Plan for a Fulbright

Planning for Fulbright - presentation by the Office of Professional Development

Tuesday, December 2, 4:30 pm, Goodell Hall - Graduate school lobby

UMass graduate students have done very well in Fulbright applications.  Last year all eight who applied won the award.  This panel will assist graduate students contemplating a Fulbright year abroad for research or further study.  Participants include Professor David Mednicoff, a Fulbright scholar and Director of Middle Eastern Studies; Kathryn Julian, a PhD candidate in History and Fulbright student in Germany last year; and John Dickson, advisor in the Office of National Scholarship Advisement.  While applications are due in September of each year, understanding the criteria and timetable for Fulbright will assist those interested in applying.  Light refreshments will be served.

Register here: Fulbright for Grads

Hideharu Tanaka speaks at the Syntax Workshop

In the Syntax Workshop on Thursday, Dec 4, Hideharu Tanaka will give a talk entitled: "Pseudo-gapping: A Case against Defective Intervention.” The talk starts at 4:10 in ILC 451.

Everyone is welcome!

Yutaka Ohno speaks on Thursday

Visiting Scholar Yutaka Ohno (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto) has been invited to give a talk for the UMass Asian Languages Program next on Thursday, December 4, at 4PM in Herter 301. Prof. Ohno will discuss the secrets of writing a successful textbook, such as the one he co-authored, Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. For more details, go here.

UUSLAW on Saturday, December 6

The UConn, UMass, Smith Language Acquisition Workshop (UUSLAW) is Saturday, December 6, at UMass. The workshop begins at 9:30 in ILC N400. A schedule of talks follows.

9:30-10:00 Greetings and Refreshments

10:00-10:30: Mike Clauss and Jeremy Hartman (UMass). “Syntactic Cues to Adjective Type"

10:30-11:00: Ryosuke Hattori (UConn). “Acquisition of Floating Quantifiers in Japanese: Evidence against the Transformation"

11:00-11:30: Vanessa Petroj (UConn). TBA

11:30-11:45 Coffee

11:45-12:00: Barbara Pearson (UMass): TBA

12:00-12:30: Covadonga Sanchez-Alvarado (UMass). “Information Structure in L2 in Spanish"

12:30-1:00: Megan Armstrong (UMass). “Elicitation tasks for mental state intonation in non-standard varieties of English and Spanish"

1:00-2:00: Lunch

2:00-2:30: Kadir Gökgöz (UConn). “Aspects of Bimodal Bilingual Language Development"

2:30-3:00: Rebecca Woods (UMass visitor). “Embedded Inverted Interrogatives: Investigating Strong Islands in Acquisition of Questions"

3:00-3:30: Coffee

3:30-4:00: Andie Faber (UMass). “Assigning Grammatical Gender to Novel Nouns in L1 and L2 Spanish"

4:00-4:30: Tom Roeper (UMass). “Update Common Ground, Presupposition Failure, Question-under-Discussion, and but-implicatures: How does a child get it all co-ordinated?"

Call for papers: Sinn und Bedeutung

Sinn und Bedeutung 20 Workshop:"Experimental Methodology in Semantics and Pragmatics"

Location:           University of Tübingen, Germany

Date:                  Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Call deadline:     February 15th 2015

The number of researchers in semantics and pragmatics using experiments as a tool to evaluate hypotheses derived from linguistic theories is increasing. This workshop offers a forum for methodological reflection on what can and cannot be achieved with experimental work in our field and which paradigms are best suited to yield reliable and valid results for answering current questions in semantics and pragmatics.  

We invite contributions addressing one or more of the following topics:

1.  Method Evaluation

1.1  Comparing experimental methods: What are the advantages and limitations of existing psycholinguistic methods?  How can these methods be combined and extended for the purpose of investigating questions in semantics and pragmatics? How can the current methodological repertoire be extended by adapting and developing new techniques?

1.2  Experimentation vs. other methods:What are the advantages of corpus studies, field work, and computational modelling compared to experimental methods?  How can these other methods complement experimental evidence?

1.3  Basis and Limits of Speaker Judgments

2.  Implications of Experimental Results for Semantic and Pragmatic Theorizing

2.1  Does the predicted effect reflect the structure under investigation or some processing constraint?

2.2  (How) can we supplement formal theories with (independent) processing components?

2.3  What linking hypotheses are necessary to relate experimental data to semantic/pragmatic theory?

2.4  How can experimental results contribute to a reassessment of central theoretical concepts?

3.  Problematic Data

3.1  How can we deal with conflicting evidence?

3.2  What do null effects tell us? 

Call for Papers:

We invite submissions for 20-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less then 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than February 15th 2015. 

Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link: 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub20

For questions or enquiries please write to: sub20xmeth@gmail.com

Unravel Magazine

Unravel Magazine: An international student-run accessible linguistics magazine

Love languages and linguistics? We’re looking for fellow young protolinguists passionately in love with the wonderful world of words to be part of our writing and design team.

Much of linguistic writing remains academic or scholarly and as such difficult for an average reader to access. Unravel seeks to enable a wider general audience to clearly understand what linguistics is about, as well as allow the average reader to express more informed opinions regarding linguistic issues and gain more knowledge and awareness about languages and the study of language.

We are looking for writers, language editors and web designers from all over the world to be part of our team of journalinguists. You don't need a linguistics degree, as our resident second language acquisition editor will tell you (he's in Economics) - all you need is a love of the world's many words, and the ability to put them to good use. And we're not looking for just writers in English - we are willing and able to publish articles in español, deutsch, français, português, italiano, 华文 and русский as well.

If you're interested in working with us, contact the current chief editor Kevin Martens Wong at submit@unravellingmag.com with your name, your CV and a sample of your writing.

We can presently be found online at http://unravellingmag.com. You can also follow us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/unravellingmag and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/unravellingmag.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Call for papers: Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation

THE ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL TBILISI SYMPOSIUM ON LANGUAGE, LOGIC AND COMPUTATION
21-26 September 2015

Tbilisi, Georgia
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015

The Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held on 21-26 September 2015 in Tbilisi, 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

* Natural logic, inference and entailment in natural language

* Distributional and probabilistic models of information and meaning

Authors can submit an abstract of three pages (including references) at the EasyChair conference system here:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2015

PROGRAMME
The programme will include the following invited lectures and tutorials.

Tutorials:
Logic: Brunella Gerla (University of Insubria)

Language: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)

Computation: Joel Ouaknine (Oxford University)

Invited Lectures:

Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts )

Melvin Fitting (Graduate School and University Center of New York) 

Helle Hansen (Delft University of Technology)

George Metcalfe (Bern University)

Sarah Murray (Cornell University)

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Queen Mary, University of London)

Workshops

There will also be a workshop entitled: “Automata and Coalgebra”, organised by Helle Hansen and Alexandra Silva, as well as a workshop entitled: "How to make things happen in grammar: Encoding Obligatoriness”, organised by Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer. More information will be available on the TbiLLC website: http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015 . 

PUBLICATION INFORMATION
Post-proceedings of the symposium will be published in the LNCS series of Springer.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 1 March 2015

Notification: 1 May 2015

Final abstracts due: 1 June 2015

Registration deadline: 1 August 2015

Symposium: September 21-26, 2015

Programme and submission details can be found at:
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015/