Maria Turrero in Acquisition Lab/LARC

Maria Turrero will present the following paper in the acquisition lab / LARC meeting:

"Spanish L2 speakers and wh- island constraints: experimental ideas"

The meeting is Monday, October 15, in Herter 301 at noon.

Everyone is welcome!

Poole at SRG

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG will be meeting this Thursday at 6:30pm at the home of Partee et
al., 50 Hobart Lane in Amherst.  Ethan Poole will be talking about
partitive case in Finnish.  Bring money for pizza or BYOD.

Pater talks at McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting

Joe Pater will present on "learning probabilities over derivations" at the next McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting, Friday, October 19,  in the Partee room at 11. He'll be talking about the work on Harmonic Serialism in the paper below, and will also discuss the general approach, including  about how it can be applied to other derivational approaches to OT, with a summary of some work on learning in stratal OT that Alex Nazarov and he did last semester.

Staubs, Robert and Joe Pater. To appear. Learning serial constraint-based grammars. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press. http://people.umass.edu/pater/staubs-pater-serial-learning.pdf

UMass at NELS

The annual North East Linguistics Society meeting takes place October 19-21 at the City University of New York. UMass will be well represented:

Papers:

Andrew Weir (graduate student) "Why-stripping targets Voice Phrase"

Seth Cable (faculty) "Distance distributivity and pluractionality in Tlingit (and beyond)"

Elliott Moreton (alumnus) with Katya Pertsova "Pastry phonotactics" (delicious!)

Michael Becker and Maria Gouskova (alumni) "Source-oriented generalizations as grammar inference in yer deletion"

Posters:

Maria Biezma (alumna) (with Daniel Siddiqi and Andrew Carnie) "Counterfactuality in non-standard subjunctive conditionals"

 

Call for papers: LSALAA 2013

Workshop on Languages with and without articles 2013

The workshop will be held Feb 28 - March 1st 2013
Salle de conférences, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris.

Invited speakers :

- Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
- Östen Dahl (Stockholm)

Call deadline : November 25, 2012.

The workshop is organised by the project "Calcul de la référence nominale: langues avec et sans articles" of the Fédération Typologie et Universaux du Langage (CNRS FRE 2559) which aims to bring together researchers in

-- L1 and L2 language acquisition,
-- sign language linguistics and
-- comparative syntax and semantics.

We encourage submissions exploring the linguistic means used to establish the reference of a nominal expression, including, but not limited to, the following questions:

- what is the role of definite and indefinite articles in establishing the
reference of the DP?

- how are the effects of definite and indefinite articles achieved in
languages that lack those articles?

- what are the semantic distinctions involved in languages that
distinguish two distinct definite articles (see Ebert 1970, Löbner 1985
and much subsequent literature) or two indefinite articles (see von
Heusinger, Klaus & Klein, Udo (to appear) The Distribution of two
Indefinite Articles in Uzbek and references cited there)?

- what is the difference between definite and demonstrative determiners?

We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics, L1 and L2 acquisition of (in)definiteness in spoken and sign languages.

We invite submissions for 25-minute presentations (plus ten-minute
discussions).

Abstracts should be at most 2 pages in length (including examples and
references) written in French or English.

Abstracts must be anonymous and should be sent by e-mail (plain ASCII, rtf, ps or pdf) to : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Please write the (first) author's name plus the word 'abstract' in the
subject line of your message (e.g., 'Dupont abstract'), and include author name(s), affiliation, contact information and the title of the abstract in the body of the email. For co-authored papers indicate the email address that we should use for correspondence.

Website :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Journees-LSALAA-2013-Workshop-.html E-mail : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Abstract Submission Deadline : 25 nov / 25 Nov 2012
Notification of Acceptance : 20 déc / Dec 20th, 2012
Workshop :  Thur 28 Feb and Fri 1st March 2013

PhD position at Brandeis University

The Linguistics faculty of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University invites applications for a Ph.D. position under the supervision of Dr. Sophia A. Malamud, starting in September 2013. In addition to tuition remission, there is a stipend of $22,000 renewable for 4 years.

Individuals are encouraged to apply who have an interest in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, computational approaches to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, and/or linguistic annotation for meaning-related phenomena. The research topic will lie in the overlapping areas of modality, mood, sentence type, speech act modifiers, modelling of dialogue, and indirectness.

Applicants should have a Bachelor's or Masters degree or equivalent in linguistics, computational linguistics, speech technology, cognitive science, computer science, or a related discipline.

For more details on the linguistics faculty at Brandeis Computer Science, or on Dr. Malamud specifically, see

Sophia Malamud, Assistant Professor (website)
Brandeis Research Lab for Linguistics and Computation faculty (website)

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the project. Please contact Sophia A. Malamud (smalamud at brandeis.edu), attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV.

Details regarding the PhD program can be found at http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/computerscience/phd.html

For more information on the application procedure, please see the Graduate School website (http://www.brandeis.edu/gsas/apply/index.html) 

In order to ensure full consideration for funding, applications (including all supporting documents) need to be received by January 15, 2013.

Phonetics Lab Meetings

John Kingston writes:

Schedule of upcoming Phonetics Lab meetings:

Tuesday 9 October = a UMass Monday:
   On-going and prospective experiments, John Kingston;
   Prospective grant proposal, all.

Monday 22 October:
   Abstracts of papers to be presented at the Fall meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in St. Louis, all;
   Abstracts to be submitted by us to the Spring meeting (see separate announcement), all.

Monday 5 November:
   Kirikiri tone, Kristine Yu.

All meetings are held 4-5:30 PM in Bartlett 6.
Bagels, occasional baked goods, cheese, and spreads, including one for vegans, are provided. For now, bring your own coffee.

Phonology Reading Group meeting tomorrow!

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

The next meeting of the phonology reading group will happen:

Tuesday October 9
6:30 pm
36 Orchard st. #3, in Northampton (Kristine's place)

Brian Smith will be presenting his work on phonologically conditioned
ineffability using UR constraints.

Bring snacks/drinks if you can!

call for papers: SALT 23

*** SALT23 *** Final Call for Abstracts ***

Semantics and Linguistics Theory 23 will be held at UC Santa Cruz, May 3-5, 2013. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics.

Abstracts must not exceed 3 pages (please note the new page limit)  on letter-size 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.

SALT does not accept papers that by the time of submission have
appeared or have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed
journal. Preference will be given to presentations not duplicated at
other major conferences (including LSA, NELS, WCCFL).

To submit an abstract, please go to the following EasyChair page:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt23

Abstract submission opens on October 8, 2012. The deadline for
abstract submission is December 2, 2012 11:59 PM, PST.

More details about the conference are/will be available on the SALT 23 webpage:

http://babel.ucsc.edu/salt/

Please direct any inquiries to:

salt23ucsc@gmail.com

Important Dates

Submission deadline: December 2, 2012, 11:59pm PST
Notification of acceptance: Early February 2013
Conference date: May 3 - May 5, 2013

Cable's paper accepted to Journal of Semantics

Seth Cable's paper, "Reflexives, Reciprocals, and Contrast" was accepted to the Journal of Semantics.

Congratulations Seth!

UMass at GALANA

The fifth meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America meets at the University of Kansas October 11-13. The program includes several UMass citizens, including:

Jeremy Hartman with Yasutada Sudo and Ken Wexler "Principle B and Phonologically Reduced Pronouns in Child English"

Angelik van Hout with I. Barcia del Real Marco and M. J. Ezeizabarrena "Comprehension vs. production asymmetries in the acquisition of PF and IPF aspect in Spanish"

Angelik van Hout with A. Schouwenaars and P. Hendriks "Word order overrules number agreement: Dutch children's interpretation and production of which-questions"

Tom Roeper and Seth Cable with Rama Novogrodsky "The interpretation of "each" and "every" in language acquisition"

Karen Jesney "A Learning-Based Account of L1 vs L2 Cluster Repair Differences"

Suzi Lima "The acquisition of the count/mass distinction in Yudja (Tupi)

For more information, go to http://www.galana2012.ku.edu/home.html

Call for Papers: ICA 2013

The Call for Papers for ICA 2013, a joint meeting of the 21st
International Congress on Acoustics, the 165th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, and the 52nd meeting of the Canadian
Acoustical Association, to be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2-7
June 2013, is now posted online at acousticalsociety.org. Please note that a printed copy of the Call for Papers will no longer be sent to
members by postal mail.

The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 15 November 2012. Over 90
special sessions are being organized and a Proceedings containing all papers will be published. Other events include 5 plenary lectures by recognized experts, an exposition showcasing the latest products in all fields of acoustics, and a technical tour of La Maison Symphonique-home to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The opening ceremonies for ICA 2013 will be an exciting and entertaining event. An evening concert at Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste will feature the orchestral group I Musici.

Seth Cable at Yale

Last Monday, October 1, Seth Cable presented his paper "Distance Distributivity and Pluractionality in Tlingit (and Beyond)" at the Monday Colloquia series Yale University's Linguistics Department.

Miriam Butt presented "Deep Natural Language Processing"

Miriam Butt gave a talk last Friday, October 5. Miriam is
Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics
(Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft) at the University of Konstanz. She is best known for her theoretical linguistic work on complex predicates and on grammatical case, and for her computational linguistic work in large-scale grammar development within the Pargram project. Recently she has been also involved in interdisciplinary work on the visualization of linguistic data.

The title, and abstract, of her talk was:

Deep Natural Language Processing

This talks provides a look at the capabilities of deep linguistic
natural lanuguage processing in the context of ParGram, an
international effort at building grammars for languages as diverse as
English, French, Welsh, Wolof, Georgian, Urdu, Japanese, Indonesian,Arabic and Murrinh-Patha.  The aim is to build these grammars using not only the same theoretical assumptions (based on Lexical-Functional Grammar) but also the same computational methods.  While the process of computational grammar devleopment is, of course, inherently interesting, we will also discuss the broader uses of computational grammars, for example in systems like IBM's Watson and Powerset's information retrieval system.

The underlying development platform XLE/XFR (used by Powerset and in the ParGram effort) was developed at PARC over a number of years.  The talk will focus on the various powerful analysis possibilities this system allows for, including a version of Optimality Theory and an integration of statistical information to constrain and inform both parsing and generation. The talk will also touch on the assumptions about the underlying grammar architecture that are made, e.g., with respect to the morphology-syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.

Roeper and Amaral at the Acquisition Lab/LARC meeting on Monday

The Acquisition Lab/LARC meeting is Monday, October 1, in Herter 301 at noon. Tom Roeper and Luiz Amaral will give presentations on:

1) Age effects and the acquisition of recursive possessives in Wapichana

2) Updates on their collaboration with Brazilian partners and the 2013's conference on Recursion at UFRJ

3) Parsing effects in Recursion in Karaja

Everyone is welcome!

Valentine Hacquard gives department colloq on Friday

Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland) will give the department colloquium this Friday, October 5, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30. There will be a dinner reception for her at Rajesh Bhatt's house in Northampton.

Title: Attitude Problems

Children seem to lack a full understanding of verbs like 'think' until their fourth birthday, but show no such difficulties with verbs like ‘want’. A common explanation for this asymmetry links it to conceptual development. Under this view, children lack the ability to attribute beliefs to themselves and others (theory of mind) until age 4. On the other hand, the concept of desire is held to develop much earlier. Thus, children do not have the same difficulties with verbs reporting desires than with those reporting beliefs. However, several issues cast doubt on this conceptual development hypothesis. This talk explores an alternative, semantic explanation for the asymmetry in children's understanding of think and want, which doesn't rely on a fundamental change in conceptual structure.

Weir speaks at SRG on Thursday

Andrew Weir will give a practice talk for NELS entitled " 'why' Stripping targets voice phrase" at the S Reading Group this Thursday, October 4, at 6:30. The meeting is at Barbara and Volodja's place (50 Hobart Lane). BYOD(inner), or bring dinner-money.

Schardl at the LSA

Anisa Schardl will give a poster on "Simple Partial Movement and Clefts" at this year's LSA meeting in Boston. 

Congratulations Anisa!

NECPhon 2012 this Saturday at Maryland

The Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop meets Saturday, October 6, at the University of Maryland. There will be two talks by members of the UMass linguistics community.

Joe Pater will present joint work with UMass alumnus Elliott Moreton in a paper entitled "Incremental Maximum Entropy phonotactics and the Shepard complexity hierarchy"

and

Presley Pizzo will give a talk entitled "An online model of constraint induction for learning phonological alternations"

Bolozky speaks at the Ling Club meeting on Wednesday

Amanthis Miller writes:

We are happy to invite you to  come see Professor Bolozky at Ling Club speaking on "Two recent  phonological phenomena in Israeli Hebrew phonology and  their possible  implications". He was kind enough to write an abstract, which is down there below the dotted line. All are welcome to come, there will probably be pizza!

When: Wednesday 10/3 at 5.20 PM
Where: 301 South College - Partee Room
RVSP: jccahill@student.umass.edu

If you have any questions, please email Jeremy or me! See you there!

****************

 Two phonological phenomena in Israeli Hebrew (IH) will be  introduced, pre-tonal lengthening (PTL) and i > e centralization (CENT), both of which had precedents in Ancient Hebrew. Both have recently been observed in IH in generally-similar environments, but their scope of application is limited to certain colloquial registers  and to some groups of speakers, and even then the processes involved  are not applied consistently. Still, the motivation for each could be  similar, at least in part, to what it was in ancient Hebrew.  

Historical PTL was probably intended to distinguish Hebrew lexical items from comparable Aramaic ones among the predominantly bilingual population; in IH it may signal a general rhythmic change, but may  also constitute an attempt to avoid opacity-causing qualitative vowel reduction (as in English). CENT was and is just an “ease of  articulation” phonetic process. Both apply to unstressed vowels.   

Since PTL generally applies in open syllables, and CENT in closed ones, a single possible explanation is suggested ---  in terms of syllable structure ---  that can account for both.

Acoustical Society of America meeting in Montreal

John Kingston writes:

The spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held relatively nearby in a very interesting city, Montreal, 2-7 June 2013.

It's a joint meeting with the International Congress on Acoustics and the Canadian Acoustical Association. I'm writing to you now because the deadline for a 200 word abstract is (as always) very early, 15 November 2012, and because this is a potentially interestingly different venue to present your work. Abstracts are submitted via:

acousticalsociety.org

All submissions are accepted, although you have to join the society at the meeting in order to register. This is VERY cheap for students (and VERY expensive for anyone else).

Could we consider an expedition north next June? We'll discuss this at the next Phonetics Lab meeting, 10 October 2012.

Kristine has proposed that we discuss selected abstracts from the fall meeting at the lab meeting after that on 22 October 2012. She'll be sending around an announcement about that shortly. That will give a chance to can see what an ASA abstract is like and what kind of papers are given at the meeting.

The last time a lot of us from the Lab went was to the meeting in Providence in 2006. We gave a brace of posters and got excellent and intense feedback. (I recommend giving a poster because talks are just 15 minutes total which leaves little time for discussion.)

Magda Oiry joins faculty!

Starting this academic year, Magda Oiry has joined the Linguistics Department faculty. Magda completed a dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance dependencies by French learners at the University of Nantes in 2008, and is an expert on both the syntax of questions and their acquisition. She will have a joint appointment with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Welcome Magda!

Mike Clauss and Jon Nelson at the LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting

Magda Oiry writes:

Mike Clauss and Jon Nelson will be presenting their work this coming Monday in the LARC / Acquisition lab meeting: 

 

- "Wh clauses in polar questions" by Mike 

- "Recursion in Second Language acquisition" by Jon.

 

Monday, the 24th in Herter 301 at 12.

 

Everyone is welcome!

Conner and LaCara at the German Society of Linguistics meeting

The Thirty Fourth annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics meets this March in Potsdam. They have a special workshop on "Parenthesis and Ellipsis" that will include papers by Nick LaCara and Tracy Conner. Mr LaCara's paper is entitled "Inversion, Deletion, and Focus in "as" Parentheticals," and Ms Conner's paper is "Overt Functional Heads License Ellipsis: A Unified Account of VP-Ellipsis and Ellipsis in Possessive DPs."

Congratulations Tracy and Nick!

Call for Papers: Tampa Workshop in Linguistics

The fourth annual Tampa Workshop in Linguistics will take place at the University of South Florida in Tampa on March 21 and 22. The keynote speaker this year is former UMass syntax guru Jason Merchant. The deadline for abstracts is December 31. For more information, see http://www.tampalinguistics.org

Weir Posters at LSA

Andrew Weir's poster "Article drop in headlines: failure of CP-level Agree" was accepted to the LSA's meeting this January in Boston.

Congratulations, Andrew!

Schardl and Bogal-Allbritten at the LSA

Anisa Schardl and Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will give a post at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America meeting this January in Boston. Its title is: "Expressing uncertainty with `gisa' in Tshangla."

Congratulations Anisa and Elizabeth!

LaCara on the move

Nicholas LaCara will give a series of presentations in the upcoming months. He will give "Comparative deletion in "as" parentheticals" at the Ellipsis 2012 conference in November at the Universida de Vigo, Spain. (For more information, see http://webs.uvigo.es/ellipsis2012/index.php). And he will give a poster at the LSA's meeting in Boston this January, which, rumor has it, might be entitled "On the table lay a book, and on the sofa did too: Ellipsis, locative Inversion and why they are bad together."

Congratulations Nick!

Telicity in Verse

 

To be, or to be with atelicity,
That is the question:
Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
In fits and starts with countless pains and strife,
Or to take Arms against the dogged Fates,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
Forever; and by sleep, to say we end
All relapse of the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to. ‘Tis an intermission
Devoutly to be wished? To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of telic death, alas,
What dreams may come amount to only one.
Would we expect that dreams come frequently
And often? In those dreams that kids jump rope,
And ample teeth fall out of bloody throats?
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
There is but one event for us in store:
To dream of nothing evermore.

--Joshua Levy

Fernanda Mendes presents at the Acquisition Lab/LARC tomorrow

The Acquisition lab/ LARC meeting on Monday, September 17 at noon in Herter 301.

Fernanda Mendes visiting from Brazil until December will present "Inalienable possession: differences between body-parts names and relationship names in English and Brazilian Portuguese"

Everyone's welcome!

Undergraduate Linguistics Club starts up

Jeremy Cahill writes:

Linguistics Club is back for the fall semester! We will once again be   hosting a number of events throughout the semester, including a talk  series featuring UMass linguistics professors and other language researchers.

We invite you to come join us for our first event of the semester:  Game Night, featuring Phonetic and Standard Scrabble, Bananagrams,  Boggle, and more. Pizza will be provided.

What:  Game Night
Where: 301 South College (next to Du Bois Library)
When:  Wednesday 9/19 at 5:30 PM
RSVP:  jccahill@student.umass.edu

To receive messages about future Linguistics Club events, subscribe to  
our mailing list here:

https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-club

(A number of you visited our table at the Activities Expo and gave us  your email. If you did, don't worry about subscribing -- we've got you covered.)

To look at an events calendar and find out about a host of other activities going on in the department, go here:

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


Need directions? Other questions? Suggestions? Email me at  
jccahill@student.umass.edu.

Lisa Selkirk presents

Lisa Selkirk was an invited speaker at the the Tone and Intonation conference at the University of Oxford on September 6-8.  Her talk, "Prosodic Headedness and Prosodic Typology" was the closing presentation of the conference at Balliol College. For more information, see

http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/events/tie/

She reprised this presentation at the Prosody Proseminar last Tuesday, September 11.

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten in Natural Language Semantics

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten's paper "Decomposing Notions of Adjectival Transitivity in Navajo" has been accepted for publication in Natural Language Semantics.

Congratulations Elizabeth!

Bhatt at NYU

Rajesh Bhatt will be giving the colloquium at New York University this Friday, September 21. His talk will be on Differential Comparatives.

PsychoSyntax gets organized

The PsychoSyntax group meets every other Wednesday in 206 Tobin Hall at 10:45 AM.  The PsychoSyntacticians have organized the following schedule of presentations for their meetings.

9/19: Josh Levy, Semantics of "however"
10/10: Kristine Yu, Samoan morphosyntax
10/24: Jon Ander Mendia, Basque quantifiers
11/7: Magda Oiry, Experimental investigation of French clefting
12/5: Shayne Sloggett, Processing of German case

All are welcome!

If you have something you'd like to discuss, or present, at the PsychoSyntax meetings, get in touch with Brian Dillon.

S Reading Group fires up

Anisa Schardl writes:

It's the fall, and that means that SRG is starting up again!  SRG, formerly known as the syntax/semantics reading group(s), is a group that meets about every two weeks on Thursday evenings over dinner and drinks.  Usually, someone presents on whatever they're currently working on.  This is a way for the s-siders in the department to keep up to date with each other's work.  It's also a great place to give practice talks!

I would like to claim the first slot of the semester to give a practice talk.  It's on work this Elizabeth and I did this summer, and it's semantically inclined.  I also happen to be busy on the appropriate Thursday, so I'm moving that weeks' SRG to Wednesday evening, September 19th.

After that, we have no one signed up!  So, I would like to invite s-siders to volunteer to give practice talks or just talk about what they've been working on.  Other than practice talks, we like to keep these presentations as informal as possible, so don't worry if it's not polished!  Email me if you'd like to present!  Here are some open dates:

October 4th
October 18th
November 1st
November 15th
November 29th

Finally, the SRG calendar can be found here:

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

If you need help importing it into iCal or something, just let me know.

The S Reading Group meets on Wednesday

Anisa Schardl writes:

We'll be having the first meeting of SRG this Wednesday (not Thursday) at Elizabeth's house, starting around 6:30pm.  I'll be giving a practice talk about work that Elizabeth and I have been doing together on Tshangla.  It will be semantically/pragmatically oriented.

Since it is dinner time, we will be ordering pizza.  As SRG has no budget, please bring money to pay for pizza, or bring your own dinner if you don't want pizza.  It would be nice if a couple people brought drinks too.

Elizabeth's house is a large blue Victorian-style house with a porch located at 50 Philips Pl in Northampton.  Her apartment is number 1L.  It would be easiest for people to enter through the back door to the apartment, since the front entryway is locked. To do this, walk down the driveway (on the left side of the house), turn the corner and go in the door that you come to back there (next to the large trashcans).  If you get lost, please call Elizabeth at (270) 293-9489.  See you there!

UMass at South Asian Languages Theory at Yale

Yale University is hosting "South Asian Languages: Theory, Typology, and Diachrony" September 28-30. Our own Rajesh Bhatt is one of the invited speakers, he'll present a paper entitled "many and more." In addition, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten and Anisa Schardl will present their paper "Tshangla conjectural questions."

For more information, see

http://linguisticssouthasia.commons.yale.edu

Undergraduate Research Positions in the Phonetics Lab

John Kingston writes:

If you're interested in getting research experience in phonetics,  particularly in techniques for studying how people recognize and  distinguish speech sounds, please contact me to set up an appointment to discuss what you might do.

Rajesh Bhatt on the road

Rajesh Bhatt's summer was filled with linguistics. A small sampling of his activities would include these talks, presentations and classes:

May 28-30: "Causativization in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank" at Konstanz

June 4: "Differential Comparatives" talks at Stuttgart and Tübingen

July 2-4: Commentary on papers by Grosu (Internally Headed Relative Clauses), Heycock (Reconstruction in Relative Clauses), and Rouveret (Resumption in Welsh Relative Clauses) with Sabine Iatridou at the University of Jerusalem, Israel.

July 5: "Complex Predicates and Agreement in Hindi-Urdu," International Conference on South Asian Languages, Moscow State University, Russia.

July 10-28: Intro to Syntax, taught at the Suny Stony Brook New York Institute in Saint Petersburg, St. Petersburg State University.

August 1-5: Work on Dependency Grammars and Parsing, with Shravan Vasisth and Samar Hussain at Potsdam University.

Chomsky gives talks at UMass

Noam Chomsky will be giving a talk at the People Before Profits fundraising dinner hosted by the Center for Popular Economics. The event is on September 27 at 5:30 in the Amherst Room (10th Floor) of the Campus Center. 

For more information, go to:

www.populareconomics.org/people-before-profits-celebration-dinner

To purchase tickets, go to:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/264854

Chomsky will also be giving a free public lecture "Who Owns the World? Resistance and Pathways Forward" in the UMass Fine Arts Center at 8:00PM on September 27. Reserve your tickets by contacting the Fine Arts Center box office at 545-2511. Only two tickets per person. 

GLSA online store refreshed

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten writes:

The GLSA online store has been updated to include many new GLSA publications, including NELS 39 (Vol 1 and 2), UMOP 38 (Processing Linguistic Structure), SULA 5 and SULA 6, and dissertations by Schwarz, Alonso-Ovalle, and Juarros-Daussà. 
If you would like more information on publishing a UMass dissertation through the GLSA, please contact Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (eba@linguist.umass.edu).

The McCarthy-Pater grant group meets on Friday

Joe Pater writes:

The McCarthy-Pater grant group will meet Friday Sept. 21st at 11 in the Partee room to plan for their next NSF grant submission. All are welcome. If you plan to come, and haven't received the reading materials for the meeting, please contact me and I'll send them.

Barbara becomes fellow of the Cognitive Science Society

In July, Barbara Partee joined Lila Gleitman, George Miller, Noam Chomsky, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Barbara Landau, Aravind Joshi and a long list of others as fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.

Congratulations Barbara!

Parenthesis and Ellipsis Workshop in Potsdam

Marlies Kluck, Dennis Ott and Mark de Vries of Groningen write:

 

We wanted to draw your attention to the workshop "Parenthesis and Ellipsis" we will be organizing as part of the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) in March 2013 at the University of Potsdam. The (extended) deadline for abstracts is Sept. 15. All further information can be found on the workshop website: http://let.webhosting.rug.nl/~ott/workshop.html

Language Acquisition Resource Center meets tomorrow

Magda Oiry writes:

The First Meeting of the Acquisition Lab/LARC (Language Acquisition Resource Center) will be this Monday, September 10th. New time and place! From 12 to 1:30 in Herter 301. 

1. Organization: introductions, future meetings, experimental plans

2. Tracy Conner, back from the Sociolinguistics symposium in Berlin will be presenting  'When it’s Not an Option: Probing the Limits of Variation in Possessive Marking in Child African American English through Multi-method Research'.

American International Morphology Meeting at UMass in two weeks

On September 22, UMass will host the American International Morphology Meeting. The keynote speaker will be Gregory Stump, who will present "Variable Affix Order and the Amorphousness Hypothesis." There will be opening presentations by UMass alumnus James Blevins and Heidi Harley. For more information, go to:

http://people.umass.edu/aimm/registration.html

Phonetics Lab Meetings

John Kingston writes:

Phonetics Lab Meetings will be held this semester, every other Monday,  starting next Monday, 10 September 2012, from 4-5:30 PM. The meetings  are held in the Phonetics Lab, Bartlett 6. Everyone interested in  attending and participating is welcome.  If you know someone who might be interested but who isn't on this list, please feel free to forward this message to them. Snacks are provided. The topic for each lab meeting will be announced shortly beforehand. Here they are for the  first two meetings.

10 September 2012:
A brief review of experiments in progress.
Deciding on the snack menu for the rest of the semester.
Separating lexical from auditory effects on speech perception. A  
presentation by Kevin Mullin of the results of a recent phoneme monitoring experiment designed to separate in time the effects of word recognition from the auditory effects of a sound's neighboring sounds on its recognition.

24 September 2012:
Phonotactic biases are fast. A presentation by K. Mullin of a phoneme  
identification experiment that pits phonotactic biases against  
auditory biases and finds that phonotactic biases are present for  
earlier responses but are weakened or absent in later responses.

Aaron Walker is new office manager

Filling Sara Vega-Liros shoes in the department office until her replacement is hired is Aaron Walker. He spent last week getting a crash course from Sarah on office managing, and will start up full time Monday.  Stop on in and welcome Aaron to the department

The first meeting of the Phonology Reading group is Thursday

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

The first meeting of the phonology reading group will be:

Thursday, 13 September
6:30-8:00 at Packards, in Northampton (we'll be in the 'Mahogany room')
(14 Masonic st.)

We'll do a round of about six 'lightning presentations'.  Each presenter 
will read an article (but no-one else needs to read it), and give a 5-10 
minute presentation about it.  You can use a handout if you see fit - 
try to keep it to a page.

I've created the following google doc, on which you can suggest articles  for people to present, or claim ones to present yourself. We can just  keep this list going throughout the semester, and continue to add to it  and present from it.  If you have this link, you should be able to edit  the doc - let me know if you have problems.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w_OFy9QeOyobJYbOC5jbvFabA5GJCn0aNJmGLy5loQw/edit

In the future, we'll alternate our meetings between Thursday night in 
Northampton, and Friday at 11 on campus.  It's confusing, but I'll keep 
you all posted.

The Fall Colloq series is announced

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten writes:

Claire and I (your departmental colloquium monsters) are pleased to announce the following speakers for the fall colloquium series:

October 5: Valentine Hacquard

October 19: Daniel Swingley

October 26: John Hale

November 30: Paul Smolensky

A date for one more colloquium, with Jonathan Bobaljik, will be announced very soon. 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to let us know. Locations of receptions and information about arranging individual meetings with invited speakers will be announced closer to the date of each talk.

McCarthy, Kimper and Mullin appears in Morphology

"Reduplication in Harmonic Serialism," by John McCarthy, Wendell Kimper and Kevin Mullin has appeared in volume 22 of Morphology.

Congratulations gentlemen!

Partee at Sinn und Bedeutung

Barbara is in Paris at the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, where she gave a paper “Controversies in the History of Formal Semantics: Linguistic Form and Logical Form”; abstract, slides, and the whole program are online here:

https://sites.google.com/site/sinnundbedeutung17/program .

Also on the program are UMass PhDs Florian Schwarz, Roger Schwarzschild, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menendez-Benito, and Dorit Abusch (Philosophy), and UMass visitors (and Hobart Lane residents!) Francesca Foppolo, Floris Roelofsen, and Sonja Tiemann.

The PsychoSyntax meetings

Brian Dillon and Rajesh Bhatt write:

The PsychoSyntax meetings ride again! Once again we'll be meeting biweekly to hear from folks about research going on locally in syntax, adult language comprehension, and related topics / issues.

We'll be having an organizational meeting at 11am on Wednesday, 9/12, in Bartlett 11. The goal of this meeting will be just to figure out a meeting time that works for everyone for this semester, and try to hammer out a presentation schedule for the semester. Everyone is invited, and we'd especially like to encourage people to think about coming and presenting unfinished (and maybe even not-yet-begun) projects! If you're in the beginning stages of a project, and just want to talk through your ideas, this is a good forum to get useful feedback.

If you can't make the Wednesday meeting, no worries; just send me a message letting me know when you are available for meetings, and whether you have something you'd like to talk about at one of our meetings. And if you'd like to be added to the PsychoSyntax email list, drop me a line to let me know.

Stefan Keine's paper accepted to Lingua

Stefan Keine's paper, "How complex are complex words? Evidence from linearization" was accepted for publication in Lingua over the summer.

Congratulations Stefan!

Cable in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory

Seth Cable's paper "EPP in Dholuo" has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, volume 30. Congratulations Seth!

Ania Lubowicz publishes in the Advances in OT series

Alumna Ania Lubowicz (University of Minnesota) has published her book "The Phonology of Contrast," in Equinox Publishing's Advances in Optimality Theory series. Congratulations Ania!

Barbara's summer

In July, Barbara Partee sent to WHISC the following report:

I gave a talk at the conference LOGICA 2012 in the Hejnice Monastery north of Prague June 18-22, “The history of formal semantics”, and  Volodja and I spent the following week enjoying time with their colleagues in Prague.

When Rajesh came to Moscow for a conference on his way to St Petersburg, he and I spent Saturday July 7 being tourists in Moscow – my first time inside the Kremlin since 1959! - and then enjoying one of Volodja’s home-cooked meals before Rajesh took the midnight train to St. Pete. We hope to see him in Moscow again after John Bailyn’s New York Institute summer school is over. Tech note: Rajesh did better at figuring out the route on foot from the Kremlin to the Tretyakovsky Gallery with the GPS in his iPhone than I did with my map. I now want an iPhone.

Fall Student Staff in the Department

The new crew of work-study student help has arrived in the department. They are:

Krista, who is in the department Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 10-12

Meaghan, who is in the department Monday, Wednesday and Friday:
1:30-5:00

Mike, who is in the department Tuesday and Thursday 9-11.

In addition, the department's new Information Technology guru is on board. His is Ken Ottaviano, and he'll be in the department Monday and Wednesday 3-5, and Friday 10-12 and 3-5. Ken is a junior Computer Science major and will be helping out with various IT issues such as printing problems, email, software issues, viruses, etc.

Request from John McCarthy to students and alumni/ae

John McCarthy writes:

GrantSearch for Graduate Students (GSGS) is an office in the Graduate School that helps graduate students apply for grants and fellowships. Examples of successful applications are particularly useful. If you would be willing to share your successful application with other graduate students, please send it as an email attachment to GSGS at gsgs@grad.umass.edu<mailto:gsgs@grad.umass.edu>. Staff will redact your name from the application materials. Applications for all external grants and fellowships are needed: NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants, Ford Foundation, AAUW, SSHRCC, Fulbright, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera (said by a bald man).

Sarah Vega-Liros accepts job

Sarah Vega-Liros, who has been the Linguistics Department's able Office Manager and Assistant to the Head for the past eight some years has accepted a new position as Research Business Manager Liaison for the schools of Humanities and Fine Arts and Social and Behavioral Sciences. It is with considerable regret that WHISC announces that this Friday, September 10th, will be her last day in the linguistics department. Ms. Vega-Liros was instrumental in upgrading WHISC to its present cutting-edge technology, and our entire editorial and reporting staff have relied heavily on her support since WHISC's inception.

Fortunately, her new office will be next door, in Machmer W34B. Our investigators have discovered, however, that this office is buried deep within a cluster, so visit her now while she is still reasonably accessible.

The entire WHISC staff wish her well in her new position.

Town Meeting on Friday

The annual first-of-the-year Town Meeting happens this week, on Friday at 3:30 in the Third Floor lounge in South College. This is *the* seen and be seen event of the year. Dress to impress (the camera).

Annual Start-of-the-Year Picnic on September 15

Barbara and Volodja will be hosting the start of the year potluck picnic at their house, 50 Hobart Lane, on Saturday, September 15. The festivities begin at 3:30. 

This is *the* event of the Fall: the one time that the extensive linguistics community in the Pioneer Valley gathers to catch up, share news, show off the kids, introduce new sweethearts, friends and wardrobes. 

Hobart Lane is a small street that goes east off North Pleasant just a short distance north of the university, opposite Puffton Village, near the Crestview /Presidential Apartments bus stop. 50 Hobart Lane is a big white house on the left, near the end. The street sign may be missing; but in that case it’s the only street around there with a pole but no sign. Hobart lane is very near the Crestview/Presidential Apartments bus stop. Bring things to eat, international foods are encouraged! The eating generally begins at 4:30 or so. There will be a charcoal grill, and a little beer --- bring drinks too.

Meg Grant defends

Meg Grant defended her dissertation "The Parsing and Interpretation of Comparatives: More than Meets the Eye" last Monday, August 27th. Her defense was more than successful.

Congratulations Meg!

Undergraduate Research Assistants sought in Psychology

Alexandra Jesse from the Department of Psychology writes:

We are currently looking for undergraduate research assistants to work in the Language, Intersensory Perception, and Speech (short: LIPS) lab in the Psychology Department. Positions are open starting this Fall semester. Ideal applicants are those who can commit to a longer time period.

The work within the LIPS lab falls within the area of Psycholinguistics. We examine how 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. We use eye-tracking and other behavioral methods to address these questions, as well as EEG. 

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

Typical tasks of our research assistants are:
- help with finding stimuli for an experiments (e.g., selecting words, making nonwords)
- help with recording, annotating, 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 during the school year is 9hrs/week, for 3 credits. You would be enrolled in Psych 398B, but this course can count as an elective towards your linguistics degree. Please contact me if you have any questions about how these credits can be applied to your degree in Linguistics. 

So if you are interested in the position for the Fall, please contact me as soon as possible for more information and for an application form. Once you return the completed application form, we will then contact you to schedule for an interview. We will then also require a letter of recommendation. Therefore, if you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.

Roeper named Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

Tom Roeper has been elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Tom joins six other UMass faculty (Emmon Bach, Barbara Partee, Alice Harris, Lisa Selkirk, Angelika Kratzer and John McCarthy) on this august body. His induction ceremony will take place January 4th at the LSA's annual meeting in Boston. 

Congratulations Tom!

Andrew Weir goes to NELS

Congratulations to Andrew Weir, whose paper "Why-stripping targets Voice Phrase" has been accepted to this year's NELS conference, which will take place October 19-21 at the City University of New York.

Congratulations Andrew!

Elisabeth Selkirk gets NSF Grant

Congratulations to Elisabeth Selkirk who won a $500,000 NSF grant to study the effects of syntactic constituency on phonology and tone. The grant brings together collaborators from Central Connecticut State University and the University of the Basque Country. 

Congratulations Lisa!

Maria Gouskova gets tenure

WHISC congratulates UMass alumna Maria Gouskova, who will start this month as a tenured faculty at New York University.

Speas at NAISA

Peggy Speas and Evangeline Parsons Yazzie presented at a forum on creating Mohegan, Navajo and Maliseet texts for community users at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference in Boston on June 5. 

Seth Cable publishes in Natural Language Semantics

Seth Cable's paper on graded tense in Kikuyu was accepted for publication in Natural Language Semantics. Congratulations Seth!

Andrew's Summer Vacation

Fourth year graduate student Andrew Weir gave the following two presentations this summer. 

"Negation in Scots: two dinnas " at the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, University of Aberdeen, July 19.

"Some, speaker knowledge, and subkinds" at the Student Session of the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, University Opole, Poland, August 15.

Congratulations Andrew!

Call for papers: Workshop on Aspect across Languages

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 20-Sep-2012


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

The level of complexity and importance of aspectual systems in languages, compounded by the diversity of approaches to representing aspect, make aspect an extremely interesting topic for discussion. In this workshop, we would like to engage in this discussion from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although many authors have thoroughly addressed and investigated issues surrounding aspect, there still remains a lack of uniformity in regard to the theoretical notion of aspect (Beavers, 2008, in press; Borer, 2005; Comrie, 1976; de Swart, 1998; Dowty, 1979; Filip, 2008; Klein, 1994; Krifka, 1998; Vendler, 1967, amongst others). Aspect can roughly be delimited as describing the speaker's perspective on the internal organisation of an action, event or state, which not only covers temporal perspectives, but might also include characteristics such as progressive, habitual, repetition, momentary, bounded, perfective etc. (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994; Dahl, 1985; Smith, 1997; Talmy, 2000; Verkuyl, 1993).

Topics of interest in this workshop include but are not limited to:

- definitions and classifications of aspectual notions;
- diachronic perspectives on aspect;
- aspectual coding in specific languages, i.e. single-language treatments of aspect;
- comparisons of aspect across different languages.

The workshop is held as part of the Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (https://sites.google.com/site/als2012uwa/home).


CALL FOR PAPERS:

We invite abstracts of up to 500 words. Please submit your abstract at

<https://bookings.arts.uwa.edu.au/ocs/index.php/linguistics/linguistics2012/schedConf/cfp>

Papers will be of 30 minutes duration, consisting of a 20 minute lecture-style presentation followed by 10 minutes for questions/responses.

Abstracts should be submitted online and will be reviewed by at least two reviewers drawn from the Program Committee. Please ensure that your abstract meets the specific guidelines (cf. website).

Note that only ALS members are eligible to present at an ALS conference. Non-members presenting papers must take up membership by the beginning of the conference.

We particularly invite contributions that focus on the premise that aspectual categories reflect conceptual structures and which make these structures explicit. In addition, we welcome analytical and comparative studies of aspect across languages as well as discussions and presentations that help to clarify the current knowledge base of aspect terminology. Authors with problematic and non-standard examples as well as with work in progress are encouraged to contribute.

Call for papers: SALT

Semantics and Linguistics Theory 23 will be held at UC Santa Cruz, May
3-5, 2013. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral
presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any
topic in natural language semantics.

Abstracts must not exceed 3 pages (please note the new page limit) in
letter-size 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.

SALT does not accept papers that by the time of submission have
appeared or have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed
journal. Preference will be given to presentations not duplicated at
other major conferences (including LSA, NELS, WCCFL).

Details about the submission process will be posted soon on the SALT 23 webpage:

http://babel.ucsc.edu/salt/

Please direct any inquiries to:

salt23ucsc@gmail.com

Important Dates:
-- Submission deadline: December 2, 2012, 11:59pm PST
-- Notification of acceptance: Early February 2013
-- Conference date: May 3 - May 5, 2013

Seth Cable goes to NELS

Congratulations to Seth Cable, whose paper "Distance Distributivity and Pluractionality in Tlingit (and Beyond)" was accepted to this year's NELS, which will be held at CUNY on October 19-21.

Speas in Leiden

Peggy Speas was a keynote speaker at "The Nature of Evidentiality," a conference held in Leiden on June 14-16. An abstract of her talk, "Evidential Situations," follows.

What is “evidence”?  In many formal analyses of evidentials, the denotation of a modal or illocutionary operator simply includes a stipulation that the speaker has “direct evidence,” “indirect evidence,” etc. This is a problem, since “evidence” has no denotation independent of what it is evidence for.  I argue that an explanatory theory of evidentials must be a relational one. I will draw on the insights of Nikolaeva (1999), Chung (2007) or Lee(2008), who have analyzed evidentials in terms of temporal or spatial relations, as well as others such as deHaan (1999) who have drawn attention to the fact that evidentials involve overlap or non-overlap with the speaker’s perceptual field. However, I will argue that evidentials denote relations between situations, not times or locations. 

Tibetan distinguishes three different types of evidence, ego, direct and indirect.  However, within each category there are multiple sub-types. For example, there are three different direct evidential morphemes, (‘dug, shag and song), which are often, but not always, interchangeable.

(1)	a.	kha sang khong ‘khrom la slebs ‘dug yesterday he market (LOC) arrived  ‘DUG ‘Yesterday he arrived at the market’ (and the speaker witnessed the event’)
	b.	kha sang khong ‘khrom la slebs shag yesterday he market (LOC) arrived  SHAG ‘Yesterday he arrived at the market’ (and the speaker witnessed the event’)
	c.	kha sang khong ‘khrom la slebs song yesterday he market (LOC) arrived  SONG ‘Yesterday he arrived at the market’ (and the speaker witnessed the event’)

In this talk I will focus on the distinction between ’dug and shag . It is fairly well established that song incorporates past tense, while ‘dug and shag are unmarked for tense. (Agfa 1993, Tournadre and Dorje 2003 and Garrett 2001) Although shag is the most frequent evidential in spoken Tibetan, it has not been extensively studied.  Documented differences between ’dug and shag do not reveal any obvious pattern. However, a pattern emerges within a theory that treats direct evidentials as denoting a relation of inclusion between the situation being reported and the situation in which the speaker came to know this information. I will argue that ‘dug and shag differ only in the direction of this inclusion relation. This analysis receives surprising support from the behavior of direct evidentials in the antecedent of conditionals, questions and negation. I further argue that apparently idiosyncratic uses of ’dug and shag are extensions of the relevant inclusion relations to epistemic domains.

It would be premature to draw conclusions from Tibetan about the general typology of evidentials, but I conclude by sketching out a typology based on the assumption that evidentials are necessarily relational. 

Kathryn Pruitt's defense on Friday

Kathryn Pruitt will defend her dissertation on Friday, May 25, at 1:00PM in Machmer E-37. Her dissertation is entitled: Stress in Harmonic Serialism.

The (re-)birth of structurally biased phonology

Alumnus Elliott Moreton, now of UNC Chapel Hill, and Joe Pater have written a pair of papers launching what they call "structurally biased phonology". A further UMass connection is that they cite Professor Emeritus Emmon Bach as one of the original progenitors of this approach to phonological theory. From Pater and Moreton (to appear):

"Structurally biased phonology is a program of research that aims to understand the role of structural complexity in phonological learning and typology...Although a form of structurally biased phonology was originally proposed in Bach and Harms (1972), it seems not to have been subsequently much pursued. We seek to better understand: (1) what effects structure has on learning and typology, (2) whether and how the learning effects are causally connected with the typological ones, (3) what properties a learner must have to account for them, and (4) whether and how these effects are connected to other domains in and out of linguistics." 

Moreton, Elliott and Joe Pater. To appear. Structure and substance in artificial-phonology learning. In Language and Linguistic Compass. http://www.unc.edu/~moreton/Papers/MoretonPater.Draft.4.1.pdf

Pater, Joe and Elliott Moreton. To appear. Structurally biased phonology: Complexity in learning and typology. In a special issue of the EFL Journal on phonology, edited by K.G. Vijayakrishnan (The Journal of the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad). http://blogs.umass.edu/pater/files/2012/05/pater-moreton-2012.pdf

Brian Smith goes to Manchester

Brian Smith will be going to the 20th annual meeting of the Manchester Phonology Meeting to present "Ineffability and UR constraints in Optimality Theory". He will be joined by several UMass alums: Jill Beckman, Elliott Moreton and Jen Smith.

http://people.umass.edu/bwsmith/
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/20mfm-prog.pdf

WHISC goes on holiday

WHISC has discovered summer, and will be doing something about it. See you in the Fall!

ICESL sponsored workshop on c-command on Wednesday

On Wednesday, May 16th, from 9 to 5:30 in Herter 301, there will be a series of talks at a workshop entitled:

Where is c-command? Relational structure in parsing long-distance dependencies. 

Speakers include Matt Wagers, Dan Parker, Maria Sol Lago, Colin Phillips, Dave Kush, Shevaun Lewis, Wing Yee Chow, Brian McElree, and UMass alumnus Jeff Runner and UMass student Jason Overfelt.

More information can be found at: http://people.umass.edu/bwdillon/workshop.html

Suzi Lima gets NSF dissertation award

Suzi Lima has been awarded an NSF Dissertation Grant. It will fund her next two field trips to the Xingu Indigenous Territory (Mato Grosso, Brazil).

Below is  a short abstract that summarizes her main proposal:

The Grammar of Counting and Measuring: a view from Tupi languages

This proposal aims to investigate the processes of counting and measuring in two under-studied Tupi languages spoken in Brazil, Yudja (Juruna family) and Kawaiwete (Tupi Guarani family). Three major aspects of the grammar of counting and measuring will be investigated: (i) the semantic and syntactic properties of numeral constructions, and their compatibility with notional count and notional mass nouns; (ii) the semantics of the measure constructions, their interaction with numerals and their syntactic status, and finally (iii) the semantics of nominal quantifiers. Preliminary research shows that Yudja and Kawaiwete are number neutral languages that do not obviously fit into the widely accepted linguistic typologies of the count/mass distinction proposed so far, in particular by Chierchia 1998a and Chierchia 1998b). Therefore, these languages raise new and important theoretical questions in the field of semantics.

Congratulations Suzi!

Andrew Weir gets a University Fellowship

Andrew Weir has been awarded a University Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year.

Congratulations Andrew!

Keir Moulton gives talk on Friday

UMass Alumnus Keir Moulton (UCLA) will give a talk on Friday, May 11, at 2:30 in Machmer E37. A title and abstract follow.

Covariation and Causers in Backward Variable Binding

Backward variable binding (BVB) as in (1) has inspired either deviations from surface syntax (Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Pesetsky 1995) or appeals to notions like logophoricity (e.g. Bouchard 1995).

(1) Heri new-found fame will make everyi actress rich.

I report that: (i) the distribution of BVB is distinct from backward bound reflexives and reciprocals, and not subject to constraints imposed by exempt or ‘logophoric’ reflexives; (ii) Backward bound variables are found in ’containing phrases’ that are situation-denoting (i.e. causers, Pesetsky 1995); (iii) the containing phrase falls in the scope of the binding quantifier and locality conditions on QR limit BVB. These ingredients lend themselves ideally to a D-type analysis (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2005). The semantics of causers supplies a situation variable for resolving the D-pronoun—one that co-varies with respect to the binding quantifier (hence the sensitivity to QR). We then show why these D-type pronouns in causer arguments do not exhibit crossover violations (2a), while D-type pronouns otherwise do (2b) (Büring, 2004).

(2) D-type in a causer:
      a. Heri mother made every knight who courted a ladyi nervous.

      D-type in an agent:
      b. *Heri mother visited every knight who courted a ladyi.

The mere existence of D-type BVB as in (2a) corroborates the analysis of (1) and, incidentally, speaks against recent accounts of BVB in causatives by Larson (Larson and Cheung 2009).

Angelika Kratzer selected as Radcliffe Institute Fellow

Angelika Kratzer has been selected as a fellow of The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2012-13 Academic year.  The Radcliffe Institute is "dedicated to creating and sharing transformative ideas across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences." The Fellowship program brings together fifty artists and scholars every year.  An excerpt from the bulletin announcing Angelika's selection is below.

Congratulations Angelika!

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has selected Angelika Kratzer to be a Radcliffe Institute fellow for the 2012–2013 academic year. Angelika Kratzer is among the 51 women and men who will pursue independent projects in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences within the rich, multidisciplinary community.

After a highly competitive peer-review process, Angelika Kratzer is among only 5 percent of applicants who were accepted to create a diverse incoming class that ranges from A to V: including anthropologists, chemical engineers, linguists, literature professors, molecular biologists, musicologists, and visual artists.

“As an alumna of the Institute’s Fellowship Program, it is a special pleasure for me to welcome these distinguished individuals to a year of exploration, innovation, and creation,” said Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “We expect that each fellow will enjoy a year of profound growth and great productivity.”

Angelika Kratzer is a professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has been a guest professor in many places around the world and is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. With Irene Heim from MIT, she is co-founder and co-editor of Natural Language Semantics, a journal that, for the last twenty years, has been a major force in bringing together results from theoretical linguistics with fieldwork-based research on underdescribed languages.

Angelika Kratzer’s area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research is about how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to systematically assemble complex meanings from small and simple pieces. Humans talk about mere possibilities: what might have been, ought to be, could be, or should be. Human notions of what is possible, inevitable, likely, or desirable are highly systematic,and this is why they have attracted the attention of mathematicians, logicians and philosophers for more than two thousand years. As a Radcliffe fellow, Angelika Kratzer will write a book showing how talk about possibilities is the result of an intricate interaction between the human language faculty and general cognitive abilities, some of which we share with other species.

The Radcliffe Institute, which is Harvard’s institute for advanced study, has awarded nearly 600 fellowships since its founding in 1999. The complete list of 2012–2013 fellows is online: www.radcliffe.harvard.edu.

Graduate Commencement on Friday, May 11

Commencement for our Master's and PhD students will take place at the Mullins Center at 9AM this Friday, May 11.  WHISC has learned that the following linguists will be presented with their degrees at this ceremony.

Abril Navarro
Mike Key
Emily Elfner
Karen Jesney
Aaron Schien
Martin Walkow

For more information about Commencement:  http://www.umass.edu/commencement/graduate-ceremony

Congratulations to them, and to the rest of our graduating students this year.

Kingston on the Road

John Kingston will be taking his show on the road through May and June, with talks and classes at Nijmegen, Paris and San Pablo, Oaxaca. Here, in his own words, is a description of his itinerary.

9-11 May 2012. Relations in Relativity: New Perspectives on Language and Thought. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Invited talk or a side in a conversation with Emmanuel Dupoux on whether linguistic knowledge affects speech perception early or late -- I argue that the effects are late. I'll also be participating in master classes for graduate students and a panel discussion. Details can be found at: http://www.mpi.nl/events/relations-in-relativity

13 May-13 June 2012. International chair, Empirical Foundations of Linguistics. I'll be giving a weekly seminar on the relationship between speech perception and sound perception and collaborating with colleagues Jacqueline Vaissiere, Cecile Fougeron, Pierre Halle, Barbara Kuhnert, Annie Rialland, Rachid Ridouane and others at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie. For more info:

http://www.labex-efl.org/?q=fr/node/1
http://www.labex-efl.org/?q=fr/node/125

15-24 June 2012. Taller de tonos para linguistas hablantes de lenguas de Mesoamerica. (trans: Workshop on tone for native-speaker linguists of Mesoamerican languages). Together with Emiliana Cruz from Anthropology and a number of other colleagues from the US and Mexico, I will be lecturing on the phonetics, phonology, and historical development of tone in morning sessions and advising small groups focused on particular languages in the afternoon sessions. For more info: http://tallerdetonos.blogspot.com/

Bon Voyage, John!

Borschev and Partee give talk at Moscow State University

Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee gave a talk “Genitive of measure, types, sorts, and semantic shifts” at Moscow State University on April 28 in the 169th meeting of Vladimir Uspensky’s seminar series on Applications of Mathematical Methods in Linguistics. (The talk relates to two of their recent papers, a 2011 one in Russian in a festschrift for Yury Apresjan and a 2012 one in the Journal of Semantics, both downloadable from Barbara’s website.)

Undergraduate Commencement

Commencement for UMass undergraduates is this Friday, May 11, at the McGuirk Alumni Stadium, starting at 4:00 PM.  There is a separate ceremony for graduates of School of Humanities and Fine Arts that takes place on Saturday, May 12, at 1PM in the Recreation Center.

(For more information: http://www.umass.edu/commencement/)

Say congratulations to our graduating seniors:

Kelly Jo Fuller
James ParsonsDatherine Rose DeVane Brown
Gavin Galloway
Marissa Malone
Chelsea McGovern
Heather Pastushok
Rebecca Shaughnessy
Madolyn Chiu
Renee Lessard
Amanda Lewis
Karin Eichelman
Sheila Rotkiewicz
Nathan Banker
Laura Catanach
Taylor Cohen
Rhiannon Courtney
Epiphany Holmstock
Carol Huben
Glynis Anna Jones MacMillan
Mikaela Ortstein-Otero
Kayly Tillman
Yurleni Velez
Yiliang Xie
David Rome

Linguistics Club selects officers

Amanthis Miller writes:

The Undergraduate Linguistics Club is happy to say that we've survived our first year as an RSO! Thanks to all the student and faculty that have come to meetings and made our club great! We will be returning again for Fall 2012 for more linguistic antics and adventures, with another all-star officer line-up:

President:       Jeremy Cahill   (jccahill@student.umass.edu)
Vice President:  Amanthis Miller (amanthis@student.umass.edu)
Treasurer:       [Tentatively: Pratiksha Yalakkishettar]
Secretary:       Benjamin Herman (bsherman@student.umass.edu)
Librarian:       Emily Westland  (enicat@verizon.net)
Web Master:      Samuel Baldwin  (sbaldwin@student.umass.edu)

Hope to see everyone next semester, good luck on finals, and happy almost summer!

Linguistics 401 Summer Playlist

Rajesh Bhatt writes:

In the last class of the semester before the summer, I asked the wonderful students of the Spring 2012 Linguist 401 [Introduction to Syntax] class for listening suggestions for the summer. This is what came in with the finals.

List BA
Midnight City - M83
Shuffle - Bombay Bicycle Club
Dancing Behind My Eyelids - Mum

List DM
The next time around - Little Joy
Attaboy - Yo Yo Ma & Stuart Duncan
Love is all - The Tallest Man on Earth
Ziggy Stardust - Seu Jorge
The Breeze - Dr. Dog
40 Day Dream - Edward Sharpe
Sam Huff's Flying Raging Machine - Lettuce
Jackie wants a black eye - Dr. Dog
Dancefloors - My Morning Jacket
Slippin' and Slidin' - Justin Townes Earle
A La Longue - Noir Desir
Magic Marker - Monsters of Folk
Oliver James - Fleet Foxes

List FC
Guy who got a headache and accidentally saves the world - The Flaming Lips
Spitting Blood - WU LYF
In her drawer - RX Bandits
Randy described Eternity - Built to Spill
Building Steam with a Grain of Salt - DJ Shadow
A More Perfect Union - Titus Andronicus
Award Tour - A Tribe Called Quest
A Tender History In Rust - Do Make Say Think
Black History Month - Death From Above 1979
Cross the Breeze - Sonic Youth

List GURH
Stand and Deliver - Adam Ant
Sound and Vision - David Bowie
Blame it on Cain - Elvis Costello
You're the voice - John Farnham
We are Golden - Mika
Birdhouse in your soul - They Might Be Giants
Bicycle - Pink Floyd
That'll be the day - Buddy Holly
Psycho Killer - Talking Heads
Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra
Running up that hill - Kate Bush
Marty Groves - Fairport Convention
Sorrow - David Bowie

List MS
Turn to Stone - Electric Light Orchestra
Super Rad - The Aquabats!
Tamacun - Rodrigo y Gabriela
Take the long way home - Supertramp
Opera Singer - Cake
Cousins - Vampire Weekend
Ballroom Blitz - Sweet
Me and Julio down by the schoolyard - Paul Simon
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground - The White Stripes
Somewhere in the Between - Streetlight Manifesto

Roeper appointed to commission of the German Ministry for Education and Science

Tom Roeper has been appointed to an evaluation commission of the German Ministry for Education and Science as part of their Initiative in the Humanities to promote longterm research in the Humanities.

Congratulations Tom!

Kamiya talks at LARC/Acquisition Lab on Monday

On Monday  April 30, 2012 at 5:20 in the Partee Room (South College 301), Masaaki Kamiya (Hamilton College) will give the following talk.

"Semantic/Pragmatic notion of contrastiveness and learnability issues in
Japanese-speaking children"

Everyone is welcome!

2012 ESSLLI student grants extended to Monday

Reminder and Grants Info 
ESSLLI 2012 STUDENT SESSION

Held during
The 24th European Summer School
in Logic, Language and Information

Opole, Poland, August 6-17, 2012

EXTENDED DEADLINE: APRIL 30, 2012
http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/

This is a reminder of the final, extended deadline for submission to the ESSLLI 2012 Student Session and a notification that the ESSLLI 2012 OC are offering grants in form of waived fees to selected students. Preferences will be given to students actively participating in the Student Session.

The deadline for submitting to the ESSLLI 2012 StuS is **APRIL 30**

For more information of grant application, instructions for authors and important dates, please refer to the Student Session website: http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/

Mini-conference on Thursday, May 3

The second year students will give short presentations of their generals papers in the annual mini-conference, this Thursday (May 3). It will be held in 22 Arnold House, from 1-4, with refreshments served.

Cable gets HFA Project funds award

Seth Cable has been awarded monies to support his work over the summer on Tlingit from the Humanities and Fine Arts Project funds.

Congratulations Seth!

Linguistics Majors present at the Undergraduate Research Conference

On Friday, April 27, there were three presentations at the Massachusetts' Undergraduate Research Conference by UMass linguists. They were:

Katherine Devane Brown, Learning to understand foreign-accented speech, 11:35-12:20, Room 911

Kayly Tillman, Perception of Intrusive /r/ in Bostonian English, 11:35-12:20, Room 911

Chris Garry, An Algorithm for Tracking Vertical Larynx Movement, 3:30-4:15 in the Auditorium, Board 38A

For more information, go to:

http://honorsapp.honors.umass.edu/aspnet_resources/conference/2012ucdprogram.pdf

Congratulations!

Ayesha Kidwai gives talk on Wednesday

Ayesha Kidwai, Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, will give a talk entitled "Extraposition, Scrambling and Wh-construal in Hindi and Bangla Finite Complements" on Wednesday, April 25, at 2:30 in Herter 204 (abstract follows).

Professor Kidwai  has worked on scrambling, binding, topic and focus, intonation, and information structure in a number of languages, with a focus on Hindi-Urdu and Meiteilon. She is the author of the OUP book `XP-Adjunction in Universal Grammar: Scrambling and Binding in Hindi-Urdu'. Most recently she translated `In Freedom's Shade', a memoir by Anis Kidwai that documents the first twenty years of independent India.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will revisit the familiar question of finite clause extraposition and argue that the Hindi and Bangla facts from rightward and leftward scrambling, WH-construal  and bound anaphora in embedded clauses suggest that the non-canonical rightward positioning of finite complements is effected by a generalised, and revised, version of TH/EX (Chomsky 1999/2001). I will argue that while this 'displacement' is driven by interface conditions holding primarily at the PHON interface, it also serves to facilitate the observance of SEM interface conditions. Along the way to this analysis, I will propose that the distribution of expletive pronominals that frequently occur in construction with such finite clauses is fundamentally unrelated to the extraposition operation per se, and that the differences between Hindi and Bangla reduce to a single lexical item -- the nature of the embedded C0.

Gaja Jarosz speaks on Friday, April 27

Gaja Jarosz, from Yale University, will give the department colloquium talk this Friday, April 27, at 3:30PM in Machmer E-37. You can learn more about Professor Jarosz at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~gjs42/.

The title and abstract for her talk are:

Learning Hidden Structure in OT and HG

Computational models of learning with violable constraints have led to significant progress in understanding how learners acquire the complex system of knowledge that is phonology; however, a number of significant challenges remain. This talk addresses one of the major outstanding problems, learning in the face of hidden structure, and examines the challenges this problem poses for successful and efficient learning. The particular kind of hidden structure I focus on in this talk is structural ambiguity, which includes any kind of latent structure assigned when parsing a phonological string, such as metrical feet, (sub)syllabic constituents, and autosegmental representations. I examine Robust Interpretive Parsing (Tesar and Smolensky 1998), a well-known approach to structural ambiguity in OT, and show that its extension to probabilistic constraint-based grammars as first described by Boersma (2003) is problematic. The problem occurs because the proposed formulation fails to take advantage of the rich information contained in the learner's stochastic grammar. I propose two modifications to the learning algorithm, one trivial and another more involved, and show that both lead to improvements in the success rates of Stochastic OT and noisy HG learners. I then examine another important aspect of these algorithms' performance: their efficiency. The results of this second evaluation are complex but indicate an efficiency advantage for the proposed modifications as well. I discuss the implications for the relative merits of OT and HG as well as for the evaluation of computational models of phonological learning more generally.

Workshop on memory and long-distance dependencies

On Wednesday, May 16th, ICESL is sponsoring a one-day workshop hosted by Brian Dillon and Lyn Frazier, with the goal of discussing issues at the interface of memory retrieval and the construction of long-distance dependencies, and in particular, if and how structural notions like c-command are used during the online comprehension of binding dependencies. Invited speakers include Brian McElree (NYU), Colin Phillips (UMD), and Jeff Runner (U of R). For more information, please visit the workshop website:

http://people.umass.edu/bwdillon/workshop.html

If you plan on attending, please let Brian know so that we can have an accurate head-count.