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