UMass at LSA

The 88th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America was held January 2-5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  UMass was well-represented, with the following presentations given by current UMass residents:

Yangsook Park
"Different Monsters for Person and Adverbial Indexicals in Korean"

Brian Smith
"Rhythmic conditioning of ‘-licious' in English"

Yelena Fainleib
"Lexical Distributions and Productive Generalizations of Stress in Modern Hebrew nouns"

Kristine Yu (with Sameer ud Dowla Khan)
"Intonational phonology in infant-directed speech"

Lisa Green (with introduction by Tom Roeper)
"Diversity in Linguistics"

and the following UMass alumni also presenting:

Emily Elfner (McGill)
"Prosodic boundary strength in verb-initial structures: Evidence from English and Irish"

Jill Beckman (University of Iowa)
"Speaking Rate effects on VOT in German Stops: Phonological Implications"

Tohru Noguchi (Ochanomizu University)
"Reflexive Verb Constructions in Japanese"

Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins)
"iPython Lambda Notebook: a system for digital fragments in semantics"

Ana Arregui (with Maria Luisa Rivero and Andres Salanova, all from University of Ottawa)
"Aspect and tense in evidentials"

Janet Randall (with Lucas Graf, both at Northwestern University)
"Linguistics meets 'legalese': syntax, semantics and jury instruction reform"

Partee wins trivia prize at LSA meeting

Barbara Partee writes:

The LSA meeting in Minneapolis featured some events commemorating the 90th anniversary of the LSA, including two days of short talks contrasting the state of things in 1924 and 2014 in the different subfields, and of the LSA itself, and women in linguistics, and other related topics, all interesting. And there was a video compiled by Dennis Preston from materials sent in response to a year-long appeal (including a number of photos from the 1974 Linguistic Institute at UMass Amherst), which ended with a quiz: photos (many of them cryptic in one way or another) and clues about 10 linguists, and we were all invited to submit entries. There was also a “tie-breaker” photo with two guys in T-shirts, one with an undecipherable autograph, one with something written in some non-English language. It turned out that I won, to my great surprise. I guess I’m now a certified “old guy”, because I think you had to be. I was one of two to get 7 right, and I got the first three words on the t-shirt (I didn’t know the language, but it was something Scandinavian, and I deciphered “I have not ….” (turned out to be Icelandic, and to say ‘I have no idea what this T-shirt says’.) My prize: free registration for next year’s LSA, in San Francisco – so maybe I’ll go! 

From the WHISC editor:

You can see the LSA’s 90th anniversary video presentation here. There is a section that includes the artistic accomplishments of several notable linguists — be sure to check out Emmon Bach’s poem and Barbara’s photography, as well as the contest that Barbara describes above.

Workshop on Gradability and Quantity

MIT and McGill University will sponsor a Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and Brain. The workshop is hosted by MIT on January 31 and February 1.  UMass alumni Irene Heim, Roger Schwarzschild and Bernhard Schwarz will be giving presentations, as will UMass syntax guru, Roumyana Pancheva. For a full schedule, go here.

Call for Applications: Summer School on Mathematical Philosophy for Women

Sponsored by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy

The summer school is open to women with a keen interest in mathematical philosophy. Applicants should be female students of philosophy, or philosophically minded logicians, mathematicians, or scientists at an advanced undergraduate level, in a master program, or at an early PhD level. To apply for participation, please send a cover letter (including a statement of motivation) and your CV (ideally everything in one pdf file) to mathsummer2014@lrz.uni-muenchen.de. A separate letter of recommendation should be sent to the same address. Please indicate in your cover letter if you wish to present your own project. The deadline for applications is February 15, 2014. Decisions will be made by March 1, 2014. The participation fee is 200€. The language of all events will be English.