Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten writes:
Here’s a picture taken this morning at the Hot Chocolate Run, where the ‘Linguists and Friends’ took part in both the 5K run (Ivy Hauser, Hannah Greene, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten, Kristine Yu) and 2 mile walk (Magda Oiry (and Marie!), Andrew Weir, Claire Moore-Cantwell, and Terri Yu). Not pictured in the post-hot chocolate photo are Magda and Marie.
Magda Oiry writes:
Tom Roeper writes:
Charles Yang will skype into our root infiinitives class and discuss those
issues and others he may be working on.
The class is 2:30 on December 2nd in Dickinson 210. Everyone is invited to attend!
The deadline for SALT 24 is Monday, December 2, 2013, 11:59pm EST. SALT 24 will be hosted by the Linguistics Department of New York University on May 30 through June
1, 2014. The conference will be preceded by a series of tutorials on Formal Semantics Beyond Spoken Language, on May 29 (see notice below). The Call for Papers and submission information can be found here.
The Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures presents
Dr. Tao Gong (The Hong Kong University) and Dr. Lan Shuai (Johns Hopkins University) who will give a talk entitled "Simulating Vowel Chain Shifts" (Tao GONG) and "Language as an 'interface' -- evidence from tone perception and its lateralization" (Lan SHUAI). The talks are on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 in Herter Hall 210 from 4:00-6:00. Abstracts of the talks follow.
Simulating Vowel Chain Shifts.
Vowel chain shift, as a series of related sound changes leading to a rearrangement of the phonetic realizations, is a typical phonetic change in world languages, yet the explanation for it remains controversial; some scholars highlight the roles of self-organizing property of the vowel space, whereas others emphasize the necessity of phonetic contrast maintenance. In this talk, based primarily on Bart de Boer's self-organizing model and the empirical data of vowel chain shifts in Xumi language, I present an agent-based computer simulation to address this controversy and explain how the vowel chain shift in Upper Xumi occurs. The simulation results show that extended vowel chain shift cannot be solely explained by self-organization, the phonemic contrast maintenance mechanism is also necessary. Under these two factors, the vowel chain shift in Upper Xumi can be explained as the combined effect of the evolution of vowel system under noise conditions and the addition of the loan phoneme /ɔ/. This is the first simulation attempt to address the process of an extended vowel shift in relation to real-world data.
Langauge as an Interface — evidence from Tone Perception and its lateralization
In this talk, I report my ERP studies investigating the hemispheric specialization of tone perception. This line of research begins with the debate between the task-dependent (based on linguistic mechanisms) and cue-dependent (based on acoustically driven mechanisms) hypotheses, which predict opposite lateralization patterns. Since lexical tone is defined as the use of pitch variations to distinguish lexical meanings, it is natural to examine both the linguistic function and acoustic property of lexical tone, and my work shows that both aspects affect the lateralization in tone perception, in both early (~200 ms) and late (~400 ms) time windows. This work contributes to a more complete picture of tone lateralization, and supports a parallel processing of both linguistic and acoustic factors. It further indicates that language functions such as tone perception involve various concurrent cognitive functions, linguistic and non-linguistic, such as semantic memory or pitch perception, which is in accordance with the ‘mosaic theory’ stating that “language is regarded as a kind of ‘interface’ among a variety of more basic abilities” (Wang, 1978).
Seth Cable writes:
I wanted to let everyone know that, as part of the Semantics Proseminar, Barbara will be giving a special one-hour talk on December 10th at 2PM in the Partee room.
Titled "On the History (and a Bit of Post-History) of Montague's PTQ", this talk will assume some prior familiarity with the content of Montague's seminal paper "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English." That is, unlike some of Barbara's other popular talks on the history of formal semantics, this one will be targeted to 'S-siders' with some technical knowledge of Montague's work. Nevertheless, all are very welcome to attend!
If you'd like to attend Barbara's talk, could you please let me know by Friday? I'd like to get a head count, just in case we need to shift venues.
The Linguistics Department at Rutgers is hosting the Afranaph Project Development Workshop II (APDW2) which will take place on December 13-14 at the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers, New Brunswick. The full event program for APDW2 is available here.
APDW2 brings together researchers and consultants presenting their work on languages within the Afranaph Project, or joint work in connection with the Afranaph Sister Projects, or else proposals for new sister projects that will expand the scope of the Afranaph data resources. We invite anyone interested in African linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and the relationship between online empirical research collaborations and linguistic fieldwork, to attend our event (there is no registration fee). Inquiries may be directed to Ken Safir, Afranaph Project Director, safir@ruccs.rutgers.edu.
Barbara Zurer Pearson writes:
UMass Linguistics was represented at the American Speech Language and Hearing Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, November 14-17.
Fourth-year graduate student Tracy Conner led a "Dialect Awareness Workshop: Enhancing Language Flexibility in African American English-Speaking Children & Their Teachers & Clinicians." Co-presenters for the hands-on activities of the two-hour workshop were myself, and Tamika LeRay, a 2009 participant in Professor Lisa Green's Summer Dialect Research Project, who is now a practicing speech-language therapist in the Boston Public Schools. The workshop was based on a paper by me, Tracy, and co-author Janice Jackson published earlier this year in Developmental Psychology (volume 49:1). [Janice was unable to join them because she had extensive brain surgery earlier in the fall. Fortunately, she is now on the mend.) ]
Tom Roeper and Ondene van Dulm, a colleague from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, presented "Toward a Principled Approach to Child Language Remediation", showcasing materials based on the DELV-Norm Referenced test (Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2005) that Ondene and Frenette Southwood of Stellenbosch University in South Africa created.
LARC member Jill de Villiers of Smith College participated in three presentations of a still-unnamed computer-based assessment of vocabulary and syntax for monolingual and bilingual preschoolers being developed in conjunction with researchers at Temple University, University of Delaware, and Laureate Learning Systems. Like the DELV, the new assessment focuses on a more sophisticated notion of syntactic and lexical knowledge than most current tests that screen for language delay.
I also presented on the DELV-NR in Catherine Snow's class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on Monday November 25.
In conjunction with the University of Potsdam, the SFB 833 at the
University of Tübingen is currently co-organising a semantics workshop titled 'Triple A’. The workshop's primary focus is the semantics of underrepresented languages in Africa, Asia and Austronesia. It will be held on June 11-13, 2014 . Submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion are invited. Submissions should present original formal semantic or pragmatic work on any interpretive aspect of the languages under discussion, ideally originating from own fieldwork. We particularly encourage Ph.D. students to apply. The deadline for abstracts is January 7, 2014. For more information, go here.
In conjunction with SALT, NYU is sponsoring a series of tutorials on the formal semantics of signed languages and the formal semantics of pictures, gestures and diagrams. These tutorials take place on May 29, 2014. They are free, but registration is required. For more information, go here.
GLOW 37 will take place on April 2-5, 2014 in Brussels. The GLOW conference will be followed by the GLOW Spring School 1 (April 7-11, 2014), with courses taught by Charles Yang, Antal Van den Bosch, Norvin Richards, Philip Hofmeister, Martina Wiltschko, Philippe Schlenker, Hagit Borer, and Pavel Caha.
The registration deadline for GSS1 is January 15, 2014!
For all practical information relating to both the GLOW colloquium and the Spring School, see http://www.glow37.org.
The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS) at the
University of Toronto is excited to announce its 7th annual Toronto
Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON), to be held on March 7-9, 2014!
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 tulcon2014@gmail.com by Friday January 31st, 2014. 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 future! If you
have any questions, please contact us at tulcon2014@gmail.com.
The Research Group Dynamic Structuring in Language and Communication, which is funded by the Institutional Strategy of the University of Cologne as part of German Excellence Initiative, offers
four post-doc research positions at the level of TV-L E13
to be filled by 1st February, 2014 or as soon as possible thereafter for a period of three years (with the possibility of renewal for 2 years subject to the funding situation)
We are seeking excellent linguists to join our interdisciplinary Research Group constituted by the following PIs: Martin Becker, Christiane Bongartz, Martine Grice, Klaus von Heusinger, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Beatrice Primus. Our current main concern is Prominence in Language, which we approach from different linguistic perspectives. Candidates are expected to have a clear interest in interdisciplinary work, a completed PhD and an excellent research record in one or more of following four areas of specialization: A: Crosslinguistic analysis of argument structure; B: Phonology and the interface to semantics/pragmatics with a specialization in prosody; C: Syntax and discourse structure in second language acquisition; D: Modeling dynamic structure and interface conditions.
The research group provides a professional infrastructure and an appropriate workplace for conducting research, and encourages developing and implementing individual research projects associated with Prominence in Language. Fellows have the opportunity to benefit from a variety of career development measures.
The University of Cologne is committed to promoting equal employment opportunities and, in light of this, applications from disabled candidates are particularly welcome. Disabled candidates will be given priority in cases in which applicants possess similar qualifications. Additionally, applications from female candidates will also be favored in cases of comparable qualifications, capabilities and professional accomplishments unless an applicant’s personal qualities recommend them in particular for the position.
Applications with the usual documentation (CV, list of referees, a two page outline of a research project, and a pdf-file of the dissertation thesis) should be submitted no later 30. 12. 2013. to Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger by email only: klaus.vonheusinger@uni-koeln.de.
The 15th Szklarska Poreba Workshop, a workshop on the roots of pragmasemantics, will be held at the top of the mountain Szrenica, near Szklarska Poreba, Poland, on 21-24 February 2014. The workshop will address issues related to the semantics and pragmatics of aspect and, more generally, to the representation of meaning, both from a linguistic as well as a philosophical and cognitive perspective.
For more information, go here.https://sites.google.com/site/szklarskaporebaworkshop/
The 38th annual Penn Linguistics Conference will take place on March 28-30 at the UPenn campus in Philadelphia. The conference hosts posters and 20 minute talks on any topic in linguistics and associated fields. This is a very good venue for student papers. The deadline for abstracts is MONDAY, November 18. For more information about the conference, go here. For information about submitting an abstract, go here.
Jon Gajewski (UConn) will give the department colloquium on Friday, November 22, at 3:30 in Machmer E-32. A title and abstract follow.
NPIs in definite descriptions
Brian Dillon writes:
Psych evening meeting will meet (at least) one more time this semester. Please join us Wednesday, 11/20, at 7:30pm. We'll meet at Adrian's house. Adrian is interestd in presenting, and getting feedback on, a new analysis for visual world eye-movement data that he and John Kingston have been using to analyze some of their recent eye-tracking data. No reading is required, but Adrian has suggested the following articles for people who want to get some background on the issues that he'll be discussing:
Barr, D. J. (2008). Analyzing ‘visual world’ eyetracking data using multilevel logistic regression. Journal of memory and language, 59(4), 457-474.
Mirman, D., Dixon, J. A., & Magnuson, J. S. (2008). Statistical and computational models of the visual world paradigm: Growth curves and individual differences. Journal of memory and language, 59(4), 475-494.
Sakshi Bhatia and Jyoti Iyer, with their co-author Gurmeet Kaur, have a paper “Comparatives in Hindi-Urdu: Puzzling over ZYAADAA” appear in the online Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Moutnains Working Papers. Take a look here.
Congratulations Jyoti and Sakshi.
Workshop on (Co-)Distributivity
The workshop will be held
Fri 14 February 2014
CNRS Pouchet, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris.
Conférences invitées / Invited speakers :
- Adrian Brasoveanu (UC Santa Cruz)
- Jakub Dotlacil (Leiden)
Submission deadline: 5 Dec 2013
We encourage submissions exploring the linguistic means used to establish distributive dependencies, including, but not limited to, questions like the following:
- the syntax and semantics of markers of distributive keys (e.g. distributive quantifiers) or distributive shares (e.g. Hungarian reduplicated numerals)
- multiplication effects for indefinite singulars (e.g. He eats a sandwich for breakfast.)
- distribution effects for plurals (e.g. dependent plurals: Here professors wear ties.)
- distribution effects over times (e.g. A lot of people have been dying of this disease lately).
We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics on distributive dependencies (distributivity and co-distributivity) 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.
For more information :
Page www/ Website :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Journee-Co-Distributivite.html
E-mail : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr
Abstract Submission Deadline : 5 Dec 2013
Notification of Acceptance : 20 Dec 2014
Workshop : Fri 14 February 2014
Dillon, Clifton and Frazier's article "Pushed aside: Memory, Processing, and Parentheticals" has been accepted for publication at Language and Cognitive Processes.
7th Colloquium Semantics and Philosophy in Europe — SPE 7
Hosted by Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin in cooperation with Institut für Philosophie and Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik at Humboldt University Berlin
Place: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin
Date: June 26-28 , 2014 (conference), June 25, 2014 (tutorials)
WEB: www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/spe7
The Semantics and Philosophy in Europe colloquia provide a forum for presenting research in the interface between linguistic semantics and various areas in philosophy (philosophy of language, philosophy of mind/cognition, metaphysics etc.). In addition to the general session, SPE 7 will feature two special sessions and offer two preconference tutorials.
Special sessions:
Tutorials:
The submission deadline is 1. February 2014.
For submission details cf. www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/spe7/call.html
Hannah Greene writes:
Congratulations to Noah Constant, who successfully defended his dissertation, “Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations” on Friday.
Noah Constant defends his dissertation, “Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations,” Friday, November 15 at 3:30 in Machmer E-37.
Steven Foley from NYU will give the following talk at 2:30pm in the Partee Room on Friday, November 15.
Relative Clauses in Georgian
Georgian is notable for exhibiting many relativization strategies.
Relative clauses may contain a wh-phrase, or the complementizer rom,
which occurs in a non-initial position; they may occur directly after
the modified nominal head, extraposed to the right edge of the matrix
clause, or preposed in a correlative construction; the nominal head
may appear inside the relative, outside it, or both. Despite this
variation, I propose that all relative clauses in Georgian are derived
from a single underlying structure, with the relative CP generated as
the complement of D/N (Kayne 1994, Hulsey & Sauerland 2006). The whole
array of relative clauses and their asymmetries are derived through a
combination of an articulated left periphery and movement through
escape hatches provided by Phase extension (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand
2005). Such a unified account challenges analyses of very similar
phenomena in Hindi by Mahajan (2000) and Bhatt (2003).
Phonology guru Elliott Moreton has arrived, and will be leading three sessions this week.
WGBY will be airing a documentary about UMass tonight (Sunday, November 10) at 8PM. The trailer can be found here.
GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Workshop Series
The semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 1
-------------------------
-------------------------
Date: June 11-13, 2014
Call deadline: January 7, 2014
Notification of acceptance: February 2014
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Stefan Keine’s paper “Syntagmatic Constraints on Insertion” has appeared in Morphology. Congratulations Stefan!
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
will host the 21th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal
Linguistics Association (AFLA) on 23-25 May, 2014. AFLA is an
organization which promotes the study of Austronesian languages from a
formal perspective. More information about the conference can be found
at the conference website (http://www2.hawaii.edu/~afla21/).
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.
Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10 minutes for
discussion) 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 font.
Abstracts should be submitted online by January 13, 2014 at the
following URL: http://linguistlist.org/confservices/afla21
Contact person: Yuko Otsuka (afla21@hawaii.edu)
Tom Roeper writes:
WGBY will air a documentary on Sunday, Nov. 10, at 9PM entitled “The Radical Idea: UMass Amherst and America’s Educational Revolution." You can see a description, and a trailer, here.
Sharon Peperkamp will be visiting as our phonology guru starting on Monday November 4th. She will be presenting in Joe Pater and Lisa Sanders' seminar in Tobin 207 from 10:10 - 11:25 on Monday and Wednesday. The reading for Monday is:
Skoruppa, K. & Peperkamp, S. (2011). Adaptation to novel accents: Feature-based learning of context-sensitive phonological regularities. Cognitive Science, 35, 348-366.
She will also be discussing the following paper at a meeting of the PRG Thursday Nov. 7th chez Claire Moore-Cantwell:
Dupoux, E., Parlato, E., Frota, S., Hirose, Y., Peperkamp, S. (2011). Where do illusory vowels come from? Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 199-210.
Finally, on Sunday November 10th at 9 am in the Herter auditorium, she will deliver a plenary address at Phonology 2013, entitled "Assimilation from the listener's perspective: adult and infant data". The abstract is available here.
The inaugural meeting of Phonology 2013 is hosted by UMass this weekend: November 9 and 10. Over 100 phonologists, from all corners of the world, will be in attendance. Registration is not required to attend, but a quick email to phonology-2013@linguist.umass.edu is required if you plan on participating in the meals or consuming the coffee break goodies. The plenary speakers are John McCarthy, Kevin Ryan (Harvard), and Sharon Peperkamp (LSCP). McCarthy’s talk is at 9 on Saturday, and entitled “Irreducible Parallelism.” Ryan’s talk is at 5:15 and entitled “Onset Weight, word weight, and the perceptual interval.” Peperkamp’s talk is at 9 on Sunday and entitled “Assimilation from the listener’s perspective: adult and infant data.” A schedule can be found here.
This Friday, November 8, Phonology 2013 hosts a series of Workshops on experimental and computational methods. They are in Machmer W 32 and W 37. For a schedule, go here.
Tom Roeper gave one of the keynote talks at the “Parallel Grammars and Multilingualism” in Trondheim Norway on October 16-18. Preceding that he gave a course on Multilingualism and Grammar, along with Johanne Paradis and Shana Poplack, For more information, go here.
The University of Maryland is hosting the second of their biennial conference on topics of interest to linguists, philosophers and others in neighboring disciplines. This year’s conference is devoted to “Language and Other Minds." It will take place on February 14 and 15, 2014; Mandy Simons and Jason Stanley are the invited speakers, and there is a special discussion session devoted to acquisition issues led by Shevaun Lewis. Here is their description of the conference topic:
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The use of language relates to an awareness of other minds in two important ways. First, communication depends fundamentally on a sensitivity to the intentions and beliefs of others in conversation. Presupposition and implicature are interesting special cases of this. Second, with verbs like "think" and "know", we can talk about mental states explicitly, in ways that create familiar semantic challenges. Acquiring a language therefore involves the development of competence in both areas, not a simple task.
In this conference, we invite discussion of both sorts of relations between language and other minds, from the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and cognitive or developmental psychology. What understanding of knowledge, belief, desire and intention is expressed in the meanings of attitude verbs? In what ways does the use of such verbs rely on pragmatic enrichment? What is the correct understanding of knowledge in conversation, as expressed in presuppositions, evidentials, or epistemic modals? By what path do children become competent in these various areas? And what does this tell us about the linguistic representation of mental states, or semantic theories of attitude verbs?
***********************************
Submissions are open to graduate student researchers only. Presenters will have 30 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes for round-table discussion. Submissions to the conference may take one of two forms, depending on the author’s preferences:
Type 1: Abstract. Maximum of 1 page of text single-spaced, 12pt font, with an additional page for examples, figures, and references.
Type 2: Paper. Maximum 4000 words, double-spaced, 12pt font, suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please include references.
Submissions are accepted until December 15th, 2013, with final selections to be made by January 15th, 2014. Abstracts should be uploaded to EasyChair (abstracts, like papers, should be loaded as a separate document): https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=phlinc2.
Ned Block from NYU will be speaking on Friday, November 8, at 3:30 pm in Bartlett Hall, room 206.
The title of his talk is "Seeing – As in the Light of Vision Science.”
Joshua Levy will give the brown bag lunch talk in Psychology on Wednesday, October 30th, in Tobin 521B from 12:00-1:15. The title of his talk is "Resolution of Reflexive Dependencies: Is binding theory enough?” All are welcome!
Page Piccinini (UCSD) will be giving the following talk at 10AM on Thursday, October 31, in Herter 301.
Accessing Cross Language Categories in Learning a Third Language
Current theories differ greatly in explaining how bilinguals organize
their two languages, including at the sound level. The heart of the
debate is whether bilinguals have constant access to all of their
sounds across their two languages, or only access to sounds from one
of their two languages at a time. The present study examines these
theories by testing the ability of early Spanish-English bilinguals to
access phonetic distinctions within the voice onset time (VOT)
continuum that exist across their two languages (negative, short-lag,
and long-lag VOT). To this end, bilinguals were tested on a third
language that has all three contrasts phonemically: Eastern Armenian.
The effects of both language mode and language dominance were
examined. One production and two perception tasks were carried out. In
the production task participants heard words and nonce words in
Eastern Armenian and were told to repeat the words back to the best of
their abilities. Participants produced the three types of stops
significantly differently both for bilabials and velar. However this
was modulated by language dominance, with those who were more English
dominant producing less of a contrast between the negative and
short-lag categories (the phonemic categories in Spanish). There was
no effect of language mode. The first perception task was an AX
discrimination task. Participants heard two words and said if the
words were the same or different. Participants were consistently good
at negative versus long-lag VOT, but did poorly at both negative
versus short-lag VOT and short-lag versus long-lag VOT. There was no
effect of language mode or language dominance. The second experiment
was an ABX discrimination task. Participants heard three words and
said if the third word was the same as the first or second word.
Participants performed best at negative versus long-lag VOT, also
preformed well at short-lag versus long-lag VOT, but performed poorly
at negative versus short- lag VOT. However, there was an interaction
with language dominance such that those who were more balanced
bilinguals preformed better at the negative versus short-lag VOT
contrast than those were more English dominant. Language mode was not
significant. These results support a theory whereby language dominance
and not language mode is a key determining factor both in speech
production and perception. Furthermore, the results of the AX and ABX
experiments together suggest that while more balanced bilinguals can
accurately perceive the three way contrast when forced to assign
category labels (the ABX task) they do poorly when categorization is
open (the AX task). This may show a preference by participants for a
language with a two-way contrast, as would match their native
languages, even if they can produce and perceive a three-way contrast.
Nina Hyams (UCLA) will give a talk entitled “The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality: Evidence from English Copy-Raising” in the Oiry/Johnson seminar on Wednesday, October 30 at 4pm in Dickinson 210. She will be reporting on her collaboration with Lauren Winans and Jessica Rett.
Everyone is welcome!
Many descriptive generalisations have been established concerning the characteristic properties of adjuncts: for example, (1) adjuncts are optional and iterable, (2) they are typically islands (Huang 1982), (3) they are able to avoid reconstruction (Lebeaux 1988), and (4) they can be extraposed rightwards to a strictly local degree (Baltin 1981). This talk addresses the question of why these properties should cluster together, and proposes an analysis of adjunction which unifies the various characteristic properties that have been observed.
To do so, I develop a system where movement and adjunction are not independent phenomena, but rather are related byproducts of the same underlying grammatical machinery. This relies on the interaction of two crucial ingredients that I take from previous work. The first is the observation that in neo-Davidsonian semantics adjunction generally corresponds to a simple mode of semantic composition (namely predicate conjunction) that is not mediated by grammatical roles or thematic relations, in contrast to predicate-argument relations (Hornstein and Nunes 2008). The second is the intuition that syntactic movement might usefully be thought of as "re-merging", which I implement by drawing on insights from formal computational analyses of minimalist syntax (Stabler 2006). I show how together these ingredients yield a system in which adjunction and movement are revealed to be two sides of the same coin. The system therefore makes strong predictions about how adjunction and movement should interact, and these predictions unify the distinctive properties of adjunction listed in (1)-(4) above.
Brian Dillon will be giving the linguistics colloquium at Yale tomorrow, Monday October 28. A title and abstract follow.
Colloquium to be given at Yale Linguistics, 10/28, 4pm:
Memory search in syntactic comprehension
One widely observed finding about syntactic comprehension is that the construction of syntactic dependencies is subject to locality effects: shorter syntactic dependencies are easier to process, and preferred over longer ones in cases of ambiguity (Bartek, Lewis, Vasishth & Mason, 2011; Frazier, 1978; Gibson, 1998; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; Kimball, 1973; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; a.o.). A number of theories have proposed to capture these findings as a consequence of the memory architecture of the parser. Recently, theories in this tradition have highlighted the role for temporal decay (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, Foraker & Dyer, 2003) and similarity-based interference (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Van Dyke & McElree, 2006). In this talk I defend the hypothesis that locality effects in syntactic comprehension cannot be entirely reduced to the effects of decay and interference. I argue instead that locality effects reflect a memory search procedure that prioritizes the retrieval of dependents within a local syntactic domain. I support this hypothesis by investigating the time course of antecedent retrieval for long-distance reflexives in Mandarin Chinese. Data from a speed accuracy trade-off experiment show that local antecedents are retrieved more quickly than non-local antecedents. A computational model of these data points to a role for a local search procedure when retrieving an antecedent for a reflexive. Taken together, these findings support the view that locality effects in processing reflect a syntactically-guided memory search.
Lyn Frazier is an invited participant at a symposium at the 38th meeting of the BU Conference on Language Development this Sunday, November 3. The symposium, which includes Helen Goodluck and Colin Phillips is entitled “A New Approach to Language Learning: Filtering through the Processor.” You can learn more about BUCLD here.
Rajesh will give a presentation at McGill University on Friday, November 1. He’ll present his work with Stefan Keine:
Two Roots in One Phase: An Environment for Semantically Contentful Head Movement
In this presentation we develop an argument that head movement may
have semantic effects and that it can hence not be a PF phenomenon.
The argument is based on novel facts regarding scope in infinitival
complementation structures in German. We show that every element
inside the infinitival clause must take scope over the matrix verb if
the embedded clause is a VP that remains in situ. If, by contrast, the
embedded clause is either a vP or a VP that undergoes movement, no
such wide scope is possible. We propose that wide scope of embedded
elements is the result of syntactic verb cluster formation: The
infinitival verb incorporates into the higher verb. To obtain the
observed scope facts, we suggest that the verb cluster is semantically
interpreted via Function Composition. Supplemented with standard
assumptions about the interpretation of movement, this account derives
the wide scope of material inside the embedded clause.
Date: June 11-13, 2014
Call deadline: January 7, 2014
Notification of acceptance: February 2014
Location: Tübingen, Germany
::: Meeting Description :::
The Universities of Tübingen and Potsdam are proud to announce TripleA 1, a workshop focusing on the cross-linguistic formal semantics of understudied languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.
::: Invited Speakers :::
Miriam Butt (Universität Konstanz)
Manfred Krifka (ZAS/ Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Kilu von Prince (ZAS, Berlin)
Walter Bisang (Johannes-Gutenberg-
Barbara Partee writes:
I gave the linguistics colloquium at MIT on Friday Oct 25, “The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics”. While in Cambridge Oct 23-25, I also did interviews for her history project with Joyce Friedman, Kai von Fintel, Irene Heim, and Hilary Putnam. On colloquium day besides meeting with a number of advanced PhD students, I enjoyed lunchtime conversation with the first-year students and wondered whether we have such a tradition -- if not it might be nice to think about it.
Joe Pater writes:
David Huber of Cognitive Psychology will be offering a seminar "Computational Modeling in Cognition" Tuesday 4 - 6:30. He'll be using a text by Lewandowsky and Farrell that I've started reading myself, and can already highly recommend - from my perspective, it starts at exactly the right level of math, and does a great job of explaining the role of quantitative modeling in theory construction.
http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Modeling-Cognition-Principles-Practice/dp/1412970768
You might also want to check out this paper by Huber and Cowell, which offers a perspective on the connectionist/bayesian debate that you might find congenial:
Huber, D. E. & Cowell, R. A. (2010). Theory driven modeling or model driven theorizing? Comment on McClelland et al/Griffiths et al. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(8), 343-344.http://people.umass.edu/dehuber/TICS_huber_cowell.pdf
Finally, this is a good opportunity to welcome David and Rosie to UMass - they are a great addition to our cognitive science community, and I'm sure many of you will look forward to meeting them if you haven't already at the Cognitive bag lunches or elsewhere.
Angelika Kratzer writes:
The deadline for abstracts for Chronos 11 has been extended:
http://linguistica.sns.it/Chronos11/dates.htm
The new deadline is 20 December 2013.
Again, of particular note is the variety of interesting workshops proposed:
http://linguistica.sns.it/Chronos11/conference_workshop.htm
Saturday, October 26, was the annual department tasting party. This year, continuing the smashing success of last year’s party, the theme was apples and their products. In addition to such pomological achievements as the Golden Russet, the Fuji, the famed University of Minnesota Honeycrisp, and the sensational Winter Banana (all from UMass’s Cold Spring Orchard), there was a Bhatt-curated selection of hard ciders, fine cheeses, Rysling-shaken (Apple)Jack Rose cocktails, and apple-themed baked goods.
And there were characters.
William Snyder (UConn) will give a talk entitled "Evidence of parameter-setting in the acquisition of English particles and datives" in the seminar on Arguments and Acquisition that Magda Oiry and Kyle Johnson are conducting. His talk is on Wednesday, October 23, at 4PM in Dickinson 210. Everyone is welcome.
Adam Albright (MIT) will give the department colloquium on Friday, October 25, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30. A title and abstract follow.
Modeling the acquisition of phonological alternations with learning biases
[joint work with Young Ah Do, Georgetown University]
What expectations do learners bring to the task of acquiring alternations? We provide evidence for three biases: (1) a bias against alternations, favoring uniform paradigms (McCarthy 1998); (2) a bias in favor of alternations that target broader classes of segments (Peperkamp et al. 2006); (3) a substantive bias against perceptually salient alternations (Steriade 2001).
Learners’ biases were probed using Artificial Grammar experiments, in which adult English speakers were taught singular~plural pairs in a “Martian language”, and were then asked to produce or rate plural forms. In the artificial language, obstruent-final stems exhibited either voicing alternations (dap~dabi) or continuancy alternations (brup~brufi), for both labial-final and coronal-final stems. By manipulating the frequency of labials vs. coronals, we were able to vary the amount of data concerning different segmental alternations. If learners are biased to expect non-alternation, then we expect fewer alternating responses for the rarer segment, and this is indeed what we observe: participants often produce non-alternating responses for the rarer segment, even though non-alternation was unattested in the training data.
By manipulating the relative proportion of voicing vs. continuancy alternations across the two places of articulation, we were able to pit frequency of segmental alternations (p~f > p~b) against feature-level frequency (voicing > continuancy). If learners expect alternations to target natural classes, rather than individual segments, then we expect subjects to prefer the alternation that is overall more frequent across both classes. In general, this is indeed what we find: subjects prefer to generalize the featurally more frequent alternation, even if it is less frequent for particular segment pairs. However, the effect of feature-level frequency differs significantly depending on the feature. Comparing across experiments, we find that subjects more readily extend voicing alternations across different places of articulation than continuancy alternations. We attribute this to a learning bias against certain featural alternations. Finally, we show how these relative preferences can be modeled using a regularized maximum entropy model of constraint weighting.
Joe Pater writes:
In the first half of November we will have the great pleasure of having not only Elliott Moreton and Sharon Peperkamp visiting us as phonology gurus, but also Anne-Michelle Tessier in our midst as well. I'm writing now primarily to encourage people to get in touch with the three of them, whom I've cc'd, to set up meetings. Meeting with students is the primary function of a guru-ship, and Anne-Michelle has indicated that she'd also like to get (re-)acquainted with the current denizens of South College while she's here. Please visit their websites to find out about their research - I could never do justice to any one of them with a short blurb.
Peperkamp - 1st week of November - http://www.lscp.net/persons/peperkamp/
Moreton - 2nd week of November - http://www.unc.edu/~moreton/
Tessier - 1st 2 weeks of November - http://www.ualberta.ca/~annemich/
Sharon and Anne-Michelle will both be talking at Phonology 2013 November 9th and 10th (please register *today* if you haven't already), and Elliott will be giving a colloquium November 15th. There will also be further classes and PrG events that will be announced separately.
http://blogs.umass.edu/phonology-2013/
Magda Oiry writes:
The acquisition lab / LARC meeting this Wednesday (Partee room 12:15 to 1:15) will be a "conference round-up" where we discuss ideas from the recent conferences we have been involved in: acquisition of quantification, Multiple grammars, Rio conference on recursion.
Everyone is welcome!
Modeling experiencers in natural language semantics
January 13-16, 2014, Tezpur, Assam, India
Workshop hosted by the 5th Indian School on Logic and its Applications (ISLA 2014)
Webpage of the local organisation: http://www.tezu.ernet.in/isla2014/index.htm
Invited speakers
Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Brendan Gillon (Mc Gill)
Carla Umbach (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)
Meeting description
There is a long-standing tradition of using logical and, more specifically, model-theoretic tools in the analysis of natural languages. Building on this tradition, our workshop aims at addressing one specific issue that has been the topic of discussion lately in the areas of formal semantics, applied logic, computational linguistics, and philosophy. The issue at stake is the notion of experiencer, across languages and across linguistic categories. For example, it is commonly assumed that in a sentence like "Deeti's performance astonished Raj", Raj occupies the role of the experiencer. One of the open questions currently under debate is whether this experiencer argument remains present in derived adjectives such as 'astonishing', as in "Deeti's performance was astonishing". Another open question is whether derived adjectives like 'astonishing' belong to the same semantic category as morpho-syntactically simple adjectives like 'nice' or 'great', which are commonly classified under the label of evaluative adjectives and have elicited a heated debate in semantics and in philosophy. Yet another question is the role of experiencers in other linguistic constructions such as, e.g., evidential markers (which do not exist in English but do e.g. In Japanese). In addressing these and other questions concerning experiencers, our workshop aims at reaching a better understanding of the nature of argument structure in natural language, which we take to be a key element in understanding the logical patterns that linguistic constructions give rise to, and in modeling the logic of natural language. Our interdisciplinary workshop will provide a platform for a fruitful exchange between those working in foundational areas in logic and those who are interested in the applications of logic to natural languages.
Call for Papers
We invite abstracts for 40-minute presentations (30 + 10) to be submitted by October 22 to both of the following addresses:
berit.gehrke@upf.edu
isidora.stojanovic@upf.edu
Please include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail. Abstracts should be anonymous and should not exceed 2 pages in length (A4 or letter-size), in 12 pt. font, with 1-inch/2,5-cm margins, including examples and references. The language of the submissions and the presentations will be English.
Important dates
October 22, 2013: Deadline for abstract submission
October 31, 2013: Notification of acceptance
January 5-17, 2014: ISLA 2014
January 13-16, 2014: Workshop dates
Roberto Zavala Maldonado, a linguist from CIESAS-Sureste, will give a talk entitled "Preferred Argument Structure in Chol (Mayan), an agentive language," at 3:30 on Friday, October 18 in Machmer E37. Professor Maldonado, an expert on Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean, languages will be here all week and is available for meetings. To make an appointment, get in touch with Rajesh Bhatt.
Rajesh Bhatt presented joint work with Stefan Keine at a department colloquium at the University of Michigan on October 4. A talk and abstract follows.
An Argument for Semantically Contentful Head Movement
In this presentation we develop an argument that head movement may
have semantic effects and that it can hence not be a PF phenomenon.
The argument is based on novel facts regarding scope in infinitival
complementation structures in German. We show that every element
inside the infinitival clause must take scope over the matrix verb if
the embedded clause is a VP that remains in situ. If, by contrast, the
embedded clause is either a vP or a VP that undergoes movement, no
such wide scope is possible. We propose that wide scope of embedded
elements is the result of syntactic verb cluster formation: The
infinitival verb incorporates into the higher verb. To obtain the
observed scope facts, we suggest that the verb cluster is semantically
interpreted via Function Composition. Supplemented with standard
assumptions about the interpretation of movement, this account derives
the wide scope of material inside the embedded clause.
PhD position at Université Paris Diderot: Verbal ellipsis in Portuguese and English
The Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) is offering a fully funded three year PhD grant in linguistics on the topic of "Post-verbal ellipsis in Portuguese and English". Research is to be conducted at Paris Diderot, under the joint supervision of Philip Miller (Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7) and Sonia Cyrino (Unicamp, Universidade estadual de Campinas). The position is expected to open in January 2014, subject to final confirmation of funding, with a salary of at least 1400 euros per month. A detailed description of the project is included at the end of the document.
Qualifications
Candidates must have excellent command of Portuguese (Brazilian or European) and English. They must hold a master's degree in linguistics (or in a related field), and have research experience in one or more of the following specialties: syntax and semantics of Portuguese, syntax and semantics of English, ellipsis and anaphora, discourse pragmatics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics.
Application
Candidates should send a CV, a .pdf copy of their Master's thesis, a statement of interest, and the names of three references (with their contact information) to Philip Miller (philip.miller@univ-paris-diderot.fr) and Sonia Cyrino (cyrino@iel.unicamp.br) by October 27 2013.
This weekend, UConn, Storrs is hosting NELS 44, where the following members of the department will give posters.
Visiting professor Ilaria Frana will give a poster with UMass alumnus Kylito Rawlins entitled: `Mica' questions and bias.
Andrew Weir will give the poster "Fragment answers and the Question under Discussion."
Shayne Sloggett will give the poster "Case Licensing in processing: Evidence from German"
Alumna Junko Shimoyama will also give a talk with Alex Drummond entitled "QR as an agent of vehicle change: Evidence from Japanese and Hindi comparatives.
Linguistic Variation has accepted for publication "Complete and Defective Agreement in Kutchi" by Rajesh Bhatt and Stefan Keine. Congratulations!
MIT is hosting the Twenty-Third meeting of the Japanese/Korean Linguistics conference. UMass alumna Junko Shimoyama is an invited speaker, and there are talks by alumni Chris Davis, Kiyomi Kusumoto, and Jennifer Smith. Go here for more information.
Lap-Ching Keung is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of his talk is "Effects of Discourse Status and Planning Difficulty on Acoustic Variation".
His abstract is:
Repeated words within a discourse tend to be acoustically reduced. This variation can be explained by a pragmatic selection rule (discourse status) or by speaker facilitation (planning difficulty). For this experiment, we ask whether these effects are part of the same cognitive system or different systems. Participants saw an array of four objects and described a sequence of two movements like, "The chiddle moved above the hamel. The *cammer moved above the neeken." The *target?s discourse status and planning difficulty were manipulated. Durations were longer for new vs. given and novel vs. familiar, which replicated findings from previous research. More importantly, at the target noun, there was a trend towards an interaction. Givenness had a greater effect on novel targets. Although not significant, onset latency patterned in the same way as target duration, showing a correlation between the two factors. These results together suggest that discourse status is partially mediated by planning difficulty, which further suggests that the two effects are operating from the same cognitive system.
Magda Oiry writes:
Valentina Brunetto a post-doc fellow from England and Italy will present
"Acquisition of near-reflexivity"
at the LARC meeting on Wednesday, October 9 at 12:15 in the Partee Room.
Everyone welcome!
Barbara Pearson writes:
We want to report the success of the LARC Workshop on the Acquisition of Quantification, which took place October 4 and 5 in the Math Lounge 1634 at UMass Amherst and was attended by roughly 70 students and more senior experts from Canada, the UK, Hungary, The Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany, plus New England, New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Tom Roeper set the tone with his opening comments: "Why are there no methods, only theories: Experimental style and the historical path from syntax to discourse in the acquisition of quantification." Invited talks by Julien Musolino (Rutgers), Bill Philip (Utrecht), and Martin Hackl (MIT) stimulated lots of discussion that spilled over into the breaks and shared meals. Congratulations to organizers Jeremy Hartman and Magda Oiry, with help from Mike Clauss, Tom Roeper, Tom Maxfield and Barbara Pearson.
From the Department of Linguistics at Australian National University:
We wish to announce the public release of the World Phonotactics
Database, an online searchable relational database containing
information about phonotactic restrictions from around the world.
Using the database, you can compare and contrast phonotactic patterns
in different languages, group languages by features, investigate the
frequencies of different settings for different features, view the
areal distribution of such patterns through the use of the interactive
map, and check correlations with other phonological features.
The World Phonotactics Database includes phonotactic information on
over 2300 languages, with segmental data for an additional 1400. At
their most basic level, each language entry includes information on
phonemic inventories, restrictions on consonant and vowel placement,
and phonotactic restrictions concerning specific sounds in coda and
onset position. The database, which was implemented by James
McElvenny, contains extensive coverage, and is continuously updated as
more data becomes available.
As in any project of this size, the database will contain errors,
whether these be errors in the coding of information or errors in the
sources consulted. We welcome any feedback correcting these errors as
well as any other suggestions or comments you may have. We can be
contacted at phonotactics@anu.edu.au.
For more information and access to the database itself, please visit
http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au
The Linguistics Department will be hosting a workshop on the acquisition of quantification on Friday and Saturday in the Math lounge (Graduate center). Alumni Angeliek Van Hout, Bart Hollebrandse and Gennaro Chierchia have papers, as do locals Tom Roeper, Jill and Peter de Villiers, Amanda Rizun, Jeremy Hartman, Seth Cable, Rama Novogrodsky, and Magda Oiry. There are invited talks by Julien Musolino and Martin Hackl.
Schedule and information can be found at http://blogs.umass.edu/moiry/workshop-quantification/
Joanna Morris from Hampshire College writes:
Hampshire College, an independent, innovative liberal arts institution, is accepting applications for an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the School of Cognitive Science. The position carries a 4-course per year teaching load and also includes supervision of undergraduate concentrations and thesis projects. The area of specialization is open. We are particularly interested in candidates who have successful records in undergraduate teaching and who can make connections across the cognitive or neural sciences.
Hampshire College, located in Amherst, MA, is a member of the Five Colleges, Incorporated, a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1965 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions which, along with Hampshire, include Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The consortium fosters close academic collaboration, and facilitates intellectual communities and broad curricular and co-curricular offerings. All members of the consortium benefit from the shared use of educational and cultural resources and facilities, including a joint automated library system. Students are allowed to register for nearly any course offered on any of the five campuses.
Hampshire's unique academic program requires that students work closely with a faculty committee to design and carry out a personalized course of study, the concentration. A concentration may range from a plan of study similar to that of a traditional college major to a highly individualized program of study that encompasses several disciplines or areas of conceptual thought and understanding. There are no courses that are required of all students, and faculty are encouraged to develop innovative interdisciplinary courses that introduce students to their intellectual passions and that explore new, cutting edge areas of scholarship.
The review of applications will begin November 1, 2013 and continue until the position is filled. A Ph.D. is required at time of appointment, July 1, 2014. Hampshire College offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits. Applicants should submit the following: 1) letter of application; 2) curriculum vita; 3) teaching statement with descriptions of potential courses; 4) research statement and 5) three professional references via our website at http://jobs.hampshire.edu/
Hampshire College is an equal opportunity institution, committed to building a culturally diverse intellectual community and strongly encourages applications from women and minority candidates.
Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:
PRG will meet on October 3, 7:30pm, chez Ivy. We will be
discussing Robert's paper which he is planning to submit to Phonology.
Further details to follow.
Boston University is currently searching for an Assistant Professor specializing in language acquisition and linguistic theory, and will be conducting interviews at the BUCLD and LSA meetings for applicants in attendance. The application deadline is OCTOBER 1.
For more information: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/2803
UMass Alumnus and MIT's Associate Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Kai von Fintel is interviewed about how to be come a linguist. Check it out here.
Invited Speakers:
Emmanuel Chemla (ENS)
Valentine Hacquard (Maryland)
Lauri Karttunen (Stanford)
Sarah Moss (Michigan)
The conference will be preceded by a series of tutorials on Formal Semantics Beyond Spoken Language, on May 29.
The abstract submission deadline is Monday, December 2, 2013, 11:59 pm EST. We expect to make notifications of acceptance in late February.Detailed instructions are available at: http://www.nyu.edu/salt2014
Please direct inquiries to salt2014inquiry@gmail.com or reply to this message.
38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development
November 1-3, 2013
Kyle Johnson is giving a talk entitled "The Empty Category Principle and linearization" at the 28th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop Saturday, October 5 at the University of Leipzig. The Workshop's website is here.
Akira Omaki of Johns Hopkins will be giving a colloquium:
Friday, Sept. 27, 3:30 pm
in Machmer E-37.
Title and abstract are below.
Learning to parse syntactic dependencies
Much psycholinguistic research has investigated the relation between distributional information and expectations in language comprehension. One way to study this relation is to examine how expectations arise during sentence processing in adults as a function of relevant distributional information in corpora. An alternate approach is to explore how such predictive behaviors grow in children as a result of relevant distributional information that accumulates over a longer period of time. This presentation will discuss a series of studies that explore the second approach, with a focus on learning and processing of non-local dependencies. The first part of the talk explores the role of transitional probability information (and its breakdown) in learning a dependency between 'is' and 'ing' (e.g., John is kick-ing the ball). It is shown that 15 month old infants, who generally do not demonstrate sensitivity to the co-occurrence of is and ing, can use statistical (ir)regularities and learn to detect the co-occurrence relationship after a few minutes of exposure to input in the lab. The fact that children rely on distributional information to discover non-local dependencies makes it feasible that the acquired representations with statistical information may guide parsing of such non-local dependencies. The second part of the talk presents developmental research on comprehension of various wh-questions. It is shown that children's syntactic expectations in filler-gap dependency processing may be slightly different from the type of expectations that have been observed in adults, despite the fact that the distributional information available for children should fully support adult-like expectations. I will discuss implications of such findings for psycholinguistic models of syntactic predictions, as well as relevant linguistic and cognitive factors that may need to grow before adult-like predictive behaviors emerge.
Magda Oiry writes:
Michael Clauss will present
"Exploring the distinction between Wh clauses and Question clauses in Child English"
at the LARC meeting on Wednesday, September 25 at 12:15 in the Partee Room.
Everyone welcome!
Andrew Weir gave a paper, "Fragment Answers and congruence with Question under Discussion" at the Identity in Ellipsis Conference at Leiden University yesterday, September 21. For more information about the conference, click here.
The annual meeting of the Generative Linguists of the Old World will take place in Brussels April 2-11, 2014. In addition to the main colloquium, there will be a workshop on "Phonological Specification and Interface Interpretation" and another workshop on "Understanding Possession." Paula Fikkert, John Harris and Bert Vaux are invited speakers to the first workshop, and Chris Barker and Kilu von Prince are invited speakers to the second workshop. Two page abstracts should be submitted by December 1, 2013. More information can be found here.
Lisa Green will give a talk at Cornell entitled "Inversion in African American English: When Negation Isn't Enough" on September 26 (Thursday).
(Re)presenting the Speech of Others
Date: 13-Mar-2014 - 14-Mar-2014
Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2013
Location: Groningen, Netherlands
Organization: Franziska Köder & Emar Maier
Hosted by the ERC project BLENDS
Contact: f.koder@rug.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------
https://sites.google.com/site/representing2014/
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There are different ways of reporting what someone else has said. Common forms of speech reports are direct speech (Mary said 'I am sick') and indirect speech (Mary said that she is sick). Pretense and role play are closely related phenomena. Like in direct speech, someone engaging in role play adopts the perspective of another person and produces utterances from that shifted standpoint (I am sick) (Harris, 2000). Another interesting parallel is that children start to use speech reports and to engage in role play at around the same time, namely at two to three years of age. This is well before they pass standard false belief tests (at around four) which are often taken to be the hallmark of Theory of Mind and metarepresentation (e.g. Perner, 1991).
Since at least some forms of reported speech exhibit recursion, intensionality, and/or clausal embedding, this developmental gap may shed new light on the debate over the relationship between Theory of Mind and the syntax/semantics of recursive embedding (e.g. de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000). The aim of the conference is to discuss the cognitive and conceptual relationship of reported speech, pretense and cognitive abilities such as perspective-taking, metarepresentation and Theory of Mind.
Keynote Speakers:
- Paul L. Harris
- Josef Perner
- Jill de Villiers
Call for Papers:
We invite authors to submit an anonymous two-page abstract by 1 December 2013
, for a talk of 20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion or a poster. Submissions should be made via Easychair. We welcome theoretically and empirically oriented contributions addressing some of the following topics of interest from the perspectives of (psycho)linguistics, philosophy, psychology or semantics.
Topics of Interest:
- Development of reported speech
- Development of pretense/ role play
- Direct and indirect speech
- Perspective shift, role shift, deictic/indexical shift
- Theory of Mind / mindreading
- Metacognition and metarepresentation
Barbara is in England Sept 24-29 for a big conference and a little workshop. On September 25, she and Luigi Rizzi will be the two speakers at a small workshop organized by Ian Roberts at the University of Cambridge on “Formal Approaches to Linguistic Theory”, where her talk will be “The starring role of quantifiers in the history of formal semantics”. Then on Sept 26-27, she’ll be one of the speakers in a big conference in London sponsored by the British Academy, organized by Ian Roberts and Theresa Biberauer, on the theme “The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On” . Her talk there will be “How syntax and semantics have provoked different views of linguistic competence.”
The deadline for abstracts for Chronos 11 (11th International Conference on Actionality, Tense, Aspect, Modality/Evidentiality), which will take place in Pisa on 16--18 June 2014, is 31 October 2013. For more information go here.
In addition to the main session, of particular note is the variety of interesting workshops proposed.
