style

It's at 3:20