What's Happening in South College: 2015

20 December 2015

Call for papers: NEST

John Kingston writes:

NEST 2016 (= New England Sequence and Timing) will be held in N400 on Saturday, 5 March. Rebecca Spencer, of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and I have been hosting the meeting since Bruno Repp, of Haskins Labs, retired 3 years ago. If you have work that addresses how people control the sequence or timing of events in speaking or how they perceive sequences and timing in speech, you should consider submitting a title and abstract to me. Getting a speaking slot is on a first-come-first-served basis, so don't dilly-dally. If you're interested in these phenomena, you should consider attending.

Call for papers: Sub-Saharan African Languages

Special Session at Interspeech 2016:
Sub-Saharan African languages : from speech fundamentals to applications

Call for papers

This special session aims at gathering researchers in speech technology and researchers in linguistics (working in language documentation and fundamentals of speech science). Such a partnership is particularly important for Sub-Saharan African languages which tend to remain under-resourced, under-documented and often also unwritten. Prospective authors are invited to submit original papers in the following areas:

ASR and TTS for Sub-Saharan African languages and dialects

Cross-lingual and multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling

Applications of spoken language technologies for the African continent

Phonetic and linguistic studies in Sub-Saharan African languages

Zero resource speech technologies: unsupervised discovery of linguistic units

Language documentation for endangered languages of Africa

Machine-assisted annotation of speech and laboratory phonology

Resource / Corpora production in African languages

Submission deadline

Same as regular Interspeech 2016 papers: March 23, 2016

Special session web site

For more details on this special session: http://alffa.imag.fr/interspeech-2016-special-session-proposal/

Interspeech 2016 conference website: http://www.interspeech2016.org/

Organizers

Martine Adda-Decker (madda@limsi.fr) – CNRS – LPP and LIMSI, France.

Laurent Besacier (laurent.besacier@imag.fr) - Univ. Grenoble-Alpes, France - LIG laboratory.

Marelie Davel (marelie.davel@nwu.ac.za) – North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.

Larry Hyman (hyman@berkeley.edu) - Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.

Martin Jansche (mjansche@google.com) – Google, London, UK.

Francois Pellegrino (francois.pellegrino@univ-lyon2.fr) – CNRS – DDL Lyon, France.

Olivier Rosec (olivier.rosec@voxygen.fr) – Voxygen SAS,- Pleumeur-Bodou, France.

Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu) - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.

Martha Tachbelie Yifiru (martha.yifiru@aau.edu.et) – School of Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Call for papers: Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Emergence of Modern Hebrew

Angelika Kratzer writes:

This is a call for papers for a fascinating conference by the “Emergence of Modern Hebrew Research Group” at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Our alum Aynat Rubinstein is a current fellow at the Mandel Scholion Research Center and is also a member of the research group. This conference has a very interesting conception: you do not have to work on Modern Hebrew to participate. They are interested in a much wider range of topics:

1. Description and characterization of the revival of Hebrew, preferably with emphasis on the less studied aspects (morphology and syntax), and how the early language of the non-native speakers differed from that of the first native speakers.

2. Different forms of language contact and planned language change – e.g. revival, standardization, language maintenance – in the history of Hebrew and other languages: Arabic diglossia, revival of Syriac in the Galilee, Yiddish in Haredi communities, Welsh and Manx in Britain, revival of tribal languages in America, Australia, Scandinavia, revival of local Italian dialects, etc.

3. Theoretical models of language variation and change, and the role of language contact.

4. Theoretical work on the nature of heritage languages and creoles. Though Modern Hebrew differs from both, it is based on language skills that do not reflect ordinary linguistic knowledge.

5. The role of children: to what extent does the theory of language acquisition, and in particular bilingual language acquisition, inform the process of language revival? Are the same mechanisms operational in both situations?

Call for papers: ESSLLI

*ESSLLI 2016 STUDENT SESSION*

Held during the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
Bolzano, Italy, August 15-26, 2016

*Deadline for submissions: March 10th,2016

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2016

*ABOUT:*

The Student Session of the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Bolzano, Italy,August 15th to 26th (http://esslli2016.unibz.it). We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic &Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and selected papers will appear in the Student Session proceedings by Springer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

*ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS:*

Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for oral presentations and one for posters. This means that papers are directly submitted either as oral presentations or as poster presentations. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present smaller research projects and research in progress.

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*

Authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Each author may submit at most one single and one jointly authored contribution. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages foran oral presentation or 4 pages for a poster presentation (including examples and references). Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information. More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website: http://www2.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/esslli-stus-2016/.

*SPONSORSHIP AND PRIZES*

As in previous years, Springer has kindly agreed to sponsor the ESSLLI student session. The best poster and best talk will be awarded Springerbook vouchers of 500€ each.

*FURTHER INFORMATION:*

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to marisa.koellner@uni-tuebingen.de andrziai@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de.

ESSLLI 2016 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. For further information, including registration information and course listings, and for general inquiries about ESSLLI 2016, please consult the main ESSLLI 2016 page: http://esslli2016.unibz.it.

13 December 2015

Graduate Program in Paris

The Cognitive Science Departement of Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (Département d'études cognitives, DEC) aims to recruit advanced undergraduate international students in Cognitive Science and in Linguistics.

DEC and Ecole Normale Supérieure (http://www.ens.fr) offer several international fellowships, intended for advanced undergraduate students who will either directly enroll in a master's program (two-year or three-year fellowship) or first complete their last year of undergraduate studies and then enroll in a master's program (three-year fellowship). These fellowships will be attributed on the basis of a national competitive exam, known as the 'ENS international selection'. For more details (including about eligibility), please visit: http://www.ens.fr/admission/selection-internationale/?lang=en

The fellowships include:

- monthly stipend: 1000 euros;

- possibility of subsidized housing;

- access to subsidized cafeteria (about 4 euros/meal);

- minimal tuition fees (about 500 euros/year).

How to Apply

More detailed information is available on line:

-http://www.cognition.ens.fr/EnseignementFinancementENG

-http://www.ens.fr/admission/selection-internationale/article/session-2016?lang=en

Applications Deadline: 1-Feb-2016

Web Address for Applications: http://www1.ens.fr/recrutement-si/

Contact Information:

Benjamin Spector: benjamin.spector@ens.fr

Call for papers: Definiteness Across Languages

The Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies of El Colegio de México will host a workshop on definiteness across languages, which will take place in June 22-24, in Mexico City. The aim of this event is to bring together linguists working on the syntactic and semantic description of languages as well as on the development of theories in order to discuss answers to two main questions:

i. What formal strategies do natural languages use to express definiteness?

ii. What are the possible meanings of their definite noun phrases?

Invited speakers

Bert Le Bruyn (Utrecht University)
(UMass alumnus) Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract submission

We invite submissions contributing to the study of any aspect of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of definite noun phrases in natural languages. Please submit an abstract in PDF format of no more than one page of text with an additional page for extra data, figures, and references. This file must not contain any personal information or affiliation, and must be submitted via EasyChair. If you are not familiar with EasyChair, please follow these submission instructions.

The talks, which can be given either in English or in Spanish, should be 30 minutes long followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: February 14, 2016

Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2016

Conference dates: June 22-24, 2016

For more information, go here.

Hartman at MIT

Jeremy Hartman will give two talks at MIT this week — one on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. The titles and abstracts of his talks follow.

Tuesday, December 15:

What is this construction, that we should be puzzled by it?

I will discuss the construction exemplified below, where a wh- question is followed by a gapless subordinate clause:

a. What were you doing, that you couldn’t come help me?
b. Where is he from, that he talks like that?
c. Who are you, to make that demand?
d. What did she do, that everyone is so mad at her?

A puzzling fact about such sentences is that their declarative counterparts appear to be ungrammatical (*He is from Texas, that he talks like that, *I was on the phone, that I couldn't come help you). Sentences like these have not, to my knowledge, received a detailed analysis in the syntactic literature. I will offer some preliminary observations about their syntactic properties, their meaning, and their relationship to other syntactic phenomena, including degree constructions.

Wednesday, December 16. ESSL/LacqLab 32-D461 at 5:00PM:

Building a corpus for root infinitives

I will present work in progress, on the development of a large database of children's optional infinitive utterances taken from the English CHILDES corpora, and coded for a variety of factors of interest. I'll discuss how the database can be used to asses the effects of several syntactic and phonological factors that have been claimed to influence children's use of the root infinitive, as well as the interactions between these factors.

Call for papers: GALANA 7

The 7th biennial conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA 7) will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on September 8-10, 2016.

The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, and the development of pidgins and creoles. GALANA-7 will include a special session on ''Input Variation and Language Acquisition.''

The invited speakers for the main session are Cynthia Fisher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Roumyana Slabakova (University of Southampton), and Virginia Valian (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center).

The invited speakers for the special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition are Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University) and Janna Oetting (Louisiana State University).

Conference URL: https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/

Conference email: galana7.2016@gmail.com

Abstract Submission Deadline: 10-Feb-2016

GALANA-7 invites abstracts of no more than 500 words (with an optional second page for examples, figures and references) for double-blind peer review.

Guidelines and instructions about abstract submission can be found at https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/abstract-guidelines-and-submission/

For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, bilingualism, multilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

Abstracts are also invited for a special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition. Understanding how children use input to help form a grammar is central to an adequate theory of language acquisition. Broad differences in input based on dialect variation have been used as a fixed effect in explaining differences in children's grammars. Between-child differences within homogeneous samples of families, similar in socio-economic statuses, speaking the same dialect have also provided insight. The special session Input Variation and Language Acquisition asks how these two approaches relate to one another; specifically how language variety as a fixed effect relates to the random effects of between-child variation within a language variety. The papers presented in this special session will advance theories of grammatical acquisition and applications in the field of child language disorders.

Dillon in D.C.

Brian Dillon gave a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland on Friday, December 11. The title of his talk was "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives." An abstract follows.

One question of enduring interest for psycholinguists is the question of how closely real-time sentence processing routines align with grammatical knowledge: does the competence grammar directly constrain sentence comprehension, or does it play a secondary role, 'cleaning up' the results of a comprehension process driven by heuristics (Lewis & Phillips, 2015; Patson & Ferreira, 2007; Townsend & Bever, 2001)? Much experimental work has provided evidence for the view that the human sentence processor is directly constrained by grammatical knowledge. A challenge for this view is the observation that there are a number of apparently simple grammatical constraints that comprehenders fail to respect in comprehension, such as subject-verb agreement (e.g. Wagers, Lau & Phillips, 2009). Providing an explanation of why we see these 'grammaticality illusions,' and why only certain dependencies seem to be be susceptible to illusory grammaticality, has been a productive research project that has led to new and diverse models of linguistic dependency formation in real-time comprehension (Phillips, Wagers & Lau, 2011). In this talk, I will review this work, and present two case studies from the research group at UMass that provide some new perspectives, and new puzzles, for this project. In the first part of the talk, I will present evidence from English reflexive processing (joint work with Shayne Sloggett) that suggests that grammaticality illusion associated with English reflexives are created by assigning a logophoric interpretation to the reflexive form. In the second part, I present work with Jérémy Pasquereau on a novel grammatical illusion, French quantifier/de-phrase dependencies. This work suggests that not all intrusive licensors are created equal, and that only some quantifiers have the potential to create grammaticality illusion effects in French. Taken together, these studies suggest that grammatical illusions are conditioned by the availability of alternative structures and interpretations made available by the grammar. In a slogan, it appears that what could've been said, but wasn't, seems to play a role in creating grammaticality illusion effects in comprehension.

Hannah Green goes to Washington State University

Barbara Partee writes:

Hannah Greene was in our Ph.D. program from 2011 to 2014, with her main interests in semantics and fieldwork. She had always also loved animals, and while she was our student she did a lot of horse dressage (while helping to care for horses at that stable). In the spring of 2014 she was hard at work on a research paper when she “felt a pull to be elsewhere: a large animal parasitology workshop hosted by my vet.” And from there she realized that what she really wanted to be was a large animal vet - that that was a career that would combine intellectual stimulation with her love of animals. So during the 2014-2015 academic year she embarked on an intensive program in "pre-vet" courses here at UMass, which she just completed, and this fall she applied to a number of veterinary programs. I was one of her letter writers, and I just got the happy news that she was offered a place in Washington State University’s DVM program, a program she was really impressed with when she visited. Hannah will still be here in the area until July. I suggest having a party for Hannah sometime in the spring to give us all a chance to say farewell and best wishes, and to reaffirm that she’s part of our department ‘family’ whatever she does next. And I invite WHISC readers to help share news about other “alumni-lites” (feel free to suggest a better term!) -- and if you’re reading this and are one yourself, send in news!

Here’s a very recent selfie that Hannah took with a friendly cow.

HannahWithCow

Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication

The Eleventh International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication was on December 10 and 11 at the University of Latvia in Riga. UMass alumna Suzi Lima, who gave the talk “Let Context Define What You Count," was an invited speaker. For more information, go here.

06 December 2015

Joint Syntax Phonology Workshop on Friday

Joe Pater will present joint work with Jennifer Culbertson, Coral Hughto and Robert Staubs at a joint meeting of the syntax and phonology workshop this Friday at 2:30 in ILC N458. A title and abstract of his talk follow.

Title: Typological Prediction with Learning: Grammatical Agent-Based Modeling of Typology

Abstract: What effect does learning have on the typological predictions of a theory of grammar? One way to answer this question is to examine the output of agent-based models (ABMs), in which learning can shape the distribution over languages that result from agent interaction. Prior research on ABMs and language has tended to assume relatively simple agent-internal representations of language, with the goal of showing how linguistic structure can emerge without being postulated a priori (e.g. Kirby and Hurford 2002, Wedel 2007). In this paper we show that when agents operate with more articulated grammatical representations, typological skews emerge in the output of the models that are not directly encoded in the grammatical system itself. This of course has deep consequences for grammatical theory construction, which often makes fairly direct inferences from typology to properties of the grammatical system. We argue that abstracting from learning may lead to missed opportunities in typological explanation, as well as to faulty inferences about the nature of grammar. By adding learning to typological explanation, grammatical ABMs allow for accounts of typological tendencies, such as the tendency toward uniform syntactic headedness (Greenberg 1963, Dryer 1992). In addition, incorporating learning can lead to predicted near-zeros in typology. We show this with the case of unrealistically large stress windows, which can be generated by a weighted constraint system, but which have near-zero frequency in the output of our ABM incorporating the same constraints. The too-large-window prediction is one of the few in the extant literature arguing for Optimality Theory’s ranked constraints over weighted ones.

McCarthy named AAAS Fellow

John McCarthy has been made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For more information, go here.

Congratulations John!

Call for papers: Semantic Contribution of Det and Num

Workshop title: Semantic Contribution of Det and Num. (In)definiteness, genericity and referentiality

May 27 and 28, 2016. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Workshop description:

The structure and interpretation of nominal phrases of different syntactic and semantic complexity have been among the most extensively studied topics in linguistics in the past decades. The literature has established various syntax-semantic mappings of noun phrases to express (in)definiteness and genericity across languages, stemming from the classical studies on the topics (Carlson 1977, Kamp 1981, Heim 1982). Much of the syntactic literature, adopting the DP Hypothesis of Abney (1987), has been devoted to the internal architecture of the DP (cf. Longobardi 1994, Zamparelli 2000, Borer 2005, Alexiadou 2014). Yet another much discussed issue is the derivation of referential properties of nominal phrases and the syntactic and semantic ingredients involved (e.g., articles, type-shifting, number specification, mass and count distinction, etc.) in building different types of referentiality (Chierchia 1998, Bouchard 2002, Dayal 2004, Cheng 2012, Aguilar-Guevara et al. 2014, Dobrovie-Sorin and Beyssade 2014, among many others). Recently, a number of experimental studies have been carried out which complement the theoretical investigation (cf. Ionin 2015).

In this workshop we aim at bringing together researchers involved in the study of nominals, nominalization, genericity, specificity and indefiniteness in theoretical and experimental linguistics. We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics of nominal phrases in natural languages, focusing specifically on the role of Determiner(s) and Number in establishing referential properties of the nominal phrase. We also encourage submissions on experimental studies on production/processing and L1 and L2 acquisition of referentiality, article systems and genericity.

Particular topics to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to, questions like the following:

1. What is the structure of nominal expressions in languages with and without articles?

2. To what extent the count / mass distinction is related to the presence / absence of Number?

3 What is the semantic contribution of Det and Num? How is this contribution achieved in languages with no overt determiners and no Number specification?

4. Why do languages that allow bare nominals and / or null articles also allow weak and expletive definites? How are these distinctions expressed in a language with no articles? What is the contribution to meaning of weak and expletive articles?

5. Where is Number to be interpreted within the nominal domain? Is there a parametric distinction between languages that interpret Num on N and languages that interpret Num on D?

6. How do different languages refer to kind entities? Should a distinction be made between kind entities and pluralities of individual objects? How do these differences relate to Number specification?

7. What is the semantic contribution of indefinite determiners? What are the elements that make possible for an indefinite expression to contribute to indefiniteness, I-genericity or D-genericity?

8. Is the taxonomic distinction between kinds and subkinds linguistically relevant? Which are the elements that may constrain linguistically either a kind or a subkind reading?

9. How are nominal expressions interpreted at different stages in the acquisition of L1 and L2?10. How does the interpretation of quantifiers interact with the funcional structure within the nominal domain, and more specifically with the presence / absence of a definite article?

Invited speakers:

Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt University)

Tania Ionin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Lisa Cheng (Leiden University)

Ora Matushansky (CNRS / Université de Paris 8)

Claire Beyssade (Université de Paris 8)

Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania)

Call for Papers

We invite abstracts for 45 minutes presentations (35-minute talk plus 10 minutes discussion) that address any of the topics above or related questions. Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed 2 pages (A4 format), including examples and references, using a 12pt font with 2.5 cm (1 inch) margins on all for sides. Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf-format by December 15, 2015 to the following email address: cr.clt@uab.cat and include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail.

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: December 15, 2015

Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2016

Final programme: February 29, 2016

Workshop: May 27-28, 2016

Scientific committee: Artemis Alexiadou, Claire Beyssade, Olga Borik, Lisa Cheng, Sonia Cyrino, M.Teresa Espinal, Tania Ionin, Urtzi Etxeberria, Ora Matushansky, Florian Schwartz, Xavier Villalba.

Organizers: Olga Borik and M.Teresa Espinal. Centre de Lingüística Teòrica. UAB.

Call for papers: NISM 2016

We are very pleased to announce the first edition of the new series New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling 2016 (NISM2016), which will take place in Paris, September 7 and 8, 2016.

The conferences New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling resume the Journées de Sémantique et Modélisation (JSM 2003-2010), targeting the renewed community in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. Papers from any theoretical framework are welcome, granted that new empirical data are clearly complemented with a formal analysis.

This year, the conference will feature a thematic session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms, in honor of Francis Corblin, founder of the JSM.

Invited Speakers

Elizabeth Coppock (Gothenburg University & Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)

Henriette de Swart (Utrecht University)

Paul Portner (Georgetown University)

François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

Organizers

Claire Beyssade (Structures Formelles du Langage, Paris 8 University)

Alda Mari (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

David Nicolas (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

Talks and posters

Talks will be 35 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.In addition to the general session, submissions are also invited for the special session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms.The conference will also feature a poster session.

Abstract submission

Papers in formal semantics and pragmatics are welcome. Experimental papers are welcome, granted that they provide a formal analysis of the data. Abstracts (neither submitted nor published elsewhere) are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. Abstracts, including references and data, should be limited to two single spaced pages (A4 or US Letter) with one inch margins, minimum font size 12pt (Times New Roman). They must be in PDF format. Examples should be interspersed throughout the text.Abstracts can be submitted in English or French, but the language of the conference will be English. Anonymous abstracts must be submitted online at http://nism2016.sciencesconf.org, by March 31, 2016.Abstracts will be triply blind-reviewed.

Proceedings

We plan to publish the proceedings of the conference.

Schedule

Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2016

Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2016

Conference : 7-8 September 2016

Call for papers: WSCLA 21

Richard Compton writes:

We are organizing the 21st Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSLCA) which will be held at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) this spring. Please see this flyer for more information.

Postdoc position in Computational Linguistics at Tübingen

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, Germanyinvites applications for a PhD (or Postdoc) position in the group ofProf. Dr. Detmar Meurers: http://sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/en/tcl

This is a university position, with an initial period of appointmentof three years, with the possibility of renewal for another three years. The position involves independent research and teaching (2hrs/week during the semester) and related departmental duties. The degree programs in computational linguistics are taught in English, so knowledge of German is not a prerequisite. The position is at the rank of Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (German scale TV-L E13 50% = 19.75hrs/week), for which salary starts at € 22.000 per year, increasingwith experience and marital status.

Ideal candidates have an excellent Master's degree in Computational Linguistics or a related field and link to the strengths of the group and the excellent research context in Tübingen. Candidates with an interdisciplinary interest in Second Language Learning, Education, or Psychology are particularly encouraged to apply and may be associated with the Excellence Initiative LEAD graduate school in Empirical Educational Science: http://purl.org/lead/4

Applications should include:-

Cover letter spelling out research experience & interest in position

- Academic CV

- Copy of MA degree and transcript

- Names and emails of two referees

Send applications by email as a single pdf attachment to:

Lisa Becker <sekretariat-meurers@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de>

For questions, please email Detmar Meurers <detmar.meurers@uni-tuebingen.de>

Applications received by December 22, 2015 will receive fullconsideration, although interviews may start at any time and will continue until the position has been filled.

The University of Tübingen is an equal opportunity employer regarding professional opportunities for women and men. Equally qualified candidates with physical challenges will be given preference. Employment will be conducted by the central university administration. The NLP CALL list is housed at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and administrated by Mat Schulze (mschulze ä uwaterloo.ca). See http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/nlp call for more information.

29 November 2015

Jesse Harris at UMass

Amanda Rysling writes:

Next week on Monday, November 30th, UMass alumnus Jesse Harris (PhD linguistics '12) will present some of his recent work in the linguistics labs meeting. If you’re planning on coming, and don’t usually attend lab meeting, please let me know (arysling@linguist.umass.edu) so we can ensure there are enough snacks.

We'll meet at the usual time, 4 to 5:30, but in an unusual place: ILC N400.

SSRG meets TOMORROW

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will meet on Monday, November 30th. At that meeting, we'll be discussing two papers from the journal Syntax:

Hunter, Tim. (2015) "Deconstructing Merge and Move to make room for adjunction." Syntax volume 18, issue 3.

Jenks, Peter. (2014) "Generalized Clausal Modifiers in Thai Noun Phrases." Syntax volume 17, issue 4.

Jon Sprouse gives department colloq

Jon Sprouse (UConn) will give the department colloquium at 3:30 on Friday, December 4, in ILC 400. A title and abstract will be posted here when they become available.

Sánchez in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet on Friday, 12/4, at 12:20 in ILC N451. Everyone is welcome! Covadonga Sánchez will present "Experimental ideas for the elicitation of subject focus in L2 Spanish.''

Call for Papers: NonFinite Subjects

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes is organizing the conference NonFinite Subjects, to be held in Nantes (France) on April 1-2, 2016.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Misha Becker, University of North Carolina

Hazel Pearson, ZAS Berlin

Michelle Sheehan,

Anglia Ruskin University

Sandhya Sundaresan, University of Leipzig

MEETING DESCRIPTION
The conference aims at providing a forum for discussion of recent, highquality research on the subject position of non-finite structures. Theworkshop focuses on recent findings that shake the standard assumptions onthe syntax and semantics of the subject position of non-finite structures.By scrutinizing data that does not quite fit standard approaches tonon-finite subjects, we seek to question the premises and basic tenetsunderlying standard approaches in order to develop more explanatoryanalyses of the distribution and interpretation of non-finite subjects.

We invite submission of abstracts on the syntactic, semantic and psycholinguisticaspects of this topic, with potential questions thatinclude, but are not restricted to the following issues:

Lexical subjects freely alternating with PRO

The classical approach assumes a strict correlation between finiteness andtypes of subjects: finite constructions display lexical subjects, whilenon-finite ones only allow PRO (here used pretheoretically) or NP-traces.However, a multiplicity of data contradicts this generalization.

In many languages lexical DPs alternate with PRO in non-finitestructures (see in particular Sundaresan & McFadden 2009), includingEnglish gerunds (Reuland 1983, Pires 2007), personal infinitive constructions in Romance (Elordieta 1992, Mensching 2000, Herbeck 2011),and raising structures across a variety of languages (Szabolcsi 2009).

Structures that are apparently finite allow PRO-like non-overtsubjects in alternation with lexical subjects in languages such asBrazilian Portuguese, a phenomenon dubbed 'finite control' (for discussion cf. Rodrigues 2004, Ferreira 2007, Holmberg et al. 2009, Modesto 2011).What are the theoretical consequences of this non-complementary distribution? Should the PRO vs. lexical subject dichotomy be abandoned?The standard approach relied on Case theory (Chomsky 1981). But given theaforementioned facts, can Case still be said to play a role with respect tothe realizational properties of subjects (cf. Sigurðsson 1991, 2008,Landau 2006, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009, Duguine 2013)?

'Overt PRO'

Languages such as Hungarian, Korean, Italian or Portuguese allow overt pronouns with the properties of Obligatory Control PRO (Borer 1989, Szabolcsi 2009, Barbosa 2009, Duguine 2013). How does the existence of 'overt PROs' fit in current approaches to non-finiteness (and in particular to control/raising)? Should we conclude that the silent nature of PRO is nothing more than a circumstantial fact (cf. Livitz 2013, Sundaresan 2014,Duguine 2015, Herbeck 2015)? Furthermore, 'overt PROs' appear to be limitedto pro-drop languages (Barbosa 2009). Is this a causal correlation? Overt PROs are pronouns in many languages, but have reflexive or anaphor-like properties in languages such as Korean (Borer 1989, Lee 2009). Can a unified explanation be given of this cross-linguistic variation?

Beyond infinitives: degrees of (non-)finiteness and subjects

From a cross-linguistic perspective, the finiteness vs. non-finiteness dichotomy is intricate. Besides infinitives, languages display othernon-inflected structures, such as gerundive constructions, or nominalizations whose subject positions can have properties that contrast with those of infinitives (cf. Pires 2007). Moreover, certain subjunctives,in particular in languages that lack non-inflected constructions, such as Greek and other Balkan languages, have been shown to display OC properties,while in other languages (e.g. Romance languages) the subject of subjunctives is typically obviative (cf. Szabolcsi 2010). A further relevant topic is that of inflected infinitives and the variety of subjects they allow (cf. Sheehan 2013, 2014). How can this range of phenomena be accounted for? How do we correlate the typology of (non-)finiteness and the distribution/interpretation of subjects and what theoretical implications should we draw?

From a more general perspective on clausal structure, assuming a whole spectrum of non-finiteness (Haddican & Tsoulas 2012, Wurmbrand 2014), is there a corresponding array of subjects and how do the precise features of this continuum interact with the typology of subjects? Are the properties of the C-layer relevant in this regard (Rizzi 1997, Adger 2007)? What about tense and/or agreement (Wurmbrand 2001, 2014, Landau 2004)?

Interpretation of finite vs. non-finite subjects

Beyond forcing the subject to be non-overt, a further tenet of the standard approach is that non-finiteness also forces the subject to be anaphoric/referentially dependent. To what extent does this correlationhold since, as noted above, in many languages referentially free expressions (overt or null) also occur in nonfinite constructions. How can these differences be accounted for?

Should we abandon the idea that (non-)finiteness and referential dependence are causally related? In which case, should we still maintain the hypothesis that the silence of PRO-like expressions is related to their anaphoric nature (cf. Livitz 2013)? Is the notion of syntactic dependency with respect to an antecedent relevant for characterizing the types of subjects found in non-finite constructions? Ultimately, should we consider (at least) PRO and /pro/ to be two facets of a single phenomenon (cf.Duguine 2015, Herbeck 2015; see also Sundaresan 2014)?

Selection

There is also the issue of the relation with the higher finite structure.Are the properties of non-finite subjects determined by the matrix verb that selects the non-finite construction (Borer 1989, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009, Pearson 2013, Grano 2015)? What then determines the nature ofsubjects of e.g. non-finite clauses in adjunct position or subject position?

Experimental evidence

How do children acquire the intricate patterns of finiteness and the corresponding subject properties? Are the different constructions discussed above processed differently? More generally, what experimental orpsycholinguistic evidence can be brought to bear on the issues discussed above?

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples, tables, figures and references, with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins onall sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title and should not reveal the name of the author(s). The abstracts must be uploaded as PDF attachments to the EasyChair site. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author. To submit an abstract, please go to the following Easy Chai rpage: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfs2016

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submissions: December 11, 2015

Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2016

Conference dates: April 1-2, 2016

CONFERENCE WEBSITE:

https://sites.google.com/site/nonfinitesubjects/

CONTACT

nonfinitesubjects@gmail.com

Dillon in print

Brian Dillon, Wing-Yee Chow and Ming Xiang's paper, "The relationship between anaphor features and antecedent retrieval: Comparing Mandarin ziji and ta-ziji," has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology.

22 November 2015

SSRG next Monday

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will meet Monday, November 30th. At that meeting, we'll be discussing two papers from the journal Syntax:

Hunter, Tim. (2015) "Deconstructing Merge and Move to make room for adjunction." Syntax volume 18, issue 3.

Jenks, Peter. (2014) "Generalized Clausal Modifiers in Thai Noun Phrases." Syntax volume 17, issue 4.

Call for papers: AAA

The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 3

Call for Papers

Date: July 6-8, 2016

Call deadline: February 8, 2016

Location: Tübingen, Germany

Website: http://semanticsofaaa.wordpress.com/

::: Meeting Description :::
The TripleA workshop series aims at providing a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages. Its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.

::: Invited Speakers :::
Sigrid Beck (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

Chris Davis (University of the Ryukyus)

Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers University)

Letuimanu’asina Emma Kruse Va’ai (National University of Samoa)

Jenneke van der Wal (University of Cambridge)

::: Call for Papers :::
We invite submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Submissions should present original formal work on any interpretive aspect of the languages under discussion which should have originated from own fieldwork or experimentation.

We particularly encourage Ph.D. students to apply. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via Easy Chair no later than February 8, 2016.

::: Abstract Submission Link :::
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=triplea3

::: Local Organizing Committee :::
Polina Berezovskaya, Vera Hohaus Anna Howell, Konstantin Sachs

Psycholinguistics job in Genoa

RESEARCH POSITION IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS – EXPERIMENTAL PRAGMATICS
Project: EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions
Place: Genoa (Italy)
Department: DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences, Psychology Unit
Principal Investigator: Dr. Filippo Domaneschi
E-mail: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it
Phone: +39 010 20953710

N. 1 – 2-years contract (1 year contract renewable 1 year).

Title: Psycholinguistic analysis of the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions

Short Title: Presuppositions and Cognitive Processes

Description: Applications are now being accepted for a 2-years (1+1) full-time research position in psycholinguistics with specialization in experimental semantics/pragmatics.

The successful candidate will become member of the DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences – Psychology Unit, University of Genoa (Italy) and will join Dr. Filippo Domaneschi’s SIR project “EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions” financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project investigates by psycholinguistic experimental methods the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions with a particular focus on the cognitive load required to process the information communicated as taken for granted.

This position is 100% research and involves no teaching obligations. Responsibilities of the researcher will include: lab activities, contributing original research avenues, and presenting and publishing results.
The planned start date is the beginning of February, and the project will run for 2 years (1 year renewable 1 year).

Required skills:
(i)Solid training in linguistic semantics and pragmatics.(ii)Experience in psycholinguistic experimental work.(iii)Programming skills with Lab software (e.g. E-Prime, Presentation, Psychopy).(iv)Statistical skills (e.g. SPSS, R).

For Italian candidates – further details about the submission can be found at:
https://unige.it/concorsi/assricerca/

For foreign candidates – info about the submission procedure will be provided directly by Dr. Filippo Domaneschi at: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

Deadline: 17.12.2015
Info: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

15 November 2015

Laura McPherson gives department colloq

Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) will give the department colloquium this Friday at 3:30 in N400. The title of her talk is “Constraint Interaction and the role of spell-out in Dogon tonosyntax,” and an abstract follows.

The Dogon languages of Mali share a unique system of replacive grammatical tone in the DP, where a word’s lexical tone is completely overwritten by tonal overlays in particular morphosyntactic positions. Unlike more typologically common systems of replacive tone, which tend to be triggered by morphemes or morphological features and are confined to a single word, Dogon overlays in the DP may span multiple words and are triggered by certain c-commanding syntactic categories or positions (hence, tonosyntax). In cases where a word is targeted by more than one potential trigger, the Dogon languages differ in their resolutions. I argue that these changes are inherently morphological in nature, despite occurring at the phrase-level rather than the word-level, and propose a construction-based model in which phrase-level morphological constructions encode idiosyncratic phonological changes sensitive to both syntactic category and syntactic structure. Constructional schemas are implemented in the grammar as constraints (construction constraints). The variation found in the Dogon language family is descriptively quite complicated, with no two languages working in exactly the same way, but in this talk, I show that the surface patterns falls out naturally in a maximum entropy (Goldwater and Johnson 2003, Hayes and Wilson 2008) model with weighted constraints, capable of capturing both within-language and between-language variation.

Additionally, data from the tonosyntax of possession and relative clauses provide evidence for the role of phases in determining morphophonological form. In particular, the application of tonal overlays is often, though (crucially) not obligatorily, blocked on material that has spelled out in a previous cycle. I argue that these effects provide evidence for transcyclic faithfulness constraints, which penalize alterations to the morphophonological form of spelled out material in later grammatical cycles. Like all constraints, these too are shown to be violable, with different Dogon languages displaying varying degrees of faithfulness to phasal targets. Thus, the Dogon data show that while spelled out material may be resistant to later phonological changes, it is not immune to it, as argued by proposals such as Lowenstamm (2010) or Newell and Piggott (2014).

SSRG Tomorrow!

Leland Kusmer writes:

For the SSRG meeting next week (Monday the 16th), we'll be doing an overview session of the journal Syntax. We looked at this journal in our first overview session last year, so the goal is to cover newer issues and also some of those issues we missed in the last round. As such, I've put together a sign-up sheet that includes only those issues we haven't yet done.

Remember that the overview session is intended to comprise very short, high-level overviews — you should aim for maybe 5 minutes for the entire issue. We'll then select a few papers that sound interesting to the group which we can all read for the next meeting.
Please claim issues here:

bit.ly/SSRGReadsSyntax

Tu+ on Saturday, November 21

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here: http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh, at 9 Myrtle St. in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Marcus Maia and Aniela Franca at LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday at noon in ILC N451. All are welcome! Two talks will be presented:

A Computational Efficiency Principle in action in the processing of recursively embedded PPs in Brazilian Portuguese and in Karaja - Marcus Maia (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

An ERP Evaluation of the comprehension of PP embedding and coordination in Karaja and in Portuguese - Aniela França (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Barbara at U Michigan

Barbara Partee writes:

I will be part of a small workshop on the Origins of Formal Semantics organized by Rich Thomason at the University of Michigan November 19-21. The other invited participants are Max Cresswell, Hans Kamp, Jeff Pelletier, Martin Stokhof, and Ivano Caponigro.

I will give an opening ‘topic-framing’ talk, and will also be part of a closing panel on UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rich, Barbara, and Ivano (who is working on a biography of Montague) earlier worked up a set of questions that were circulated to all the workshop members, including lots of questions about who influenced whom about various topics, the connections among people like Montague, David Lewis, Arthur Prior, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel; counterfactual conjecture questions like how and whether formal semantics would developed if Montague hadn’t lived or hadn’t done any of what he did, as well as what a possible world might look like in which he didn’t die so young.

The program is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/lpw15/program.html

Tom and Jeremy at Jackson Street School

Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper will make a presentation at “Science Night" at the Jackson Street School on November 19th. There talk will be on acquisition and psycholinguistics.

UMass at BUCLD

The Fortieth meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development happened over this weekend, and UMass was represented by:

Mike Clauss and Jeremy Hartman gave the paper “Syntactic cues in adjective learning"

Elliott Moreton gave the talk “Phonological pattern learning involves both implicit and explicit processes” with K. Pertsova.

Amy Schafer gave the poster “Mapping prosody to reference in L2” with A. Takda, H. Rohde and T. Grüter.

Tom Roeper, Anca Sevecenco and Barbara Pearson gave the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative prepositional phrases and relative clauses in child English.”

Roeper in Connecticut

Tom Roeper is giving a talk “Recursion and Disorders” at Connecticut College tomorrow, November 16.

ECOM Workshop at UConn

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

Information about the workshop can be found at the workshop webpage. You may find the schedule, abstracts and information about visiting Storrs at the workshop page. Registration for the workshop, which is free, but required, is available by following this link. The workshop is open to the public and ECOM encourages attendance by researchers in the cognitive sciences from nearby institutes to attend.

Workshop Schedule:
  Thursday, November 19th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
            2:00-2:25PM                Registration
            2:25-2:30PM             Welcome
            2:30-3:45PM                Timothy Jay (Psychology, Massachusetts College) - "Doing Research with Taboo Words"
            4:00-4:40PM                Trip Glazer (Philosophy, Georgetown) - "Contemptuous Speech"
            4:40-5:20PM              Helen L. Daly (Philosophy, Colorado College) - "Silently Insulting"
            5:30-6:45PM                Ljiljana Progovac (Linguistics, Wayne State) - "Expressive Language in the Evolution of Grammar"
            6:45-7:15PM                Reception

Friday, November 20th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
        9:30-10:00AM              Breakfast - Coffee & Bagels
          10:00-11:15AM           Mark Richard (Philosophy, Harvard) - "Why Do We Care About Slurs?"
        11:30-12:10PM           Bianca Cepollaro (SNS & IJN) & Tristan Thommen (IJN) - "What's Wrong with the Truth-Conditional Accounts of Slurs?"
        12:10-12:50PM           Andrew Morgan (Philosophy, Virginia) - "Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Language that 'Has it Both Ways'"
          12:50-2:00PM              Lunch! (sandwiches, etc. provided)
        2:00-3:15PM                 Dean Pettit - "Objectivity and Emotion"
        3:30-4:10PM                 John Voiklis (CPS, Brown)* - "Building a Moral Lexicon to Study (and Implement) Moral Communication
        4:10-4:50PM                 Laura Niemi (Psychology, Harvard)** - "Implicit Causality and Moral Inference"
          5:15-6:30PM                 Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Delaware) - "Evidentiality Across Languages"
          7:00PM                             Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIRED

The Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group is pleased to announce that it will be hosting its second annual interdisciplinary workshop this November on "Expressive Language: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Origins", to be held November 19-20, 2015 at the University of Connecticut.

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

7:00PM Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIREDThe Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group is pleased to announce that it will be hosting its second annual interdisciplinary workshop this November on "Expressive Language: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Origins", to be held November 19-20, 2015 at the University of Connecticut.

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

08 November 2015

Howard Lasnik gives department colloquium on Friday

Howard Lasnik (University of Maryland) will give the department colloquium on Friday at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title of his talk is "Clause-mates, Phases and Two Families of Questions.” An abstract is here.

Partee, Green and Harris honored at the LSA

Alyson Reed, Executive Director of the Linguistic Society of America, writes:

I am pleased to inform you that three current members of the faculty at UMass Amherst, will be honored at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

· Dr. Barbara Partee will receive the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award

· Dr. Lisa Green will be inducted as a Fellow of the LSA

· Dr. Alice Harris will begin her term as the 92nd President of the LSA (at the conclusion of the meeting)

We have already notified the recipients of these awards, but wanted to be sure their colleagues in the department are also made aware of these important honors. For additional background information on the award, please visit our website: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards.

Congratulations to Barbara, Lisa and Alice!

David Erschler at Hampshire College

David Erschler will be giving a talk entitled “Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork” at Hampshire College on Wednesday, November 18 at noon in Adele Simmons Hall. An abstract follows.

Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork

I will discuss the importance of doing theoretically-oriented linguistic field work and the urgency to perform such field work on modern spoken Yiddish (Hassidic Yiddish). I will illustrate this via a discussion of two phenomena from Yiddish syntax: the position of the finite verb (the so called "verb-second") and the structure of relative clauses in Yiddish.

Barbara Partee on the road!

Barbara Partee writes:

On Wednesday, November 4, I was in Wrocław, Poland as an invited speaker in a surprise event honoring Bożena Rozwadowska on her 60th birthday: “Bożena’s Birthday: A Special Linguistic Workshop”. Bożena was our Ph.D. student here 1984-87, and she would have completed her Ph.D. here (on thematic roles in Polish nominalizations, especially nominalizations of psych-verbs and other verbs with interesting argument structure) if she had been able to get a fourth year of leave of absence from her teaching obligations at the University of Wrocław. I still consider her one of my Ph.D. students even though she had to complete her Ph.D. in Poland instead. I gave an invited talk: “Polish influences in the History of Formal Semantics”. The next day I flew home, and on Nov 6 and 7 was at the Hornucopia workshop in honor of her UCLA Ph.D. Larry Horn at Yale, as reported in the last WHISC, where we couldn’t report Bożena’s event for fear of spoiling the top-secret surprise, which was indeed a real surprise.

Call for Papers: SALT

SALT 26

The 26th Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference will take place on May 12–15, 2016, at The University of Texas at Austin. There will be keynote presentations by:

Sigrid Beck, University of Tübingen
Edit Doron, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Rick Nouwen, Utrecht University
Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University

In addition to the regular sessions of SALT 26 there will be a one day special session on Presupposition, with presentations on theoretical, experimental, fieldwork-based, or corpus-based approaches to presupposition, presupposition triggering, or presuppositional inference. We are happy to announce three further invited speakers for this session:

Lauri Karttunen, Stanford University
Stanley Peters, Stanford University
Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University

Call for Papers

We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (with an additional 10 minutes for questions) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics with relevance to linguistic theory. The special session on presupposition has the same submission and reviewing process as the main session.

Call URL: http://salt.ling.utexas.edu/26/call
Submission URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt26

Submission Details

Deadline: December 20, 2015, 11:59 pm Central Standard Time (UTC-6)

As with SALT 25, there will be a short period for authors and reviewers to exchange feedback. Author feedback is scheduled for February 5–12, 2016.

Requirements

Abstracts must be anonymous. The main text should be at most 3 pages (US Letter or A4) in length, including examples, with an optional fourth page for references. The abstract should use a 12pt font and 1 inch margins (for US Letter) or 3 cm margins (for A4) on all four sides. The abstract must be submitted as a single PDF file. These limitations will be strictly enforced. In addition to the intellectual merit of the abstract, clarity and readability will also be taken into account in reviewing.

SALT 26 will feature a poster session. Poster presentations will be published as regular papers in the proceedings. Poster presenters will be asked to give a short “lightning round” presentation prior to the poster session.

Policies

Authors may be involved in at most two abstracts and may be the sole author of at most one abstract.

SALT does not accept papers that at the time of the conference have been published or have been accepted for publication. In addition, preference will be given to presentations that are not duplicated at other major conferences.

If the work or a close variant of it is under submission to or accepted for publication or presentation in any other major venue (such as a national or international conference or a journal/book chapter), we request that the authors create a small section titled “Additional Submission” after the references at the end of the paper. This section should include the other venue(s) for which the work has been submitted, the status of those submissions, and an indication of any major aspects of the SALT abstract not submitted elsewhere. We require that authors update us by email if/when there is a relevant change in the status of other submissions.

Proceedings

All papers presented at the main or the special session of the conference will be published in a SALT 26 volume following the conclusion of the conference, edited at Cornell University and published by the Linguistic Society of America.

Easychair Instructions

On the EasyChair submission page, there are several additional options to pay attention to:

A checkbox to indicate if you want your abstract to be considered for poster presentation (if you do not check this, your paper will be considered only for oral presentation).
A checkbox to indicate if you would like your abstract to be considered for the Special Session on Presupposition.
An extensive (but not comprehensive) list of topics that will be used to help assign reviewers. Select all topics relevant to your paper (we estimate most papers will select 1-3 topics).
You may use the Keywords textbox to prioritize or add additional topics.

Submit your abstract here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt26

01 November 2015

UUSLAW on Saturday

Smith College will host the “University of Massachusetts, University of Connecticut and Smith College Language Acquisition Workshop” (UUSLAW) on Saturday, November 7. The talks, below, will be in McConnell Hall 103.

9.30am Coffee, tea and bagels Foyer of McConnell

10 am Andie Faber (U.Mass) “Assigning and incorporating grammatical gender in L1 and L2 speakers of gendered languages”

10.40am Emma Nguyen (U.Conn) "Some thoughts on English-speaking children's comprehension of long passives"

11.20am Ryosuke Hattori (U.Conn) "On The Majority Influence in English-Chinese Japanese Trilingual Acquisition"

11.50pm Mantoa Smouse (UCT, visiting Smith) “The Acquisition of Disjoint Morphemes in isiXhosa”

12.30-2 Lunch break (we will provide, but other options available locally!) Foyer of McConnell

2pm Kadir Gökgöz (U.Conn) "IX arguments in code-blending: asymmetries between subjects and objects"

2.30pm Meghan Armstrong (U. Mass) “Catalan-speaking children's multimodal perception of disbelief”

3.10pm Vanessa Petroj (U. Conn) "Article Distribution in English-ASL Code-blended Whispered Speech"

3:50pm tea break Foyer of McConnell

4.10pm Renato Lacerda (U.Conn) "Contrastive topicalization in early English: initial questions"

4.40pm Michael Clauss, Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson (U.Mass) “Examining restrictiveness and the semantic correlates of recursion”

Dillon in Connecticut

Brian Dillon gives a colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut on Friday, November 6, entitled "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives."

Barbara Partee at Hornucopia!

Barbara Partee will be at Yale November 6-7 to participate in Hornucopia (https://campuspress.yale.edu/hornucopia/) -- a workshop in honor of Laurence R. Horn on the occasion of his retirement. She'll be giving an invited talk: An ever-so-brief history of semantics, pragmatics, and Larry.

Call for Papers: ACAL 47

2nd Call for Papers: 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 47)

We are now accepting papers for the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, to be held at UC Berkeley, March 23-26, 2016. The general session will take place March 23-25, while a special workshop on "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa" will take place March 25-26.

General Session

For the general session we welcome papers on any area of African linguistics. The general conference will consist of talks, poster sessions, and plenary talks by prominent researchers on African languages.

Special Workshop: Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa

In addition to the general session, we welcome papers on the special theme "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa." Africa contains several distinct linguistic areas which are often claimed to hold special importance for the reconstruction of African proto-languages and our understanding of African pre-history. This workshop will focus on exploring the fine-grained areal distribution of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Africa with debates about genetic affiliation and historical migration patterns as a backdrop.

Deadline

The deadline for submission is Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 11:59pm PST (UTC-8:00). Please be advised that late submissions may not be considered. Because of visa requirements, prospective international participants are urged to submit their abstracts at the earliest date possible. Participants will be notified about the outcome of their submission by early January 2016.

Review process

All abstracts will be blind reviewed for their originality, quality, and relevance. Main session talks will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation with a 10 minute question and answer period. Poster presentations will take place at a dedicated time with no simultaneous oral sessions. An important factor in considering your abstract will be its appropriateness for a 20-minute talk.

Abstract Guidelines

All abstracts should be anonymous and written in English with glosses or translations for words or examples in any other language. Each abstract, including the title and any data in figures or tables, must not exceed 500 words. Data must include interlinear glosses following the Leipzig Glossing Rules. The 500-word abstract should be single-spaced and in a unicode font no smaller than 11 point, and in .pdfor .doc/.docx format. Abstracts must be be submitted electronically via EasyChair. Example abstracts from other conferences can be found on the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Submission Instructions

Submissions are restricted to one single-authored paper and one co-authored paper per individual. Your abstract must be submitted online using the EasyChair website, which will give you additional instructions, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acal47. If you have never used EasyChair before, you will need to register at https://www.easychair.org/account/signup.cgi?conf=acal47

Contact Information

For more information, you may email the conference organizers at acal47@berkeley.edu or visit the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Graduate Program in Linguistics at the University of Kansas

The Linguistics Department at KU has undergone significant changes in the past decade to position itself as a unique program that unites linguistic theory and experimental research. We have particular strengths in experimental phonetics and phonology, first and second language acquisition, developmental psycholinguistics, second language psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, the cognitive neuroscience of language, linguistic fieldwork, and theoretical syntax and semantics. Our faculty members and graduate students study a broad range of languages including understudied language varieties in Asia and the Americas. The department has six active research labs, which have all successfully competed for external funding and provide support for graduate studies. The department has both head-mounted and remote eye trackers, an EEG laboratory, and on the KU medical center campus, cortical MEG, fetal MEG and MRI systems. We offer both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. We invite you to explore our graduate degree program further at our website: http://linguistics.ku.edu/

Funding

The Linguistics Department has several fellowships that will be available in the 2016-2017 academic year. All doctoral students who are admitted to the program will be offered five-year packages that include graduate teaching or research assistantship positions. We will be able to award one Chancellor’s Fellowship, the university's most prestigious graduate award, which offers a very generous funding package. All Ph.D. applicants will be automatically considered for these awards.

Placement

Recent Ph.D. graduates of our program have enjoyed successful job placement as postdoctoral researchers and tenure-track professors at a variety of institutions around the world. Recent graduates have attained postdoctoral positions at universities such the University of Chicago, New York University, University of Reading, Oxford University, the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition, and Language, and tenure-track appointments at colleges and universities such as Indiana University, Mississippi State University, Harding College, Hankyung National University in Korea, and the University of Costa Rica.

Lawrence, KS

Lawrence is a dynamic college town located 45 minutes from downtown Kansas City. We have an art theatre, a local brewery, multiple museums, great coffee shops, several natural foods grocers, many farmers markets, and the most amazing sunflower fields you will ever see.

Apply

Information on admission requirements is available at: https://linguistics.ku.edu/admission

The deadline to apply for the Fall 2016 semester is January 1, 2016.

If you have questions, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Alison Gabriele at gabriele@ku.edu.

Syntax Workshop

Lisa Green writes:

The schedule for the remaining activity is below.

November 6th: Discussion of "How to Neutralize a Finite Clause Boundary:Phase Theory and the Grammar of Bound Pronouns: by Thomas Grano and Howard Lasnik

November 13th: David Erschler talks

November 20th: Open

November 27th: Thanksgiving break (We will not meet.)

December 4th: Rodica Ivan talks

26 October 2015

Armstrong in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, 10/30 at 12pm in N451. All are welcome! Meghan Armstrong will present a talk titled: "Tasks for eliciting expressive prosody in mother-child dyads"

25 October 2015

SSRG tomorrow

Leland Kusmer:

Our next meeting will be this coming Monday, October 26th, at 7:30pm as usual. Two of our visitors — Lisa and Georgia — will be presenting their own work. The meeting will take place at the home of Lisa, Michael, and Jai Eun — 183 Bridge Street in Northampton.

As always, please remember to RSVP so that we can get food for you:

http://doodle.com/poll/crziepiqbyqqe3k5

Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Agreement at UMass

The departments of Linguistics and Psychology are hosting a workshop on Agreement Thursday and Friday of this week (Oct. 28 and 30). Registration is free, but if you plan on attending, you should rsvp here. Thursday’s talks are on “Agreement and Linear Order,” and Friday’s on “Experimental and theoretical approaches.” Thursday’s talks are in ILC N400 and Friday’s talks are in ILS S211.

For a schedule and more information, go here.

Tracy Conner in Kentucky

Tracy Conner gave a talk entitled “The Effects of Morphosyntactic Variation on Ellipsis Licensing” at the University of Kentucky last Monday, Oct. 19.

AAUW dissertation fellowships

The American Association of University Women has dissertation fellowships designed to help pay for living expenses in the year that a woman is writing her dissertation. The fellowships are available to citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. They are due on November 15, 2015. You can learn more here.

Tu+ program available

Deiz Ozylidiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here:

http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here:

http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Alice Harris at Oxford

Alice Harris will be giving an invited talk at Oxford University on Monday, October 26, entitled “Affix order, multiple exponence, and morphological reconstruction."

Roeper in India

Tom Roeper gave a keynote talk at the Thirty-Seventh International Conference of Linguistic Society of India, hosted by the Centre of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi last week. The title of his talk was “Recursion: from theory to acquisition in cross-linguistic Perspective.” He also gave a two week workshop on connecting acquisition experiments to fieldwork on newly researched Northern Indian languages. Tom is a guest at the Institute for Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is also giving a lecture entitled “Strict Interfaces: Why modern theories of UG entail greater Innateness."

18 October 2015

Jill de Villiers presents at LARC

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, Oct. 23, at noon in ILC N451 to hear Jill de Villiers present: “How to make a child language assessment in a language with no history of assessments (or even research); some lessons learned.” All are welcome!

Claire Halpert gives talk on Friday

Syntax guru Claire Halpert will give a talk on Friday, Oct. 23, in ILC N400 at 3:30. (The title and abstract follow.) Claire has taken up residence in N472 until October 30, and she can be reached at halpert@umn.edu.

Escape clause

In this talk, I investigate the syntactic properties of clausal arguments, looking in particular at whether A-movement is permitted out of finite clauses and at whether these clauses themselves may undergo movement or establish agreement relationships. In English, argument clauses show some puzzling distributional properties compared to their nominal counterparts. In particular, they appear to satisfy selectional requirements of verbs, but can also combine directly with non-nominal-taking nouns and adjectives. Stowell (1981) and many others have treated these differences as arising from how syntactic case interacts with nominals and clauses. In a recent approach, Moulton (2015) argues that the distributional properties of propositional argument clauses are due to their semantic type: these clauses are type e,st and so must combine via predicate modification, unlike nominals. In contrast to English, I show that in the Bantu language Zulu, certain non-nominalized finite CPs exhibit identical selectional properties to nominals, therefore requiring a different treatment from those proposed in the previous literature. These clauses, also like nominals, appear to control phi-agreement and trigger intervention effects in predictable ways. At the same time, these clauses differ from nominals (and nominalized clauses) in the language in certain respects. I will argue that these properties shed light on the role that phi-agreement plays in the transparency/opacity of finite clauses for A-movement and on the nature of barrier effects in the syntax more generally.

Clauss at MIT

Mike Clauss gives a talk at the Acquisition Lab at MIT Wednesday, Oct. 21, where he will present “Classifying Adjectives without Semantic Information," joint work with Jeremy Hatrman.

Call for papers: Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The Department of English, Linguistics/TESOL Program at Central Connecticut State University is pleased to announce the 12th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, to be held from May 12 to May 15, 2016. As a special feature, we are hosting a one-day session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic Languages.

Invited Speakers:

- Mark Baker (Rutgers University)

- Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware)

- Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto)

2nd Call for Papers:

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10-minute discussions) and for posters on topics dealing with formal aspects of any area of theoretical Altaic linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Additionally, abstracts covering any area of theoretical linguistics of sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages are welcome. We are using Easy Abstracts at the LINGUIST List for the submission and the blind review process.

The address for abstract submission is: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/WAFL12

Authors are invited to submit anonymous abstracts to any of the following sessions:

- General session: May 13-15

- Special session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages: May 12

- Poster session: TBA

Authors should indicate what session they are submitting an abstract to. Abstracts should be a maximum of one page in length excluding references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2.5 cm/1 inch. There is a maximum of two abstracts per person, one of which must be co-authored.

Important Dates:

- Deadline for submission: November 30, 2015, 11:59pm EST

- Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2016