Call For Papers: Penn Linguistics Colloquium

The 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium

 

Call for Papers

The 36th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium will take place March 23-25, 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.

Invited Speaker: Paul Kiparsky (topic and title TBA)
There will also be a special panel on Friday, March 23, which is about game theory and linguistics. More information will be posted closer to the conference.

Papers on any topic in linguistics and associated fields are welcome. Speakers will have 20 minutes for their presentations and 5 minutes for discussion and questions.

Posters: We are happy to announce that this year's PLC will feature a poster session with catered lunch.  Abstracts should indicate whether they are being submitted for consideration as a talk, poster, or both. (See instructions.)

Deadline: Abstracts are due Thursday, November 15, 2011. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be given by Wednesday, January 25, 2012.

Length: Please limit abstracts to one page, single-spaced. An additional page may be used for references and tables. Do not include your name or affiliation within the abstract.

Format: To facilitate the review process, please submit your abstract as a .pdf file.

Abstract Submission: To submit an abstract, you must follow these steps:

1. To begin, click here to go to our abstract submission system and login.
2. If you do not have an existing EasyChair account, click on "sign up for an account." You will be asked to fill out a simple form to create an account.
3. Click "NewSubmission" at the top of the page.
4. Enter author information in the provided fields. Tick the "Corresponding Author" box for all authors who wish to receive e-mail correspondences or notifications.
5. Enter your title in the "Title" field.
6. In the "Abstract" field, please enter a one sentence summary, or any comments you have, in order to assist the committee in assigning reviewers. Please also indicate here whether you would like your submission to be considered for a talk, poster, or both. By default, submissions will be considered for both modes of presentation. Do not paste your full abstract into this field.
7. Please select the primary category of your abstract. Additional categories may be included in the keywords.
8. Enter at least three keywords.
9. Upload your abstract .pdf file in the "Paper" field. Only .pdf files will be accepted. Do not include your name or affiliation in the abstract/file name!
10. Do not tick the "Abstract only" box, or your .pdf will not be uploaded.
11. Click "Submit." You will be taken to a summary page of your submission - this is your confirmation that it has been saved. Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously.
12. You may make any necessary updates by logging in and clicking on "My Submissions."

Proceedings: Conference proceedings will be published as a volume of the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. Speakers will be invited to provide camera-ready copies of their papers after the Colloquium.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Email plc36@ling.upenn.edu
Visit http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc36

 

Semantics guru speaks in semantics seminar on Tuesday

Roger Schwarzschild, our resident guru, will give a talk entitled "Nouns as eventuality predicates and the mass/count distinction" in Angelika Kratzer's seminar this Tuesday, October 18th, at 2:30pm in Bartlett 206.

All are welcome!

Seth Cable awarded LSA's "Early Career Award"

The Linguistic Society of America gives, every year, its Early Career Award to "a new scholar who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of Linguistics." This year, our own Seth Cable has won this coveted award. WHISC has not determined whether Dr. Cable plans on being present at the gala awards ceremony at this year's LSA meeting in Portland, Oregon this January to receive the award.

We at WHISC join Sally Thomason, Chair of the Awards Committee, who offers "congratulations on the super-impressive record of scholarship and teaching that earned you this award!"

Roger Schwarzschild gives department colloq on Friday

Roger Schwarzschild of Rutgers University will present the department colloquium this Friday at 3:30 in Machmer E-37.  A title and abstract follow.

Quantifier Domain Adverbials, Semantic Change and the Comparative

The sentence “Jack is more anxious than Jill” is a comparative.  We know that because of the presence of “more” as well as the presence of “than”.   Across the world’s languages, there are expressions of the comparative that lack a morpheme comparable to “more”  (comparative marker) and there are some that lack a morpheme comparable to “than” (standard marker).   From this perspective, the comparative seems to be redundantly marked in the English example. 

Where is the meaning of the comparative localized, in the more-word?  in the than-word?  in both? Is there a dependency between the grammar of the than-word in a given language and its use of a more-word (Stassen 1985)?

What is the process by which languages acquire a more-word over time?

In this talk, I will be looking at expressions of the comparative in Modern Hebrew.  I’ll propose an analysis that makes use of Quantifier Domain Adverbialization.  In this analysis, both the more-word and the than-word are meaningful. The phrase headed by the than-word can function as a Quantifier-Domain Adverbial whereby it comments on the domain of the degree quantifier more. I’ll address the questions raised above through the lens of the proposed analysis.

NELS 42 schedule published; registration deadline soon!

NELS 42 is being hosted by the University of Toronto this year on the weekend of November 11-13. The theme of the conference is: "The role of Typology and Linguistic Universals in Linguistic Theory." In addition to plenary talks by former UMass faculty David Pesetsky and Lisa Matthewson, other UMass notables presenting include:

Claire Moore-Cantwell "Over- and under-generalization in Learning derivational morphology."

Michael Becker (with Clemens and Nevins) "A richer model is not always more accurate: The case of French and Portuguese plurals."

Maria Gouskova and Michael Becker "Russian 'yer' alternations are governed by the grammar."

Gillian Gallagher "Speaker knowledge of laryngeal phonotactics in Cochabamba Quechua."

Stefan Keine "Long-distance agreement and movement: Evidence from Hindi"

Keir Moulton "What covaries in backward variable binding."

The deadline for early bird registration is this Tuesday: October 18. It looks like a smashing conference (NB: the party is to be held in the Bata Shoe Museum). More information at: NELS 42

LSA Fellows include yet more of UMass

In the October 9th issue of WHISC, it was reported that two UMass faculty (Lisa Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer) and one UMass alumnus (Irene Heim) were inducted into the list of Linguistic Society of America Fellows. Word has since reached WHISC that two other UMass faculty members -- John McCarthy and Alice Harris -- have joined those august ranks this year. Emmon Bach and Barbara Partee were among the inaugural Fellows in 2006 and, with the addition of Professors McCarthy, Harris, Selkirk and Kratzer UMass now has more LSA Fellows than any other University east (or west) of California.

Bhatt at Berkeley

Rajesh Bhatt presented an invited talk at UC, Berkeley on October 10. A title, and abstract, follow.

Amounts versus Cardinalities

Semantic treatments of differentials in comparatives treat measure
phrases (`one pound' in `Jules is one pound heavier than Jim') and
numerals (`one' in `Jules has one more book than Jim') alike. This
seems justified based on the syntax of English but an examination of a
wider variety of languages reveals a peculiar restriction. In Hebrew,
Hindi-Urdu, or German, one cannot say `one more book'; instead the
form `one book more' must be used. I'll explore the consequences of
this peculiar restriction for the semantics of comparatives and the
distinctions between cardinalities and amounts.

RESEARCH and TEACHING POSITIONS for 2011-2012 in Paris

The LabEx EFL is a 10 year project funded by the French Ministry of Higher
Education and Research and relies on a cluster of 13 research teams from 5 Parisian Universities (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris Diderot University, Paris Descartes University, Paris 13 University and INALCO ), in partnership with CNRS, INRIA, EPHE,  and IRD.

The project’s aim is to promote interdisciplinary innovative research between different fields of theoretical and applied linguistics, with a special focus on empirical
foundations and experimental methods.

For the academic year 2011-2012, we are offering the following positions :

-    International chair of quantitative and experimental linguistics (invited professorship)
-    9 Postdoctoral positions in the following fields: prosody, experimental syntax, experimental semantics, text data mining, language typology, history of  computational linguistics
-    2 Engineers in the following fields: language resources, psycholinguistics
-    1 three year PhD stipend  in experimental semantics (laboratory linguistique formelle, University Paris Diderot)
-    2 Research assistants in psycholinguistics (laboratory psychologie de la perception, University Paris Descartes)

Application deadline November 10th 2011

http:// www.labex-efl.org

Another call will be issued for positions to be filled in 2012.


Jacqueline Vaissière
Professeur, coordinateur EFL, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris3 (Sorbonne Paris Cité), Institut Universitaire de France

Laboratoire Phonétique et Phonologie, LPP (CNRS/Paris3)

19 rue des Bernardins
75005 Paris

tel: 06 15 93 94 71 (01 43 26 57 17: gestionnaire du laboratoire)

Pages du laboratoire: http://lpp.univ-paris3.fr
Pages personnelles: 
http://www.personnels.univ-paris3.fr/users/vaissier/pub/ARTICLES/index.htm

WCCFL 30 call for papers

The Thirtieth meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics will be held on April 13-15 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Abstract submissions are now being taken, the deadline is October 31. For more information, go to: WCCFL 30 @ UC Santa Cruz - Call for Papers

The InterContinental for NELS

The NELS  42 organizers write:

For those of you who are attending NELS42, we would like to announce a
special hotel offer: if you book with the InterContinental hotel for Friday
11 November and Saturday 12 November, you will receive a $40 rebate on your
conference registration fee.

Together with our special reduced hotel rate ($175/night; for comparison,
regular rates start at $229), this is a great opportunity to spend a weekend
in a luxury hotel without breaking the bank! The InterContinental is located
close to campus in Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood, the city's premier
district for fine shopping and dining.

Act fast -- this offer is available in a limited quantity for a limited time
(expires October 21).

Hotel details:
- 220 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1T8
- http://toronto.intercontinental.com/
- Phone: (416) 960-5200, Fax: (416) 960-8269
- Refer to "NELS - University of Toronto" when booking

As the number of registration rebates is limited, please email Will Oxford
(will.oxford@utoronto.ca) before you book to confirm that a rebate is still
available for you.

Frazier at UCLA

Lyn Frazier gave an invited colloquium talk at UCLA on October 7th, entitled "Processing ellipsis: Explorations at the edge of grammar."

SALT 22: Call for Papers

Semantics and Linguistics Theory 22 will be held at the University of Chicago, May 18-20, 2012. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics.

The abstract submission deadline is January 3, 2012, 11:59pm CST.  We expect to make notifications of acceptance in late February. 

Abstracts must not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples and references, with 1 inch margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title but should not identify the author(s). The abstract must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author, or 2 joint abstracts per author.

We are using EasyChair for the submission and the review process; the url for abstract submission is: 

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt22

For detailed instructions about EasyChair and the submission process, please visit the conference website:

http://salt22.uchicago.edu

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. 

Please direct inquiries to salt22chicago@gmail.com.

Roeper in Bucharest

Tom Roeper writes:

I gave an invited lecture last week on the topic "An Interface Question: does SLI
involve Pragmatic Excess" at the final meeting of the EU-sponsored CLAD
(Cross-linguistic Language Diagnosis) where a number of theoretical and
applied linguists have been developing evaluation materials for language
problems in LIthuanian, Romanian, Italian, German and other languages.
This project grew out of the European COST project which grew out of our own
DELV project.

Cable's paper accepted to the Amsterdam Colloquium

Seth Cable's paper, "Between Tense and Adverbs: Temporal Remoteness in Kikuyu," has been accepted to the 18th annual Amsterdam Colloquium, held on December 19-21 at the University of Amsterdam. For more information, go to Amsterdam Colloquium 2011: Homepage.

Congratulations Seth!

Jason Overfelt speaks at SRG

Jason Overfelt gave a presentation at the S Reading Group meeting last Thursday, October 13th. A title and abstract follow.

Title: Right Roof Economy

Description:  In this paper I offer new evidence from the licensing of
null-operator structures in various adjunct clauses as well as scope
shifting effects to support the existence of unbounded,
successive-cyclic rightward movement.  The current state of the
analysis provided suggests that the Right Roof Constraint (Ross 1967,
Soames and Perlmutter 1977, McCloskey 1999 i.a.), commonly thought to
limit rightward movement to strictly local applications, can be
reduced to syntactic and interface economy conditions.  This in turn
supports a model of grammar in which linearization is determined by
independent principles responsible for mapping syntactic structure to
PF.

Bhatt at Stanford

Rajesh Bhatt presented joint work with Trupti Nisar, of SNDT Women's University, Mumbai, at Stanford on October 7th. A title and abstract follow.

Shadows of Ergativity: Variable Agreement in Kutchi


Kutchi, a western Indo-Aryan language, presents a typologically unusual split ergative system which manifests ergativity at the wrong end of Silverstein's scale (1st Person is Ergative, everything else seems Nominative). Ergativity is manifested in the 1st Person in Kutchi via object agreement and hence this split is not a surface morphological split of the kind analyzed by Deo & Sharma (2006). Handling non-morphological person based splits is challenging: can the abstract case licensed by a head depend upon the person features of the DP receiving the case? We show that the Kutchi system makes sense once we extend our understanding of ergativity to cover the impoverished agreement found with 2/3 subjects in Perfective Transitive environments in Kutchi - object agreement can then be seen as a limiting case of impoverished subject agreement. We also discuss the typological oddness of Kutchi in the context of the proper location of Silverstein's Generalization (nominal versus verbal), and possible diachronic motivations.

UMass at NECPhon

The Fifth meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop met on October 15 at Yale and included talks by Kristine Yu (The Learnability of Tones from the Speech Signal) and Robert Staubs (Learning-Based Biases in Quantity-Insensitive Stress). You can learn more at NECPHON 2011.

Montrul speaks on Friday, gives workshop on Saturday

Silvina Montrul, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present two programs October 14-15, a guest lecture on Friday and an informal workshop on Saturday. Her visit is co-sponsored by LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) with The Center for Latin America, Latino, and Caribbean Studies (CLACLS).

All are invited to attend.

Here is the information

Date  Friday, October 14, 2011

Title   “Attrition or Incomplete Acquisition in Heritage Language Speakers?"

Time  3pm to 5 pm

Location  Herter Hall 301

Complete abstract (and poster) at http://www.umass.edu/spanport/

______________________________________________________

Date:  Saturday, October 15, 2011

Title: Workshop on trends and future directions in bilingual acquisition

Herter Hall 301

10 am to 3 pm

Description of visit:

Montrul's talk on Friday will address the question in the title with data from Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian.  Complete abstract at http://www.umass.edu/spanport/.

Montrul is Professor and Chair in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and is also in the Department of Linguistics.  She is the author of four books on linguistic theory and the acquisition of Spanish, with an emphasis on bilingual and heritage language speakers. She also directs the University Language Academy for Children and the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab (SLAB)

Short abstract:  What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical areas in the weaker language of a bilingual?  What do different heritage languages have in common at the structural level? What are their differences?  Montrul investigates the linguistic competence of heritage speakers in an aspect of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface by focusing on knowledge of the morphology for differential object marking (DOM) in these three languages. Experimental evidence points to attrition in Spanish, but incomplete acquisition in Hindi and Romanian. She considers how language internal and language external factors contribute to the degree of intergenerational attrition of the DOM marker in these three languages..



The programs are open to the public.  All are invited to attend. For more information, contact Luiz Amaral (amaral@spanport.umass.edu), Tom Roeper (roeper@linguist.umass.edu) or Barbara Pearson (bpearson@research.umass.edu)

Roger Schwarzschild, semantics guru, arrives this week

Angelika Kratzer writes:

It gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival on October 11 of  our Fall Semantics Guru:

ROGER SCHWARZSCHILD, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY 

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~tapuz/

Roger will be delivering the colloquium on October 21. It will be about comparatives. He has also agreed to give a more explorative and specialized talk in my seminar on October 18: that talk will be on nouns as eventuality predicates and the mass/count distinction. I will announce the room for the seminar session in a later message: for now, mark your calendar - everyone is most welcome. 

The main function of a guru is to enlighten us individually. Roger will be using my office, and I am setting up a schedule for him. Please e-mail me for an appointment with him with your availabilities. Roger has worked on a wide range of topics, including plurals, givenness and focus, comparatives, and measure phrases.  He is easy to talk to and you can try out any topic on him.

Lisa Selkirk, Angelika Kratzer and Irene Heim elected Fellows of the LSA

Word has reached WHISC that Lisa Selkirk, Angelika Kratzer and UMass alumnus Irene Heim have been elected fellows of the Linguistic Society of America. A high-placed informant has leaked this portion of a message, reportedly from LSA's Executive Director, Alyson Reed:

On behalf of the LSA Executive Committee, it is my distinct pleasure to
inform you of your nomination and election as a Fellow of the Linguistic
Society of America. The induction ceremony for the 2012 class of Fellows
will take place on Friday, January 6, 2012 at the LSA Annual Meeting in
Portland.

Congratulations Lisa, Angelika and Irene!

New prosody e-mail list

Kristine Yu writes:

I have started a new e-mail list for people interested in prosody for
announcements about meetings, conferences, etc.

You can subscribe at the link at the bottom of the webpage of the
departmental e-mail lists.

http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php

NELS 42 registration open

NELS 24 organizer Will Oxford writes:

We are pleased to announce that online registration for NELS 42 is now open and the preliminary program has been posted on our website:
http://linguistics.utoronto.ca/nels42

Discounted early-bird registration rates are available until October 18. 
Special hotel rates are available until October 11; please visit our website
for details.

For those of you who are presenting, we ask that you check the posted
program to ensure that your information is correct.

We look forward to seeing you in Toronto!

LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting on Monday

LARC/Acquisition Lab will meet on Monday, October 3, in the Partee Room (South College 301) at 5:15. Tracy Conner will present:

The Acquisition of Possessive Marking in African American English: Testing
for Obligatory Genitive 's with N' Ellipsis*

All are welcome!

Generative Linguists of the Old World: Call for papers

The 35th annual GLOW conference will take place March 28-30, 2012 in Potsdam, Germany. The topic of the colloquium is "Context in grammar: a frequent visitor or a regular inhabitant?". Abstracts are invited for 45 minute talks with an additional 15 minutes for discussion, as well as for two poster sessions. The submission deadline is Tuesday, November 15.

In addition to the colloquium, there will also be four thematic workshops happening on Tuesday, March 27 and Saturday, March 31 that are described in separate postings of WHISC.

The abstract deadline is November 15, 23:59 CET. All abstracts (including abstracts for the workshops) must be submitted through EasyChair. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent out on January 20.

For more information, go to: GLOW 35 @ Potsdam

GLOW Workshop on Empty Categories

Empty categories in syntax: are there any?

Organizers: Gisbert Fanselow and Gereon Müller. 

Keynote speaker: to be announced. 

Abstract deadline: November 15. 

Description: Obviously, there are morphemes that are devoid of semantic content, so that the postulation of morphemes (or words and phrases) that lack a phonological interpretation can be considered a natural move. Indeed, most grammatical models employ elements that are unpronounced. They may already exist in the lexicon, or be created by grammatical processes such as deletion in syntactic movement chains or in contexts of ellipsis. Grammatical models must be explicit about the licensing condition for such unpronounced material.

There is a more restrictive concept of empty elements: he introduction of empty categories into syntactic representations in the Government-and-Binding framework was once considered a major milestone in the development of grammatical theory. Empty categories in this sense are not just syntactic elements that lack a phonological matrix, rather, they have special properties (as compared to pronounced material) that are subject to specific conditions such as the Empty Category Principle of Chomsky (1981). Their postulation promised, e.g., an elegant approach to the locality of movement or crossover phenomena, identifying connections between seemingly unrelated areas such as A-movement, the binding of reflexives, and scopal properties of quantifiers. Extrasyntactic motivation was argued to exist in the form of morphophonological evidence (recall the discussion of wanna contraction) or psycholinguistic results (e.g., the issue of the reactivation of an antecedent at the site of the trace, Nicol 1993). The postulation of empty categories and the modelling of their syntactic properties figured prominently in argumentations for the idea that UG constitutes an abstract formal competence unrelated to other cognitive capacities in a principled way. The discovery of such invisible (inaudible) elements seemed to put linguistics on par with disciplines such as the physics of elementary particles. The inventory of empty categories was quite differentiated: the traces of A- and A-bar movement, head movement traces, PRO, pro, empty expletives, empty operators. 

Thirty years later, empty categories in this narrow sense have lost most of their importance in syntactic theory. The shift from a representational to a derivational approach in syntax eliminated the need for a device for encoding transformational history such as traces, and attempts to formulate a satisfactory model for properties specific to empty categories have failed (cf., e.g., Hornstein 1995 for the ECP), which is not surprising on the background of a minimalist approach to grammar. 

The purpose of our workshop is an evaluation of empty categories, both in the narrow and the broad sense, as part of the syntactic toolbox, answering questions such as

• What are the substantial differences between approaches working with and without empty categories? To what extent are these differences merely due to overall changes in the grammatical architecture (e.g., derivation vs. representation?)
• how can the phenomena previously captured by models of empty categories (such as common locality aspects for different sorts of descriptive phenomena) explained without them?
• can empty categories be eliminated completely from grammatical theories? What consequences does this have for the abstractness of linguistic representations?

We invite abstracts for 45 + 15 minutes talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.

GLOW Workshop on Prosody

Production and perception of prosodically-encoded information structure

Organizers: Frank Kügler and Sabine Zerbian. 

Keynote speaker: to be announced. 

Deadline: November 15. 

Description: In many (though not in all) languages, information-structural context, e.g. focus, influences the prosodic form of an utterance. Information structure may be prosodically encoded by different acoustic parameters, such as the commonly found increase in intensity, duration and fundamental frequency for focus, but also by differences in pitch register scaling of tones or phrasing. The prosodic encoding of information structure may be based on universal aspects of pitch (Gussenhoven 2004) or driven by communication-oriented processes as a deviation from a neutral register/voice (Kügler 2011). Many studies have investigated the prosodic encoding of information structure in a variety of languages, as e.g. presented at last year's GLOW workshop on the phonological marking of focus and topic. 

The workshop wants to continue this research by turning to the perceptual relevance of the prosodic encoding of information structure. It is therefore interested in the combination of production and perception studies. It aims at dealing with the questions whether listeners perceive prosodic differences related to information structure and how they decode this information at the interface of phonetics, phonology and semantics/pragmatics. E.g. studies by Wu and Xu (2010) have shown that listeners can reliably point out the "prominent" element in a sentence in a language that marks focus prosodically. Swerts et al. (2002) have shown that Dutch listeners are able to reconstruct previous discourse on the basis of prosodic information. Common experimental tasks used to elicit perception and interpretation data include prominence ratings, context matching, and appropriate judgments. 

Particular emphasis will be on work that addresses these issues in lesser studied languages and varieties (including contact varieties and learner varieties) in order to gain insight into the existing variation concerning not only production but also perception of prosodically-encoded information structure and therefore reach at a better understanding of the phenomenon as such. 

Core issues are:

• Which prosodic cues to information structure do we find in the languages of the world? Are certain cues more prevalent in one type of language than in another?
• Are prosodic cues to information structure found in production studies perceived and parsed to such an extent that they influence the interpretation of the meaning of a sentence?
• Are gradual changes in prosodic cues to information structure perceived categorically?
• If information structure is encoded by means of different prosodic cues such as F0, duration, intensity or phrasing, do listeners make use of all the cues, or which cues are most important in the perception and interpretation of information structure?
• If in speech production evidence for speaker-specific strategies to prosodically mark information structure is found, how do listeners deal with speaker variation?
• Does information structure have a direct or indirect effect on the phonetic realization of the intonation contour and/or phrasing? Are there further case studies that provide evidence for a communication-oriented approach in the phonetic encoding of information structure?
• What are important methodological issues in the study of perception and interpretation of prosodically-encoded information structure?

We invite abstracts for 30 + 15 minute talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.

GLOW Workshop on Real Time Processing

The timing of grammar: experimental and theoretical considerations

Organizers: Harald Clahsen and Claudia Felser. 

Keynote speaker: Patrick Sturt (University of Edinburgh). 

Deadline: November 15. 

Description: This workshop examines the real-time application of grammatical constraints during language processing, and how these interact with other types of constraints such as selectional restrictions, discourse-pragmatic biases, or cognitive resource limitations. Our focus will be on constraints which help determine the interpretation of overt or covert anaphoric elements. 

Theoretical linguists have identified a set of grammatical principles or constraints --such as the principles of binding theory, or island constraints-- which are thought to restrict the search for an antecedent for pronouns, or for silent copies of moved constituents. These constraints are known to interact with other types of constraints during language comprehension and production, however, and have also been shown to be violable. The apparent violability of grammatical constraints is often attributed (by linguists) to ''processing factors'' without necessarily being explicit about what exactly these may be. Using timecourse-sensitive experimental methods allows us to gain a better understanding of how grammatical and non-grammatical constraints interact during moment-by-moment language processing, and to examine at what point during processing grammatical constraints are applied, or potentially overridden by other types of constraints. 

The workshop will provide a forum for discussing the timing of grammatical constraints from both experimental and theoretical perspectives. Abstracts are invited which may examine any type of anaphoric (or cataphoric) dependency, including movement dependencies. We also welcome contributions that investigate the timecourse of language processing in children, nonnative speakers, or language-impaired populations. 

We invite abstracts for 45 + 15 minute talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.

GLOW Workshop on Focus

GLOW-Workshop "Association with focus", Potsdam, March 31, 2012

Keynote speaker: David Beaver

Important dates:
Workshop date: March 31, 2012 (Please note the change of date!)
Date of the GLOW colloquium: March 28-30, 2012
Deadline: November 15

Description:

Research on focus has always been linked to research on focus-sensitive elements. One central area of research is concerned with the nature of this sensitivity. Is it semantic, and therefore encoded into the lexical meaning of these elements (Rooth 1985, Jacobs 1983)? Or is it pragmatic (Rooth 1992, 1996, von Fintel 1994)? Or are there different kinds of focus-sensitivity, as proposed in Beaver and Clark (2008)? In the case of pragmatic association with focus, must the particles rely on focus, or can they also associate with alternatives provided by other elements such as e.g. contrastive topics (Krifka 1999)? What role does accenting on the focus-sensitive elements themselves play in interpretation?

The second area of research concerns the meaning contribution of focus-sensitive elements. What meanings, across languages, do focus-sensitive elements contribute? In most cases, the contributed meaning components are non-truth-conditional. What is the nature of these meaning components? If e.g. the prejacent of only and the additive component of also are both presupposed (as suggested e.g. in König 1991), why do the presuppositions said to be triggered by also/even differ from those said to be triggered by only: uttering a sentence with also is not permissible unless its presupposition is already in the Common Ground (the presupposition cannot be accommodated), whereas the presupposition of only is easily, and most often, accommodated; see. e.g. the classification of projective meanings by Tonhauser et al. 2011)? A third area of research concerns the function of these particles in discourse. It has been suggested that the function of some focus-sensitive particles lies in discourse structuring, e.g. by marking an utterance as unexpected, unlikely, or surprising (e.g. Karttunen and Peters 1979 for even, Zeevat 2009 and Beaver and Clark 2008 for only). But whose surprise is marked by these particles? That of the hearer, or that of the speaker? And what does this mean for a more fine-grained model of the Common Ground that keeps track of speaker/hearer commitments?

Questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the following:

* What is the inventory of focus-sensitive elements in different languages? In what sense do they function as discourse particles (Thurmair 1989)?
* What is the nature of their association with alternatives? Is there evidence for different classes, as suggested by Beaver and Clark (2008), or evidence for a unified account? Are there cross-linguistic similarities with respect to the class that corresponding elements belong to?
* Do such expressions associate exclusively with focus, or rather with alternatives in general (including alternatives generated by contrastive topics, Krifka 1999)?
* What is the nature of their meaning components? What can we learn about presuppositions / conventional / conversational implicatures by looking at association with focus?
* For those focus-sensitive elements that are said to have a scalar meaning component, what is the nature of these scales?
* What is the discourse function of focus-sensitive elements, and what can we learn from them for a model of the Common Ground?

We invite abstracts for 30 + 10 minutes talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=glow35). Please consult the abstract guidelines (http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~glow/submit.html) before submitting.

For more information, please visit http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~glow/

SRG events this week: Andrew on Thursday, Gennaro on Saturday

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG is having a busy week this week!  On Thursday, Andrew will be talking
about modality in English double object constructions, at Rajesh's house,
starting around 6:30pm.  There will be dinner.

Then, on Saturday, Gennaro Chierchia will be visiting us at Barbara's house
at 10am.  Topics of discussion are TBD, but we believe there will be coffee
and bagels.

Food at SRG: We determined last week that we like to have dinner-type food
at SRG.  However, since SRG has no budget, we ask that SRG attendees who
intend to eat please bring a small amount of money to pay back the food
buyers.  BYO dinner is also perfectly acceptable.  Thanks!

Special Lecture in Semantics Seminar on Tuesday

Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Spanish "algunos" and dependent plurality

Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill), Paula Menéndez-Benito (Göttingen)

2:30 p.m., Herter 209

Special invited lecture for LINGUIST 720 Semantics seminar. Everyone is welcome.

Ling Club Interest Meeting: This Thursday

Jeremy Cahill writes:

The first Ling Club meeting is going to be Thursday, 9/29, at 6 in the
linguistics lounge. There'll be pizza.

It won't be particularly long -- we don't have any programming yet,
we're just going to be talking about club ideas, organizational stuff,
and all that. We can talk about better times and sexier spots for
meetings, but only if you show up to this one.

Email me at jccahill@student.umass.edu about pizza preferences and any
topics you want brought up in the meeting. You obviously don't need to
RSVP, but if you do, I'll have a better idea of how much pizza to get
and we won't run out.

To get to the linguistics lounge after hours:

Come in Entrance A (the one on the right if you're looking at South
College from the library) and head upstairs. Turn right at the top of
the stairs. You should already have your animal sacrifice prepared at
this point for safe passage. Take the next set of stairs to the third
floor and go down the hallway. The lounge is at the end, most of the
time.

Some doors might be locked; I'm told they sometimes respond to sweet
nothings whispered into their doorknobs.

If you can't get in, don't know where to go, or find yourself in a
field of poppies instead of the linguistics lounge, my phone number's
857 201 9473. You could also shout really loudly to nobody in
particular. Throwing rocks at windows is discouraged.

LARC/Acquisition Lab Meeting tomorrow!

The next LARC/Acquisition Lab Meeting is Monday Sept 26, in the Partee Room at 5:15.  The presentations are:

"A new approach to preschool language assessment"
Jill deVilliers

"An overview of the LARC-UFRJ-UFRR (Brazil) collaboration in two
projects with native Brazilian languages"
Luiz Amaral


There is a potluck afterwards at Tom Roeper (and Laura Holland's) house
149 High ST Amherst--- bring something if you'd like--but we will
have plenty of food--

All are welcome!

(rides should be available--it is about a 15 minute walk--directions
at the meeting)

Chierchia talks at the department colloq on Friday

On Friday, September 30, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37, Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University) will present:

Title: Some parameters of epistemic and free choice indefinites

Abstract: In this talk I explore a quadrant of the system of polarity sensitive
items, namely the existential one, that includes items like Italian 'uno
qualunque' and 'un qualche', German 'irgendein', Spanish 'algun', Rumanian
'vreun'. The attempt is to identify the generative matrix at the basis of
typological generalizations on the behavior of such items. The concept of
'implicature' and a characterization of the ways in which implicatures may get
'grammaticized' through an alternatives based semantics play a key role in this
attempt.

Join us at Barbara's house (50 Hobart Ln.) for dinner afterwards.

PHLING at University of Maryland

PHLING, a graduate student research group in philosophy and linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, is hosting its first interdisciplinary research symposium, PHLINC (Philosophy & Linguistics Colloquium) on //events//. 

We hope to bring together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. We aim to relate the discussion of events in these fields, bringing into conversation the work in ontology, logic, semantics, and perception. We will also have two invited speakers: Achille Varzi, of Columbia University, and Paul Pietroski, of the University of Maryland.

Submissions are open to graduate student researchers only. 10 students will have 30 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes for round-table discussion. The symposium will take place over the weekend of the 31st of March and the 1st of April, in College Park MD. Each day, we will reserve some time for closing discussion.

We are accepting two varieties of submissions for consideration to participate in the symposium, depending on the author's preferences:

TYPE 1 - Abstract - maximum 1 page of text single-spaced, 12pt font, with 1 additional page for examples, figures, and references.

TYPE 2 - Paper - maximum 4000 words, double-spaced, 12pt font, suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please include references.

All abstracts/paper submissions will be considered by an interdisciplinary audience. Ideally, the composition of speakers will reflect in equal parts contributions from Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. As the goal of the symposium is to bring together researchers with a strong focus on interdisciplinary cognitive science, reviewers will be looking for evidence in abstract/paper submissions that the author(s) are able to communicate effectively to individuals outside of their primary field.

We will be accepting abstract/paper submissions until January 7th, 2012, and final selections will be made by February 4th, 2012. Abstracts/papers should be sent to phling@umd.edu, with "Events - Abstract" or "Events - Paper" as well as your name in the title of the email.

Note that as this is a graduate student symposium, we will make special efforts to help with accommodations in College Park or Washington, D.C., and transportation to the university. Details will be provided closer to the date on our website,http://phling.umd.edu/symposia.html

Richard Schmierer is Ambassador to Oman

Peggy Speas writes:

Oh the places you might go - Belated kudos to alumnus Richard Schmierer, who
we recently learned was appointed US Ambassador to Oman in 2009.  After
receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics at UMass in 1977, Dr. Schmierer embarked
on a career in the foreign service, which has taken him to Germany, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Washington DC and now Oman.  In addition to being a diplomat,
he has taught at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and
is the author of the 2007 book *Iraq:  Policy and Perceptions.*  Next time
someone asks what one can DO with a degree in Linguistics, point them to Dr.
Schmierer's Wikipedia page!

Acquisition Lab/LARC Meeting on Monday

Everyone Welcome!

September 19, 2011

Monday 5: 15

Partee Room

Gustavo Freire [University of Sao Paolo]

"Perception and Causative Verbs and their Acquisition"

UMAFLAB meets this Thursday

Seth Cable writes:

The first full meeting of UMAFLAB (UMass Funny Languages Breakfast)  
will take place *Thursday*, September 22 at 9AM in *Bartlett 11* (note  
day and room change).

At this meeting, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will present some of the  
results of fieldwork this summer, examining modals in Navajo.

As noted above, the day and location of our meetings have changed. In  
order to accommodate everyone's schedule, our meetings will take place  
*Thursday* mornings at 9AM. Unfortunately, this means we won't be able  
to meet in the Partee room, since the McCarthy-Pater grant group meets  
there at that time. However, Brian Dillon has very generously offered  
up his lab meeting room, which is in Bartlett 11.

At today's organizational meeting, we put together the following  
schedule of meetings for the remainder of the term:

Thursday 9/22 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (Navajo Modals)

Thursday 10/6 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Rex Wallace (A puzzle concerning Etruscan)

Thursday 10/20 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Suzi Lima (Projects on Yudja and Kawaiwete)

Thursday 11/3 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Jérémy Pasquereau (Projects on languages of Caucasus)

Thursday 11/17 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Seth Cable (Tlingit Distributive Numerals or Multiple Tenses in Kikuyu)
[note: I'm happy to drop my slot if another student would like to  
present]

Thursday 12/1 (9AM, Bartlett 11):
Emiliana Cruz (Projects on Chatino language)

Thursday 12/15:
Possible extra date, if we'd like to do it.

If you'd like to get on the e-mail list for future meetings, please  
just drop me an e-mail letting me know.

Psycho/Syntax Lab meetings

Brian Dillon writes:

This is just a quick note to announce that the Psycho/Syntax lab meetings for the semester have been scheduled, and that anyone who is interested in attending any or all of the meetings is more than welcome to come! Meetings are at 9am in 11 Barlett (space permitting). The schedule for Fall 2011 is:

9/29: Jason Overfelt (Tigrinya wh-in-situ, visual world eye-tracking)

10/13: Meg Grant (Extraction from comparatives)

10/27: Shayne Sloggett (German case attraction)

11/10: Magda Oiry (French wh-in-situ)

12/8: Rajesh Bhatt / Brian Dillon (Hindi agreement, Mechanical Turk for judgment studies)

The list can also be found at the XLUM blog: http://blogs.umass.edu/XLUM. Reminders will be sent to the "linguist-experimental" list, so if you'd like to continue getting more messages like this one, sign up for that list here: http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php.

 

Robots start talking in Australia!

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/16-robots-invent-their-own-language

NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes

Brian Dillon writes:

The NSF's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for US graduate students program (EAPSI; http://www.nsfsi.org) is now accepting applications for their 2012 institute. The grants from this program support graduate students who want to go perform research in East Asia (construed very broadly, it includes Australia and New Zealand), and provides funding, travel and host arrangements, and good beginning experience with grant-writing for the NSF. Compared to other NSF programs there is a pretty high rate of success. I got a grant through this program to go to China for a summer to do research and it was definitely among the most useful things I did to advance my doctoral research. For linguists who want to work on East Asian/Pacific/Australian languages, it's usually fairly straightforward to put together a statement saying why Asia/the Pacific would be a good place to do research. I'd be happy to talk to people who are interested in pursuing one of these about how to put together an application.

The official call is copied below.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION EAST ASIA AND PACIFIC SUMMER INSTITUTES FOR U.S. GRADUATE STUDENTS - 2012 APPLICATION NOW OPEN

The National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students (EAPSI) is a flagship international fellowship program for developing the next generation of globally  engaged U.S. scientists and engineers knowledgeable about the Asian and Pacific regions. The Summer Institutes are hosted by foreign counterparts committed to increasing opportunities for young U.S. researchers to work in research facilities and with host mentors abroad. Fellows are supported to participate in eight-week research experiences at host laboratories in Australia, China, Japan (10 weeks), Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan from June to August. The program provides a $5,000 summer stipend, round-trip airfare to the host location, living expenses abroad, and an introduction to the society, culture, language, and research environment of the host location.

The 2012 application is now open and will close at 5:00 pm proposer’s local time on November 9, 2011. Application instructions are available online at www.nsfsi.org. For further information concerning benefits, eligibility, and tips on applying, applicants are encouraged to visitwww.nsf.gov/eapsi or www.nsfsi.org.

NSF recognizes the importance of enabling U.S. researchers and educators to advance their work through international collaborations and the value of ensuring that future generations of U.S. scientists and engineers gain professional experience beyond this nation's borders early in their careers. The program is intended for U.S. graduate students pursuing studies in fields supported by the National Science Foundation. Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply for the EAPSI. Applicants must be enrolled in a research-oriented master's or PhD program and be U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents by the application deadline date. Students in combined bachelor/master degree programs must have matriculated from the undergraduate degree program by the application deadline date. 

The first Summer Institutes began in Japan in 1990, and to date over 2,400 U.S. graduate students have participated in the program.

Should you have any questions, please contact the EAPSI Help Desk by email at eapsi@nsfsi.orgor by phone at 1-866-501-2922.

Postdoc in Semantics and Pragmatics at University of Amsterdam

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research fellow to work in the project "Indefinites and beyond: Evolutionary pragmatics and typological semantics" at the ILLC-Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam

For information on the project please visit the website at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~maloni/Indefinites/

Qualifications: The candidate must have a PhD in linguistics or philosophy or a related area
Starting date: Preferably 1 January  2012, but extensible to 1 March  2012
Total duration: 6-8 months
Closing date for applications:  1 November 2011

The gross monthly salary will be between €3195 and 4374 [‘Onderzoeker 3’; salary scale 11] in the case of a full-time position (38 hours/week). Depending on experience and date of completion of the PhD an appointment as ‘Onderzoeker 4’ (salary scale 10) may be necessary. Secondary benefits at Dutch universities are attractive and include holiday pay and an end of year bonus.

Interested candidates are encouraged to get in touch at their earliest convenience with Maria Aloni  (m.d.aloni@uva.nl)

Please include the following documents in your application: CV, list of publications, names and contact details of two personal references

Our Worst Building is better than MIT's Worst Building

In the widely touted CNBC lists of worsts, UMass ranks better than MIT.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44231749/?slide=8
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44231749/?slide=9

(Thanks to David Pesetsky and Angelika Kratzer for bringing this contest to WHISC's attention.)

Festschrift for Jorge Hankamer

Nick LaCara writes:

After nearly two years in the making, I am pleased to inform WHISC about a working papers/festschrift volume for which I was one of the editors. The volume is entitled Morphology at Santa Cruz: Papers in Honor of Jorge Hankamer (or MASC, for short). MASC grew out of the morphology seminar that Jorge Hankamer organized and taught in the fall of 2009 at UCSC which itself developed from the department's long-running morphology reading group. Many of the papers in the volume are revised versions of those originally written for that seminar. In addition to these, several others were solicited from UCSC alums and associates. A number of the papers, though not all them, are written in or about Distributed Morphology, and they focus on languages from Arabic and Bulgarian to Icelandic and Luiseño.

The volume has been published by the Linguistics Research Center at UCSC through the University of California's eScholarship website. It is available in its entirety and it's absolutely free: http://escholarship.org/uc/lrc_masc

Complexity Workshop

Fritz Newmeyer writes:

We are organizing a conference in Seattle next March on a topic that will be of interest to many of you. It's on 'Formal Linguistics and the Measurement of Grammatical Complexity'. Here's the url:

http://depts.washington.edu/lingconf/index.php

The basic idea is to probe whether 'formal linguistics' (broadly defined) has anything to contribute to the topic of relative overall complexity of languages.

First Meeting of Acquisition Lab/LARC this Monday

Tom Roeper writes:

The First Meeting of  Acquisition Lab/LARC  (Language Acquisition Resource Center) will be at 5:15 this Monday, September 12, in the Partee Room (301 South College). Everyone is Welcome!!

On this week's agenda:

1. Organization: introductions, future meetings, experimental plans

2.  Magda Oiry: "Exploring the pragmatics of long-distance questions"

If you are interested in language acquisition, this is an excellent way to
learn about ongoing work at UMass and Smith, present your own ideas, and get feedback for planned projects.

SRG starts up

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG (the Syntax/Semantics Reading Group) had a brief planning meeting on Friday.  This is how it went:

We would like SRG to continue to exist.  The plan is that most of the time, S-side members of the department will offer informal, low-key presentations of the work they've been doing in the past year or so, and the group will be there to provide feedback and ideas.  This way, S-siders will be more in touch with each other's work.  SRG will continue to be a place where people can give practice talks, we will continue to invite S-side colloq speakers and gurus to talk to us, and if anyone actually wants to read something to discuss, we can do that too.  If you want to present or you have an idea of what to read, email me (Anisa).

We're sticking with Thursday evenings, every two weeks or so, and we'll be alternating between Northampton and Amherst locations.

The first real meeting will be this coming Thursday, September 15th, at Barbara's house (50 Hobart Lane in Amherst.)  It will be at 6pm, and we'll order some dinner in so we don't starve.  Stefan will be presenting his work on long-distance agreement in Hindi.

The next few scheduled meetings are as follows, locations TBA:

Sept 29 -- Andrew W.

Oct 27 -- Jason

... plus hopefully some presentations by gurus and colloq speakers during that time.

As far as the SRG traditions of cocktails and other fancy edibles, we hope that this will emerge organically.  If someone wants to provide a fancy edible, we will be happy to consume it.

SRG has a Google calendar!  You can access it in any of the following ways:

As a website: 
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

In iCal format: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

By pasting this link into a feed reader: https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/04kst2o3cab09bg4fa2pggp6ro@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

 

Roger Levy speaks Friday, September 16

Joe Pater writes:

The Institute for Computational and Experimental Study of Language (suggested pronunciation: ['aisəl]) welcomes Roger Levy of the University of California, San Diego, who will present on "Probabilistic Knowledge and Uncertain Input in Rational Human Sentence Comprehension" on at 3:30, Friday September 16th in Machmer E-37. A reception will follow in South College.

Roger will be available for meetings on Friday morning from 9-12. Graduate students and post-docs are especially encouraged to meet with him. To sign up for a meeting, please indicate your available times here:

http://www.doodle.com/hqzwkrnacz4k79az

An abstract of Professor Levy's talk follows:

Considering the adversity of the conditions under which linguistic communication takes place in everyday life — ambiguity of the signal, environmental competition for our attention, speaker error, our limited memory, and so forth — it is perhaps remarkable that we are as successful at it as we are. Perhaps the leading explanation of this success is that (a) the linguistic signal is redundant, (b) diverse information sources are generally available that can help us obtain infer something close to the intended message when comprehending an utterance, and (c) we use these diverse information sources very quickly and to the fullest extent possible. This explanation suggests a theory of language comprehension as a rational, evidential process. In this talk, I describe recent research on how we can use the tools of computational linguistics to formalize and implement such a theory, and to apply it to a variety of problems in human sentence comprehension, subsuming both classic cases of garden-path disambiguation and syntactic processing difficulty patterns in the absence of structural ambiguity. In addition, I address a number of phenomena that remain clear puzzles for the rational approach, due to an apparent failure to use information available in a sentence appropriately in global or incremental inferences about the correct interpretation of a sentence. I argue that the apparent puzzle posed by these phenomena for models of rational sentence comprehension may derive from the failure of existing models to appropriately account for the environmental and cognitive constraints — in this case, the inherent uncertainty of perceptual input, and humans’ ability to compensate for it — under which comprehension takes place. I present a new probabilistic model of language comprehension under uncertain input and show that this model leads to solutions to the above puzzles. I also present behavioral data in support of novel predictions made by the model. More generally, I suggest that appropriately accounting for envir
onmental and cognitive constraints in probabilistic models can lead to a more nuanced and ultimately more satisfactory picture of key aspects of language processing and of human cognition.

UMass Morphologists at the LSA Institute

A workshop, "The Challenges of Complex Morphology to Morphological Theory"
was organized at this summer's Linguistic Institute in Boulder by Alice
Harris, Farrell Ackerman, and Gabriela Caballero.  Presentations included
Robert Staubs' "Operational Exponence: Process Morphology in Harmonic
Serialism", Minta Elsman's "Multiple Plural Exponence in Maay: An Optimality
Theoretic Account", and Alice Harris's "Exponent Adjacency in Multiple
Exponence."

UMass at GALA

Tom Roeper writes:

GALA in Thessalonika, Greece, Sept 6-8th had a good representation from
UMass. Papers or Posters were presented by UMass alumn Bart Hollebrandse, Miren Hodgson as well as Barbara Pearson, Chloe Gu and Tom Roeper. In addition UMass visitors Angeliek van Hout, Petra Schulz, Ruth Lopes, Rama Novogrodski made presentations.

WHISC returns

The WHISC staff have returned from the beach today, hungry for news. Please let us know if we have missed one of your newsworthy summer activities by sending a description of it to umass.whisc@gmail.com.

Special Lectures in Proseminar in Semantics

Angelika Kratzer writes:

You are all cordially invited to two special lectures of this semester's proseminar in semantics on quantification around the world.

September 6 (tomorrow!)

Barbara Partee

The history of formal semantics (with particular attention to debates about and treatments of quantification).

September 27

Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill) & Paula Menéndez-Benito (Göttingen)

Spanish "algunos" and dependent plurality.

 

Time: 2:30 PM

Place: the regular meeting place for the seminar is 136, Hasbrouck Laboratory. But since we are expecting a bigger crowd for the special events, we requested Herter 207 for those. Since the request has not yet been confirmed, I will send around another message on Tuesday morning.

Department Town Meeting this Friday

The beginning of the year Town Meeting will occur this Friday, September 9, at 3:30 in the Partee Room (301 South College). This annual event marks the official beginning of the social life at South College. It is the occasion at which the new members of the linguistics community meet the old(er) ones, and reading groups, labs and the like are announced, and, most importantly, the department picture is taken.

Department Picnic this Saturday

The annual department picnic kicks off at 3:30pm this Saturday, September 10, at Barbara and Volodja's house in Amherst. Their house is at 50 Hobart Lane, a small street off North Pleasant just a short distance north of UMass and opposite Puffton Village. Their house is big white thing on the left, near the end of this short street.

This potluck marks the unofficial start of the social life of the linguistics community and provides a venue for showing off your summer recipes. It is usual for the menu to be organized at the Town Meeting on Friday.

Barbara writes:

There is no parking permitted on most of Hobart Lane.
Parking is possible in our driveway, and parking is possible in the
daylight hours on the opposite side of the street between our house and
where Hobart Lane turns into a dirt road, but for safety, put a note
under your windshield wiper that tells the police your name and that you
are now at 50 Hobart Lane and asking them please to let us know if there
is a problem. (The parking restrictions help us combat the problems of
large beer parties in the neighboring apartment complexes on Hobart
Lane, so we like to stay friends with the police! We'll let them know
about the party, but they won't be able to grant a parking waiver for a
September Saturday. But they are usually willing to come and let us know
when cars need to be moved, rather than just towing them away.)    

But don't be daunted by any of that -- somebody can always help you
figure out where to park. Do come, rain or shine!

The free bus service has a bus stop very near Hobart Lane -- it's the
"Crestview/ Presidential Apartments" stop, near Puffton Village and
North Village and Crestview apartments.

UMOP 38 deadline looms

Meg Grant and Jesse Harris write:

This is a reminder that the deadline for submitting to UMOP 38: Processing Structure is approaching. The dead is firm at September 15th 2011. The volume will be published in early October.

We ask that you try to submit your paper in LaTeX. Please contact Jesse for the template and appropriate files.

Please let us know if you plan to submit or have any questions about publishing a paper in a UMOP.

Entering class arrives!

WHISC extends a warm welcome to the new class of graduate students:

Michael Clauss, from the University of Hawaii

Hannah Greene, from the University of British Columbia

Stefan Keine, from Leipzig University

Jérémy Pasquereau, from the University of Lyon

Shayne Sloggett, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, by way of University of Maryland.

The sixth member of this class, Amanda Rysling, from NYU, will arrive Fall 2012 after completing her Fulbright at Poland

Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper's book hits the stands!

Springer Publishers has just released the Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, edited by Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper. The Table of Contents reads like a Who's Who of language acquisition. Take a look:

http://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/linguistics/book/978-94-007-1687-2?changeHeader

Congratulations Jill and Tom!

UMass Funny Languages Breakfast

Seth Cable writes:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the first meeting of  
UMAFLAB (UMass Funny Languages Breakfast) will be held this Friday  
morning at 9AM in the Partee Lounge (Room 301).

What is UMAFLAB? Well, the purpose of UMAFLAB is to bring together  
individuals with a shared interest in puzzling linguistic data,  
optimally from understudied or minority languages.

*Presentations are always informal*.  We are *not* looking for  
polished work or practice talks (though those are welcome).  Rather,  
participants are free to present any puzzles they like.  They needn't  
have any analysis in mind; indeed, part of the fun of the group is  
hearing other people's thoughts on some difficult problem.

Thus, if all you have is an interesting pattern worth 'boggling at',  
that's perfect for our group (particularly if it's from an otherwise  
not-very-much-talked-about language or variety). For example, a run  
down of all the crazy data obtained during some recent field work (or  
experimental work, or whatever) would be quite ideal.

As the name suggests, our meetings are typically in the morning, with  
some breakfast item served.  However, the schedule is always flexible,  
if it turns out that most people can't make it Friday mornings.

So, if you'd at all be interested in joining us, we'll be having our  
first meeting Friday morning. This will be an organizational meeting,  
where we'll discuss the times/dates of meetings, who will present on  
what, etc.

If you think you'd like to drop by, please just send me a quick reply  
back!

Angelika speaks at North Carolina State

Angelika will give a talk at the Conference on Meaning in context, September 23-24, at North Carolina State University. Her talk is entitled "How Do 'If'-Clauses Restrict the Domain of Quantifiers?" Also speaking is UMass alumnus, Paul Portner (now of Georgetown University) who will be giving: "Clause Types in Context." For more information, visit the conference website:

http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/documents/ContextConf.Information.pdf

Roeper and Biezma in Sinn und Bedeutung 15

Tom Roeper's "How the Emergence of Propositions Separates Strict Interfaces from General Inference," and María Biezma's "Optatives: Deriving Desirability from Scalar Alternatives" has appeared in the Proceedings of  Sinn und Bedeutung 15. Take a look at:

http://uvs.uni-saarland.de/monographien/frontdoor.php?source_opus=30&la=de

Andrew McKenzie defends dissertation

Andrew McKenzie defende his dissertation, "The Role of Contextual Restriction in Reference-Tracking," on August 19th.

Andrew will be a Faculty Fellow at the Linguistics and TESOL program at UT, Arlington in the 2010-11 year.

Congratulations Andrew!

Jesse Harris and Tom Ernst go to Madrid

Jesse Harris's paper "On the syntax and semantics of domain adjectives in English" and Tom Ernst's paper "Modification of state predicates" have been accepted at the "Workshop on Modification" in Madrid on December 15 and 16. The Workshop has invited lectures from former faculty member Chris Potts and UMass graduate Marcin Morzycki. More information at:

http://www.congresos.cchs.csic.es/mdf2011/node/1

Call for papers: Discourse Cohesive Means in Acquisition

Tom Roeper is an invited speaker to DICMA conference at ZAS in Berlin, March 2012. Abstracts are due September 19th. The full call follows:

Full Title: Discourse cohesive means in acquisition

Location: Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

Start Date: 11.-13.3.2012

Contact: Dagmar Bittner, Nadja Kuehn;  dicma@zas.gwz-berlin.de

Meeting Website: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_dicma.html

Meeting Description:

Telling others about complex events, impressions, and thoughts in a coherent manner is a very demanding task for children up to their teenage years, and, though less obvious, understanding complex texts produced by others is just as demanding. The richness, diversity, and complexity of the pragmatic and linguistic devices that have to be followed in order to produce and comprehend a coherent discourse make this arguably one of the most challenging tasks in language acquisition. Children have to figure out the structure and content of the macro-parts, i.e. who is acting where and when, what happened and what follows from what happened. In addition, there is a broad range of linguistic means of discourse cohesion which are, at least partially, interacting with each other. Most of them are linked to pragmatic interpretations and to the internal non-linguistic knowledge and emotional states of the communication partner(s).

The conference will address the micro-level of discourse structure and present current research on the acquisition of the various phenomena that ensure coherence in discourse. In order to open our eyes to the complexity of the domain and the possible interactions between the diverse phenomena, we invite papers investigating children’s development into discourse coherence from all angles and perspectives. Currently, the main body of research focuses on referential expressions with respect to e.g. the introduction and maintenance of referents, topic-sensitivity, and anaphoric capacity. More recently, the role of coherence relations expressed by different types of connectors and the impact of verb semantics in discourse continuation have become of interest. However, apart from the early studies from the 1980s, not much work has been done on time reference and tense/aspect chains in discourse. Little is known about the influence of epistemic, modal, and several other types of expressions. The same holds for the influence of context information, the impact of prosodic information, and the treatment of focus.

The conference provides the opportunity to discuss the broad range of discourse cohesive means and the methods of their investigation from different theoretical perspectives. We especially encourage the presentation of papers focusing on the following aspects:

- correlations and interactions between different types of discourse cohesive means

- correlations between discourse cohesive means and non-linguistic phenomena such as emotional states, discourse context, etc.

- the role of theory of mind

- the acquisition of pragmatic implicatures in the use of discourse cohesive means

- acquisitional milestones and paths in the development of discourse abilities

- processing of discourse cohesive means

- the interaction of discourse cohesive means with parameters of information structure

- acquisition in mono- and bilingual children as well as in SLI children

 

Invited speakers:

Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul

Juhani Järvikivi

Tom Roeper

 

Abstracts of max. 500 words (not including references) should be sent as a pdf-file by the 19^th of September 2011 to dicma@zas.gwz-berlin.de.

Please provide name(s) of author(s) and affiliation(s) in the text of the email and do not mention it in the abstract file.

Emmon Bach is Keynote speaker at conference in Brazil

Emmon Bach gave a keynote lecture at the I International Meeting on Syntax and Semantics and their Interfaces, held August 25-26 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. More information at:

http://www.pucrs.br/eventos/sintaxe/

Aynat Rubinstein defends Dissertation

On August 18, Aynat successfully defended her dissertation "Roots of Modality."

Aynat will be a postdoctoral fellow in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University in the 2010-11 year.

Congratulations Aynat!

Kingston speaks at Kyoto

John Kingston is a guest speaker at the International conference on Phonetics and Phonology held in Kyoto on December 10-14, sponsored by the National Institute for Japanese and LInguistics (NINJAL). More information can be had at:

http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/phonology/InternationalConference/icpp/home/

María Biezma at Carleton University

María Biezma has taken a teaching post at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada's capitol. Congratulations María!!

Northeast Computational Phonology Circle at Yale in October

Joe Pater writes:

The Northeast Computational Phonology Circle will meet at Yale on October 15th. Please let me know if you'd like to give a talk.

Tom Roeper in Potsdam

Tom Roeper gave a lecture over the summer at Potsdam University entitled "Recursion: Formal and Applied Issues." He spent a month teaching in the European Master's in Clinical Linguistics program there as well.

WHISC janitor takes over

With the WHISC staff prematurely on holiday, the duty of publishing this, the last issue of the 2010-11 academic year, has fallen to the WHISC janitor. You may notice a slight dip in production values.

FASL at MIT this weekend

The twentieth meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics is occurring at MIT this weekend.

Michael Key's dissertation

Mike Key will defend his dissertation, "Phonological and phonetic biases in speech perception," on Monday, June 13 at 2:00PM in Herter 116.

Congratulations Mike!

UMOP 38

Meg Grant and Jesse Harris write:

The editors of UMOP 38: Processing Structure would like to announce the final call for papers. This volume would be an ideal place to publish experimental GPs or pilot studies on any aspect of sentence processing. Publishing a project in the working papers series does not preclude publishing it elsewhere.

The deadline for submission is September 15th 2011. The volume will be published in mid October. Please contact the editors for more information or with your intention to submit. 

MIT150

MIT organized a series of colloquia this spring which they describe as focussing "...on large, synthetic questions, crosses multiple schools and departments, and undertakes to be a significant, watershed moment in the intellectual history of its subject." One of these, led by UMass alumna Irene Heim in collaboration with faculty outside of Linguistics, was entitled "Brains, Minds and Machines. This symposium took place from May 3 through May 5 and included talks from UMass alumnus Gennaro Chierchia as well as Barbara Partee. The photo shows Barbara with one of MIT's indigenous linguists.

Call for papers: Islands in Contemporary Linguistic Theory

In November 16-18, 2011, the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz is hosting a conference on Islands. Two page abstracts are due June 27. A description of the conference follows.

Meeting description: Islands in Contemporary Linguistic Theory (ISLANDS 2011)

Displacements have occupied a central role in the development of syntactic theorizing since the outset of Generative Grammar. They are taken as clear exponents of context-sensitive operations that take place in local domains. However, it is well established that some of these operations cannot take place in certain environments which are usually termed 'islands' after Ross (1967) (e.g Complex NP Constraint, Wh-islands, Negative islands, Adjunct islands, Coordinate Structure Constraints). Over the years, there have been a wide range of accounts for the nature and source of the various island effects (for an overview cf. Goodluck & Rochmont 1992, Szabolcsi 2006, Boeckx 2007), with explanations in terms of syntactic locality constraints (e.g. Chomsky 1986, Rizzi 1990, Starke 2001), information structure (e.g. Erteshik-Shir 1973), language processing (e.g. Kluender 1998, Phillips 2006) or semantic well-formedness (e.g. Szabolcsi & Zwarts 1993, Abrusan 2007). Although there is no consensus emerging from these studies, it has become clear that the classical 'bounding node'/'barrier' type of explanation has to be revised and reanalyzed taking into account the latest trends in generative grammar (specially, phase-based computations, multidominance structures, etc.). Thus, some of the questions that we would like to address in this workshop are the following ones:

- What makes islands opaque domains? Do island effects reflect structural ill-formedness, semantic contradiction or language processing difficulties?
- Are some domains inherently islands or is islandhood always derivative?
- What do islands do? What are the different consequences of derivational and representational approaches to islands? (cf., i.a., Boeckx (2003), Gallego (2010) and Abe & Hornstein (2011) for discussion).
- What is the reality and nature of the 'island repair' strategies like the ones proposed in works like Merchant (2001), Fox & Pesetsky (2004), Lasnik (2009)?

We would like this workshop to provide a meeting point and a forum for open discussion for all researchers working on new trends to explain the nature and effects of islands.

Invited speakers

Marta Abrusan (University of Oxford)
Cedric Boeckx (ICREA-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Howard Lasnik (University of Maryland)

• Submission link: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=islands2011
• Conference website: Portal de Congresos y Jornadas (UPV/EHU) - Islands in Contemporary Linguistic Theory 2011
• Contact: islands2011@ehu.es

Karen Jesney defends

Karen Jesney's dissertation, "Cumulative constraint interaction in phonological acquisition and typology," will be defended at 10AM on Thursday, June 9 in Herter 116.

Congratulations Karen!

Lisa Green at UConn

On April 1, Lisa Green gave a talk at UConn under the auspices of the Cognitive Science Program. Her talk was entitled "Syntactic and Morphosyntactic Variation in Child African American English."

Roeper at Greifswald

Tom writes:

At the end of April, I traveled to Greifswald University in Northeastern Germany to give a talk on "Cognitive Wissenschaft und Reformpädagogik" which was a rough translation of a talk that I gave at the Roeper School in Michigan on "Cognitive Science and Progressive Education".  I mention it in hopes that others will put a little thought into the wider implications of what we do.

Wendell Kimper's dissertation defense

Wendell Kimper will defend "Competing Triggers: Transparency and Opacity in Vowel Harmony" on Friday, June 10 at 9:30AM in Herter 201.

Congratulations Wendell!

Second call for papers: Semantics and Philosophy in Europe

Second Call for Papers

SEMANTICS AND PHILOSOHPY IN EUROPE 4

26 September - 1 October, 2011
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

http://www.rub.de/phil-lang/spe4

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Jan Broersen (Utrecht) - Philippe de Brabanter (Paris) - Manuel
Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona) - Andreas Herzig (Toulouse) - Katarzyna
Jaszczolt (Cambridge) - Hannes Leitgeb (Munich) - Robert Matthews (Rutgers)
- Friederike Moltmann (Paris) - Stephen Neale (New York) - John Perry
(Stanford) - Paul Saka (Texas) - Mark Richard (Harvard) - Daniele van de
Velde (Lille) - Dag Westerstahl (Gothenburg)

GENERAL ORGANIZATION
Markus Werning and Heinrich Wansing

It is with great pleasure that we announce the upcoming Semantics and
Philosophy in Europe 4 conference. The conference will feature expert
tutorials, symposia, roundtables, and a colloquium on the following topics:

A) The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation
B) The Semantics of Action Sentences
C) The Semantics and Epistemology of Mental State Ascriptions

The purpose of the SPE workshops is to enhance the dialogue between
linguists and philosophers and to provide a new forum for presenting
research in the interface between linguistic semantics and the related areas
of philosophy (philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind,
metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology) . SPE takes place
annually in different European cities. The previous meetings took place in
Paris (SPE1, 2008), London (SPE2, 2009), and Paris (SPE3, 2010).

Submissions of abstracts (650 words including references) are invited for 30
min talks or poster presentations on each of the three themes of the
conference or related topics. Submissions will be accepted via the
conference website until 15 June, 2011.

CONTACT/ORGANIZATION
Prof. Dr. Markus Werning/Prof. Dr. Heinrich Wansing
Department of Philosophy II
Ruhr University Bochum
44780 Bochum, Germany

Please direct email inquiries to spe4@rub.de.

Tom Roeper in Mannheim

Tom Roeper gave two talks at the end of April in Mannheim. One, joint work with Luiz Amaral, was on Multiple Grammars and the OPC, and the other, joint work with Terue Mishayita, Suzi Lima and Barbara Pearson, was "The Acquisition of Each, Every, and Plurals and how exhaustivity, genericity, and distributivity are distinguished."

Deadline for Ninth International Tbilisi Symposium extended

Final Call for Papers: EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE

THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL TBILISI SYMPOSIUM
ON LANGUAGE, LOGIC AND COMPUTATION

26-30 September 2011
Kutaisi, Georgia
Website: http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2011/
****************************************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS

The Ninth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held on 26 - 30 September 2011 in Kutaisi, Georgia. The Programme Committee invites submissions for contributions on all aspects of language, logic and computation. Work of an interdisciplinary nature is particularly welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
* Constructive, modal and algebraic logic
* Linguistic typology and semantic universals
* Logics for artificial intelligence
* Information retrieval, query answer systems
* Logic, games, and formal pragmatics
* Language evolution and learnability
* Computational social choice
* Historical linguistics, history of logic
* Algorithmic game theory
* Formal models of multiagent systems

Authors can submit an anonymous abstract of two pages (800 words) at the EasyChair conference system here:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2011

PROGRAMME

The programme will at least include the following invited speakers for the lectures and tutorials.

Tutorials:
Enzo Marra                  Logic
Ulle Endriss                Computation
Daniel Hole                 Language

Invited Lectures:
Alexandru Baltag            Logic
Agi Kurucz                  Logic
Sonja Smets Logic
Prakash Panangaden     Computation
Nikolaj Bjorner             Computation
Vangelis Paschos            Computation
Bart Geurts                 Language
Peter beim Graben Language


Two Special sessions:

A special session on Frames, chaired by Sebastian Loebner and a special session on Logic, Information, and Agency chaired by Alexandru Baltag & Sonja Smets. Full details below.


PUBLICATION INFORMATION

A selection of accepted submissions will be published after a second review in the LNAI series of Springer.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline:          May 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance:   July 1, 2011
Final abstracts due:          August 1, 2011
Registration deadline:        September 1, 2011
Symposium:                    September 26-30, 2011

Programme and submission details can be found at:

http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2011/

WHISC goes to the beach

With this issue of WHISC, the 2010-2011 volume officially closes. Our hardworking staff is already lathering on the sunscreen and blowing up the beach toys.

WHISC returns in September.

Lab Jobs for undergraduate Linguistics Students

Alexandra Jesse writes:

I direct the Language, Intersensory Perception, and Speech (short: LIPS) lab in the Psychology Department. We are currently looking for undergraduate research assistants to work in the lab in the upcoming Fall and Spring semester.

Research within the LIPS lab looks at how (young and older) listeners recognize speech from hearing and seeing a speaker talk. In particular, we are interested in the time-course of recognizing words, both from listening and from lip-reading, how listeners adjust to a speaker's idiosyncratic pronunciations, and what happens to these processes when people get older. 

You can also visit our website for more information:
http://lips.psych.umass.edu

Typical tasks of our research assistants are:
- help with finding, recording, and editing of speech materials for the experiments
- assist with recruitment, scheduling, and testing of participants
- attend & prepare for weekly lab meetings
- do administrative research-related tasks

The typical commitment of our research assistants is 9hrs/week, for 3 credits.  

If you are interested in this position, please contact me for more information and/or for an application form.

Martin Walkow defends dissertation

Martin Walkow will defend his dissertation "Goals, Big and Small" on Friday the 13th (of May). For the location and time, look for the adverts around the department.

Graduation this Weekend

The graduating class of 2011 will matriculate this Friday and Saturday. Of our linguistics majors, those seniors eligible to graduate this year are:

Pamela Angel
Daniel Benowitz
Sean Bethard
Maria Bonilla
Rachel Borden
Stephanie Clement
Jennifer Cusworth
Amilyn DeCarteret
Aurora Feeney-Kleinfeldt
Roxanne Frattaroli
Jordan Galler
Teresa Gotal
Jeffrey Haigler
Elissa Kraemer
Jessica Lee
Saul Lee
Nicholas Leoutsakos
Eliza Mandel
Thomas Mizrahi
Erica Reinholz
Aaron Schein
Eric Swotinsky
Zachary Waegell

Congratulations linguists!

Grant and Lima get University Fellowships

The prestigious University Fellowships have been announced for the 2011-12 academic year, and the linguistics department's Suzi Lima and Meg Grant are both recipients. The University Fellowships are awarded to graduate students throughout the university based on research accomplishments: there are only 18 given to continuing graduate students. Linguistics was the only department to be awarded more than one fellowship.

Congratulations Meg and Suzi!

RUMMIT meets this week

R(utgers)UM(ass)MIT, the annual area meeting of phoneticians and phonologists, meets Monday, May 16, in Rutgers. The talks this year include:

From Rutgers:

Vandana Bajaj -- Hindi Bilingual Joke Wellformedness: A Study of
Laryngeal Contrast Perceptibility

Aaron Braver -- (Im)perceptible incomplete neutralization: Two
experiments on flapping in American English

Peter Staroverov -- Sonority and the acoustics of Russian word-final
consonant clusters

from UMass:

Kevin Mullin -- The Necessity of Diacritics for Descriptive Adquacy

Claire Moore-Cantwell -- Epenthesis Typology in Harmonic Serialism

Brian Smith -- Paradigm Gaps and Spell-Out in OT and HG

From MIT

Suyeon Yun -- String-based domains of duration preservation

Coppe van Urk -- On the distribution of clashes
For more information, get in touch with John Kingston.

Cable in Moscow

Seth Cable writes:

Last weekend, I attended MOSS 2 (the second Moscow Syntax and Semantics conference). Also in attendance were the following UMass-related folks: Barbara Partee, Ana Arregui and Malte Zimmerman. Ana presented the second talk of the conference, a joint work with Maria Luisa Rivero and Andres Salanova titled "Imperfectivity: Capturing Variation Across Languages." On the next day, I presented an invited talk titled "The Optionality of Movement and EPP in Dholuo." Malte presented the third invited talk, titled "Contrastive Discourse Particles: Effects of Information Structure and Modality." Overall, it was an incredible program, and also featured fascinating talks by folks from all over Europe, Asia and North America. The program can still be found here:

http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/korotkova/moss/program.html

SALT 21 meets on May 20-22

The 21st meeting of Semantics and Linguistics Theory will meet on May 20-22 at Rutgers. Our own Angelika Kratzer is one of the invited speakers; she will be presenting "What *can* can mean."

Daniel Altshuler, of Hampshire College, is also presenting a paper: "Towards a more fine-grained theory of temporal adverbials."

UMass grad student Maria Biezma will be presenting a poster: "Conditional Inversion and Givenness."

UMass alumni Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito will also be presenting a poster: "Two types of epistemic indefinites: private ignorance vs. public indifference"

And UMass alumni Ilaria Frana and Kyle Rawlins will be presenting the poster: "Unconditional concealed questions and the nature of Heim's ambiguity"

More information can be found at: http://salt.rutgers.edu/.

Johnson in the Basque Country

Kyle Johnson will present ten lectures at the Universidad del País Vasco in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain in the last two weeks of this month. The lectures are on a "Typology of Movement," but, it is rumored, actually show off difficult to draw three dimensional phrase markers.