Classes start this week, and with them so does WHISC. As in previous years, WHISC posts news about the goings-on in the Linguistics department at UMass. The posts usually appear on Sundays. If you have an item that you would like to see in WHISC, send it to umass.whisc@gmail.com by the Friday preceding the Sunday you’d like to see it posted. (The staff at WHISC are slow and long in the tooth. They will appreciate a bit of lead time.)
Welcome back!
The introductory Town Meeting occurs this Friday (Sept. 11) in the department seminar room (ILC N400) at 3:30. This gathering is a chance for us to welcome the new members of the department, and for them to get their first look at us. Photographer Brian McDermott from Communication and Journalism be on hand at 2:30 to take pictures. If you have not had your picture taken for the department directory, or if you would like to replace the one we have, please come at 2:30.
Barbara and Volodja write:
This year the picnic, which occurs on Saturday September 19, will be preceded by a memorial tribute to Emmon Bach, long-time pillar of the department and a beloved colleague, teacher, friend to many of us. You may have received a separate invitation from John Kingston to that -- let me know if you didn't so that we can make sure you will get future notices in case of any changes (e.g. if it rains); in any case, everyone is welcome to both parts of the combined event. The Emmon remembrance will include music, reminiscences, tributes, to which everyone is welcome to contribute, planned in advance or spontaneously. If you're interested in contributing some live music, contact Kristine Yu (krisyu@linguist.umass.edu).
The Emmon event will start at 2, and the picnic proper will start at 3:30. In case of rain, the Emmon event will probably be moved to the department, but the picnic will be at 50 Hobart Lane rain or shine.
If you're coming from out of town, you don't have to contribute to the potluck part -- just let me know and we'll make sure there's plenty!
And please let me know of people who should be added to the mailing list; and at the same time you can invite them to come (and urge relevant people to get themselves onto the ling-colloq mailing list.)
For more information about the picnic — directions, etc, — go here.
The Fifth international symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages will be held in Buffalo, New York May 24-27. The special theme of these year’s meeting is "Tone in the brain and the world: Bridging linguistic and psychological perspectives.” The deadline for submission of papers is December 1, 2015. For more information, go here.
Seth Cable writes:
I’m writing to let you all know that the meetings of the Semantics Workshop this fall will be at the following time-space coordinates:
Wednesdays, 12:20 - 1:10
Room N451 (of the Integrative Learning Center)
Our first meeting will be Wednesday (September 9th). We’ll discuss our general goals for the semester, and set a preliminary agenda.
Speech Prosody 2016 will be held in Boston May 31-June 3, 2016. This year’s theme is “Prosody and Individual: Unity and Difference Within and Across Speech Communities.” The deadline for submission of regular papers is November 15. (They are also accepting proposals for Special Sessions. The deadline for those proposals is September 15.) You can learn more about the conference here.
Amanda Rysling writes:
The Psycholinguistics Workshop this semester will meet on Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 in N400.
There are also going to be some talks or events not at that time, which will be announced on the ling-psych mailing list. Anyone who wants to present something, whether at a daytime meeting or during a special evening/reading group session, should let me know.
Cornell University is hosting the fifteenth meeting of LabPhon July 13-16, 2016. The call for abstracts for 20 minute talks, as well as posters, can be found here. This year’s themes are: Perceptual dynamics, Prosodic organization, Lexical dynamics and memory, Phonological acquisition and changes over the lifespan, and social network dynamics.
Two page abstracts are due on December 1. You can learn more about the conference here.
Joe Pater writes:
We’ve settled on Thursday 4-5 as the meeting time for the phonology grant group. Our first meeting at that time will be Thursday the 24th, but we’ll have a meeting this week at the special time of 1:45 Friday (the 11th). I’l try to get N400, but if I can’t, I’ll e-mail the ling-phonology list (newcomers can sign up to this list and others here: http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php.html).
Rajesh Bhatt and Lisa Green write:
The Syntax Workshop this semester will meet on Fridays from 2:15 to 3:05, location TBA. Our first meeting will be on Friday September 11. We will attend to organizational matters and then we already have a speaker lined up for the meeting! An announcement will be forthcoming.
UMass will host the third meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting October 2-4. UMass is represented by:
Hsin-Lun Huang presents the paper “Argument Structure and Causativity in Mandarin Resultatives."
Kristine Yu presents the paper “Tonal Marking of Absolutive Case in Samoan."
Jaieun Kim (with Inkie Chung) presents the poster “Locality in Suppletive Allomorphy of GIVE in Korean."
The program for the 2015 Annual Meetings on Phonology has been announced, and features talks and posters by the following UMassers:
Alumna Claire Moore-Cantwell gives a talk entitled “The phonological grammar is probabilistic: new evidence pitting abstract representation against analogy."
Alumna Gilian Gallagher gives a talk entitled “Vowel height and dorsals: allophonic differences cue contrasts"
Faculty Gaja Jarosz gives a talk entitled “Learning opaque and transparent interactions in Harmonic Serialism."
Alumnus Wendell Kimper gives the talk “Asymmetrical generalisation of harmony triggers” (Wendell has been at the University of Manchester for the past three years, explaining his quaint orthography.)
Alumna Karen Jesney will give the poster “On the relationship between learning sequence and rate of acquisition"
Alumna Presley Pizzo, with faculty Joe Pater, will give the poster “Learning alternations affect phonotactic judgments"
Alumna Suzanne Urbanczyk will give a tutorial on fieldwork on indigenous languages.
The conference meets October 9-11 at UBC in Vancouver. You can learn more here.
The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes is hosting the twelfth meeting of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition this weekend: September 10-12. UMass is represented by:
Alumna Suzi Lima, who with Peggy Lis and Jesse Snedeker, is presenting the paper “Acquiring the denotation of object-denoting nouns"
Alumnus Bart Hollebrandse, who with Natasa Knezevic and Hamida Demirdache, is presenting “Vowel epenthesis in children’s oral and written productions of consonant clusters."
Michael Clauss is presenting “Free relatives in acquisition: Mislabeling or Generalized Move-Wh rule?
Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson, who with Anca Sevcenco, is presenting the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative PPs and relative clauses in child English."
Bart Hollebradse, who with Marleen Kremer and Angeliek van Hout, is presenting the poster “Asymmetries in Dutch children’s development of definiteness."
You can learn more here.