Seid Tvica speaks on Thursday

Seid Tvica, (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk this Thursday, April 30, at 12:20 in ILC: N451. A title and abstract follows.

Rich Agreement Hypothesis beyond Indo-European

It is well-established in the literature that many Germanic and Romance languages differ in the placement of adverbs, appearing either before or after the finite verb. This typological distinction is standardly accounted for via v-to-I movement, arguably triggered by the subject agreement features that are assumed to be located at I (cf. Roberts 1985; Kosmeijer 1986; Rohrbacher 1994; Vikner 1995;Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998; Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014, among many others). The observed correlation between the properties of agreement morphology and verb movement gave rise to the so-called “rich agreement hypothesis” (RAH) which, in its strong version, states thatin controlled environments the finite verb moves to a vP-external position if and only if the agreement morphology is rich (cf. Koenemanand Zeijlstra 2014). Building on the work done so far in this talk, I present the results of a typological investigation of RAH, showing that RAH holds across many languages, well beyond the Indo-European family. In particular, I will discuss verb movement in three unrelated non-Indo-European languages.

Diversity Linguistics

This weekend, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig is hosting the conference “Diversity Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect.” UMass is represented by David Erschler, who will be giving his paper “A universal on generalized sluicing.” For more information, go here.

The Three Rogers

Angelika Kratzer writes:

Every time Roger visits for a colloquium, we take a picture of him in front of the same painting in our kitchen. Here is the current series of 3: Roger-way-back-when, Roger-then, Roger-now. 

 

Postdoc at Hebrew University

The Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (http://scholars.huji.ac.il/llcc) is looking for post-doctoral fellows. Earliest start date: Fall 2015. The positions are initially for one year, renewable for another year. The ideal candidate for a position is someone who already submitted their Phd dissertation, is working in syntax, semantics and/or formal pragmatics, and has an interest in experimental work. The fellow will be primarily a member of the LLCC but will also have an opportunity to interact extensively with members of the Department of Linguistics and the Safra Center for Brain Science (ELSC). Apart from contributing to the research environment of the LLCC and pursuing their own research, the fellow will have some (minor) local responsibilities. Pay: 7,500-10,500 NIS per month (Euro 1,750-2,400). Applicants should send a CV, a 1-page research statement, and a link to their publications to Luka Crnic (luka.crnic@mail.huji.ac.il) or to Yosef Grodzinsky (yosef.grodzinsky@mail.huji.ac.il), to whom all inquiries should be addressed.

GLOW 2015

The annual meeting of Generative Linguistics of the Old World met in Paris Wednesday through Saturday of last week, and UMass was represented by:

UMass alumnus Winnie Lechner, with coauthors Giorgos Spathas, Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou, presented their paper “On deriving the typology of repetition and restitution."

UMass students Stefan Keine and Ethan Poole presented their paper “Intervention in tough-constructions."

UMass alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, presented their paper “Mismatching Pseudo-Relatives Describe Event Kinds."

UMass citizens Coral Hughto, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs presented their paper “Grammatical agent-based modeling of typology."

UMass prospective faculty Gaja Jarosz presented her paper “Phonotactic probability and sonority sequencing in Polish initial clusters."

Tom Ernst was also in attendance at the States/Events Workshop on the last day of the conference. You can learn more here.

Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The program for the eleventh Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics has been announced. The Workshop will be at the University of York on June 4-6. UMass is represented by Deniz Ozyildiz, who is presenting the paper "Move to mI, but only if you can."

UConn Workshop for Irene Heim

The UConn Logic group has its annual workshop on May 2-3. Each year their workshop is dedicated to the work of a single person, and this year they're honoring Irene Heim. The workshop is announced here: http://logic.uconn.edu/workshop/. 

Saturday, May 2

9-10:30 Barbara PARTEE (UMass) Irene Heim in the History of Formal Semantics (Invited) 

10:30-11:35 Lucas CHAMPOLLION (NYU) The weak/strong ambiguity in donkey sentences cannot be explained away. 

11:50-1:20 Thomas Ede ZIMMERMANN (Frankfurt) Type-shifting and the proportion problem (Invited) 

2:30 - 3:35 Paul DEKKER (Amsterdam) Indexical Inference 

3:35 - 4:40 Matthew MANDELKERN (MIT) Taking things for granted (Graduate Student Prize) 

4:55 - 6:25 Hans KAMP (Stuttgart/Texas) Presuppositions after 1983 (Invited) 

Sunday, May 3

9 - 10:30  David BEAVER (Texas) “The X” files (Invited) 

10:30 - 12  Simon CHARLOW (Rutgers) The scope of alternatives (Invited) 

12:15 - 1:45 Irene HEIM (MIT) Keynote