Paula Menendez-Benito gives talk on Tuesday

Paula Menendez-Benito will give a semantics talk on Tuesday, March 5, at 4:00PM in Machmer W-27. A title and abstract follow.

On Choosing Randomly

(joint work with Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill))

Many languages have indefinites that trigger modal inferences in the absence of an overt modal. Some of these items signal speaker’s ignorance. Others indicate that an agent made a random choice. While the former type has received a lot of attention in recent years (see Alonso-Ovalle and Mene ́ndez-Benito (to appear) for references), random choice indefinites are comparatively less studied (but see Choi (2007); Choi and Romero (2008); Alonso-Ovalle and Mene ́ndez-Benito (2011)). This talk paves the way towards a better understanding of random choice indefinites by analyzing the interpretation and distribution of Spanish "uno cualquiera."

The sentence in (1) illustrates the random choice reading of "uno cualquiera": (1) can be understood as saying that Juan took a card and that his choice was indiscriminate. This reading has a restricted distribution. Cases like (1), where "uno cualquiera" is in object position, are ambiguous between the random choice reading and an evaluative reading that conveys that Juan took an unremarkable card (and is compatible with him having chosen the card carefully.) In subject position, only the evaluative reading is available: (2) can only mean that an unremarkable student spoke.

(1) Juan cogio ́ una carta cualquiera. 

       John took a card CUALQUIERA.

(2) Hablo ́ un estudiante cualquiera.

      Spoke a student CUALQUIERA

We argue that "uno cualquiera" introduces a modal component that is anchored to the event described by the sentence. This component derives the random choice reading of sentences like (1) (roughly, that the agent’s decision is compatible with any of a number of actions under consideration), and blocks the random choice reading of (2) by deriving a contradiction. Our proposal is in line with some recent work on verbal modality where modal domains are projected from small particulars (events or individuals), rather than from whole worlds (see Hacquard (2006, 2009); Kratzer (2012)).

Nazarov at PRG on Thursday

This Thursday, March 7, Alex Nazarov will be presenting a paper to PRG, which meets at Packards in Northampton at 6:30. 

Nick LaCara at SRG on Thursday

Jason Overfelt writes:

Please join us this Thursday (March 7th) at 6:30p for a meeting of the Syntax Reading Group.  This week we will be hearing a practice talk by Nick LaCara titled `Inversion, deletion, and focus in as-parentheticals'.  The meeting will be at Elizabeth's place at 50 Phillips Place in Northampton.  Bring $5 for pizza or your own dinner.

LaTeX for Linguistics Workshop on Wednesday

Jeremy Cahill of the Linguistic Club writes:

Linguistics Club invites you to join us next Wednesday for an interactive LaTeX workshop!

WHEN: Wednesday, March 6, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
WHERE: Machmer W-15

Presenters Felix Lehmann, Steffen Hildebrandt, and Ilia Kurenkov will cover LaTeX basics as well as tools for linguistic typesetting. To get the most out of the workshop, make sure to bring a laptop (no installation required -- just internet access). Check out the attached flyer to see a bit of LaTeX in action.

{ What is LaTeX? A (free) document preparation system widely used by professional linguists, mathematicians, and others with unusual typesetting needs or who just want their documents to be of very high quality. }

Space is limited!

Sign up here: http://bit.ly/UMassLaTeX

or RSVP at: jccahill@student.umass.edu

Call for Papers: Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Compuatation

THE TENTH INTERNATIONAL TBILISI SYMPOSIUM ON
LANGUAGE, LOGIC AND COMPUTATION

23-27 September 2013
Gudauri, Georgia

http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2013
***********************************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS

The Tenth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and
Computation will be held on 23-27 September 2013 in Gudauri,
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:

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

Authors can submit an abstract of four pages (including references) at
the EasyChair conference system here:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2013

PROGRAMME

The programme will include the following invited lectures and
tutorials.

Tutorials:

Logic: Rosalie Iemhoff (Utrecht)
Language: Daniel Altshuler (Duesseldorf)
Computation: Samson Abramsky (Oxford)

Invited Lectures:

Balder ten Cate (Santa Cruz)
Agata Ciabattoni (Vienna)
Thomas Colcombet (Paris)
Galit Sassoon (Jerusalem)
Alexandra Silva (Nijmegen)
Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow)

WORKSHOPS

There will also be a workshop on Algebraic Proof Theory organized by
A. Ciabattoni and R. Iemhoff and a workshop on Aspect organized by
D. Altshuler, D. Hole and S. Tatevosov. More information can be found
on the TbiLLC website.

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

Post-proceedings of the symposium will be published in the LNCS series
of Springer.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: May 1, 2013
Notification: July 1, 2013
Final abstracts due: August 1, 2013
Registration deadline: September 1, 2013
Symposium: September 23-27, 2013

Programme and submission details can be found at:

http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2013/

LARC meeting tomorrow

Magda Oiry writes:

 

Please join us this Monday, February 25, in the Partee Room (South College 301) at 12:05 for a new LARC acquisition lab meeting.

 

Here is the detailed program:

 

1. Hristo Kyuchukov ---our former visitor and collaborator will give us a brief update on his efforts to create a language disorders test for Roma children in Eastern Europe

 

2. Tom Roeper and Luiz Amaral will seek from everyone whatever suggestions they have for instances where Transfer occurs and crucially where it does not occur in L2 and bilingualism.

 

3.  Tom Roeper will outline an experiment on: Do children have restrictions on Wide-Scope quantifiers in Nominalizations (work with Masaaki Kamiya and Angeliek van Hout).

 

Any questions to Magda, moiry@linguist.umass.edu.

Everyone welcome!

Phonetics Lab meeting on Tuesday

John Kingston writes:

The next Phonetics Lab meeting will be held Tuesday, 4-5:30, 26 February 2013. The usual sustenance and refreshment will be provided, spiced with all the gory details of on-going experiments. It's also time to put your best face forward, as we'll be taking head shots to post on the lab's new website.

Vincent Homer gives colloq on Friday

On Friday, March 1, Vincent Homer (École normale supérieure) will give a colloquium entitled "Polarity and Grammar." The talk is at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. An abstract follows.

The licensing of polarity items is an old and difficult problem. It is hard to find the exact conditions that govern the distribution of those elements (e.g. some, any), not simply due to the intrinsic complexity of the patterns, but also because it is not even clear whether one should look for conditions couched in syntactic or semantic terms.

The discovery, due to the seminal work of Fauconnier (1975) and Ladusaw (1979), that downward-monotonicity is a characteristic property of the set of expressions whose presence can make an NPI acceptable (e.g. any in (1)), was a breakthrough which could have decisively tipped the scales in favor of a semantic approach.

(1) John didn’t understand anything.

That is, it could have become universally accepted that an NPI is only acceptable in a sentence S if it is in a position within S in which downward inferences are supported. But in fact, a vast majority of researchers who work on the topic view licensing essentially as a syntactic relation between a polarity item and an operator equipped with a certain negative feature, and do not take the monotonicity of the environment of the NPI as a direct factor. There is at least one good reason that supports their move: adding a negative expression to (1) does not lead to anti-licensing (2), as might be expected on strictly semantic grounds, given the monotonicity reversal; the acceptability of (2) is expected on the other hand if all that any requires is a structural relation with at least one appropriate operator above it:

(2) It is impossible that John didn’t understand anything.

In this talk, I propose a general account of licensing, both for NPIs and PPIs, which goes against the grain of the dominant syntactic approaches, as it maintains that polarity items are directly sensitive to the monotonicity of their environment. The theory, which relies on a few simple principles, also accounts for a number of unnoticed facts, and sheds new light on the dedicated mechanisms which evaluate the acceptability of polarity items, and on their interaction with other interpretative processes.

Aleksei in Amherst Choral Society

Alex writes:

Colleagues! I will be performing with the Amherst College Choral Society (and Symphony Orchestra) for the last time this upcoming March 2 at 8:00 PM. The concert will take place at Buckley concert hall on the Amherst College campus (tickets will presumably be $15, or $5 (for five college students)). We will be singing the magnificent Lord Nelson Mass (Missa in angustiis) by Joseph Haydn; the program will also feature the Tragic Overture by Johannes Brahms. Come and support good choral singing, and enjoy the beautiful music!

Vincent Homer gives talk on Thursday

On Thursday, February 28, Vincent Homer from the École normale supérieure-Paris will give a talk at 4:00 in Machmer W-27. His talk is entitled "Escape!" and an abstract follows:

Escape!

Modal verbs have intriguing scopal properties, which have received relatively little attention in the semantic literature. Compare can and must (both interpreted deontically):

(1) John can’t jog.
(2) John mustn’t jog.

If we are right to treat can as having existential force and must as having universal force, there is a puzzle: can takes obligatory narrow scope in (1), while in the exact same frame, must takes obligatory wide scope (2). This talk has one main goal: show that the contrast is due to a movement–I label it escape–which only certain modals can undergo. In the case at hand, it is must that moves because it is unacceptable in a negative environment, while can doesn’t move, because it has no reason to do so. I will study escape in detail, (i) because it has properties that set it apart from other known displacements, viz it is motivated by polarity and it is a last resort, and also (ii) because of the original light it sheds on modals and on the interplay of syntax and semantics in the mechanism of polarity item licensing.

UMass in NLLT

The most recent issue of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory contains the article "Passivization, reconstruction and edge phenomena: connecting English and Japanese Nominalizations," by Angeliek van Hout, Masaaki Kamiya and Tom Roeper.

Postdoc on discourse particles in Stuttgart

Post Doc, full time, 12 months
Location: University of Stuttgart, Germany
Email: cornelia.ebert AT ling.uni-stuttgart.de

We invite applications for one post-doc position in theoretical linguistics (semantics/pragmatics) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, available from May 1st. The position is for 1 year. Salary is according to the German TV-L E13 scale. 

The candidate will contribute to the project C4 of the Sonderforschungsbereich (collaborative research center) 732,
(http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/linguistik/sfb732/), 'Incremental Specification in Context'. The project investigates discourse particles and their interpretation in context.

Desired qualifications:

- Ph.D. in Linguistics or a closely related field
- Specialization in/interest in formal semantics and pragmatics

We offer the opportunity to work on cutting-edge research projects in a dynamic and international research team with up-to-date infrastructure and resources. English is the working language; nevertheless, an ability to speak, or willingness to learn, German is appreciated.

Please send inquiries and applications to Cornelia Ebert by March 15, 2013 (see contact information below). Applications should be in PDF format and include a CV, a list of publications and the names of two references.

The University of Stuttgart is committed to increasing the proportion of women in research and teaching. Qualified women are encouraged to apply. According to German law, disabled candidates with equal qualification will be given preference.

Application email: cornelia.ebert AT ling.uni-stuttgart.de

Contact information

Dr. Cornelia Ebert
Department of Linguistics/Germanic Studies
http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/ilg
cornelia.ebert AT ling.uni-stuttgart.de

UMass in Language and Linguistics Compass

The latest issue of Language and Linguistics Compass has a couple articles by current and former members of the UMass linguistics community:

"Two Views on Epistemic Indefinites" by Louis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito

and

"Pied-Piping: Comparing Two Recent Approaches" by Seth Cable

Check them out: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1749-818X

A red glove event at Tom and Laura's

 

 

 

Call for papers: Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia

The link below will take you to the second call for papers of PaPI 2013. The conference website can also be found at http://ww3.fl.ul.pt/laboratoriofonetica/papi2013/ .

Floris Roelofsen gives presentation on Thursday

Floris Roelofsen will present "An inquisitive perspective on meaning: the case of disjunction" on Thursday, February 21 at 4:00 in Machmer W-27. An abstract follows.

A primary function of language is to allow for the exchange of information through a process of raising and resolving issues. To model this process, it is useful to have a notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content. This talk presents such a notion of meaning, and illustrates its advantages with respect to the classical, purely informational notion, focusing on the case of disjunction. The first part of the talk shows how the two main existing views on disjunction can be reconciled adopting an inquisitive perspective on meaning. The second part of the talk presents a uniform analysis of disjunctive questions and assertions in English, paying special attention to differences in form (e.g. declarative vs interrogative) and intonation (e.g. final rise vs final fall).

Floris Roelofsen gives colloquium on Friday, Feb. 22

Foris Roelofsen will present "Polarity Particles," in the department colloquium on Friday, February 22, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. An abstract follows.

Polarity particles—words like yes and no—play a basic role in communication, and yet, their interpretation and distribution gives rise to a number of intriguing puzzles. This talk seeks to deepen our understanding of polarity particle systems cross-linguistically, revealing both their common core and the ways in which they vary from language to language. This investigation also has wider implications for linguistic theory, since polarity particles offer a valuable window onto the semantics of polar questions and assertions, which both license polarity particle responses. The common semantic core of polar questions and assertions is captured within the framework of inquisitive semantics. Subsequently, the account is extended to capture more involved patterns in the distribution of polarity particles, in particular in response to negative questions and assertions. The main predictions of the account concerning English are corroborated experimentally, and the cross-linguistic predictions are substantiated by data from German, French, Romanian, and Hungarian.

P Reading Group meets on Tuesday

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

We will meet Tuesday night to have a discussion about constraint  induction.  Everyone who works on constraint induction, come prepared to  talk a little bit about what you do; all others come with  questions/discussion points if you've got them.

Location: Kristine's place. 
Time:  8pm on Tuesday 19 February

Suzi Lima at Harvard

This Tuesday, February 19th, Suzi Lima will present a talk in the Language and Cognition Group entitled "Individuation and Counting in Yudja Tupi."

Lisa Sanders talks on Friday

Lisa Sanders will be presenting a talk on ERP measures of phonological learning in an artificial language on Friday, Feb. 22, at 9:30 in Tobin 423.

All are welcome!

Newton International Fellowships Announced

New Round of Newton International Fellowships Announced

A new round of Newton International Fellowships - an initiative to fund research collaborations and improve links between UK and overseas researchers - has now opened. The Newton International Fellowships are funded by the British Academy and the Royal Society and aim to attract the most promising early-career post-doctoral researchers from overseas in the fields of the humanities, the natural, physical and social sciences.

The Fellowships enable researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution with the aim of fostering long-term international collaborations. Newton Fellows will receive an allowance of £24,000 to cover subsistence and up to £8,000 to cover research expenses in each year of the Fellowship. A one-off relocation allowance of up to £2,000 is also available. In addition, Newton Fellows may be eligible for follow-up funding of up to £6,000 per annum for up to 10 years following completion of the Fellowship to support activities which will help build long-term links with the UK. The scheme is open to post-doctoral (and equivalent) early-career researchers working outside the UK who do not hold UK citizenship.

Applications are to be made via the Royal Society’s online application system which is available at https://e-gap.royalsociety.org/

The closing date for applications is Wednesday 10 April 2013. Further details are available from the Newton International Fellowships website: www.newtonfellowships.org

The British Academy
10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
020 7969 5200 britac.ac.uk

Mike Terry and Mako Hirotani in the news

www.tinyurl.com/KinstonLanguageStudy

Cable's papers virtually appear

Seth Cable's paper "Reflexives, Reciprocals and Contrast," has appeared in the electronic version of Journal of Semantics. And his paper "Beyond the Past, Present and Future: Towards the semantics of 'graded tense' in Gikuyu" has appeared in the electronic version of Natural Language Semantics.

WCCFL

The West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics met  in Tempe Arizona last weekend. UMass was well-represented. The following present and past students gave papers:

Chris Davis

Martin Walkow

Robert Staubs

Anisa Schardl

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten

Min-Joo Kim

Shigeto Kawahara

Satoshi Tomioka

Kyle Rawlins

Bern Samko

 

Junko Shimoyama and Luis Alonso-Ovalle were also scheduled to give a talk, but the Winter storm trapped them in Montreal.

 

You can see more at:

 

http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/WCCFLProgram.pdf

 

 

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten has sent partial proof:

 

 

(NB: This was the same weekend that 20 inches of snow fell upon the Happy Valley.)

Lisa Green talks at Yale on Friday

Lisa Green gives a talk this Friday, February 15, at Yale University entitled "Aspect, Events and Variation."

Yasutada Sudo gives talk Monday (tomorrow)

Yasutada Sudo (Institute Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure) will give a talk on Monday, February 11 at 4:00 in Machmer E-37. The title and abstract follow.

Title: The Problem of Non-entailed Presupposition: Toward a Multi-dimensional Theory of Presupposition

Abstract:

Presupposition is intensively discussed in the theoretical literature today, and a multitude of competing theories have been put forward that differ both conceptually and empirically (Beaver 2001, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, Chemla 2009, Fox 2008, 2012, George 2008, Geurts 1999, Heim 1983, Peters 1979, van der Sandt 1992, Schlenker 2008, 2009, 2010a,b). The goal of this talk is to contribute to this debate by raising an empirical problem for current theories, and to motivate the 'multi-dimensional' view of presupposition. The key observation is that some predicates have presuppositions that are not entailed by their assertive meanings (in the sense of generalized entailment), which I call 'non-entailed presuppositions'. I claim that when combined with certain quantifiers, predicates with non-entailed presuppositions give rise to meanings that pose a serious challenge for current theories of presupposition. In particular, the problem illustrates the need for a more expressive theory where assertive meanings and presuppositions can be true or false independently from each other. To this end, I advocate a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition. The multi-dimensional view was once popular in the 70's (Karttunen & Peters 1979), but it is now known that it faces an empirical problem called the 'Binding Problem' in quantified sentences. This was once considered to be a fatal problem for the multi-dimensional view and led to the development of modern one-dimensional theories, but I will offer a solution in the second talk.

Suzi Lima at LARC/Acquisition Lab

Magda Oiry writes:

This Monday, Suzi Lima will present her work in the lab acquisition / LARC meeting:

"How bilingual Yudja speakers (Tupi; Brazil) perceive quantities in their second language (Brazilian Portuguese)"

We will meet in the Partee room at 12/12:10.

Everyone is welcome!

Yasutada Sudo gives talk on Tuesday: Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences

Yasutada Sudo (Ecole Normale Supérieure) will give a talk at 4:00Pm on Tuesday, February 12, in Machmer W-26. The title and an abstract of his talk follow.

Title: Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences and Cross-Dimensional Anaphora

Abstract:

Presupposition projection in quantified sentences has been a particularly tantalizing issue for theories of presupposition (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, George 2008, Schlenker 2008, 2009, Chemla 2009, Fox 2012). In this talk I will offer a novel theory of presupposition projection in quantified sentences. Its main empirical support comes from the hitherto unnoticed correlation between presupposition projection through quantifiers and cross-sentential anaphora with quantificational antecedents: those quantifiers that support 'maxset anaphora' give rise to universal presuppositions, and those quantifiers that support 'refset anaphora' give rise to presuppositions weaker than universal presuppositions. I propose a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition where this correlation is directly captured by the mechanism of 'cross-dimensional anaphora'. The resulting theory, I claim, is empirically superior to its alternatives (cf. the first talk). In particular, it solves the Binding Problem that has plagued the multi-dimensional view of presupposition. Furthermore, it is also conceptually attractive in that it gives a principled explanation of the projection properties of quantificational expressions based on their anaphoric properties.

PsychoSyntax schedule

Brian Dillon writes:

The PsychoSyntax schedule for this semester is arrived! Here are the meeting we have scheduled:

2/11: No meeting
2/25: Tracy. Licensing ellipsis and its interaction with variable rules in AAVE
3/11: Shayne & Brian. Discussion of Mauner & Koenig (2000): Linguistic vs. conceptual sources of implicit agents in sentence comprehesion
3/25: Amanda. A closer look at syntactic satiation effects
4/8: Open time
4/22: Yangsook. Processing antecedent-anaphor dependencies in Korean.
5/6: Open time.

Meetings will take place at 3pm in the Partee Room (301 South College). If you'd like to present during one of our remaining open date, shoot me an email. 

Linguistics Club Game night on Wednesday

Jeremy Cahill writes:

We invite you to come join us for 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 2/13 at 5:30 PM

RSVP appreciated for head count:  jccahill@student.umass.edu

Have any board game suggestions? Please let me know.

Noah Contant gives practice talk

Seth Cable writes:

Hi Everyone,

I'm writing to announce that our own Noah Constant will be presenting a practice job talk next Friday (2/15) in the Partee Room at 9AM.

Everyone is cordially invited and encouraged to come. I'll be bringing some breakfast items ; )

Post-Doc position in semantics/pragmatics in Düsseldorf

The Cooperative Research Center (CRC) 991 'The Structures of Representation in Language, Science and Cognition', which is funded by the German Science Foundation at the Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf seeks a postdoctoral researcher. The CRC brings together faculty and students from the departments of General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Philosophy, Romance and German Depts. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to this interdisciplinary community.

The successful candidate will contribute to a research project whose goal is to better understand how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. The focus of the project is context dependence of temporal expressions (e.g. tense, aspect, temporal adverbials) with the aim of proposing semantic constraints imposed by temporal expressions on anaphora resolution. Prior research on temporality and discourse dynamics is not required.

The appointment will be for two years, starting October 1, 2013, with the possibility of renewal for four more years thereafter (until 2019). Applicants must have completed their PhD degrees by the time of the appointment. The department welcomes international applications.

Applications should be sent in pdf format via email (subject line “Job application – Post Doc”) to: Daniel Altshuler (daltshul@gmail.com). Dossiers should include a CV, one representative publication, and a short letter summarizing: (a) your research activity and (b) why you would like to work on the context dependence of temporal expressions. Candidates should also arrange for three letters of reference to be sent directly to the email above. Applications should be received by April 1 for full consideration.
The Heinrich-Heine-University is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from women, minorities and handicapped applicants, who will be given preference in case of equal qualifications.

The availability of this position is subject to budgetary approval.

Special PsychoSyntax event on Friday

Brian Dillon writes:

We'll be having a special PsychoSyntax event next Friday (2/15). Abhijit Debnath will join us and talk about his work on the "Minimal Agent-Predicate" preference in sentence comprehension and present some processing experiments in Bangla. See the attached abstract from this years WCCFL. We'll meet at 3:30pm in Partee 301 (the empty colloq slot).

LSA Summer Institute at the University of Michigan

The Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute takes place this June 24-July 19 at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. UMass faculty Seth Cable, Lisa Green, Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk are teaching classes, as are UMass alumni Anne-Michelle Tessier and Gillian Gallagher. Joe Pater will be a discussant at the workshop "Universality and Variability: New Insights from Genetics."

For more information, see: http://lsa2013.lsa.umich.edu

Fellowships are available; see http://lsa2013.lsa.umich.edu/about/registration-and-fellowship-information/

Postdoctoral Research position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

Alexandra Jess and John Kingston recommend:

PhD position at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

John Kingston and Alexandra Jesse recommend:

ICESL Workshop

Joe Pater writes:

Mark your calendars for the 3rd Annual ICESL Workshop, Friday April 26th, 3:30 - 6:30. Our speakers will be Lyn Frazier of Linguistics (presenting collaborative work with Chuck Clifton and Brian Dillon) and Gwyneth Rost of Communication Disorders. We'll have a poster session too, which is a great way to get conversations about our research going, so get postering ("old" posters welcome too, of course!).

Ezra Keshet gives a guest lecture in LING 752

Ezra Keshet will give a guest presentation in the Topics in Syntax seminar on Thursday. The talk will begin at 4:00 PM and will be in Machmer W-27 (not the room the seminar is normally scheduled for).

Title: Answering Questions about Coherence and Anaphora"

Abstract:

As I will argue in my general-audience talk (and preview here), discourse coherence relations between sentences can constrain pronoun referents in a way suitable to generate sloppy readings in ellipsis contexts. For instance, sentence (1d), which stands in a RESULT relation to (1c), most easily means that people didn’t vote for Nixon:

 (1)  a. Kennedy looked good on TV.         b. People voted for him.

        c. Nixon looked bad on TV.                 d. People didn’t.

In this talk, I claim that coherence relations are a type of projective meaning (see Tonhauser et al. 2013) that determines a hidden Question Under Discussion (QUD) as defined by Roberts (2012). For instance, (1b) is understood as a response to the (hidden) QUD What resulted from Kennedy looking good on TV? while (1d) is the response to QUD What resulted from Nixon looking bad on TV? (See Kehler 2009) for a previous suggestion along these lines.)

Pronouns in the answers to questions are often quite constrained in their interpretations:

(2) Q: Who does Bill like?  A: He likes Mary. [He must refer to Bill]

I argue that these constraints on pronouns follow from a very small modification to theories of Focus/Givenness such as Rooth (1992) and Schwarzschild (1999). Under Rooth’s system, for instance, a ~ (‘squiggle’) operator effectively ensures that the answer in (2) appears in the Hamblin (1973) denotation of the question. The ~ operator, I argue, can alter the local assignment function to achieve its purpose, setting the referents of pronouns such as he in (2) to properly fit them into the question denotation. With this machinery in place, the pronoun him in (1b) can receive a locally-derived meaning (Kennedy) via the ~ operator but this meaning can have a different extension (Nixon) when picked up by the ellipsis site in (1d).

Next, I extend this analysis to embedded coherence relations, especially in quantified sentences containing a donkey pronoun, such as (3). The “consequent” clause he cries in (3) stands in a RESULT relation to the “antecedent” clause Jill teases a boy. In fact, this consequent stands in several different RESULT relations to the antecedent – one for each situation quantified over by whenever. I argue that the consequent clause is therefore evaluated with respect to a slightly different QUD for each situation quantified over, analogous to the way the phrase his sister in (4) generates a slightly different presupposition for each boy quantified over by every. Since each QUD for the consequent potentially pertains to a different boy, the pronoun he in he cries can end up referring to different boys (but in each situation refers to the boy that Jill teased in that situation).

(3) Whenever Jill teases a boy, he cries.

(4) Every boy loves his sister.

Staubs practices WCCFL on Tuesday

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

Robert Stabus will give a practice talk for his upcoming WCCFL talk at Presley's place Tuesday night at 6:30.  Please bring snacks/drinks!

Call for Papers: Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 6

First Call for Papers

Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 6

It is our pleasure to announce the 6th Semantics and Philosophy in Europe Colloquium (SPE6), which this yearwill take place in St Petersburg during the White Nights.

Place: Bobrinsky Palace, Smolny College, St Petersburg
Time: June 10-14, 2013

INVITED SPEAKERS
GNENERAL SESSION:
Barbara Partee (University of Massachusetts, Amherst /Moscow University)
Kjell Johann Saebo (University of Oslo)

SPECIAL SESSIONS:

[1] The Interface between Linguistic Semantics and Philosophy of Mind
Berit Brogaard (University of Missouri, Saint Louis)
Frances Egan (Rutgers University)
Scott Soames (University of Southern California)
Tutorial:
Robert Matthews (Rutgers University)
Friederike Moltmann (CNRS, Paris)

[2] The Status of Semantics in the History of Generative Grammar
John Collins (University of East Anglia)
Wolfram Hinzen (Durham/Barcelona)
Robert May / Adam Sennett (UC Davis)
Howard Lasnik (University of Maryland)

[3] Empirical Methods in the Investigation of Semantics
Erica Cosentino (Calabria/Bochum)
Tatiana Chernigovskaya (St Petersburg)
Natalia Slioussar (Utrecht/ St Petersburg)
Markus Werning (Bochum)

Abstract Submission Details:
Please send an anonymous two-page long abstract to:slioussar@gmail.com
On a separate page please specify whether the submission is for the general session or one of the special sessions andmention title and your name, affiliation, and e-mail address

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 22, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: April 5, 2013

Organizing Committee of SPE6:
Berit Brogaard, Tatiana Chernigovskaya, Wolfram Hinzen,Robert Matthews, Robert May, Friederike Moltmann, Markus Werning, Ede Zimmermann

Conference website: TBA

Ezra Keshet gives department colloquium

Ezra Keshet (University of Michigan) will present "Two Effects of Context on Truth-Conditional Meaning" at the department colloquium this Friday (February 8) at 3:30PM in Machmer E-37. An abstract of his talk follows.

The lexical items and syntactic structure of a sentence play a large role in its interpretation, but other factors often contribute as well, such as the time/place of utterance, other sentences in the same discourse, salient surrounding objects; extralinguistic goals; and more. This talk presents case studies highlighting the semantic effects of two such suprasentential factors:  focus/information structure, and discourse coherence.

The first study involves so-called conditional conjunctions such as (1) whose meanings are quite similar to conditional sentences involving the word if as in (2):

(1) You get there early enough, and you usually find a seat.

(2) If you get there early enough, you usually find a seat.

I will present evidence that such sentences require a particular information structure, namely one where the first clause is Given in the context (or accommodated as Given). I argue that the conditional meaning results from the interaction between a modal quantifier such as usually in (1) and this information structure. A standard if-clause generally serves to restrict a modal quantifier (see Kratzer 1986) and since Given material tends to join the restriction of quantifier as well, this information structure mimics the effect of an if-clause.

The second study examines how discourse coherence can constrain pronoun referents in a way previously thought to require syntactic c-command. Coherence is the name for the unspoken links between clauses in discourse, as shown in (3), which is most easily understood to mean (4):

(3) Ezra flew into Hartford. He’s giving a talk at UMass.

(4) Ezra flew into Hartford because he’s giving a talk at UMass.

Hobbs (1979) noted that the establishment of such coherence relations also constrains pronoun reference, for instance constraining he in (3) to refer to Ezra when the discourse is understood as in (4). Ross (1967) described two readings for pronouns in ellipsis, as shown in (5). Most linguists, following Reinhart (1983), claim that the sloppy reading requires a c-commanding antecedent, such as Bill, which c-commands his in (5). I argue instead that discourse coherence constraints on pronouns can also generate sloppy readings, as shown in (6) and (7).

(5) Bill loves his dog. John does, too.

a. ...John loves Bill’s dog, too. (strict reading)

b. ...John loves John’s dog, too. (sloppy reading)

(6) The man who called Jane asked her out. The man who emailed Vera did ask Vera out, too.

(7) Kennedy looked good on TV. People voted for him.

Nixon looked bad on TV. People didn’t vote for Nixon

Roeper's Roast

On Monday, January 25, there was a congratulatory toast and roast event at the weekly LARC/Language Acquisition Lab meeting for Tom Roeper in celebration of his becoming a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America this September. Tom joins several other UMass faculty ---  Emmon Bach, Barbara Partee, Lisa Selkirk, John McCarthy, Alice Harris and Angelika Kratzer --- on the roster of LSA fellows. 

Congratulations Tom!

Call for papers: Workshop in Memory of Tanya Reinhart

The linguistics department at Tel-Aviv University is proud to announce the 1st graduate student workshop in memory of Professor Tanya Reinhart, which will take place on April 11th, 2013.

MA students and PhD students not having submitted their dissertation in Linguistics by April 2013 are invited to submit abstracts of their research in all areas of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics.

Papers will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion.

Invited Speaker: Idan Landau, Ben Gurion University.

Length:
Up to two single spaced A4 pages with 2.5 cm margins, typed in 12-point Times New Roman.

Format:
Abstracts must be anonymous and in pdf format.

Submission:
To submit your abstract, please send it to tau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com no later than February 1st. Please state your name and affiliation in the body of the message.

Important dates:
Deadline for submission: 1 February 2013

Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2013

Workshop: 16:00 – 19:30, 11 April 2013

Contact info: tau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com

Spring Colloquium series

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

We are pleased to announce the UMass spring Colloquium series.

5 April: Julien Musolino (Rutgers)
19 April: Ryan Bennet (Yale)

There will also be a syntax guru (Eric Potsdam) and a phonology guru 
(Eric Bakovic).  Eric Potsdam will be giving a talk March 29, and Eric 
Bakovic will be giving a talk in April, tentatively set for the 12.

UMAFLAB meets this Friday

Seth Cable writes:

I wanted to send out a general announcement that the first, organizational meeting of UMAFLAB for this term will be held *this Friday* at 9AM in the Partee Room. 

If you'd like to come, please let me know. Also *definitely* let me know if this time/date will not be possible for you, as there are some alternatives we could choose from.

For those who might have missed the first general announcement a few weeks back, UMAFLAB (The UMass Funny Languages Breakfast) brings together individuals with a shared interest in puzzling linguistic data, optimally (but not necessarily) 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 in the morning. 

So, if you'd at all be interested in being part of such an endeavor, just let me know!

Presley at PRG on Thursday

Presley Pizzo will be leading a discussion in PRG on how to choose between theories. 

Time: Thursday, Jan. 31 at 6:30PM

Location: Packards!

Jeremy Hartman at Acquisition meeting tomorrow

Barbara Pearson writes:

We have a topic for Monday's acquisition meeting.
{Jan 28, noon -1:30, Partee Room 301)

Speaker:  *Jeremy Hartman*, our new Language Acquisition professor (Office: South College 220)

Topic, *"Agentivity, affectedness, and 'target-state' passives in
acquisition"*:  Work in progress.

Please join us for our first meeting of the new semester.  We have Jeremy's talk, and some business matters to discuss (Plans and kudos). Come learn about the framework for a Research Workshop we hope to organize this semester.

Questions to me (while Magda, our meeting coordinator, is away this week):

bpearson@research.umass.edu

Semantics job at UCL: Deadline March 1

The Linguistics Research Department at UCL is looking for a semanticist with a strong commitment to world- class research. The appointment will be at Lecturer, Senior Lecturer or Reader level (Lecturer is comparable to Assistant Professor; Reader is comparable to Associate Professor). The successful candidate will have a record of high-quality publications commensurate with the stage of their academic career. He or she will contribute to the department’s research, teaching, graduate supervision, and administration.

The Linguistics Research Department has recently become part of a new Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL, which offers enhanced opportunities for cross-disciplinary research. The appointment also follows a move to newly refurbished premises where the infrastructure exists for the successful applicant to build up their own research team.

The successful applicant will start work at UCL on 1 September 2013. 

The successful candidate will hold a doctorate in linguistics or a cognate discipline and will be engaged in a program of original research that enhances the department’s research portfolio and that can give rise to PhD projects and applications for research funding.

Informal enquiries can be made to Dr Nathan Klinedinst (+1 (864) 315 9878, n.klinedinst@ucl.ac.uk) or to the Head of Department, Prof Ad Neeleman (+ 44 (0) 20 7679 4045, a.neeleman@ucl.ac.uk). 

Anisa and Elizabeth at SRG this Thursday

Anisa Schardl and Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will give presentations in this week's SRG. Watch this spot for updates.

Call for papers: ILLS

The 5th annual meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society (ILLS), to be held April 5-7, 2013 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently accepting submissions. Please pass this on to interested students to inform them of this opportunity.

Thank you for your time,
ILLS5 Committee

Marissa Goldrich
Itxaso Rodriguez
Megan Kennedy
Lydia Medill
Kate Lyons

The 5th annual meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society will be held April 5-7, 2013 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  ILLS is a graduate student conference open to all subfields of linguistics. In addition to the general conference and a Saturday poster session, this year's meeting will include a special session Saturday, April 16th on the topic of ‘Minority languages’.  We encourage submission and are currently accepting abstracts for topics in general linguistics and minority languages.  Deadline for submission is January 31st.

All talks will be given 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts will also be considered for a Saturday poster session. The top 4 submitted student abstracts will be awarded $200 to cover conference travel costs.

Abstracts should be maximum 500 words, with one extra page allowed for images, data, and/or references. Abstracts should be submitted via EasyAbs on LinguistList.org in PDF format with NO IDENTIFYING INFORMATION of the presenter in the document.

For more information: http://linguistlist.org/callconf/browse-conf-action.cfm?ConfID=152391

The conference URL is: http://ills.linguistics.illinois.edu/current/index.html

Please contact lso.illinois@gmail.com <mailto:lso.illinois@gmail.com> with any questions you may have.

Invited Speakers:
Zsuzsanna Faygal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
John Rickford (Stanford University)
Carrie Gillon (Arizona State University)
Ryan Shosted (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Michael Kenstowicz (Massachussetts Institute of Technology)

Class on Georgian

Mariam Tsiskarishvili will be teaching an informal class on Georgian.
Meeting times will be scheduled with eveyone's availability in mind.
Monday or Friday after 5:00pm are possible times.

If you are interested and would like further information please contact 
Mari.

m_tsiskarishvili@yahoo.com
mariam@linguist.umass.edu

Tom Ernst in the Chronicle for Higher Ed

The latest issue of the  Chronicle for Higher Education features Tom Ernst in an article on independent scholars (with cameos from Rajesh and Jonathan Bobaljik). Take a look:

http://chronicle.com/article/Some-PhDs-Choose-to-Work/136729/

Kathryn Pruitt ASU

Kathryn Pruitt has accepted a tenure-track position as a phonologist in the linguistics program at Arizona State University.

Congratulations, Kathryn!

Undergraduate RAs in Psychology

Alexandra Jesse from 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 Spring, 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. Enrollment has to be completed by January 29th for this position.

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten at SRG

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten gave a presentation at the SRG this past Thursday, January 24, entitled "Wondering about Alternatives in Navajo"

Bhatt at Rutgers

Rajesh Bhatt gave the following colloquium talk at Rutgers University on Friday, January 25.

Title: Many or More

Abstract:
Most Modern Indo-Aryan languages lack dedicated degree morphology. Comparative constructions are typically marked by a marker like the Hindi-Urdu `zyaadaa'/`adhik', which is often absent is adjectival comparatives. It is however required in non-adjectival comparatives. Earlier work that has identified this marker as the comparative degree head is unable to handle this asymmetry. I argue that `zyaadaa/adhik' does not by itself encode comparative meaning; it merely makes available a degree variable. I will show that this conception of 'zyaadaa' allows for us to handle a number of environments where 'zyaadaa' does not contribute a comparative meaning. The actual meaning of comparison I will take to be introduced by a covert comparative operator. Like the covert negation assumed in treatment of negative concord, this covert comparative operator needs to be licensed. It can be licensed by 'zyaadaa' or by the standard marker (the -se ‘than’ phrase). I will end with an examination the cross-linguistic grammaticization of comparative markers in the context of Schwarzschild's proposal for Hebrew `yoter'.

Phonetics Lab Meeting this Tuesday

John Kingston writes:

Phonetics Lab meetings will start this Tuesday, 22 January 2013, and continue every other week until the end of the semester. The agenda for the first meeting is to assess progress in all the current experiments and make plans for completing them this semester.

ECO 5 at UConn in March

Jason Overfelt writes:

ECO 5, is being held at UConn this year on March 30th.  This is a very friendly environment to present any polished or unpolished work you would like to get some feedback on or get a bit of practice with before presenting it on a larger stage.  The conference is intended primarily for 1st through 3rd year students, but it is open to everyone.  If you're interested in being one of the three UMass representatives, please let me know.  Mamoru Saito will be visiting UConn that weekend and it is (reportedly) highly likely to be in attendance.

Call for papers: Manchester Phonology Meeting

Kristine Yu writes:

Just a quick reminder that abstracts are due for the Manchester Phonology Meeting January 31.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/21mfm.html

Deadline Extended for qUALMS and GLEEFUL

Adam Liter, from Michigan State University writes:

 

I am writing on behalf of the q Undergraduate Association for Linguistics at Michigan State (qUALMS). As you may remember, you received an email from us near the end of 2012 asking for your help in distributing the call for papers for the third annual Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL).

 

We would greatly appreciate your help in distributing another version of the call for papers with an extended deadline. The deadline for submissions to GLEEFUL has been extended February 1. The updated call for papers is attached in PDF format. It can also be viewed on LinguistList, and additional submission information can be found at our website.

Deadline extended: WSCLA 18

WSCLA 18 -- abstract deadline extended by one week

The 18th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Language of the Americas (WSCLA 18) will take place at the University of California, Berkeley on April 5-7, 2013.

New abstract submission deadline: Monday, January 21, 2013

The central objective of this workshop is to bring together linguists who are engaged in research on the analytic study of the Aboriginal languages of the Americas so that they may exchange ideas across theories, language families, generations of scholars, and, importantly, across the academic and non-academic communities that are involved in language maintenance and
revitalization.

The following invited speakers have been confirmed:

- Judith Aissen (UC Santa Cruz)
- Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins (University of Victoria)
- Monica Macaulay (Wisconsin)
- B'alam Mateo Toledo (CIESAS)
- Joyce McDonough (Rochester)
- Andrés Salanova (Ottawa)
- Maziar Toosarvandani (MIT)
- Lorna Williams (University of Victoria)

Abstracts are invited for papers in any area of formal linguistics (including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) within any theoretical framework. We welcome papers that address diachronic, sociolinguistic, or applied topics from a formal perspective, and we are especially interested in papers seeking to relate the interests of formal linguists and the concerns of indigenous communities.

Abstract submission guidelines:

- Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format with the filename PaperTitle.pdf (where PaperTitle is the title or a clear abbreviated version of it. No punctuation or spaces.)

- Abstracts must be anonymous. Author name(s) must not appear on the abstract or file name. In addition, be sure to remove any author name in the document properties of the PDF file.

- Abstracts must not exceed 2 pages in length including references and examples

- Minimum 12pt font size, 1 inch margins

Abstracts should be sent as a PDF attachment to:
wscla18@socrates.berkeley.edu

Abstract submission deadline: January 21, 2013
Contact info: wscla18@socrates.berkeley.edu

For further information, please see the conference website:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~wscla/

McCCLU 2013: Call for Papers

The seventh annual McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates - McCCLU - will be held on March 15th, 2013- March 17th 2013.

It will again be hosted at McGill University, Montreal, by the Society of Linguistics Undergraduates of McGill - SLUM. The aim of this conference is to encourage original endeavors into the world of research as well as to enrich the present academic undergraduate community within the field of linguistics.

We are now calling for undergraduate students to submit abstracts for presentation at the conference on any subject matter within the domain of linguistics. Each abstract should detail material for a 20-minute presentation, with a 10-minute question period on  issues raised afterward. Abstracts should be a maximum of one page in length (12 point font, 1 inch margins) and submitted online to  http:// linguistlist.org/easyabs/mccclu2013 by January 25th, 2013.

For further information, please visit our blog at: mccclu2013.blogspot.com. Should you have any other questions please email us at mccclu2013@gmail.com

PsychoSyntax and CSL Lab meetings on Mondays

Brian Dillon writes:

We're set to have PsychoSyntax on Mondays at 3pm. The first meeting is 1/28, in the Partee Room, and we will meet biweekly after that. The first order of business will be to hammer out a presentation schedule, so come ready to volunteer yourself and your work!

It looks like we'll have time to actually get into some fun science in our first meeting, as well. If so, I'll volunteer myself to present something from one of the in-progress projects going on around here, and so we can hit the ground running.

For CSL Lab RAs (and folks who are interested in hanging out in the CSL lab, seeing ongoing projects, and getting involved!): our meeting times will also be Mondays at 3pm. We will meet on the weeks that PsychoSyntax does not meet, starting Monday 1/22, in Bartlett 11.

Partee Lecture in Mexico

Barbara writes:

Volodja are I are in Mexico for a couple of weeks mixing business and pleasure. I spent Jan 14-17 at El Colegio de Mexico consulting with Josefina García Fajardo and my colleagues in a project on determiners in Spanish and in Yucatec Maya, and with the 7 PhD students of the Linguistics Program about their planned dissertation projects. On Thursday the 17th, I gave a public lecture, “La cuantificación y tipología semántica”. Everything on all four days was in Spanish, though I note that Russian words were continually trying to emerge (and occasionally emerging), even though  Volodja and I tried to keep our own conversations in English. Those work days are being followed by an 8-day trip around the Yucatan, followed by two days back in Mexico City visiting with Josefina before returning to Amherst Jan 28.

UMAFLAB

Seth Cable writes:

Happy New Year! And, with a new year comes a new session of UMAFLAB (the UMass Funny Languages Breakfast)!

What is UMAFLAB, you might ask? Well, the purpose of UMAFLAB is to bring together individuals with a shared interest in puzzling linguistic data, optimally (but not necessarily) 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 in the morning.

So, if you'd at all be interested in being part of such an endeavor, please let me know! I'd like to begin scheduling soon our first organizational meeting of the semester, so if you could also let me know what days/times would work out best for you, that would greatly appreciated!

Graduate Student Workshop in Memory of Tanya Reinhart

The linguistics department at Tel-Aviv University is proud to announce the 1st graduate student workshop in memory of Professor Tanya Reinhart, which will take place on April 11th, 2013.

MA students and PhD students not having submitted their dissertation in Linguistics by April 2013 are invited to submit abstracts of their research in all areas of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics.

Papers will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion. Invited Speaker: Idan Landau, Ben Gurion University.

Length: Up to two single spaced A4 pages with 2.5 cm margins, typed in 12-point Times New Roman.

Format: Abstracts must be anonymous and in pdf format.

Submission: To submit your abstract, please send it totau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com no later than February 1st. Please state your name and affiliation in the body of the message.

Important dates: Deadline for submission: 1 February 2013 Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2013 Workshop: 16:00 – 19:30, 11 April 2013 

Contact info: tau.linguistics.workshop@gmail.com

UMass at the LSA

The annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America met January 3-6 in Boston this year, and UMass were well represented in the poster sessions. These included:

Andrew Weir, poster: "Article drop in headlines: failure of CP level Agree"

Anisa Schardl, poster: "Simple partial movement and clefts"

Nick LaCara: "*On the table lay a book, and on the sofa did too: ellipsis, inversion and why they are bad together"

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten and Anisa Scheardl "Expressing uncertainty with "gisa" in Tshangla"

and

Jeremy Hartman, with Paul Marty, Peter Graff, Steven Keyed: "Biases in word learning: the case of non-myopic predicates"

Noah Constant's paper appears in Linguistics and Philosophy

WHISC is please to announce that Noah Constant's paper, "English rise-fall-rise: a study in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation" has been published in Linguistics and Philosophy. Take a look:

http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s10988-012-9121-1

Congratulations Noah!

Call for Papers: ESSLLI

First Call for Papers
ESSLLI 2013 STUDENT SESSION

Held during
The 25th European Summer School
in Logic, Language and Information

Düsseldorf, Germany, August 5-16, 2013

Deadline for submissions: April 1st, 2013
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2013

ABOUT:

The Student Session of the 25th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Düsseldorf, Germany on August 5-16, 2013. We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic & Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and will appear in the student session proceedings in Springer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

A SEPARATE POSTER SESSION: Note that this year there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for the oral presentations and one for the posters. This means that papers can be directly submitted as posters. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters.

More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website: http://stus2013.loriweb.org/, (links to previous years' proceedings are also available there).

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to margotcolinet@gmail.com

For general inquiries about ESSLLI 2013, please consult the main ESSLLI 2013 page, http://esslli2013.de/.

Call for papers: Recursion in Brazilian Languages and Beyond

The Graduate Program in Linguistics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Language Acquisition Research Center at UMass are sponsoring a conference on recursion at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro August 7-9, 2013. Papers from different areas of theoretical, descriptive and experimental linguistics are sought.  More information can be found in the poster below.

New: Annual Review of Linguistics

Barbara Partee writes:

Mark Liberman and I will be Co-Editors of the newly established Annual Review of Linguistics, the 45^th journal in the Annual Reviews series.  You can read about Annual Reviews here: http://www.annualreviews.org/ . (Linguistics isn’t listed there yet – it was just officially approved today, December 15, 2012.)

Roeper on the road

Tom Roeper was traveling in Germany in the first week of December. He served as an advisor to the German Ministry on Science for the evaluation of the Zentrum fur allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin, and he gave a talk at the Max Planck Center for Neurolinguistic and Cognition in Leipzig. His talk: "Formal and Empirical approaches to recursion -- prospects for neurosciences."

Welcome home, Tom.

Call for abstracts: Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS) at the
University of Toronto is excited to announce its 6th annual Toronto
Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON), to be held on March 1-3, 2013!

TULCON is a great opportunity for undergraduate linguists to meet their
peers, share their work, and further their appreciation for linguistics
and language-related studies.

We invite research, complete or in progress, from any area of linguistics.
Abstracts should be approximately 500 words in length (not including
references). Please submit your abstracts in .pdf or .doc (NOT .docx)
format to tulcon2013@gmail.com by Sunday January 27, 2013. In your
submission, please indicate whether you would like to present a talk or a
poster during our poster session. Speakers will have the opportunity to
present for 20 minutes, followed by an additional five-minute question
period.

Citizens of countries who require a visa to enter Canada may submit
abstracts early. In your submission, please indicate approximately how
much time you require to secure your visa. We will try our best to review
your abstract and send notification of acceptance at an earlier date.

Stay tuned for more announcements about registration in the near future!
If you have any questions, please contact us at tulcon2013@gmail.com.

Jelena Krivokapic speaks on Tuesday

Kristine Yu writes:

I'm excited to announce an invited talk by Jelena Krivokapic (Yale) on Tuesday, December 11, at 2pm in Machmer E37. The talk is on prosody and is designed to be suitable for general audiences. Please also let me know if you'd like to meet with Jelena on Tuesday and if so, when you are free.

 

Cheers,

Kristine 

Prosodic structure and its broader cognitive context
 
Jelena Krivokapić
Yale University
 
Prosody refers to the level of linguistic structure above the segmental level, such as phrasal organization, rhythmic structure, and prominence. In this talk I examine the temporal and structural properties of phrasal organization and rhythmic structure as reflected in speech production and perception, as well as in the broader cognitive context of language use. I will present a series of experimental studies examining a) the effect of prosodic structure on pause duration in utterances, b) the extent of boundary effects as shown in the articulation of gestures near phrase junctures, c) categoricity and gradiency in the perception of prosodic boundaries, d) recursion in prosodic structure, and e) prosodic convergence. The results inform our understanding of the linguistic representation of prosodic structure and its relation to processes involved in producing spoken language.

Call for Papers: McGill Conference of Linguistics Undergraduates

The McGill Linguistics Undergraduate club writes:

You are invited on behalf of the Society of Linguistics Undergraduates at McGill to the 7th annual McGill Canadian Conference of Linguistics Undergraduates (McCCLU). This year, the conference will take place the weekend of March 8th, 2013 at McGill University. We are now accepting abstract submissions to present at the conference on any subject matter within the domain of linguistics. Each abstract should detail material for a 20 minute presentation, with a 10 minute question period. Abstracts should be a maximum of page in length (12 point font, 1 inch margins) and submitted online to http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/mccclu2013 by January 15, 2013.

For further information, please visit our blog at: mcclu2013.blogspot.com. Should you have questions, please email us at mcclu2013@gmail.com

Brian Dillon spoke at the Ling Club

Brian Dillon gave a talk "Agreement Attraction in Production" to the Linguistics Club last Wednesday, December 5. 

Jonathan Bobaljik gives colloquium

Jonathan Bobaljik will give the department colloquium Frida, December 7, at  3:30 PM in Machmer E-37. A title and abstract follow.

Suppletion Beyond Superlatives

In Bobaljik (2012) [Universals in Comparative Morphology. MIT Press], I provided an extended argument, from the morphology of comparative and superlative formation, for abstract hierarchical structure in words, prior to the rules of vocabulary insertion that map this structure to phonological exponents. The key evidence is drawn from suppletion (good-better-best). I argue that in suppletion - by definition the most irregular of morphological phenomena - there are a number of (near) universal patterns that emerge across large, cross-linguistic samples. For example, (virtually) no language has a suppletive pattern of the sort: *good-better-goodest or *good-gooder-best -- if either the comparative or the superlative is suppletive (w.r.t. to the positive), then so is the other. The explanation of these patterns, I submit, requires (hidden) structure, in this case, a structure in which the superlative always properly contains (is derived from) the comparative, and is never directly attached to the adjective. Thus, forms like English tall-est must have a hidden comparative.

The results from the study of comparatives and superlatives, if correct, should extend beyond this morphological domain and provide a test for abstract structure in morphology much more generally. After summarizing the work on comparatives and superlatives, I report on the current state of efforts to go further and investigate the generalized predictions in other suppletive domains, including suppletion for verbal number and pronominal case.

Last Phonetics Lab meeting

John Kingston writes:

We'll have one more lab meeting this semester, next Monday, 3 December, 4-5:30 PM. Its purpose is to take stock of where we are for all on-going experiments. One, Yu-hoo, has reached a very interesting stage (not only a possible failure to replicate, but perhaps even a reversal of effects reported by Yu (2010)!), so Shifra, Megan, and I will discuss it in some detail. (We're still very short on male participants in this experiment, so any help pulling in those of the Y-chromosome persuasion would be appreciated!)

If anyone wants to request some other kind of sustenance than the usual bagels, cheese, and hummus, let me know. Otherwise, as usual be there or be [].

Kristine Yu gives colloq at NYU

Freshly recovered from oral surgery, Kristine Yu gave a colloquium talk at New York University on Friday, November 30th. A title and abstract follow.

The learnability of tones from the speech signal

It is an unremarkable matter of course but a remarkable miracle of human cognition that children learning tonal languages learn maps from the speech signal to the abstract phonological tone concepts of their native language, which could be any tone language of the world. This talk is on work towards a characterization of what it is that is being learned---the class of possible maps from the speech signal to tonal categories in natural language. By studying the structure of this class of tonal maps, we can assess the learnability of the class under a mathematically precise criterion for successful feasible learning. Since the structure of tonal maps is conditioned on the phonetic space in which they are defined, we present work on determining an appropriate phonetic parameterization of the speech signal for the domain of the tonal maps, using cross-linguistic experimental data from Bole, Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese, and White Hmong. We also present results from both human perception experiments and computational modeling hinting at structure in tonal maps that would make them feasibly learnable.

Call for papers: Sinn und Bedeutung

Sinn und Bedeutung 18, 11-13 September 2013, University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz

We invite abstract submissions for 45 (35+10) minute oral presentations or posters devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, psycholinguistic studies related to meaning, and the philosophy of language. Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author. Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions should be anonymous and not reveal the identity of the author(s) in any form (e.g., references, file name or properties of the abstract). Abstracts must not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples and references, with 2.5 cm (or 1 inch) margins on all sides and 12 point font size. When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether you would like it to be considered for a talk, a poster or both.

Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub18

Invited Speakers:

David Barner (University of California, San Diego)
Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University)
Luisa Martí (University of Kent)
Maribel Romero (Universität Konstanz)

Important dates:

Submission deadline: April 15, 11:59 PM, CET
Notification of Acceptance: June 10
Conference dates: September 11-13

Contact: sub18.basquecountry@gmail.com

Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/sub18bc

Call for papers: Austronesian Formal Linguistics Society

Conference:
Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association XX (AFLA XX)

Call Deadline: January 25, 2013.

Conference website: http://ling.uta.edu/~afla20
Contact Persons: Joseph Sabbagh, Nathan Eversole (aflauta20@gmail.com)

Description:
The Department of Linguistics at UT Arlington will host the 20th
annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. The conference dates are May 17-19, 2013.

AFLA is an organization which promotes the study of Austronesian
languages from a formal perspective. We will elicit talks on all
aspects of formal linguistics (e.g. language acquisition, morphology,
phonology, phonetics, semantics, syntax) of Austronesian languages. In addition to promoting the formal study of Austronesian languages, we especially encourage work by speaker-linguists and junior scholars.

Invited Speakers:
Sandra Chung (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Eric Potsdam (University of Florida)
Norvin Richards (MIT)

Abstracts are invited for 30 minute talks (20+10) or poster presentations on any aspect of formal linguistics (morphology, phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics) of any Austronesian language(s). Abstracts on experimental or psycholinguistic research of any Austronesian language(s) are also invited. Submission limitations are one singly-authored abstract and one jointly-authored abstract, or two jointly-authored abstracts per applicant. Abstracts should be limited to a maximum of two Letter-sized (or A4) pages (for text, examples, trees, tableaux, and references), with margins of one inch and in 12 pt. type.

Abstracts should be submitted online by January 25, 2013, at the following URL:

http://linguistlist.org/confservices/afla20

The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) is located in Arlington,
Texas, situated between Dallas and Fort Worth. Arlington is easily
accessible by two major airports: DFW and Love Field.

Call for papers: MOT

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa will host the MOT (Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto) Phonology Workshop March 15-17, 2013. Abstracts on any topic in phonology (including interfaces with phonetics and morphosyntax) should be submitted electronically. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words, including examples and references.

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: Friday, February 1, 2013.

Send abstracts to:
Marie-Hélène Côté <mhcote@uottawa.ca>

Please circulate this call for papers among your colleagues and students. The call is reproduced in the attached pdf documents (one in English, one in French), which you are invited to print and post.

PhD Fellowships at UConn

LANGUAGE PLASTICITY: GENES, BRAIN, COGNITION, COMPUTATION
NSF-IGERT Ph.D. Fellowships at the University of Connecticut
Website: http://igert.cogsci.uconn.edu; Brochure; Flier

We are pleased to announce a new graduate training program at the University of Connecticut, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. We will admit 27 IGERT Fellows over the next 4 years. IGERT Fellows receive five years of full funding, including two years of NSF IGERT stipend ($30,000 per year) and three years at normal departmental levels. Trainees enter through any of 7 Ph.D. programs: Linguistics; Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences; Physiology & Neurobiology; and 4 programs in Psychology: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical, Developmental, and Language & Cognition. (Note that NSF stipends are available only to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, but others can apply to the program and can receive full funding at standard departmental levels.) Trainees complete normal home department specialist training, but also a common core of "Foundations" courses that provide them background in the fundamental ideas, methods, and terminology in each participating domain sufficient to allow them to work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams. Course-based work is integrated with hands-on training and access to cutting edge tools for neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and computational modeling.

Why are we bringing together these areas in our training program? Unifying cognitive and biological approaches will allow language development, processing, and disorders (acquired and developmental) throughout the lifespan to be studied in the context of complex, dynamic interactions of genes, environment, neurobiology, cognition, and culture, affording new insights into the nature of language. Today, cognitive and biological fields are weakly linked. Cognitive domains coupled with Behavior Genetics provide correlational clues to possible genetic bases for language disorders; causality can begin to be assessed with true experiments with gene knock-out or knock-down animal models using methods of Behavioral and Molecular Neuroscience and Genetics (focusing on sensory and cognitive traits associated with language). Currently, such research focuses primarily on language disorders, and there is little transfer back from biological to cognitive domains. Our training program prepares a new generation of scientists not just to accelerate transfer between cognitive and biological domains, but to unify them, and realize the potential for biological approaches to inform not just the bases of disorders, but the bases of mechanisms supporting language plasticity and cognitive and computational theories of language development and processing more generally.

OPPORTUNITIES. In addition to NSF Fellowships, funds are available to support research costs, international internships with partners in Europe and Asia, and trainees have access to leading scientists and state-of-the-art laboratories.

DIVERSITY. We share NSF's mission to increase participation in science by underrepresented groups. UConn and our IGERT provide mentoring and support systems for all Ph.D. students, with particular attention to the concerns of underrepresented groups. Women, minorities, and Deaf individuals are especially encouraged to apply.

APPLY! To be considered for our IGERT training program, see our website (http://igert.cogsci.uconn.edu) for application details. NSF Fellowships are available only to U.S. citizens or permanent residents, but others may join the program as IGERT Associates, funded by normal departmental mechanisms. Departmental application deadlines vary between December 1, 2012 and January 1, 2013.

Participating Faculty

Psychology
James Magnuson, PI, Perception, Action, Cognition; Haskins Labs
Holly R. Fitch, Co-PI, Behavioral Neuroscience
Ken Pugh, Co-PI, Perception, Action, Cognition; Haskins Labs
Heather Bortfeld, Developmental; Haskins Labs
Marie Coppola, Developmental; joint appointment in Linguistics
Inge-Marie Eigsti, Clinical; Haskins Labs
Deborah Fein, Clinical
Joseph LoTurco, Physiology & Neurobiology; Behavioral Neuroscience
Letitia Naigles, Developmental
Heather Read, Behavioral Neuroscience
Jay Rueckl, Perception, Action, Cognition; Haskins Labs
Whitney Tabor, Perception, Action, Cognition; Haskins Labs

Linguistics
William Snyder, Co-PI
Diane Lillo-Martin

Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
Carl Coelho, Co-PI
Bernard Grela
Emily Myers; Haskins Labs; joint appointment in Perception, Action, Cognition
Pradeep Ramanathan
Tammie Spaulding

Haskins Labs / Yale Child Study Center
Elena Grigorenko

Johnson at NYU on Friday

Kyle Johnson, following earlier gigs this semester by Rajesh Bhatt and Kristine Yu, will give a colloquium talk at New York University this Friday, December 7. A title and abstract  follow.

An ellipsis without an antecedent: Andrews Amalgams

I will argue that the best analysis of Andrews Amalgams (as found, for example, in "She ate you'll never believe how many apples") involves an unorthodox outcome from the linearization procedure, as in Guimaräes's 2004 UMaryland dissertation. That outcome arises in part by virtue of the licensing condition on ellipsis that determines where sluices can be. This means that the condition which licenses ellipsis is not something that also enforces the condition that the ellipsis must have an antecedent. We must find a way of explaining why these things are normally paired which is less deterministic than Jason Merchant's well-known proposal.

Annahita Farudi defends her dissertation

Annahita Farudi will defend her dissertation, "Gapping in Farsi: A cross-linguistic investigation" on Wednesday, November 28, at 4:00 PM in Barlett 205.

Paul Smolensky gives colloq on Friday

Paul Smolensky will give the department colloquium on Friday, November 30, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30pm.

Title: Gradient Symbols in Linguistic Competence and Performance

Ubiquitous in the study of cognition is the need to reconcile discrete combinatorial structure (as in linguistic representations) with continuous or ‘gradient’ structure. For example, this arises in psycholinguistics both empirically — in relating grammar to observables — and theoretically — as in partial ‘activation’ of competing alternatives. This reconciliation is also required for reducing discrete combinatorial grammatical computation to neural computation over continuous activation patterns. A general approach to this integration is Gradient Symbolic Computation, in which representations are combinatorial but consist in weighted blends of symbolic constituents. I will introduce a general cognitive architecture based on optimization, in which markedness, faithfulness and correspondence relations play central roles within and between all cognitive components. Of primary concern are computations in which symbolic blends are transient states between (nearly) discrete input and output states. I will discuss the relation between (i) faithfulness between symbolic representations and (ii) continuous similarity of the activation patterns realizing those representations, illustrating with general patterns in speech errors. I will close with speculations about potential roles of non-transient symbolic blends in syntactic competence and performance.

Foundation for Endangered Languages grants

Suzi Lima writes:

The Foundation for Endangered Languages has just announced that its 2012 grant application round is now open. Priority will be given to projects that focus on the revitalization of endangered languages and support the use of endangered languages in various spheres of community life (home, education, cultural and social life). Any language documentation proposals must have a clear and immediate relevance to prospects for language revitalization.

Full details and application forms are available on the FEL website athttp://www.ogmios.org/grants/index.htm. The deadline for submission of proposals is 31st December 2012.

Athulya Aravind at Acquisition Lab/LARC on Monday

Magda Oiry writes:

This Monday, due rescheduling, Athulya Aravind will present his work in the acquisition lab / LARC meeting. The title of his talk is:

"First and Second Order Complementation: New Experimental Directions".

 

We will meet in Herter 301 at noon.

Everyone is welcome!

William Snyder gives talk tomorrow

Tom Roeper writes:

William Snyder will be giving a guest lecture in the class on Multiple
Grammars where he will discuss his approach to Grammatical Conservatism in Acquisition.

The class meets at 230 Monday November 19th in Herter 211.

Everyone is welcome.

Tom Roeper ( and Luiz Amaral)

Project TRAIT abstract deadline delayed

Joanna Blaszczak writes:

We are finalizing the program of our  workhop "How categorical are categories?" organized within the Project TRAIT ("Temporality at the Interfaces"), funded by the Foundation for Polish Science

http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/trait/.

 

We still have some free slots for a few additional (GOOD) presentations. We would be very glad if you  - or some of your PhD students - could contribute to the program of our workshop. We would like to invite you to have a look at the description of the workshop available here http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/linguistics/traitworkshop.html

 

We decided to extend the deadline for selected abstract submissions till November 28th. Please find enclosed the call for papers.

Hot Chocolate and Excercise

Brian Smith writes:

For the past five years, some of us have participated in the Hot Chocolate Run. It's a 2-mile walk or a 5k run through Downtown Northampton, followed by delicious hot chocolate in a commemorative mug. The proceeds benefit Safe Passage, an organization that helps victims of domestic violence.  It happens on December 2. 

 

If you'd like to participate, you can register online, or you can download the registration form, fill it out, and put it in my mailbox with the registration fee. Under "Team/School Name", write "Linguists & Friends". Since we register as a team, each of us gets a $3 discount on the registration fee. The fee is $27 for adults and $15 for students ($24 and $15 with group discount).

 

Here's a link: http://safepass.org/HCR/

 

This year, they are anticipating selling out by Thanksgiving, so I recommend registering as soon as you read this email if you'd like to participate. (There is no longer an online registration fee!)

 

It's really a great time!

 

What: Hot Chocolate Run

When: December 2, 9:30 am

Why: Benefit for Safe Passage, delicious hot chocolate

How: Register online or by form. Definitely register by Thanksgiving. Sooner is better. (Team name: Linguists & Friends)

SRG's new face

Jason Overfelt writes:

I would like to introduce myself as your new SRG coordinator.  I will be doing my best to take over for Anisa who has done a wonderful job.  Thanks, Anisa!

Our final meeting this semester was last Thursday, but it's never too early to start planning ahead.  If you think you  would like to talk at SRG next semester, then feel free to email me once you know.  You should feel free to present a practice talk, discuss a  term paper you're working on, or just throw out some puzzling data.

Conner, Pearson and Jackson in Atlanta

Barbara Pearson writes:

Tracy Conner,  Janice Jackson and I presented a paper on "Dialect Awareness: Foundations for Effective Education of African American English-speaking Children" at the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association annual meeting in Atlanta on Thursday, November 15, 2012.  The paper was based on an article to appear in Developmental Psychology, January 2013, a themed edition on "Deficit versus Difference? Interpreting Diverse Developmental Paths" (and is already available on-line).  As part of Tracy's answers to an engaged audience, she was able to refer people to her poster in the following session:  New Diagnostic Criterion: Obligatory Possessive Marking in African American English.