Magda Oiry writes:
John Kingston writes:
The celebration for graduating seniors will be held Thursday, May 2nd,
1-2:30 in the department lounge. We'll have pizza and cake and gifts.
We'll be taking pictures, so please come in a form that you would want
to be depicted in.
Victor Ferreira (UC, San Diego) will talk on Wednesday 5/1, at 12:00-1:15 in Tobin 521B. A title and abstract of his talk follows
How do speakers' choices bring about successful communication?
Every produced utterance requires a speaker to make a cascade of choices: what words to use, what information to mention, what way to assemble a sentence. What principles guide such choices so as to allow successful communication? Explanations often default to the need to cater to listeners: Use words, include information, or assemble sentences per your listener's needs. In this talk, l describe research from my lab that points to a different principle: Speakers' choices are made to cater to speakers' needs. This fits with a broader division of labor for communicative success, whereby speakers work to speak efficiently, listeners work to understand speakers, and grammars constrain everyone so that everything works out.
Joe Pater writes:
Our departmental mini-conference will take place Thursday May 2nd. The talks will go from 9:30 - 12 in Machmer E-37, and will include presentations from all of our second years: Michael Clauss, Hannah Greene, Stefan Keine, Jérémy Pasquereau, and Shayne Sloggett. We will also have a poster session in the halls of South College immediately afterwards. All those who have promised posters, and anyone else who would like to participate, should claim their spot whenever they like before the poster session starts. I'm hoping that people will leave them up afterwards, so that we have some new art on the walls. Let's say that the poster presenters will be beside their posters from at least 12:15-12:45.
Ivy Sichel will give a talk entitled "(Resumptive) Pronouns and Competition" at 3:30 in the Partee Room on Friday, May 3. An abstract follows.
A Minimalist hypothesis about resumptive pronouns is that they should be no different from ordinary pronouns (McCloskey 2006). This paper substantiates the Minimalist hypothesis with respect to a particular view of pronouns: pronouns are ‘elsewhere’ elements. Just as the interpretation of ordinary pronouns, on this view, is determined by competition with anaphors, it is argued that the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is determined by competition with gaps. Based on systematic differences between optional and obligatory pronouns, I argue that the tail of a relative clause movement chain is realized as the least specified form available, ultimately a gap. Since the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns are fully determined by external factors, pronouns must be part of the syntactic derivation, and not lexical items merged from the (traditional) lexicon.
Kristine Yu writes:
Lisa Sanders and Adrian Staub will be giving presentations at this year's MayFest on May 3 and 4 at the University of Maryland. For more information go here.
The DGfS summer school in linguistics is sponsored by Humboldt University in Berlin this August. Early registration ends on Tuesday, April 30. For more information go here or here.
Joe Pater and Lisa Sanders of Psychology received a Collaborative Research grant from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts for their project on "Measuring brain activity in phonological learning.
Congratulations Joe and Lisa!
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Call for Papers: Extended submission deadline
THE TENTH INTERNATIONAL TBILISI SYMPOSIUM ON
LANGUAGE, LOGIC AND COMPUTATION
23-27 September 2013
Gudauri, Georgia
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2013
***********************************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Tenth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and
Computation will be held on 23-27 September 2013 in Gudauri,
Georgia. The Programme Committee invites submissions for contributions
on all aspects of language, logic and computation. Work of an
interdisciplinary nature is particularly welcome. Areas of interest
include, but are not limited to:
* Algorithmic game theory
* Computational social choice
* Constructive, modal and algebraic logic
* Formal models of multiagent systems
* Historical linguistics, history of logic
* Information retrieval, query answer systems
* Language evolution and learnability
* Linguistic typology and semantic universals
* Logic, games, and formal pragmatics
* Logics for artificial intelligence
* Natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
Authors can submit an abstract of four pages (including references) at
the EasyChair conference system here:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2013
PROGRAMME
The programme will include the following invited lectures, tutorials
and workshops.
Tutorials:
Logic: Rosalie Iemhoff (Utrecht University)
Language: Daniel Altshuler (University of Duesseldorf)
Computation: Samson Abramsky (University of Oxford)
Invited Lectures:
Balder ten Cate (University of California at Santa Cruz)
Agata Ciabattoni (Vienna University of Technology)
Thomas Colcombet (University of Paris)
Galit Sassoon (University of Jerusalem)
Alexandra Silva (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University )
Workshops:
Workshop on Algebraic Proof Theory
Invited speakers:
Matthias Baaz (Vienna University of Technology)
Alessio Guglielmi (University of Bath)
Kazushige Terui (University of Kyoto)
Organisers:
Agata Ciabattoni and Rosalie Iemhoff
More information:
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2013/Workshops/
Workshop on Aspect
Invited speakers:
Roumyana Pancheva (University of Southern California)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart University/University of Texas at Austin)
Corien Bary (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Organisers:
Daniel Altshuler, Daniel Hole and Sergei Tatevosov
More information:
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2013/Workshops/