UMass at Speech Prosody 2016

Speech Prosody 2016 was hosted by Boston University from Tuesday, May 31 through Friday 3 in Boston. UMass was represented by 

alumna Emily Elfner, who gave the tale “Subject/Object complexity and prosody boundary strength in Irish"

alumnus Jesse Harris, with Sun-Ah Jun and Adam Joyer, who gave the talk “Implicit prosody pulls its weight: Recovery from garden path sentences.”

Mara Breen, with Sarah Weidman and Katherine Haydon, gave the talk “Prosodic speech entrainment in romantic relationships."

Covadonga Sánchez-Alvarado and Meghan E. Armstrong gave the talk “Pitch scaling and the perception of contrastive focus in L1 and L2 Spanish."

Alumna Amy Schafer, with Múria Esteve-Gibert, Cristel Portes, Barbara Hemforth and Mariapaola D’Imperio, gave the paper “Intonation in the processing of contrast meaning in French: An eye-tracking study."

Meghan Armstrong organized a special session on Rising intonation in English and beyond, and gave a talk, with Maria Del Mar Vanrell, at that session entitled “Intonational polar question markers and implicature in American English and Majorcan Catalan.” She also, with Page Piccinini and Amanda Ritchart, gave the poster “Non-Question rises in narratives produced by mothers and daughters."

Call for papers: Conditionals at the Crossroads

Full Title: Conditionals at the Crossroads of Semantics and Pragmatics 

Date: 10-Nov-2016 - 11-Nov-2016 

Location: Konstanz, Germany 

Web Site: https://sites.google.com/site/conditionalsatthecrossroads/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 24-Jul-2016 

Meeting Description:

Invited speakers: 
Itamar Francez (University of Chicago) 

Daniel Lassiter (Stanford University) 

Karen Lewis (Columbia University) 

UMass alumnus Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins University) 

The workshop aims to bring together scholars working on linguistic issues both at the sentential and discourse level as well as scholars working at the junction of linguistics and philosophy. 

Particular topics of interest are but are not limited to: 

- Epistemic modals in probabilistic and non-probabilistic epistemic models 

- Tense, aspect and mood in the semantic composition of conditionals 

- Sobel sequences and related patterns 

- Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in conditionals and related constructions 

- Discourse particles and their occurrence in conditionals 

- Conditional perfection and other inferences derived from the interaction between conditionals and discourse 

- Semantics and pragmatics of quirky conditionals such as biscuit conditionals, chimeric conditionals, optative conditionals etc. 

Organizers: UMass alumna María Biezma and Maribel Romero 

Contact: conditionalsatthecrossroadsgmail.com 

Meeting website: https://sites.google.com/site/conditionalsatthecrossroads/

Call for Abstracts: 

We invite papers on the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective. 
We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (with additional 15 minutes for discussion). Abstracts must be anonymous and should be at most 2 pages (A4 or US Letter) in length, including examples and references, using a 12pt font with 1 inch (2.5 cm) margins on all four sides. The abstract must be submitted as a single PDF. Submissions are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. 

Deadline for Submission: 24 July 2016 

Submit your abstract via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/condcrossroads 

(Abstract Submission opens on 1 June 2016)

UMass at Manchester Phonology meeting

The University of Manchester is hosting the the Twenty-Fourth Manchester Phonology Meeting May 26-28th. UMass is represented by 

alumna Nancy Hall who is giving the talk “A phonetic study of closed syllable shortening in Palestinian Arabic."

Coral Hughto who is giving the talk “Typological prediction of an interactive learning model"

Leland Kusmer and Ivy Hauser who are giving the talk “Wrong side reduplication in Koasat"

For more information, go here.

Summer School in Göttingen

Summer School on Complex Clauses/Germany

Host Institution:University of Göttingen, Germany
Coordinating Institution:University of Göttingen, Germany

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/535725.html

Dates:8-Aug-2016 to 12-Aug-2016
Location:Göttingen , Germany

Focus:Linguistics in Göttingen (LinG) proudly announces a five-day summer school on Complex Clauses, held in Göttingen. During this summer school, four tutorials (1,5 hour per day each) will be held, featuring well-known teachers. In addition, there will be a poster session, where students can present and discuss their work, as well as evening lectures.

Minimum Education Level:BA
Additional Qualifications:The school is intended for 20 graduate students, PhD students or postdocs, working on, or interested in, the topic.

Full Summer School Description:
Four courses (1,5 hours/day for 5 days):

Courses:
Jaklin Kornfilt (Syracuse University): Complex Clauses in some head-final languages (with particular attention to Turkish and Turkic)
UMass alumnus Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser University): Ingredient of Embedding
Hans-Martin Gärtner (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): Issues in Special and Minor Sentence Type
Magdalena and Stefan Kaufmann (UConn): Current topics in the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals

Evening lectures:
Beáta Gyuris (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): The semantics and pragmatics of embedded interrogatives in Hungarian
Uwe Junghans and Hagen Pitsch (University of Göttingen): Complex sentence structures in Slavic

Tuition:100 (EUR)
Tuition Explanation:Tuition includes coffee breaks and free lunch on all 5 days.
Registration Dates:1-Apr-2016 to 23-May-2016
Contact person information:Edgar Onea
Email:edgar.onea@zentr.uni-goettingen.de
Apply by mail:julia.steinmetz@zentr.uni-goettingen.de
----------------
Apply by email:julia.steinmetz@zentr.uni-goettingen.de
Registration Instructions:Interested? Send an email to julia.steinmetz@zentr.uni-goettingen.de by May 23 with a short description of your research interests and a short motivation why you would want to attend the school. Together this should be no more than 500 words. Please consult the website https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/535725.html on accommodation information and financial aid. Notification of acceptance by the June, 1 the latest.

Roeper at University of Toronto

Tom Roeper will be giving a talk entitled “Recursion and Interfaces” at a workshop on Complexity in Learnability and Development that the University of Toronto is hosting this Wednesday, May 25. Tom’s paper reports on his work with Petra Schulz. The Workshop is organized by UMass alumna Ana-Teresa Pérez-Leroux, who will also be giving talks at the workshop. For more information, go here.

Ellipsis and Andrew Weir make Slate

Katy Waldman, Slate’s “words correspondent” riffs on ellipsis.

UMass at WAFL 12

Central Connecticut College is hosting the 12th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics this weekend, May 13-15. UMass is represented by:

Deniz Özyildiz, who is giving the poster “*Say what? A Turkish word order restriction explained by prosody."

and

alumnus Satoshi Tomioka, who is giving the invited talk “Purposeful Questions: A New Embedding Strategy."

For more information, go here.

UMass at FASL

Cornell University is hosting the Twenty Fifth annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics on May 13-15. Gaja Jarosz and alumnus Michael Becker are giving plenary talks. Gaja’s is entitled “Sonority sequencing in Polish: Defying the sttimulus?” and Michael’s is entitled “Inconspicuous unfaithfulness in Slovenian.” For more information, go here.

UMass at SULA

UC, Santa Cruz is hosting the ninth meeting of Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas on May 6-8. UMass is represented by:

Alumna Amy Rose Deal, who is giving the talk “Legacy Documentation: What can we learn?"

Seth Cable, who is giving the talk “Negation and negative antonyms in Tlingit."

Alumna Suzi Lima, who is giving the talk “On the interpretation of object denoting nouns in Yudja"

For more information, go here.

UMass at WCCFL

The University of Utah is hosting the 34th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics this weekend. UMass is represented by:

Ethan Poole, who is giving the talk “The locality of dependent Case,"

Alumna Amy Rose Deal, who is giving the talk “Syntactic Egativity as Case discrimination."

Alumna Karen Jesney, who with Brian Hsu, is presenting the paper “Loanword Adaptation in Quebec French: Evidence for Weighted Scalar Constraints"

Extended Deadline: Cognitive Structures: Linguistic, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

Full Title: Cognitive Structures: Linguistic, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

Short Title: Cognitive Structures

Date: September 15–17, 2016

Location: Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany.

Meeting Email: cognitive-structures@phil.hhu.de

Web Site: http://cognitive-structures.phil.hhu.de

Field(s): General and Computational Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Cognitive Science

Extended Deadline: May 1, 2016

Meeting Description

The DFG Collaborative Research Centre 991: The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science (Düsseldorf, Germany) invites abstracts for its biannual conference that aims to cover a broad range of research on language and cognition. 

We are especially interested in theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production/understanding, other manifestations of cognition as well as general reasoning about the world. One fundamental question raised in this general topic area is whether the requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. 

Topics addressed may include, but are not limited to, the following:

* frames, which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics: e.g., formal theories of frames (including their modeling by means of DAGs, AVMs), frame semantics and constructions, frame induction, linking frame semantics to truth conditional semantics

*concepts and categorization: formation/acquisition of concepts, concept types and shifts, grounding of concepts, prototypes, concept empiricism, conceptual spaces and similarity of concepts, statistical concepts;

*experimental investigation of mental representation;

*semantic interpretation and mental representation: the syntax/semantics interface, compositionality, lexical semantic decomposition, (dynamic) representation of aspect and tense, temporal sequencing in discourse.

Submissions are welcome from any area within cognitive science, including linguistics, computer science, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Accepted participants will be allotted 25 minutes to present and 10 minutes to answer questions. Accepted participants will be invited to submit their papers for the conference proceedings.

Invited Speakers

Lawrence Barsalou (University of Glasgow)

Verity Brown (University of St Andrews)

UMass alumnus Robin Cooper (Gothenburg University)

Igor Douven (CNRS and Paris-Sorbonne University)

Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)

Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University and ZAS Berlin)

UMass alumnus Marcin Morzycki (Michigan State University)

Francois Recanati (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris)

Guidelines for Submission

Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, maximally 800 words, excluding bibliographical references. Data should be incorporated into the main text of the abstract, not on a separate page.
All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers. Abstracts should not include the authors’ names, and authors are asked to avoid self-references.

Use the EasyChair platform for the submission of abstracts: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cost16

Submission Contact cognitive-structures@phil.hhu.de

Important datesExtended Deadline: May 1, 2016Notification of acceptance: May 30, 2016 Conference: September 15–17, 2016

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Angelika Kratzer writes:

You (and your friends, students, colleagues) are all invited to a symposium on:

Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports

Saturday, April 16 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Integrative Learning Center, N 400 

Please spread the word! Catered reception starting at 1:00 PM. This might or might not be a substitute for lunch. 

9:30

Coffee, settling down

10:00  - 10:55

Kate Davidson, Linguistics Department, Harvard University 

Our cat went "meow" and my dog was like "feed me!": iconic attitude reports in spoken and sign languages.

Hadas Kotek, Linguistics Department, McGill University Chair & last question or comment. 

11:05 - 12:00

Jonathan Phillips, Moral Cognition Lab, Psychology Department, Harvard University

Factive Theory of Mind

Angelika Kratzer, Department of Linguistics, UMass AmherstChair & last question or comment. 

12:10 - 1:05

Shevaun Lewis, Language & Cognition Lab, Cognitive Science Department, Johns Hopkins University

The Role of Pragmatics in Language Development and Processing

Amy Rose Deal, Linguistics Department, UC BerkeleyChair & last question or comment. 


The Symposium is offered and organized by members of the 2015/2016 SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) Summer Institute. Financial support for the symposium comes from Research and Professional Development Funds provided by UMass Amherst, which are gratefully acknowledged.  More information about the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute: 

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sias/

Brian Smith goes to Santa Cruz

WHISC is happy to announce that Brian Smith has accepted a one-year position at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Congratulations Brian!

UMass at GLOW

The 39th annual meeting of the Generative Linguistics in the Old World is being hosted by the University of Göttingen April 5-8. UMass is represented by:

Sakshi Bhatia, Leland Kusmer and Ekaterina Vostrikova who are presenting the paper “Indirect interaction of person and number"

Ethan Poole who is presenting the paper “The locality of dependent case."

Jeremy Pasquereau who is presenting the paper “Overt movement of comparative quantifiers in European French."

alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, who is presenting the paper “Clausal determiners and long distance AGREE in Italian."

Jon Ander Mendia who is presenting the paper “Conventionalizing at least some determiners."

Stefan Keine, Jon Ander Mendia and Ethan Poole who are presenting the paper “It’s tough to reconstruct"

You can learn more about GLOW here.

UMass at phoNE

NYU is hosting phoNE this Saturday, April 9. UMass is represented by Deniz Ozyildiz and Alexei Nazarov who are giving talks. A complete schedule follows.

Saturday, April 9

11:30-12      Luca Iacaponi (Rutgers): Non-stringent markednessrelations: evidence from Consonant Harmony

12-12:30      Chris Geissler (Yale): Explaining Vowel Harmony in Lhasa Tibetan

12:30-1:30   lunch

1:30-2           Deniz Ozyildiz (UMass)

2-2:30           James Whang (NYU)

2:30-2:50      break

2:50-3:20       Juliet Stanton (MIT): Trigger deletion in Gurindji

3:20-3:50       Gašper Beguš (Harvard) Unnatural phenomena and gradient phonotactics

3:50-4:10       break

4:10-4:40       Shu-hao Shih (Rutgers)

4:40-5:10       Alexei Nazarov (UMass)

5:10-5:30       break

5:30-6            Erin Olsen (MIT)

6                business meeting

The conference takes place on the first floor of the Linguistics Department, which is at 10 Washington Place in Manhattan.

Amy Rose Deal gives department colloquium

Amy Rose Deal (UC, Berkeley) will give the department colloquium on Friday, March 25 at 3:30 in ILC N400. A title and abstract of her talk follow.

Title:

Shifty asymmetries: toward universals and variation in shifty indexicality

Abstract:

Indexical shift is a phenomenon whereby indexicals embedded in speech and attitude reports depend for their reference on the speech/attitude report, rather than on the overall utterance. For example, in a language with indexical shift, "I" may refer to Bob in a sentence like "Who did Bob think I saw?". The last 15 years have seen an explosive growth in research on indexical shift cross-linguistically. In this talk, I discuss three major generalizations that emerge from this work, and present a theory that attempts to explain them. The account that I develop concerns the syntax of indexical shift along with its semantics, and has consequences for the linguistic encoding of attitudes de se. Throughout the talk I will exemplify indexical shift primarily, though by no means exclusively, with data from original fieldwork on Nez Perce.

UMass at PLC 40

The University of Pennsylvania hosted the 40th meeting of the Penn Linguistics Conference this weekend. UMass was represented by:

Alumna Gillian Gallagher, who gave the invited talk “Categorical Phonotactics and Language Universals"

Alumnus Martin Walkow, who gave the poster “Syntactic Parallels between Verbal and Nominal phi-Morphology in (Classical) Arabic."

Alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier who gave the talk “Weigh(t)ing the Evidence: Avoidance and Constraint Interaction in Phonological Development."

and 

Brian Dillon, who gave the Keynote Address: “Grammatical Illusions in sentence processing: At the interface of performance and competence."

You can learn more here.

ACAL 47

The 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics is being hosted by the University of California, Berkeley on March 23-26. UMass is represented by:

Rodica Ivan and Deniz Ozyildiz who are giving the paper “The Somali microscope: pronouns, determiners and possession.” (Their abstract is here,)

William Bennett, Kristine Yu and alumnus Wendell Kimper with Christopher Green who are giving the paper “Acoustic correlates of harmonic classes in Somali."

Alumna Rose-Marie Déchaine, who is giving the paper “Shona root classes: implications for the lexicon and beyond,” and, with Herman Keupdjio, “Compound pronouns in Bamileke Medumba"

Lisa Selkirk who is giving the paper “Edge-sensitivity in Bantu sentence topology: Luganda, Xitsonga, Bemba"

Leland Kusmer who is giving the paper “Prosody and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Tshivenda"

Alumna Meredith Landman who is giving the paper “Quantification in Kipsigis"

Alumnus Ken Safir gives the paper “Actual clauses in Lubukusu and what they mean for a symmetric theory of clausal complementation."

You can learn more about the conference here.

SALT 26 program announced

The University of Texas at Austin, who is hosting the Twenty-Sixth meeting of Semantics and Linguistics Theory in early May, has just released the program and UMass is well-represented:

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Jérémy Zehr, Cory Bill, Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli will present the paper “Presupposition projection from the scope of `none’: universal, existential, or both?"

Alumnus Chris Davis who, with Eric McCready, will present the paper “Expressives and Alternatives"

Alumnus Luis Alonso-Ovalle is presenting the paper “Are All Concessive Scalar Particles the Same? Probing into Spanish “Siquiera."

Jon Ander Mendia will present the paper “Reasoning with Partial Orders."

Alumna Suzi Lima will present the paper “On object denoting nouns: defining atoms"

Alumnus Kyle Rawlins, with Aaron Steven White, will present the paper “A computational model of S-selection” and, with Justin Bledin, the paper “Epistemic resistance moves."

For more information, go here.

Frana gets the De Vincenzi prize

Ilaria Frana has received the Marica De Vincenzi prize for best paper by an Italian researcher selected for IGG (Incontro Grammatica Generativa). The paper was “Mica as a Common Ground Management operator” (collaborative work with Kyle Rawlins). The prize is offered by “Fondazione Marica De Vincenzi Onlus”. WHISC as acquired the celebratory group picture from the event (from left to right: Nino Grillo, Francesca Foppolo, me and Carlo Gerace.)