Jason Overfelt writes:
Join us for a double-header at SRG on Thursday, March13. We will hear the following 20(10) practice talks while enjoying pizza at Jyoti and Sakshi's place.
Sakshi Bhatia: Focus Particles in Hindi-Urdu
Ethan Poole: A configurational account of Finnish case
Information for future meetings can be found at the following link.
Alexandra Jesse writes:
This is a reminder that Jeff Moher (Brown) is giving a talk this week in the Cognitive Psychology Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15).
The title of the talk is "Distractor suppression in attention and action".
The abstract is:
Human behavior is frequently interrupted by distractions, from billboards to noisy neighbors to email notifications. I will present work that addresses how and when distractor suppression mechanisms improve task performance by minimizing interference from task-irrelevant objects. Using a variety of methodologies including eye tracking, 3D reach tracking, and electroencephalography, we have found evidence for multiple distinct distractor suppression mechanisms that may be implemented through both implicit learning and explicit cueing. In some cases, even interference from perceptually salient distractors can be mitigated. Together, these data highlight the critical role that distractor interference and distractor suppression play in both attention and goal-directed action.
Magda Oiry writes:
Meghan Armstrong will be presenting at LARC this coming Thursday. The title of her talk is:
"Child comprehension of epistemic meaning throughout the grammar: lexical and prosodic considerations"
We will meet at 9:45 in room 301 on Thursday, March 13.
Everyone welcome!
The Anthropology Department is hosting a talk by Philip Deering on "Indigenous Language and Education” this Thursday 3/13 at 2:30 in Commonwealth College Events Hall, Rm. 160E next to the Roots Cafe.
THE 39th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
NOVEMBER 7-9, 2014
Keynote Speaker: Richard Aslin, University of Rochester
“From sounds to words to grammatical categories: The role of distributional learning”
Plenary Speaker: Katherine Demuth, Macquarie University
“Prosodic effects on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Evidence from perception and production”
Submissions of abstracts for 20-minute talks will be accepted beginning April 1 at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-submission/
DEADLINE. All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2014.
Submissions that present research on any topic in the fields of first and second language acquisition from any theoretical perspectives will be fully considered, including: Artificial Languages, Bilingualism, Cognition & Language, Creoles & Pidgins, Dialects, Discourse and Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input & Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics, Pragmatics, Pre-linguistic Development, Reading and Literacy, Signed Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception & Production.
A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-format/
FURTHER INFORMATION
General conference information is available at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld
Yale University will be hosting a workshop on sound systems of Mexico and Central America April 4-6. The workshop brings together an international group of linguists to discuss the phonetics and phonology of languages indigenous to Central America. UMass anthropologist Emiliana Cruz and linguist John Kingston are among those who are on the roster of participants. Registration is free and open to the public. For more information, go here.
The Workshop on “Indefinites in Discourse Structure”, is part of the workshop series 'Referential Expressions in Discourse’ (RED) and the follow up of the Workshops “Indefinites and Beyond” (Göttingen, 2011) and “Indefinites in Discourse” (Cologne, 2013).
Invited Speakers:
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart / Austin)
Anastasia Giannakidou (Chicago)
Organizers:
Klaus von Heusinger (Cologne)
Edgar Onea (Göttingen)
Call for Papers:
The workshop invites contribution to different kinds of indefinites and their semantic and pragmatic effects on discourse structure. Abstracts are invited for 20 minute talks (plus 10 minutes for discussion) on topics dealing with the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite, definite noun and demonstrative NPs with respect to discourse structure, discourse development and context.
Workshop Format:
On the first day will be a regular conference with talks, while the second day will have a different format. We plan to organise discussion groups around 2 or 3 dedicated topics identified on the first day.
Abstract Submission Guidelines:
Please send your abstracts electronically (pdf, ps, rtf) to red-2014@uni-koeln.de. Abstracts should be no more than two pages; examples should be part of the text. Please do not include your name or affiliation on the abstract. The number of abstracts per author is limited to one singly-authored and one co-authored abstract.
Please insert the following information in the accompanying email:
Paper title
Name(s) of author(s)
Affiliation(s) of author(s)
Email address to which the notification of acceptance should be mailed
Abstract submission deadline: April, 15, 2014.
Notification of acceptance: May 1, 2014.
The 32nd annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics meets this weekend at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. UMass is in force:
Alumna Gillian Gallagher (NYU) has a paper “The effect of locality on two phonotactic restrictions in Cochabamba Quechua"
Jeremy Pasquereau has an alternate paper “Phonological degrees of labiality: evidence from Karata"
Vincent Homer has a poster, with Carlo Geraci (CNRS) “Decomposing Negative Modals into their Syntactic Atoms."
Jason Overfelt has a poster The Subclausal Locality of Extraposition from NP."
Rajesh Bhatt and Stefan Keine have a talk “Verb Clusters and the Semantics of Head Movement."
Vincent Homer also has a paper “Anatomy of `ne que’."
Several members of the department got a tour of the department’s new quarters in the New Academic Classroom Building. A few shots have been leaked to WHISC.
