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.
Angelika Kratzer gave a colloquium talk entitled “Evidential Moods” to UPenn’s linguistics department on Thursday, May 5.
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.
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:
Zsofia Zvolensky will be giving two talks this week. The first is Wednesday, April 20, at 4:30 in 216 Skinner Hall at Mount Holyoke College. The title of that talk is “Authors Creating Fictional Characters, Either Intentionally or Inadvertently.” The second talk is at UMass on Friday, April 22, at 3:30 in Bartlett 201. The title of that talk is “A Common Problem for Possible-Worlds Analyses of Deontic and Fictional Discourse."
Full Title: Situations, Information, and Semantic Content
Date: 16-Dec-2016 - 18-Dec-2016
Location: Munich, Bavaria, Germany Contact Person: Kristina
Web Site: http://www.situatedcontent2016.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de
Call Deadline: 29-May-2016
Backgrounds, Aim, and Scope:
The semantic content of natural language is multiply situated: Whether an utterance receives one interpretation or another depends on the discourse situation (in which the utterance takes place), on the target situation (which is described by the utterance), and on the interpreting agents' informational situation (which also contains the agents' background knowledge). Over the past decades, work on extralinguistic context-dependence has focused on discourse situations and target situations, and has paid less attention to the dependence of interpretation on the agents' informational situation. However, this kind of information-dependence plays a crucial role in the explanation of a number of semantic phenomena, including the behavior of epistemic/deontic modals and propositional attitude-sentences. Recent research in situated cognition has suggested an even more general scope of semantic information-dependence. The latter assumes that cognition (and therefore, all linguistic understanding) is fundamentally embedded in the situational context of the cognition.
This workshop aims to bring together linguists, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive and computer scientists to discuss the information-dependence of the semantic content of natural language. It covers all aspects of the interaction between situations, information, and semantic content -- both theoretical and experimental --, including
- agents' information and semantic content
- the scope of information-dependence in natural language
- analyses of semantic phenomena featuring information-dependence
- experiments on semantic information-dependence
- the impact of agents' information on attitude attributions - semantic aspects of situated cognition
- situation theory and situation semantics
- data semantics and dynamic/update semantics
- (partial) information and situations
- the formal analysis of (informational) situations
- the formal analysis of background knowledge
- partiality of information - type-theoretic approaches to information
Invited Speakers:
- Robin Cooper (University of Gothenburg)
- Nikola Kompa (Osnabrück University)
- Roussanka Loukanova (Stockholm University)
- Friedrike Moltmann (CNRS Paris, New York University)
- Floris Roelofsen (University of Amsterdam/ILLC)
- Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum)
- Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Goethe University of Frankfurt)
- more speakers to be confirmed
Kathryn Davidson (Harvard) will give the department colloquium on Friday, April 8 at 3:30 in ILC N400. A title and abstract of her talk follow.
Title:
Combining imagistic and discrete components in a single proposition: The case of sign language classifier predicates
Abstract:
Classifier predicates in sign languages (also known as "depicting verbs") have both discrete and imagistic components: they participate fully in the grammar as verbs and involve categorical handshapes that agree with the subject, but also have an obligatory "gestural" component that psycholinguistic experiments have shown are interpreted in an analog and iconic way. Understanding how to treat these verbs in a formal semantic system is therefore a challenge. In this talk I will draw parallels with work on quotation and attitude reports to introduce an analysis of classifier predicates involving the notion of an iconic "demonstration of events". I will also present corpus data from bimodal (sign/speech) bilingual blended utterances that sheds light on the syntax/semantics of classifier predicates. Finally, I will discuss extensions of this analysis of classifier predicates to formal semantic analyses of gesture.
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.
DSALT: Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory
ESSLLI 2016 Workshop
15-19 August 2016, Bolzano, Italy
* Two-page abstract submission deadline: April 7 2016 *
URL: http://esslli2016.unibz.it/?page_id=256
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
The DSALT workshop seeks to foster discussion at the intersection of distributional semantics and various subfields of theoretical linguistics, with the goal of boosting the impact of distributional semantics on linguistic research beyond lexical semantic phenomena, as well as broadening the empirical basis and theoretical tools used in linguistics. We welcome contributions regarding the theoretical interpretation of distributional vector spaces and/or their application to theoretical morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse, dialogue, and any other subfield of linguistics. Potential topics of interest include, among others:
* distributional semantics and morphology: How do results in the distributional semantics-morphology interface impact theoretical accounts of morphology? Can distributional models account for inflectional morphology? Can they shed light on phenomena like productivity and regularity?
* distributional semantics and syntax: How can compositionality at the semantic level interact with syntactic structure? Can we go beyond the state of the art in accounting for the syntax-semantics interface when it interacts with lexical semantics? How can distributional accounts for gradable syntactic phenomena, e.g. selectional preferences or argument alternations, be integrated into theoretical linguistic accounts?
* distributional semantics and formal semantics: How can distributional representations be related to the traditional components of a semantics for natural languages, especially reference and truth? Can distributional models be integrated with discourse- or dialogue-oriented semantic theories like file change semantics or inquisitive semantics?
* distributional semantics and discourse: Distributional semantics has shown to be able to model some aspects of discourse coherence at a global level (Landauer and Dumais 1997, a.o.); can it also help with other discourse-related phenomena, such as the choice of discourse particles, nominal and verbal anaphora, or the form of referring expressions as discourse unfolds?
* distributional semantics and dialogue: Distributional semantics has traditionally been mostly static, in the sense that it creates a semantic representation for a word once and for all. Can it be made dynamic so it can help model, for example, phenomena related to Questions Under Discussion (QUDs) in dialogue? Can distributional representations help predict the relations between utterance units in dialogue?
* distributional semantics and pragmatics: Distributional semantics is based on the statistics of language use, and therefore should include information related to pragmatics of language. How do distributional models relate to such aspects of pragmatics as focus, pragmatic presupposition, or conversational implicature?
SUBMISSIONS
We solicit two-page (plus references) abstracts in at most 11pt font. No proceedings will be published, so workshop submissions may discuss published work (as well as unpublished work). The abstract submission deadline is April 7, 2016. Submissions are accepted by email at dsalt2016@gmail.com.
IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for abstract submission: April 7 2016
Author notification: May 15 2016
Workshop dates: August 15-19 2016
Angelika Kratzer writes:
You are all cordially invited to a symposium featuring some of the fellows of the 2015/2016 SIAS (Some Institutes for Advanced Study) Summer Institute. The topic of the symposium is:
Tracking the Human Mind in Attitude and Speech Reports
Saturday, April 16, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Integrative Learning Center N400. The symposium will be followed by a reception.
A detailed program will follow.
Being one of the most interdisciplinary working groups of the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute, the group on Attitude Ascriptions & Speech Reports, designed two projects that promise to make a positive contribution to the longstanding communication problem between neuroscience and linguistic research. In her dissertation, the neuroscientist in the group, Jorie Koster-Hale, found that epistemic properties of other people’s beliefs are represented via response patterns of neural populations in canonical belief ascription regions in the brain (so-called ‘Theory of Mind’ regions). These properties relate to the kind of evidence that ground a belief: whether it was good evidence or not, or whether it was visual or auditory evidence. Those kinds of properties do not only play a major role in philosophical discussions of knowledge ascriptions, they are also grammaticalized in verbal inflectional paradigms in many lesser-known languages (so-called “evidentials”). In addition, they trigger a significant dichotomy in the class of attitude verbs across languages: verbs in the believe family (believe that, suspect that, conjecture that) can be used to report false beliefs, while verbs in the know family (know that, discover that, reveal that, hear that, see that) cannot - those ‘factive’ verbs can only describe attitudes that are properly connected to reality. The SIAS Attitude Ascription and Speech Report group recognized those fascinating connections and found a common language to construct joint projects that will bring together their collective expertise in neuroscience, cognitive development, language acquisition, epistemology, theoretical linguistics and semantic typology under headings like ‘factivity/veridicality’ and ‘knowledge first’. Projects of this kind could become models for collaboration between researchers in the sciences and the humanities.
More info about the 2015/2016 SIAS Summer Institute: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sias/index.htm
Sinn und Bedeutung 21 will take place in Edinburgh, from Sun 4th-Tues 6th September 2016.
Confirmed invited speakers:
-Sigrid Beck (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
- Paul Elbourne (Magdalen College, Oxford)
We invite abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters, devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistic investigations related to meaning. Oral presentations will be scheduled for 40 minute slots (30 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion).
Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author (or two co-authored abstracts).
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 EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 31, 2016.
Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub21
For further information, please contact Rob Truswell (rob.truswell@ed.ac.uk).
NISM 2016: New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling
Paris, September 7-8 2016
http://nism2016.sciencesconf.org/
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
Schedule:
Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2016
Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2016
Conference : 7-8 September 2016
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.
UMass visitor Polina Berezovskaya will present “ `Small Degrees’: Degree Modification in Nenets” at the MIT LingLunch on March 17th.
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.
Angelika Kratzer writes:
Daniel Altshuler from Hampshire College will join the Semantics Seminar Journal Club this coming Wednesday (March 9) to facilitate discussion of the paper “On double access, cessation, and parentheticality”, which he co-authored with Valentine Hacquard, Thomas Roberts, and Aaron White. Everyone is welcome - you don’t have to be in the seminar, and you don’t have to be in the Journal Club. The Journal Club meets every Wednesday in N400 at 4:15 PM. You can download the paper here:
https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/kratzer/altshuler-et-al.pdf
Daniel will give a short presentation of the paper, but since it’s a Journal Club, the discussion will assume that everyone has looked at the paper in one way or other.
Kristen Syrett writes:
The North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information 2016 is being hosted by Rutgers this July. More information is available on the NASSLLI 2016 website, which we continue to update. The local organizing committee would like to spread the word that early bird registration is now in effect, until April 15. In addition, we are pleased to advertise information about the student scholarships and presentations during the student session. Please encourage your students to apply for either/both, and to attend NASSLLI. We have a great lineup of classes and instructors!
WHISC notes that those great instructors include Hampshire College faculty Daniel Altshuler and UMass alumni Kyle Rawlins and Craige Roberts.
Seth Cable gave a colloquium talk at MIT last Friday, February 19. The title of his talk was: “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages).” An abstract follows.
Some languages appear to have a morpheme that combines the meaning of past tense with a variety of additional implications, the nature of which depend upon the aspectual marking of the verb. For non-perfective verbs (imperfective, habitual, future,etc.), the additional implication is that the event/state in question fails to extend into the present. For perfective verbs, however, the additional implication is either that (i) the result state of the event fails to extend into the present, or (ii) some natural, expected consequence of the event failed to occur. Importantly, unlike the superficially similar ‘cessation implicatures’ of past tense in languages like English, these aforementioned implications cannot be directly cancelled. Consequently, prior authors have viewed these additional inferences as semantic in nature, as being encoded directly in the lexical semantics of the morpheme (Leer 1991; Copley 2005; Plungian & van der Auwera 2006). Under this view, the morphemes in question express a special category of tense, one that has been labeled ‘discontinuous past’ by Plungian & van der Auwera (2006).
Through in-depth investigation of one such ‘discontinuous past’ marker in the Tlingit language, I argue that – to the contrary – the special inferences of these morphemes are not semantic, and are instead defeasible pragmatic inferences. Consequently, putative instances of ‘discontinuous past’ are in their semantics simply past tenses. I provide a formalized analysis of the pragmatic inferences associated with these past tenses, whereby they ultimately follow from (i) the optionality of the tense markers in question, and (ii) a special principle relating to the inherent topicality of the utterance time. The empirical and analytic results align well with a restrictive theory of cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics, one where the only tense categories across language are Past, Non-Future, and (maybe) Present (Cable 2013).
Sinn und Bedeutung 21 will take place in Edinburgh, from Sun 4th-Tues 6th September 2016.
We invite abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters, devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistic investigations related to meaning. Oral presentations will be scheduled for 40 minute slots (30 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion).
Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author (or two co-authored abstracts).
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 EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 31, 2016. When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether you would like it to be considered for a talk, a poster or both.
Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub21
For further information, please contact Rob Truswell (rob.truswell@ed.ac.uk).
Seth will be presenting his paper “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages,” in Semantics Workshop this week. Semantics Workshop meets on Wednesday in ILC N458 from 12:20-1:10.