WGBY documentary on UMass

WGBY will air a documentary on Sunday, Nov. 10, at 9PM entitled “The Radical Idea: UMass Amherst and America’s Educational Revolution." You can see a description, and a trailer, here.

Sharon Peperkamp gurus this week

Sharon Peperkamp will be visiting as our phonology guru starting on Monday November 4th. She will be presenting in Joe Pater and Lisa Sanders' seminar in Tobin 207 from 10:10 - 11:25 on Monday and Wednesday. The reading for Monday is:

Skoruppa, K. & Peperkamp, S. (2011). Adaptation to novel accents: Feature-based learning of context-sensitive phonological regularities. Cognitive Science, 35, 348-366.

She will also be discussing the following paper at a meeting of the PRG Thursday Nov. 7th chez Claire Moore-Cantwell:

Dupoux, E., Parlato, E., Frota, S., Hirose, Y., Peperkamp, S. (2011). Where do illusory vowels come from? Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 199-210.

Finally, on Sunday November 10th at 9 am in the Herter auditorium, she will deliver a plenary address at Phonology 2013, entitled "Assimilation from the listener's perspective: adult and infant data". The abstract is available here.

Phonology 2013 this weekend

The inaugural meeting of Phonology 2013 is hosted by UMass this weekend: November 9 and 10. Over 100 phonologists, from all corners of the world, will be in attendance. Registration is not required to attend, but a quick email to phonology-2013@linguist.umass.edu is required if you plan on participating in the meals or consuming the coffee break goodies. The plenary speakers are John McCarthy, Kevin Ryan (Harvard), and Sharon Peperkamp (LSCP). McCarthy’s talk is at 9 on Saturday, and entitled “Irreducible Parallelism.” Ryan’s talk is at 5:15 and entitled “Onset Weight, word weight, and the perceptual interval.” Peperkamp’s talk is at 9 on Sunday and entitled “Assimilation from the listener’s perspective: adult and infant data.” A schedule can be found here.

Phonology 2013 Methods Workshops on Friday

This Friday, November 8, Phonology 2013 hosts a series of Workshops on experimental and computational methods. They are in Machmer W 32 and W 37. For a schedule, go here.

Tom Roeper in Norway

Tom Roeper gave one of the keynote talks at the “Parallel Grammars and Multilingualism” in Trondheim Norway on October 16-18. Preceding that he gave a course on Multilingualism and Grammar, along with Johanne Paradis and Shana Poplack, For more information, go here.

Call for Papers: PHLINC 2

The University of Maryland is hosting the second of their biennial conference on topics of interest to linguists, philosophers and others in neighboring disciplines. This year’s conference is devoted to “Language and Other Minds." It will take place on February 14 and 15, 2014; Mandy Simons and Jason Stanley are the invited speakers, and there is a special discussion session devoted to acquisition issues led by Shevaun Lewis. Here is their description of the conference topic:

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The use of language relates to an awareness of other minds in two important ways. First, communication depends fundamentally on a sensitivity to the intentions and beliefs of others in conversation. Presupposition and implicature are interesting special cases of this. Second, with verbs like "think" and "know", we can talk about mental states explicitly, in ways that create familiar semantic challenges. Acquiring a language therefore involves the development of competence in both areas, not a simple task.

In this conference, we invite discussion of both sorts of relations between language and other minds, from the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and cognitive or developmental psychology. What understanding of knowledge, belief, desire and intention is expressed in the meanings of attitude verbs? In what ways does the use of such verbs rely on pragmatic enrichment? What is the correct understanding of knowledge in conversation, as expressed in presuppositions, evidentials, or epistemic modals? By what path do children become competent in these various areas? And what does this tell us about the linguistic representation of mental states, or semantic theories of attitude verbs?

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Submissions are open to graduate student researchers only. Presenters will have 30 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes for round-table discussion. Submissions to the conference may take one of two forms, depending on the author’s preferences:

Type 1: Abstract. Maximum of 1 page of text single-spaced, 12pt font, with an additional page for examples, figures, and references.
Type 2: Paper. Maximum 4000 words, double-spaced, 12pt font, suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please include references.

Submissions are accepted until December 15th, 2013, with final selections to be made by January 15th, 2014. Abstracts should be uploaded to EasyChair (abstracts, like papers, should be loaded as a separate document): https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=phlinc2.

Ned Block gives Philosophy seminar on Friday

Ned Block from NYU will be speaking on Friday, November 8, at 3:30 pm in Bartlett Hall, room 206.

The title of his talk is "Seeing – As in the Light of Vision Science.”