Pilar Prieto gives talk in Hispanic Linguistics on Thursday

Meghan Armstrong writes:

We invite you to join us for the first of our series of talks in Hispanic Linguistics:

Pilar Prieto (ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Intonational and gestural meaning reflect information about spaces of commitment

October 16 - 11:30am

301 Herter Hall

ABSTRACT:

It is well-known that prosody and gesture patterns across languages, among other functions, convey information about the epistemic stance of the speaker, not only in relation to the speaker’s own propositions but also in relation to the addressee’s propositions. In the first part of this talk I will present evidence from two recent experiments on the role of prosody and gesture in the expression and assessment of the epistemic stance of the speaker (Roseano et al 2014, Borràs-Comes and Prieto 2014; see also Armstrong to appear). In one of our experiments on biased questions and intonation, results showed that different tune patterns in Catalan were used to encode (a) different degrees of speaker knowledge on the content of the speakers' own proposition; and (b) different degrees of speaker acceptance of the content of the proposition of the addressee(Borràs-Comes and Prieto 2014).

The second part of the talk will be devoted to show the results from a joint project with M.T. Espinal and S. Tubau (UAB) and two members of our team (J. Borràs-Comes and S. González, UPF) on the role of prosody and gesture in the interpretation of denial in Catalan. Two specific cases will be analyzed, namely double negation and yes-answers to negative yes-no questions (Espinal & Prieto 2011, Tubau et al. in press). These two cases constitute a challenge for semantics and pragmatics because double negative and yes- responses to negative questions are ambiguous in that they can constitute either a negative answer to the proposition expressed or a denial to a presupposition (e.g., What isn’t working? Nothing ‘Everything is working’; Isn't John coming (either)? Yes). Our research supports the conclusion that specific intonation contours (in particular, the so- called contradiction contour, L+H*L!H%) and gestures associated with n-words do constrain meaning in ways that allow listeners to obtain the double negation and/or the contradiction interpretation in the two types of structures. It is our claim that in both cases prosody and gesture act as linguistic and conventionalized encoders of presupposition denial (see also Espinal et al. to appear, Prieto et al. 2013). Support for the linguistic view comes from languages classified as truth-based languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, or Russian [Jones 1999: 8ff.]), which contradict negative questions by answering no yes (Don’t you drink coffee? No yes (meaning you are not right, I drink coffee)), while some languages with a polarity-based system contradict the truth of the negative proposition by answering Yes and a specific prosody (i.e. the answer ‘disagrees’ with the whole contentof the negative sentence).

Following Krifka's proposal on the interpretation of speech acts as "spaces of commitments", we propose that intonation and gesture patterns associated both to biased questions and to n-words and particles can be interpreted as epistemic operators encoding REJECT, ASSERT and REQUEST operations (see also Portes et al. 2014 for a related proposal). For example, the contradicting answer to a negative question yes is composed of REJECT (encoded by prosody and gesture) plus ASSERT(φ) (encoded through the positive word, where φ is the propositional discourse referent). All in all, these results are challenging for the design that has been traditionally assumed in the theory of grammar, since they suggest that prosody and gesture constrain meaning representations. Inparticular, the inferencing of denial.

Lisa Davidson gives department colloq on Friday

Lisa Davidson (NYU) will give the linguistics department colloquium on Friday, October 20,  at 3:30 in the seminar hub. A title and abstract of the talk follows.

Stabilizing the production of non-native sequences with acoustic variability

In the processing of non-native consonant clusters, speakers’ systematic errors have often been attributed to the influence of universal factors or native-language phonotactics (e.g., Dupoux et al. 1999; Moreton 2002; Berent et al. 2007). There has been less focus, however, on whether speakers are also sensitive to fine acoustic details in non-native sequences. In this talk, I focus on two questions: (1) Do speakers use fine phonetic detail to determine what phonotactic structures are present in a non-native speech signal, and (2) Is sensitivity to non-contrastive phonetic detail attenuated when sufficient acoustic variability is contained in the input? 

These questions were examined by presenting English speakers with ill-formed clusters (e.g. /bdafa/, /zgade/) containing systematically manipulated sub-phonemic acoustic properties, including duration and amplitude of stop bursts, and the onset and amplitude of voicing before voiced obstruents. These stimuli were presented to participants in two conditions. In the low-variability condition, participants heard the stimuli with the acoustic modifications produced by only one talker. In the high-variability condition, the stimuli were produced by three different talkers within one trial. Results show that in the low variability condition, the acoustic manipulations had strong effects both on the rate of modifications that English speakers produced, and on the type of modifications (e.g. prothesis, epenthesis, C1 change, C1 deletion). For the high-variability condition, the effects of the acoustic manipulations were either eliminated or considerably attenuated.

The results for the low-variability condition demonstrate that under such circumstances, speakers may ‘over-interpret’ non-contrastive acoustic details in determining what structure to produce. These findings are discussed in terms of both the language-specific phonetics and general acoustic characteristics that contribute to the production findings. The attenuation of the sensitivity to phonetic detail in the high-variability condition suggests that listeners generalize over highly variable acoustic information, and that more stable production targets in the high-variability condition result in blending of the information in the multiple talker stimuli.

Rebecca Woods at LARC on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

Rebecca Woods will present at this week's LARC meeting at 11:15AM on Friday in N451 -- note the slightly earlier time.

The title of her talk is:
"Extraction from Embedded Inverted Questions in Adult and Child English."

All are welcome!

Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

Next week is a busy one for the psycholing workshop. On Tuesday we'll be meeting at 7:00(pm) in Northampton (hosting TBD) to prepare for Lisa Davidson's colloquium on Friday. John Kingston will be leading a discussion of the JPhon paper, and interested parties are encouraged to follow up by reading the supplemental paper in Lingua. Both papers can be found in this google drive.

In addition, next Thursday we'll be hearing from Jon Sprouse about acceptability judgments. He'll be coming prepared with a menu of topics for us to select from in a choose-your-own-adventure-style talk.  (see posting below.)

Jon Sprouse at Psycholing

Brian Dillon writes:

Jon Sprouse (UConn Linguistics) will be speaking at the Psycholinguistics Workshop on Thursday 10/16, at 3pm, in the N400. Jon is a syntactician and psycholinguist with significant expertise in experimental syntax. He has worked on island effects and anaphoric dependencies from a variety of different angles, and has done ground-breaking work on the collection and interpretation of intuitive judgments in an experimental setting. He will be leading an informal discussion on acceptability judgment methodology, and will share with us some of what he's learned over the years. All are welcome. See you there!

SS Reading Group

Leland Kusmer writes:

At the end of this month, we will be trying something new: Rather than presenting and discussing our own work, we're going to live up to our name and do some reading!
The idea is this: Each of us will claim one issue of the journal Syntax from the past three years. At the upcoming meeting, each of us who have claimed an issue will give (brief, high-level, handout-free) summaries of the material therein. The idea is to get a better idea of what the current issues of interest are in the field at large.

I have set up a spreadsheet whereby you can claim an issue. We will discuss these at the meeting on Thursday, October 30th. Please only claim an issue if you are reasonably sure you'll be able to attend. Relatedly, if you think you would like to attend, please claim an issue! We would like to have as much of the last three years covered as possible. (I've provided a column to allow two people to share an issue if they so desire, but in the interest of better coverage please try to claim your own if any are available.)

The spreadsheet is here:

http://bit.ly/SSRGReadsSyntax

Thank you in advance for making this experiment a success! ;)

Future Proofing your PhD

On Friday, October 24th, the Graduate School Office of Professional Development will sponsor a “Future-Proofing Your PhD” workshop by Dr. Brenda Bethman, UMass alumna and Director of the Women’s Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  In this workshop, Dr. Bethman will discuss alternate academic (‘alt-ac’) careers and provide participants with tips to secure employment in these positions. The workshop will kick off with a sit-down networking luncheon, which offers participants a valuable opportunity to connect with campus alt-ac professionals.

Space is limited and registration is required: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/AltAcOct24

Additional details are provided below.  Biosketches of the alt-ac professionals participating in the luncheon can be viewed here:  http://bit.ly/AltAcOct24 

Future-Proofing Your PhD Workshop

Friday, October 24, 2014 - Campus Center Amherst Room (10th floor)

1:00 – 2:00pm:  Optional lunch

2:00 – 5:00pm:  Workshop

Workshop Description:  2:00 – 5:00pm

This highly interactive session provides concrete and immediate assistance for graduate students in any discipline wishing to leverage skills developed during doctoral training to land a job that is both fulfilling and full­-time without leaving the academy. Dr. Bethman will stress how participants can think about their Ph.D. training in ways that prepare them for a broad range of jobs within the larger university environment.  Participants should leave this workshop with:

·         a written list of their present (and/or future) academic job skills that can help land them employment in a variety of positions in higher education;

·         a set of concrete strategies for ensuring that the completion of their graduate training will provide them with multiple career options;

·        an applied understanding of the differences between administrative and research/teaching positions;

·        a greater awareness of the broad range of employment offerings available to graduate students and alumni/ae;

·        a greater awareness of the language used in applying for non-teaching academic positions.

Networking Luncheon:  1:00 – 2:00pm

To kick off the workshop, we are sponsoring a complimentary sit-down luncheon with a network of alt-ac professionals here on campus.  These professionals enjoy rewarding careers in higher education and are happy to share their experiences with graduate students who are contemplating their own career paths.  During this luncheon, at least one professional will be seated at each table to facilitate interactive and informal discussion with participants.

Call for papers: ICPhS 2015

Kristine Yu writes:

The first call for papers for International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, the phonetics olympics! Due February 1, 2015. It's only every 4 years.  This year it's in Glasgow.  It's always a really nice conference with a great set of people attending.  There is also a decent amount of phonology and people with phonological interests who attend.  Edinburgh folks are involved, so there's definitely going to be things on sound change/modeling of it.

There's some interesting discussant sessions:
http://icphs2015.info/Sessions.aspx

and a great plenary speaker lineup
http://icphs2015.info/Plenary.aspx

There's also satellite workshops, including, so far, one on developing an IPA like system for prosodic transcription.

http://icphs2015.info/Meetings.aspx

See the previous ICPhS (2011) for its program to get an idea:

http://www.icphs2011.hk/ICPHS_CongressProgramme.htm

Michelle McBride in The Man who Came to Dinner

Michelle McBride will be in the Wilbraham United Players production of The Man Who Came to Dinner in early November. For more information go here.

Position at Univ. of Wisconsin

POSITION:

The English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire seeks to hire a tenure-track faculty member in Linguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin August 24, 2015 (pending budgetary approval). 

QUALIFICATIONS:

Earned doctorate in linguistics, English, or related field. Candidates who are ABD will be considered; however, all requirements for the doctoral degree must be completed by August 24, 2015. The dissertation must focus on a linguistic topic. In addition, the candidate must show evidence of strong scholarship or scholarly potential. Other strong assets include evidence of:

·      Solid foundation in multiple areas of linguistics.

·      Demonstrated excellence in teaching introductory linguistics.·      Demonstrated commitment to teaching first-year writing within an English Department;

·      Demonstrated commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusiveness. 

Additionally, we seek candidates who value liberal education and want to join us as we develop and implement an innovative outcomes-based Liberal Education Core program in fall 2016. 

RESPONSIBILITIES:

The successful candidate will teach courses in linguistics and writing as assigned in the English Department. All department members teach first-year writing (the Blugold Seminar in Critical Reading and Writing http://www.uwec.edu/blugoldseminar/index.htm) every semester. The successful candidate will regularly teach Introductory English Linguistics (Engl 221) and other linguistics courses as well. The typical semester load is 3 courses, equivalent to 11-12 credits. In addition, all department members participate in research and scholarly activities; provide academic advising to students; participate in department, college, and university committee work; and engage in other kinds of service to the university and community. 

DEPARTMENT:

The English Department is a thriving, diverse academic community dedicated to excellence in teaching and learning. The department offers rigorous emphases in creative writing; linguistics; education; critical studies in literatures, cultures, and film; and rhetorics of science, technology, and culture to English majors and minors. There is also a small yet vital Masters program in English. Please see our website for more information: http://www.uwec.edu/english/ 

UNIVERSITY & EAU CLAIRE COMMUNITY: 

The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire promotes diversity and inclusiveness, stewardship and sustainability, leadership and innovation.  With approximately 11,500 students and 1,400 faculty and administrative/professional staff, UW-Eau Claire is consistently rated as one of the top public regional universities in the Midwest and enjoys a national reputation for excellence in liberal education, faculty-undergraduate research, and study abroad. As the UW System's only Center of Excellence for faculty and undergraduate research, faculty and students regularly work side-by-side on original research. 

Often described as Wisconsin's most beautiful campus, UW-Eau Claire's campus spans the banks of the Chippewa River in the heart of Eau Claire, western Wisconsin's largest city. Eau Claire and the surrounding countryside have many scenic rivers, lakes, parks, bike trails and wooded areas where students and community members enjoy seasonal sports, camping, canoeing, and a variety of other recreational activities. 

Eau Claire is a safe, friendly, and affordable community of 65,000 with employment opportunities for family members, outstanding schools for children, and vibrant local food and arts cultures. Eau Claire is 90 miles from Minneapolis-St. Paul, which additionally offers world class theater, symphony and chamber orchestras, opera, and major league sports.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE: 

Applications are submitted electronically: http://www.uwec.edu/Employment/EnglishLinguisticsF-724.htm   

Please submit the following in PDF format:

·      letter of application,

·      curriculum vita,

·      statement of teaching philosophy,

·      graduate school transcripts (official or unofficial),

·      writing sample (15-25 pages),

·      three letters of recommendation that you arrange to have directly sent to Ms. Vickie Schafer, lazarvr@uwec.edu. 

Your application will not be considered complete until all required documents are received and all required fields are completed.  If you have application questions, please email Dr. Erica Benson, Interim Chair of English, at bensonej@uwec.edu.

To ensure priority consideration, completed applications must be received by Friday, October 24, 2014. However, screening may continue until position is filled. The university reserves the right to contact additional references with notice given to the candidates at an appropriate time in the process. Under Wisconsin law, applicants’ names are subject to public release unless confidentiality has been requested in writing, and names of all finalists must be released. A criminal background check is required prior to employment. 

UMass at IATL 30

The Thirtieth annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics meets at Ben Gurion University of the Negev on October 20 and 21. Rajesh Bhatt is an invited speaker; he’ll be presenting a talk entitled “Polar Questions and Disjunction: clues from Hindi-Urdu `kyaa’. UMass alumna Aynat Rubinstein will also be giving a talk, with Edit Doron, entitled “Varieties of alternative unconditionals.” For more information, go here.

First Symposium on Intonation and Tone in the Spanish speaking World

Meghan Armstrong writes:

We hope you can join us for the 1st Symposium on Intonation and Tone in the Spanish-speaking World (InToSpan) on October 10 and 11. 

Plenary talks:

Friday @ 9:45am: José Ignacio Hualde "Perception of Prosodic Prominence in Spanish"

Saturday @ 1:00pm: John Kingston "Otomanguean tones: Typology, Phonology and Phonetics"

You can find more information, including the conference program, on our webpage: http://intospan2014.weebly.com

The Symposium will take place in N400 of the Integrative Learning Center. We hope you can join us!

Roeper talks at LARC on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

Tom Roeper will speak in this week's LARC meeting at 11:30 on Friday in N451.  The title of his presentation is:

"Update Common Ground, Presupposition Failure, Question-under-discussion, and but-implicatures: How does the child get it all co-ordinated"

All are welcome! 

National Linguistics Outreach Committee Co-chaired by Barbara Pearson

Barbara Pearson writes:

Joan Maling, of NSF and LSA, and I have put together a "Linguistics for Everyone" group with members from around the country who have complementary expertise in linguistic outreach activities.  Our goal is to inspire and provide practical advice to colleagues to find venues and create their own outreach activities.

Group members are

Cecile McKee, University of Arizona,

Colin Phillips, University of Maryland, and

Laura Wagner of Ohio State University

--and their colleagues and students.

We have lined up two venues for this academic year where the members of the group will disseminate their successful models to other linguists.  At third meeting, as part of  a general science conference with an established outreach component, we will bring our activities directly to the general public.

--A poster symposium at BUCLD (sessions on November 7 and 8) in Boston

--A session at the LSA (January 9) in Portland, LFE: Tools and Tips for Do-It-Yourselfers (a panel, demos, and associated poster session and "office hours")

--A booth at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Family Science Days (Feb 14 and 15) in San Jose

--"Language for Everyone," hands-on activities to engage attendees from age 5 to 95.

Student participation will be supported by an NSF grant supplement administered by the University of Maryland. Over the course of the project, we will collect materials for the LSA Resource Hub.

Poole at MIT Ling-Lunch on Thursday

Ethan Poole is giving a talk at MIT's Ling-Lunch on Thursday, 9 October entitled "Deconstructing quirky subjects."

Oiry at RALFe

Magda Oiry will be giving a talk, “French embedded clefts,” at the Rencontres d’Automne de Linguistique formelle in Paris on Friday, October 1. (For more information about the conference, go here.) An abstract of her talk follows.

I am arguing for the copula analysis in the cleft construction presented below produced by speakers of Spoken French:

1.     Paul imagine que c’est quoi que Marie a acheté?                  
        P. imagine that it-is what that Marie has bought
        ‘What does Paul believe Marie bought?’

I show that the embedded cleft is not a case of partial movement because the wh-word is base generated and the relative clause restricts its denotation. We have a real cleft in (1) which has exhaustivity and uniqueness requirements, differing in that respect from embedded wh-in situ. I will present that the construction exhibits intervention effects parallel to the ones observed with wh-in situ, and also triggers subjunctive 'spreading', raising the question of the relation between the copula and the relative clause. Finally, data from French native speakers on a forced two-choice task I will present, demonstrate that the presupposition denoted by the cleft, because embedded under a verb, can be suspended.

Position at San Francisco State University

The Linguistics Program in the English Department at SFSU seeks a generalist in theoretical linguistics with a specialization in syntax and preferably, computational linguistics. The position is tenure-track at the assistant professor level. 

Qualifications 

Ph.D. in Linguistics, or assurance that degree work will be completed by August 1, 2015.

Areas of Specialization and Teaching Range 

Candidates should be able/willing to teach graduate seminars in syntax and ideally, corpus linguistics, as well as undergraduate courses in phonology/morphology, syntax, and introductory linguistics.  Ideal candidates could develop courses in computational linguistics/NLP.  Additionally, ideal candidates will demonstrate:

·         Teaching ability at the undergraduate level minimally.

·         Evidence of outstanding research (or research potential).

·         Experience (or appreciation for) working with a diverse student population, including international students, first generation college students, and students from disciplines other than linguistics, namely TESOL and English Education.

Aside from teaching and research, duties will include supervising MA theses, and general advising of graduate/undergraduate linguistics students.  The teaching load at SFSU is 3/3.  SFSU is an equal opportunity employer.

Rank and Salary

Assistant Professor; salary competitive, commensurate with qualifications.  SFSU, as part of the California State University system, provides generous health, retirement, and other benefits, including domestic partner benefits. 

The Department 

The Department of English offers four undergraduate degrees, four graduate degrees, and three certificates.  For further information, please see our website:  http://english.sfsu.edu. 

The University

San Francisco State University, a member of the California State University system, serves a diverse student body of 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The mission of the University is to promote scholarship, intellectual accomplishment, excellence in instruction, freedom, and human diversity. SFSU’s faculty must excel in teaching and demonstrate professional achievement and growth through continued research, publications, and/or creative activities.   The University is an Equal Opportunity employer with a strong commitment to diversity and encourages applications from women, members of all ethnic groups, veterans, and people with disabilities.   

To Apply 

Deadline:  November 12, 2014. 

Submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, 3 recent letters of recommendation, and 2 samples of scholarly work to: Dr. Sugie Goen-Salter, SFSU Chair, Department of English Language and Literature (Attn: Linguistics Search Committee), recruite@sfsu.edu. Pdf. files are preferred.

Initial interviews of top candidates will take place at the Linguistic Society Conference in Portland, Oregon, January 8-11, 2015.

SNEWS website is up

Jon Ander Media writes:

The website for SNEWS 2014 is up. You  can access it here.

As a short reminder, SNEWS is an annual workshop for graduate students  in Linguistics to present their work in an informal setting. Topics of  presentation generally fall within semantics/pragmatics and any related topics (experimental and psycholinguistic investigations,  syntax/semantic interface, etc.). It's a friendly venue for graduate  students (although faculty are welcome to attend!) and it's meant to  encourage the development and exchange of ideas as well as for to meet  people from the neighboring universities.

Call for Papers: Formal Semantics meets Cognitive Semantics

Workshop: Formal Semantics Meets Cognitive Semantics
January 22-23, 2015, Nijmegen

Semantics is a divided discipline. On one side we have Formal Semantics, which has its roots in logic and analytical philosophy (Frege, Montague). Meaning here is viewed as a relation between language and external reality, formalized in terms of reference, truth, possible worlds, etc. On the other side we have Cognitive Semantics, a central part of the Cognitive Linguistics movement, which grew out of dissatisfaction with formal linguistics (in particular, formal semantics and generative syntax) in the seventies (Fauconnier, Lakoff, Talmy). In this framework meaning is primarily a relation between language and the mind, described in terms of mental spaces, conceptual schemata, frames, etc.

Today, the split between the two is as wide as ever. Both are evidently thriving disciplines, but in almost complete isolation from each other. Given the apparent overlap in subject matter - natural language meaning - this lack of interaction is surprising.

In this workshop we want to bring together researchers from both sides who contribute to bridging the gap in some way.

More specifically, we solicit submissions dealing with, for instance,

* Formal semantic approaches to phenomena typically reserved for cognitive linguistics, such as metaphor, polysemy, perspective, narrativity -- especially when they explicitly engage with existing cognitive semantic approaches.

* Cognitive semantic approaches to phenomena typically associated with formal semantics, such as anaphora, quantification or intensional operators -- especially when they explicitly engage with existing formal semantic approaches.

* Hybrid frameworks that combine aspects of both, such as cognitive interpretations of Discourse Representation Theory, or Gärdenfors' Conceptual Semantics.

* Philosophical, foundational and/or historical investigations of the opposition between formal and cognitive semantics.

INVITED SPEAKERS

-Arie Verhagen (Leiden)

- Henk Zeevat (Amsterdam)

- Nicholas Asher (Toulouse) (to be confirmed)

SUBMISSION

We invite submissions of anonymous two-page abstracts (including references etc.) via Easychair. Go to https://sites.google.com/site/formcogsem/

LOCATION

Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

DATES

- Workshop: Thu, January 22, 2015 -- Fri, January 23, 2015

- Deadline for abstract submission: Friday, November 21, 2014- Notification: December 1, 2014

ORGANIZATION

- Lotte Hogeweg (Nijmegen): l.hogeweg@let.ru.nl

- Emar Maier (Groningen): emar.maier@gmail.com

Introduction to Quechua

The Spanish & Portuguese program will offer a new Quechua language class for Spring 2015:

Introduction to Quechua Language and Culture

Instructor: Carlos Molina-Vital

SPAN 396 QCH

MWF 10:10-11:00

Prerequisite: Span 240 or Instructor's permission

Contact cmolinavita@spanport.umass.edu for more information. 

Tom Roeper and Bart Hollanbrandse at Drongo

Tom Roeper writes:

Maaike Verripps (former UMass visitor) every year runs a large Multilingualismfestival in the Amsterdam Public library with a hundred booths and activities. The whole thing attracts 8,000 people. (You can see the description if you google Drongo).

Bart and I decided to do something on recursion — using materials on an iPad (with help from Jon Nelson in Spanish) —- moveable animals made act-out possible.  But we had a lot of trouble getting the program, the ipads, our protocols organized. We did much of it the hour before it started.

Much of what transpired was pretty foggy to me since it was in Dutch, but we slowly got 20 kids to participate.  At the end, with a band and stand-up bilingual comedian, a trio of people started talking and Bart said they asked the audience of 300 presenters if anyone understood the title "Can you put somethinginside itself,” and only 3 people raised their hands (one was Bart). A lot of laughter ensued. Then after a long speech I did not understand, they called us to the stage and said we had won the prize for the best hands-on activity and we are invited to do a two week experiment at the big Science Museumin Amsterdam!

Kind of Amazing — and a good thing for formal linguistics and reaching out to the public.

You can see more here.

Roeper in Berlin

On Sept 29-30, Tom Roeper attended a Workshop on Adversitives in Acquisition at ZAS inBerlin and gave a talk entitled:

"Update Common Ground, Presupposition Failure, Question-under-discussion, and but-implicatures: How does a child get it all co-ordinated?"

PRG on Monday

Ivy Hauser and Coral Hughto write:

PRG will be held tomorrow night at 7:30pm.  We will meet at Presley's place in Northampton.  Ivy will be discussing a couple papers she has read in pursuit of a GP topic and talking about potential ideas.  As always, dinner is provided!

Call for papers: Computational Phonology Workshop

The implications of computation and learnability for phonological theory

Crystallizing a feeling widespread in the field, Mark van Oostendorp (2013) writes: ''It is fair to say that we know much more about sound patterns in human language than people did at the beginning of the 20th Century. At the same time, many phonologists seem to feel that we have not yet reached the standards of some of the ‘hard’ sciences.'' An obstacle to progress seems to be the fact that competing phonological theories are underdetermined by sheer typological and linguistic data. Moving beyond descriptive adequacy, Alan Prince thus proposes that ''rational arguments about two theories’ comparative success […] depend on a broad assessment of their properties.'' Among the formal properties of a phonological theory which are crucial for its comparative assessment are its computability and learnability properties. 

This workshop thus aims at investigating the implications of computation and learnability for phonological theory. The issues addressed include (but are not limited to): the computability/intractability of phonological grammars and the debate among derivational, representational, and constraint-based frameworks; learnability guarantees and the debate between competing modes of constraint interaction; the characterization of phonological patterns within the sub-regular hierarchy and the expressive power of phonological formalisms; the learnability filter and its implications for the evaluation of the typologies predicted by competing phonological theories; methods for constraint induction and the phonetic grounding of the phonological constraints; statistical methods, probabilistic grammars and the divide between categorical and gradient models of phonological competence; the learnability of phonological processes conditioned by prosodic domains and its implications for the syntax/phonology interface. The workshop adopts an inclusive perspective, open to any computational approach and any phonological framework. 

Invited speakers:

Paul Boersma (University of Amsterdam)

Bruce Tesar (Rutgers University)

Important dates:

abstract submission deadline: December 1st, 2014

notification of acceptance: February 15th, 2015

workshop date: April 18th, 2015

Submission:

We invite abstracts for a 20 minute oral presentation followed by a 10 minute discussion. 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 workshop is English. Abstracts should be submitted through the GLOW 38 Easychair page (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glow38), specifying that the submission should be considered for the workshop.

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/2015glow/home

Organizers:

Joaquim Brandao de Carvalho,

Mohamed Lahrouchi,

Giorgio Magri,

Michela Russo

Assistant Professor Position at McGill

The Department of Linguistics, McGill University, invites applications for a tenure-track position in phonetics and related areas of experimental linguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective August 1, 2015. Applicants should have a research agenda that connects to the existing strengths of the Department. General qualifications are a PhD in linguistics or a related field and demonstrated excellence in research and teaching in the area(s) of specialization. Duties will include undergraduate and graduate teaching, graduate research guidance and administrative responsibilities. 

Deadline for applications: November 7, 2014.  

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. 

McGill University is committed to diversity and equity in employment. It welcomes applications from: women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, persons of minority sexual orientation or gender identity, visible minorities, and others who may contribute to diversification. 

Interested candidates should submit an application consisting of a letter of introduction, a curriculum vitae, a research statement, a teaching statement, samples of research and teaching evaluations. Applicants should also arrange for three referees to submit letters of reference. The application and the letters of reference must be uploaded directly at https://academicjobsonline.org (position ID:McGill Linguistics ASSTPROF #4520).  To ensure full consideration, all materials should be submitted by November 7, 2014.  

Hot Chocolate Run

Anisa Schardl writes:

For the past 7 years, linguists have participated in the annual Hot Chocolate Run.  Let's make it 8!

The Hot Chocolate Run is a 3K walk or 5K race or 5K fun run, followed by consumption of hot chocolate.  You pay money to register, and this money goes to Safe Passage, an organization that helps domestic violence survivors in the area.  And you get a commemorative mug to keep.

HCR website: http://www.hotchocolaterun.com/

Safe Passage website: http://safepass.org/

This year's HCR is on Sunday morning, December 7th.  They are expecting registration to sell out in only about 6 weeks this year, so we'd better get on it!

Here's what you do: Go to the website and register.  You have to say whether you're walking or running, but you can change your mind later, so don't worry too much about that.  When you register, you are welcome to join the team Linguists & Friends.  Then, email me and tell me that you're participating, and I can arrange for us to meet up.

Here's the registration site: http://www.hotchocolaterun.com/register/

If you can't make it, but you still want to support Safe Passage, feel free to sponsor one of us!  You can just go to this website and search by name or by team.  (Our team is "Linguists & Friends”.) https://www.pledgereg.com/

Call for Papers: Workshop on (Co)Distributivity

Workshop on (Co-)Distributivity 2015 

26-27 February 2015

CNRS Pouchet, Salle de conférences

59 rue Pouchet, 75017 Paris

Workshop organised by the project (Co-)distributivity of the Fédération Typologie et universaux du langage (CNRS FR 2559)

Invited speakers :
Donka Farkas (UC Santa Cruz)

Viola Schmitt (Wien)

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: codistr@pouchet.cnrs.fr 

Abstract Submission Deadline : 7 Dec 2014

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: 

Website : http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/Journee-Co-Distributivite-2015.html

E-mail : codistr@pouchet.cnrs.fr

Abstract Submission Deadline : 7 Dec 2014 

Notification of Acceptance : 20 Dec 2014 

Workshop : Thur 26 - Fri 27 February 2015

Post Doc at the University of Göttingen

At the Courant Research Centre “Text Structures” at the University of Göttingen a full post-doc position is available starting from *Dec. 01,  2014* or as soon as possible within the junior research group “Theoretical Linguistics". The salary is in accordance with the German TV-L 13 regulations. The contract shall expire on *Sept. 30, 2016*. 

The successful applicant has a PhD in linguistics, research experience including publications in syntax/semantics/pragmatics and in particular research interest in at least one of the following fields: 

- the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of indefinite NPs, 

- the syntax, and semantics of conditionals, 

- the syntax and semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers, 

- information structure, 

- syntax and semantics of tense and aspect.  

The applicant will be expected to get involved in collaborative research projects at the University of Göttingen and at the Courant Research Centre “Text Structures” including interdisciplinary research. A research record in mathematical or in experimental linguistics are of advantage. Moreover, experience with computational linguistics, programming and statistics as well as proficiency in German constitute an advantage but are no strict requirements. 

The University of Göttingen attempts to increase the number of female researchers and therefore explicitly invites women to apply. Disabled candidates will be preferred in case of similar qualification. 
Applications in English or German should be submitted before *November 1, 2014* to:

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 

Courant Forschungszentrum “Textstrukturen” 

Edgar Onea / Julia Busse

Nikolausberger Weg 23 D-37073 Göttingen 

E-Mail: edgar.onea@zentr.uni-goettingen.de

Yesterday's Open House

John Kingston writes:

Yesterday's open house and house warming in the Linguistics Department's new space in the north wing of the fourth floor of the Integrative Learning Center was crowded with linguists and guests, adults and infants, current students and old. Dean Julie Hayes spoke to us about the new space, the Department's new endowment, and the future of our old space in South College. We lunched, had a poster session, slide show, and tour, including gazing out the window at the top of the stairs at the green roof, then spent a long time in N400 looking at photos of past and present members of the department, and finally wound up with stronger drink and appetizers. (The posters will remain up until they can be updated with newer evidence of the great linguistics we're doing. Reading them is a great way, too, to find out what your colleagues in other areas are doing.) A new game was even introduced, Gobblets.

I'd like to especially thank the students who helped hang posters, display slides, get the rooms shipshape to show off, bring the food and drink, and do everything else that made the day a success. They are:

Caroline Andrews

Sakshi Bhatia

Michael Clauss

Ivy Hauser

Leland Kusmer

Coral Hughto

Jyoti Iyer

Jon-Ander Mendia

Claire Moore-Cantwell

Amanda Rysling

Shayne Sloggett

Megan Somerday

Robert Staubs

UMass at CGSW

The Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop was hosted by York University over the weekend. In addition to Nick LaCara’s paper “Why is there no verb stranding in mainland Scandinavian,” UMass alumnus Andrew Weir presented the paper “The cartography of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in West Flemish” with Liliane Haegeman.

Cable's paper appears in Language

Seth Cable’s paper “Distributive Numerals and Distance Distributivity in Tlingit (and Beyond)” has appeared in the latest issue of Language.  Congratulations Seth!

NELS 45 program is out

MIT will host the forty-fifth meeting of the North East Linguistic Society October 31-November 2. The program for the conference is now available here. UMass is well represented:

Alumna Amy Rose Deal, now at UC, Santa Cruz, will give the paper “Properties of probes: Evidence from New Perce complementizer agreement."

Alumnus Shigeto Kawahara, with Aaron Braver, is giving the poster “Modeling incomplete neutralization: Paradigm Uniformity and a phonetics with weighted constraints."

Jason Overfelt is giving the poster “Cyclic Linearization and constraints on remnant movement."

Aleksei Nazarov is giving the poster “Non-maximal feet as reduction domains in Dutch."

Ethan Poole is giving the poster “Deconstructing quirky subjects."

Anisa Schardl is giving the poster “Partial movement in eh-questions: An analysis involving Q"

Andrew Weir presents the paper “Fragment answers in English: A PF-movement account."

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with many colleagues, presents the paper “Scalar implicatures vs. presuppositions: The view from Broca’s aphasia"

Seth Cable presents the poster “Semantics of graded tense in complement clauses: Evidence that future is not a tense."

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, presents the poster “Pseudo-relatives: Big but transparent."

Megan Somerday is presenting the paper “(Some) partial reduplication is full reduplication."

Alumna Karen Jesney is presenting the paper “Counterbled-Counterfeeding in Harmonic Grammar."

OPEN HOUSE THIS WEEKEND!

The department’s open house is this Saturday, September 27. The events start at 1 PM with a light lunch and opening remarks after which there is a tour of the Integrative Learning Center at 1:30. At 2-ish there is a poster session and slide show, followed by drinks and canapés. Events wrap up at 4:30.

The doors at the North Pleasant Street entrance to the Integrative Learning Center will be open at noon, and visitors are encouraged to find parking in north campus, as the Homecoming football game will tie up south campus. Lots 62 and 63 are close to the Integrative Learning Center, and can be found on the maps here.

Everyone is welcome: come see our new quarters and meet the faculty and students of the new linguistics department.

Psych Reading Group on Tuesday

Brian Dillon writes:

We'll be meeting at Amanda and Shayne's house on Tuesday 9/23, at 7pm, for our psych reading group meeting. Our goal is to have some discussions to prepare ourselves for Liina Pylkkänen's talk. In particular, we'll be discussing the book chapter, which Liina has sent us as suggested reading for any prep work we might do.

David Caplan at brown bag on Wednesday

David Caplan (Harvard Medical School) will be giving the cognitive brown bag on Wednesday, September 24, at noon in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.

Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension

This talk will review eleven models that have been proposed regarding the deficit(s) that produce syntactic comprehension disorders in people with aphasia due to stroke. These models will be evaluated in relation to existing data in the literature and unpublished data from 61 people with aphasia who were tested for the ability to understand 11 sentence types using self-paced listening and sentence picture matching.

SSRG meets on Wednesday

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will be meeting on Wednesday (September 24th) this week. We'll have discussion of Gajewski on analyticity (see also this handout), brainstorming of possible future topics, and general merriment. While discussion will be best if a number of people have looked at the paper linked above, feel free to come regardless. As always, food will be provided. We'll be meeting at the home of Jon Ander and Megan, in Northampton. 

Liina Pylkkanen speaks at Department Colloq

Liina Pylkkanen (NYU) will present the first department colloquium this Friday, September 29, at 3:30 in the seminar hub (ILC N400). Here’s the title and abstract:

Semantic Composition: A Brain’s Eye View

Though decades of research within formal semantics and in the psychology of concepts have characterized the nature of the complex semantic representations of natural language, this body of work has only recently begun to inform the brain science of semantic representation. In this talk I will bring together perspectives from theoretical linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology to discuss what is currently known about the brain basis of meaning composition. While differences in cognitive neuroscience techniques and experimental paradigms often result in more differences than similarities, a remarkable convergence arises from hemodynamic methods, magnetoencephalography (MEG) and neuropsychological data implicating the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) as a core region for the construction of complex meaning. My focus will be on MEG data, on the basis of which we have characterized the timing of LATL activity in comprehension as relatively early, peaking at 200-250ms after the onset of a composing word. Progress in our understanding of the computational contribution of this activity is only beginning to gain momentum, but I will summarize an initial body of results suggesting that, crucially, the LATL supports automatic, task-insensitive composition in both comprehension and production and that its contribution is clearly semantic, as opposed to syntactic in nature.

Bob Rothstein awarded Poland's Order of Merit

WHISC is pleased to report that Robert Rothstein was presented the Republic of Poland’s highest award given to people living outside of Poland -- The Order of Merit (pictured below) — at a ceremony last Monday, September 15, at the Chancellor’s residence. In addition to being an adjunct professor in Linguistics, Professor Rothstein directs the Slavic and East European Studies program and writes a column for the biweekly Boston newspaper Bialy Orzel. You can learn more here.

 

LaCara at CGSW

The 29th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop is taking place at the University of York on September 26-27. UMass is represented by Nicholas LaCara, who will be presenting his paper “Why there is no Verb Stranding in Scandinavian.” York University is also hosting a workshop entitled “The State of the Art in Comparative Syntax,” immediately before CGSW. For information about both meetings, go here.

Semantics/Pragmatics job at UC, Berkeley

The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has been authorized to make an appointment in semantics and pragmatics. This position will be at the rank of assistant professor (tenure-track) or associate professor (tenured). Salary will be commensurate with experience. Duties will include undergraduate and graduate advising and teaching (up to four courses per year, in semantics and other areas of linguistics), supervision of student research, and development of a successful and original research program. The PhD (or equivalent) is required by the start date of the appointment; all degree requirements other than the dissertation must be complete at the time of application.

Applicants must have a broad intellectual engagement in linguistics and a theoretically informed research specialization in semantics and pragmatics. Applicants must be able to teach formal model-theoretic semantics at all levels, including seminars and research mentoring, and should have research interests or skills that intersect with an allied field such as cognitive science, corpus or experimental linguistics, historical linguistics, language documentation, morphology, syntax, or typology.

Applications must include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, and copies of representative written work (up to 5 items may be submitted). Applications must contain evidence of teaching excellence or potential (either through separate documentation or through information in the cover letter, c.v., or recommendation letters). Applicants must arrange for 2-5 (preferably at least 3) letters of recommendation to be submitted through the online application system. All recommendation letters will be treated as confidential according to University of California policy and California state law. Please refer potential referees, including those who provide letters via a third party, to the UC Berkeley Confidentiality Policy (http://apo.berkeley.edu/evalltr.html).

Please submit all materials electronically at https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply/JPF00505. We encourage applicants to submit materials by November 14, 2014, when review of applications will begin; no application materials will be accepted after December 1, 2014. Select candidates will be interviewed at the LSA Annual Meeting in Portland, January 8-11, 2015; thereafter a few candidates will be invited for campus visits. Questions can be sent to Paula Floro (floro@berkeley.edu).

We are interested in candidates whose research, teaching, or service prepares them to contribute to UC Berkeley’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in higher education. We welcome applications from those who have had non-traditional career paths, have achieved excellence in careers outside academia, or have taken time off for family reasons. For information about relocation to Berkeley or the career needs of partners, please visit calcierge.berkeley.edu (or e-mail calcierge@berkeley.edu).

Call for papers: BLS

The 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS41) will take place Saturday and Sunday, February 7-8, 2014, on the UC Berkeley campus. BLS41 welcomes submissions of abstracts that make rigorous use of linguistic data from a variety of sources and in a variety of subdisciplines, both descriptive and theoretical.

General Session

The general session welcomes papers from phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics.

Jessica Coon, Assistant Professor, McGill University

William Croft, Professor of Linguistics, University of New Mexico

Jeff Mielke, Associate Professor, North Carolina State University

Christopher Potts, Associate Professor, Standford University

Special Session: Fieldwork Methodology

The special session will examine issues in fieldwork methodology. We welcome papers focusing on innovative fieldwork methods, as well as descriptions and/or theoretical work resulting from innovative fieldwork methods.

Shobhana Chelliah, Professor of Linguistics, University of North Texas

Kofi Yakpo, Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract SubmissionGuidelines

Authors may maximally submit one single-authored and one co-authored abstract. Abstracts, including title, data, and examples, must fit onto one page with 1” margins and 12pt font. References may be included on a second page. Omit names or phrasing that would otherwise reveal author identity. Surname-year citations of one’s own work are acceptable.All abstracts must be submitted electronically as a .pdf file to EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bls41.There you can either set up a new account or log in as an author. Click the New Submission linkin the toolbar at the top and follow the instructions on the page. Please upload your abstract in pdf 1format, observing length requirements stated above. In the keywords field, please indicate at least one topic corresponding to the linguistic subfield(s) of greatest relevance to your abstract. All submissions will be anonymized for review.All abstracts are due by Friday, October 31, 2014 at 11:59pm. Email correspondence concerning abstract submissions to bls submissions@berkeley.edu. Address general correspondences to bls@berkeley.edu.

Yangsook's GLOW talk now online

Yangsook Park gave a talk last April at GLOW 37 on Korean “caki” which those who where unable to view, now can. It’s here: http://www.glow37.org/videos/park/

Yu in Phonology

“The word-level prosody in Samoan,” has just appeared in Phonology. Get a peek here. One of its authors is our own Kristine Yu.

UMass at Phonology 2014

MIT is hosting this weekend the annual Phonology meeting. UMass is well represented:

Michael Becker (UMass Alumnus, now at Stony Brook University) is presenting a tutorial on Experigen.

Robert Staubs is presenting the talk “Learning bias in stress windows: frequency and attestation" 

Claire Moore-Cantwell and Lisa Sanders are presenting the talk “Two types of implicit knowledge of probabilistic phonotactics"

Alumna Gillian Gallagher, now at NYU, is presenting a plenary talk: “Asymmetries in the representation of categorical phonotactics"

Aleksei Nazarov is presenting the talk “Reduction Domains in Dutch: recursive feet in action."

Alumna Maria Gouskova, now at NYU, is presenting the talk “Generalization as sub lexical phonotactics: A nonce study of Russian allomorphy,” with Sofya Kasyanenko.

Alumnus Shigeto Kawahara, now at Keio University, is presenting the poster “Modeling Incomplete Neutralization: Paradigm Uniformity and a Phonetics with Weighted Constraints,” with Aaron Braver. He presents a second poster with Aaron Braver and Natalie Dresher entitled “Why are lexical length contrasts binary? Evidence from emphasis-driven vowel lengthening in English."

Ivy Hauser, Megan Somerday and Coral Hoghto are presenting the poster “Faith-UO: Analyzing Opacity in Harmonic Serialism."

Alumnus Jonah Katz, now at West Virginia University, is presenting the poster “Continuity lenition."

Megan Somerday is also presenting a solo poster: “(Some) partial reduplication is full reduplication."

Position at University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee is seeking an Assistant Professor of Language/Applied Linguistics with expertise in sociolinguistics who can teach courses in discourse analysis, pragmatics, American English, and other areas within English language studies.  We are a “Doctoral/Research Extensive” institution, with a departmental endowment that supports research. The department offers the BA, MA, MFA, and PhD. Professors teach a 2/2 load, distributed across undergraduate and graduate courses. The Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee is seeking candidates who have the ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the diversity and intercultural goals of the University.  Applicants should submit a letter of application and a CV by October 1, 2014, via http://apply.interfolio.com/25740 . Candidates selected for the next stage of review will be contacted to send additional materials.

OPEN HOUSE!

The department is hosting an open house to show off its new digs (and residents). It’ll start at 1:00 on Saturday, September 27, two weeks from yesterday. We’ll meet in the department, which is on the fourth floor of the Integrative Learning Center, 650 North Pleasant Street. (Maps can be found here.) The event kicks off with a light lunch and remarks by the Dean of HFA, Julie Hayes, as well as the department head, John Kingston. This is followed by a tour, a Poster session and finally canapés and liquid refreshment. The event ends at 4.

Come! Bring friends, family, linguists, and the curious! 

UMAFLAB meets tomorrow

Seth Cable writes:

I’m writing to announce the first, organizational meeting UMAFLAB (UMass Funny Languages Breakfast), which will take place next Monday 9/15 at 9:15 AM in ILC 451. At this meeting, we’ll simply set a schedule for the semester; please definitely attend if there’s anything you’d be interested in discussing!

To remind you all again of what UMAFLAB is all about, 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.

If this sounds at all interesting to you, please come to the first meeting next Monday (9/15). If you would like to come, but have a conflict with the day or time, please also be sure to let me know!

PRG meeting tomorrow

Ivy Hauser writes:

The first PRG meeting of this semester will be this coming Monday 9/15 at 7:30pm.  Claire has volunteered to host us at her place (132 Middle St. Unit 1 in Hadley).  Be in touch with me or Coral if you are in need of a ride.  There will be dinner provided. On the agenda is planning for the semester at PRG and planning for some computational work with Presley.   She says the following:

"Some of you attended a meeting over the summer about developing tools for OT work in Python, and we have a GitHub account ready for code. I'm going to start working on this stuff, but first we need a clear plan, so I want to do some brainstorming and idea choosing at PRG. So I have a special request - if you did go to that meeting, please revive any notes you took and help me guide the discussion! If you can't make it, just send them to me."

Anca Sevcenco at LARC on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

Anca Sevcenco will present "Remarks on the acquisition of Romanian subject and object relatives" in this week’s LARC meeting at 11:30 on Friday in N451. Before Anca's presentation, we'll gather at 10:30 for an informal discussion session on the syntax and acquisition of relative clauses.

All are welcome!

WHISC

The department newsletter is named after the department’s former home: South College. Perhaps WHISC has become enough name-like to no longer hit our readers’ ears as “What’s Happening in South College,” but to the extent that it does, its suitability for our masthead has waned. 

We seek a new name. Our hardworking reporters are hired for their lack of imagination, and WHISC’s office drones are sadly lacking in this virtue as well. Months of in-house brainstorming have yielded only “This Week in Preview” and “This Week In Local Linguistics,” neither sufficiently inventive. We therefore turn to our readers for help.

Please send us your suggestions. We are especially desirous of short, euphonious names. It must be able to be rendered in the Roman alphabet. We will award a prize to the best entry.

Send your suggestions to Kyle Johnson (kbj@linguist.umass.edu) by October 10.

SNEWS

Jon Ander Mendia writes:

I'm pleased to announce that this year SNEWS, the South New England  Workshop on Semantics, will take place at UMass, on the 15th of  November (Saturday, room tba). SNEWS is an annual workshop for  graduate students in Linguistics to present their work and receive  feedback in an informal setting. Topics of presentations generally  fall into the categories of semantics, pragmatics,  semantics/pragmatics interface, experimental and psycholinguistic  investigations of semantic/pragmatic phenomena, acquisition, etc.

The workshop is meant to encourage the development and exchange of  ideas through friendly interaction between students and faculty from  different universities in the area. It is also a great opportunity to  know other young semanticists and linguists in general with similar  interests. Universities that have participated in the past include  UConn, UMass, Harvard, MIT, Brown, and Yale.

At SNEWS only graduate students are allowed to present, although  faculty members are welcome to attend. Moreover, in order to encourage  participation and capitalize on the friendly and informal environment  of the workshop, there is no call for papers: students only need to  submit the title for their talks before October 31st. Each talk will  be 20' plus 10' for questions. In principle, it is possible to  accommodate as much as 2-3 participants from each university, but this is subject to change until I have heard back from all the universities and have a more educated estimation of the number of  interested participants.

More announcements and information will be available soon at the  website (you can check the old one here). If you are currently working on a semantic/pragmatics project, I  strongly encourage you to participate! You only need to let me know  what the title of your talk will be. Please, feel free to ask me any  further questions.

Dillon is at the Frontiers in Psychology

A paper by Brian Dillon and colleagues has appeared in Frontiers in Psychology. It examines the memory retrieval operations employed in sentence comprehension by studying how sentences involving the Mandarin reflexive “ziji” are processed on-line. The paper is called “The structure-sensitivity of memory access: evidence from Mandarin Chinese,” and you can view an abstract here.

Call for Papers: Indigenous Languages and Experimental Linguistics

Suzi Lima writes:

Cilene Rodrigues (PUC-Rio) and I are organizing a symposium at Abralin in February 2015 (http://ixcongresso.abralin.com.br). Abralin is the Brazilian equivalent of the LSA, and this year it will take place in Belem, in the north of Brazil. Our symposium is called "Línguas Indígenas e Linguística Experimental" (Indigenous Languages and Experimental Linguistics). As this is an international conference, English will be one of the languages of our symposium.

 

Abstract can be submitted online at the following address: 

 

http://ixcongresso.abralin.com.br/login/ 

 

You will find our symposium under "Eixo Temático: Psicolinguística," then you can select our "simpósio". 

 

The deadline for submitting abstracts is November 16, 2014. The conference will take place from February 25 to 28, 2015. Please contact me should you have any questions.

PostDoc at University of Nantes

Applications are invited for a post-doc position in theoretical linguistics (syntax/semantics/pragmatics interfaces) and psycholinguistics (heritage language acquisition and knowledge), at the University of Nantes, France.
 
The position is funded by the FP7 (the European Union’s 7th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development) collaborative research project AThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience) on multilingualism. The project involves 16 institutions located in 8 European countries and runs from March 2014 until March 2019. https://vre.leidenuniv.nl/vre/atheme/public/.
 
The research fellow will join the Nantes Linguistics Lab (LLING) to work on AThEME’s WP3 Heritage languages & language users in the EU, coordinated by Hamida Demirdache (LLING) & Janet Grijzenhout (Baby Speech Laboratory (BSL), University of Konstanz).
 
The goal of our project is to experimentally investigate Heritage Language (HL) knowledge and acquisition at the morpho-syntax/semantics interface.
The post-doctoral researcher will be in charge of conducting an experimental study targeting 2nd generation (adolescent) HL users of Arabic from the Nantes area, to test comprehension (vs. production) of negative sensitive items in Arabic.
 
The successful candidate will have an expertise in both theoretical and experimental syntax/semantics; in particular, of experimental methodologies to probe language comprehension and elicit production data in controlled discourse contexts. Primary duties include working with the coordinators and members of the lab to design, conduct, and write up the experiments associated with WP3. Knowledge of Arabic is an asset, but is not required. Individuals who are prepared to take a lead role in developing experimental research at the syntax/semantics interface are especially encouraged to apply. The position has a term of appointment of 2 years with a possible renewal.
 
QUALIFICATIONS:  A Ph.D in linguistics, psycholinguistics or a related field is required.
 
TO APPLY: A cover letter explaining qualifications for the position, a CV, a research statement, and one or more representative publications or other writings should be sent to the application email address below. Please also arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to that address. Review of material will begin on September 1, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. The (flexible) start date of the postdoctoral position is January 31, 2015.
 
 Application Email: hlpostdoclling@gmail.com

Workshop on Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships this Thursday

The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for students in the humanities and social sciences offers up to $38,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.  The Graduate School Office of Professional Development is hosting a panel session and optional proposal writing workshop to help students take control of the application process and develop a competitive application.
 
Panelists include:

·        Dr. Nick Bromell, Professor of English, who has served on fellowship faculty review panels
·        Dr. Emiliano Ricciardi, Assistant Professor in Music History and recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
·        Heidi Bauer-Clapp, Coordinator of Grants and Fellowships, Office of Professional Development
·        Kathleen Baldwin, Coordinator of Graduate Writing, Office of Professional Development
·        Lauren Goodman, Graduate Writing Consultant, Office of Professional Development
 
The optional workshop (1:30-2:30 pm) will focus on developing the proposal portion of the application. Participants will have the opportunity to receive peer feedback on a proposal draft, which could include anything from the full five-page proposal to a list of bullet-points to address in the proposal. To participate in the writing workshop, bring a hard-copy of the proposal draft on Sept. 11th.
 
Fellowship applications are due October 22nd.  For more information see their website:

https://www.acls.org/programs/dcf/
 
Sessions later this month will target fellowships from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Ford Foundation – stay tuned!

LARC meets on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

I'm pleased to announce that this semester's first LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) meeting will be held next Friday, Sept 12, at 11:30 in room N451, ILC.  

All are welcome to attend. We'll use the first meeting to make introductions and plan a presentation schedule for future meetings. If you're interested in presenting this semester but can't make it next Friday, let me or Tom R. know.

This is the last email that will go out to the ling-dept email.  To subscribe to the ling-acquisition mailing list, go here:

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

S Reading Group

Leland Kusmer writes:

It's time to kick off this year's Syntax/Semantics Reading Group (SRG)! (Or maybe that should be SSRG?)

SRG is an informal meeting of S-siders to talk about the field, practice presentations, talk over preliminary projects, and more. We usually meet about every other week and rotate between hosts in Northampton. The GLSA generously provides dinner.

I'd like to have our first meeting next week, and then roughly every other week after that. I've set up a Doodle poll to figure out what nights of the week might work on an on-going basis.

http://doodle.com/54mkw2pyd7uzidkp

Also, I'm looking to establish a roster of potential hosts for SRG. If you're interested in hosting even once this semester, please let me know. Hosts get to pick the food for the evening!

Psycho Workshop meets this Thursday

The first meeting of the Psycho Workshop will be Thursday, September 11, in ILC N451.

Kristine Yu in JASA

Kristine Yu’s  article, "The role of creaky voice in Cantonese tonal perception)," has been published online in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Vol.136, No.3). The article can be accessed through the issue's table of contents here.

Congratulations Kristine!

Call for papers: GALANA 6

Abstract submissions are welcomed for the 6th bi­annual conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition ­- North America (GALANA 6). GALANA 6 will take place on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, MD on February 19­-21, 2015. This conference aims to provide an outlet for cutting edge work on language acquisition, relating results in first and second language acquisition to detailed hypotheses about developing grammatical representations, the mechanisms by which these representations are acquired, and the information processing mechanisms through which these representations are engaged in real time language use by first and second language learners. Invited speakers include Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers) and Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh, Bilingualism Matters). For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

In addition to the general session, there will be a special session entitled “Learning in generative grammar: 50 years since the Evaluation Metric”. It has been 50 years since the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which first introduced the idea of an evaluation metric as a way for learners to choose between alternative grammars that were compatible with their exposure. In the intervening years, conceptions of Universal Grammar (UG) have changed, and our understanding of children's grammatical knowledge at various ages has similarly advanced, but theories of how children use UG to interpret the data and how they use the data to select a grammar from UG have not been at center stage. In recent years, however, there has been a steady increase in work returning to this question, asking how different models (including rule learning, parameter setting, constraint ranking) of UG might help learners to use the input effectively to acquire a grammatical system. Invited speakers for this special session include Janet Fodor (CUNY Graduate Center), Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine), Bruce Tesar (Rutgers), and Charles Yang (UPenn). We also invite abstracts submissions for several additional talks that address the question of how a given grammatical formalism or set of grammatical principles helps to solve particular learnability problems in linguistics.

Abstract submissions should be anonymous and should be uploaded as .pdf attachments to the EasyChair site (not typed into the text box). Submissions should fit on one page with 1” margins and 12­ point font, with an extra page allowed for examples, tables, figures and references.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due: October 6th, 2014 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time.

Notifications by: November 21, 2014

IMPORTANT WEBSITES:

GALANA 6: https://sites.google.com/site/2015galana/

EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=galana6

Has Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, read John Ross's Dissertation?

the evidence.

Dissertation Research Grants

The Graduate School is now accepting Spring 2014 proposals for the Dissertation Research Grant program for doctoral students who have achieved candidacy. The program offers up to a maximum of $1,000 fordissertation research related expenses. Grants are awarded once per semester through a competitive proposal process. The submission deadline for fall semester is Tuesday, 14th October 2014. A subcommittee of the Graduate Council will review proposals and determine awards. Detailed information on the program including allowed and prohibited expenses, submission and eligibility requirements and process can be found here.

Commonwealth College Research Assistant Fellowships

Commonwealth Honors College students who are currently sophomores or juniors and have a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher are eligible to apply. These Fellowships are working fellowships that pay $9.00 per hour (in accordance with 1/1/15 increase in Mass. minimum wage) up to a maximum of $1,000 for students to work on a faculty member's research project. The program is designed to provide supplemental financial assistance, to give students an opportunity to gain experience in their academic field, and to help prepare them to undertake their own research.

Students must submit an application jointly with a faculty member.

For application guidelines and a link to the online application system (FGS), please go to the Commonwealth Honors College website or paste the direct link into your browser:

https://www.honors.umass.edu/scholarship/research-assistant-fellowships

Students must register and submit their essay online.  Since applications may not be revised online, students and their faculty sponsors must communicate regarding revisions before the student submits their essay.

Deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 7, 2014.

Commonwealth College grants

Grants of up to $1,000 are available to junior and senior Commonwealth Honors College students, with priority given to seniors working on honors thesis research.  Applicants must have a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher and must submit a six-page proposal outlining their project accompanied by an endorsement from their faculty sponsor. Every recipient is asked to present his or her work at the statewide Undergraduate Research Conference in spring
2015. These grants of up to $1,000 are for direct costs only and do not provide a stipend or wage.

For application guidelines and a link to the online application system
(FGS), please go to the Commonwealth Honors College website or paste the
direct link into your browser:

https://www.honors.umass.edu/scholarship/honors-research-grants

Students must work with their faculty sponsor on their proposal and submit the completed proposal online.  Proposals may not be revised online, therefore, students and their faculty sponsors must communicate regarding revisions before the student submits the proposal.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 7, 2014.

CEU fellowship applications

The CEU Institute for Advanced Study (CEU IAS) is pleased to invite applications for its fellowships for the academic year 2015/2016. CEU IAS fellows spend 6-10 months in Budapest and pursue their own research in the lively intellectual community of the other fellows, the university and the city of Budapest. CEU IAS Fellowships are highly competitive and will be awarded on the basis of scholarly excellence.

Calls are open for the fellowships listed below. You may apply for all or any of the fellowships at the same time but the application process and the requirements are not the same.

SENIOR AND JUNIOR CORE FELLOWSHIPS- about 15 awarded each year

HUMANITIES INITIATIVE JUNIOR FELLOWSHIPS- 2 awarded each year

THYSSEN@CEU IAS FELLOWSHIPS - 2 awarded each year

Application deadline for all three is October 19, 2014.

More information can be found here.

Call for papers: WSCLA

We the WSCLA planning committee are pleased to announce that the University of Arizona will host the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of the Languages of the Americas this spring, from January 23-25, 2015.

This conference is a unique event that brings together linguists working with any of the indigenous languages of North, Central and South America. This will be the first time it is hosted at the University of Arizona (and high time too!) and also the 20th anniversary of this wonderful conference.

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 correlate the interests of formal linguists and the concerns of indigenous communities.

Abstracts should be submitted to the EasyChair website at this link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscla2015

Abstract submission guidelines:

Please submit your abstract for a paper in .pdf format at  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscla2015, following the requirements listed below, before midnight PST on October 10, 2014.

Abstracts should be anonymous. Author name(s) should not appear in the abstract or file name. Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages in length including references and examples (minimum 12 pt font size, 1 inch margins). Submissions are limited to two abstracts per author, including at most one single-authored abstract. (In other words, you may contribute to two co-authored abstracts, or one co-authored abstract plus one single-authored abstract.)

Please write to wscla2015@gmail.com with any questions.

BU Language Acquisition Conference program

The program for the 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development has been released. The conference meets from November 7-9. The  keynote speaker is Richard Aslin (University of Rochester) who will deliver the talk “From sounds to words to grammatical categories: The role of distributional learning,” The Plenary Speaker is Katherine Demuth (Macquarie University) whose talk is “Prosodic effects on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Evidence from perception and production.” Our own Barbara Pearson has, with Joan Maling, organized the poster symposium “Linguistics for Everyone: Engaging a broader public for the scientific study of language acquisition.”

Pre-registration starts on September 1 and closes on October 28. For more information about registering, go here.

The UMass linguistic community is represented by the following posters:

A. Aravind and Jill de Villiers: “Implicit alternatives insufficient for children’s SIs with some"

Valentina Brunetto and Tom Roeper: “Are rare constructions late in acquisition? The case of near-reflexivity"

Alumna Suzi Lima, with P. Li and J. Snedeker: “Acquiring the denotation of object-denoting nouns in a language without partitives."

Jill de Vliiers, with A. Pace, P. Yust, A Iglesias, M. Wilson, K Hirsh-Pasek, R. Golinkoff, A Takehesu Tabori, K. Strother-Garcia, K Ridge: “Examining the Validity of a Compuater-based Language Assessment for Preschool Children."

Alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier, with S. Shittu: “Perceptual attrition of lexical tone among L1 Yoruba-speaking children in Canada."

Michael Clauss: “The Syntax and Semantics of Free Relative Clauses in Child English."

Alumni Angeliek Van Hout and Bart Hallebrandse, with C Lindenbergh: “The acquisition of sentence ellipsis in Dutch preschoolers."

Alumnus Terue Nakato: “Gender Information of Possessive Pronouns: How does it work in Child English?"

Alumna Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, with A. Catilla-Earls, T Peterson, D. Massam and S. Behar: “Children’s acquisition of complex modification."

Alumna Angeliek Van Hout, with I Strangmann, and A. Slomp: “Context and the acquisition of Dutch eh-questions: The effect of topicality and thematic roles."

Barbara Pearson: “Linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity in quantified expressions: Implications for mathematics teaching and test of monolingual and bilingual students."

The complete schedule can be found here.

Town Meeting this Friday

The Town meeting will happen on Friday, September 5, in the main lobby of the department. (The “main lobby” is that area outside Michelle and Tom’s offices, immediately beyond the front door to the department.) The Town Meeting is the occasion upon which all the new members of the department meet the established members of the department. It is also a time at which much of the human infrastructure of the department is revealed (e.g., who is graduate program director? what is a graduate program director? what is a guru?). And finally, it is where photographs or linguists are produced for the department website and directory. We’ll start taking individual photos at 2:30. Since many of the old photos were lost in the move, you should come to this even if you had a photo in South College. The town meeting will start at 3:15, with the group photo happening directly afterwards.

Lyn Frazier honored at Faculty Convocation

Lyn Frazier, along with seven other UMass faculty, will receive the award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity at the Tenth Annual Faculty Convocation on Friday, September 12. Join us in congratulating Lyn on this high honor.

Kratzer gives Sweet Lecture

Angelika Kratzer gives the Henry Sweet lecture at the 2014 annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain on September 1.  Her lecture, “The semantics of embedding and the syntax of the left periphery,” is the plenary talk at a workshop on the syntax and semantics of embedding that includes talks by Enoch Aboh, Adriana Bellettii, Martina Faller and Daniel Rothschild. For more information, go here.

Call for papers: Grasping Ellipsis

The University of Campinas in Sao Paulo Brazil will be hosting a workshop “Grasping Ellipsis: its syntax, semantics, acquisition and processing” on May 4-5 2015. They are accepting abstracts for 30 minute talks until November 2. For more information, go here.

Alex Drummond

Alex Drummond will be a visiting professor in syntax for the 2014-15 academic year. He has worked on the Binding Theory, Quantifier Raising, issues in anaphora and ellipsis, Preposition Stranding and on general issues of the design of syntactic derivations. You can find out more about his work here.

He’ll be teaching a seminar in the Spring. This term, his office is in the CSAAL area of the department: N472.

Sang-Im Lee-Kim

One of the visiting phonology faculty this academic year is Sang-Im Lee-Kim, who has just completed a dissertation (“Contrast Neutralization and Enhancement in Phoneme Inventories: Evidence from Sibilant Place Contrast and Typology”) at NYU. You can find out more about her research (and name) here. Her office is N434.

Robert Staub

The inaugural dissertation defense in the Seminar Hub (N400 of the new department) took place on July 25, and featured Robert Staub who successfully defended his dissertation, “Computational Modeling of Learning Biases in Stress Typology.” Robert will be visiting faculty in the department for the 2014-15 academic year, teaching a proseminar in Phonology (LING 730) in the Fall and LING 402 in the Spring. You’ll find him in room N454 of the department.

Semantics position at Toronto

The Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto (St. George Campus), invites applications for a full-time tenure-stream position in the area of Semantics. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor, and will begin on July 1, 2015.

Qualifications include a proven record of research in formal semantics. The ideal candidate will have experience in fieldwork on an understudied language as well as a secondary strength in syntax. Applicants must have completed the Ph.D. by the start date or shortly thereafter and have a demonstrated record of excellence in teaching and research.

Duties include teaching and supervision at the undergraduate and graduate levels, maintaining an active research agenda, and participating in the academic life of the department.

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

All qualified candidates are invited to apply online by clicking on the link below. Applications should include a cover letter of no more than 2 single-spaced pages, a curriculum vitae, a research statement, evidence of teaching ability (including a statement of teaching philosophy), a writing sample, and the names and email addresses of three referees. Please combine your application into one or two files. If you have questions about this position, please contact lingdept@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA.

All application materials should be submitted online and received by October 24, 2014.

Submission guidelines can be found at: http://uoft.me/how-to-apply. We recommend combining attached documents into one or two files in PDF/MS Word format.

Applicants should also arrange to have three letters of reference, preferably as signed PDF documents on letterhead, sent directly to Professor Keren Rice at the address lingdept@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA with the subject line: "Semantics – (your full name)" by the job deadline date.

More information on the University of Toronto (http://www.utoronto.ca) and the Department of Linguistics (http://linguistics.utoronto.ca) can be found on their respective websites. Linguistics course descriptions are available at www.artsandscience.utoronto.ca/ofr/calendar/crs_lin.htm.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

McCarthy/Pater NSF

Joe Pater writes:

John McCarthy and I are very pleased to be able to announce that the NSF has awarded a grant of $305,613 to support a project entitled “Computing constraint-based derivations: Phonological opacity and hidden structure learning”, starting September 1, 2014, and lasting for 3 years. John and I will direct the grant, and the other senior personnel will be Robert Staubs (UMass) and Mark Johnson (Macquarie). The grant will support a graduate student RA, and also includes a Research Experience for Undergraduates component that will involve two undergraduates every semester. This coming semester, Presley Pizzo will be an RA on the grant, and Amanda Doucette and Stephanie Rich will  participate in the REU program. All are welcome to participate in grant activities, including our weekly meetings which will take place at 10 am Thursdays this semester. We will announce grant meetings on the ling-phonology mailing list (https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-phonology). Students interested in future RA-ships or the REU program are especially encouraged to attend grant meetings, and also to talk with John or me.

The project plans include the creation of a publicly accessible database on instances of phonological opacity, development of accounts of opacity in Harmonic Serialism and comparison with other approaches, implementation of computational tools for working with derivational versions of OT and Harmonic Grammar ("OT-Help 3"), and research on the learning of hidden structure in a Maximum Entropy framework, including learning of derivations (the goals of the project will undoubtedly evolve as we pursue this collaborative work).

UMass at AMLaP XX

The 2014 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh from Wednesday, September 3, through Saturday, September 6. UMass students, faculty and alumni are well-represented. Chuck Clifton will be chairing a panel discussion entitled "The Past, Present and Future of Psycholinguistics,” and the following papers are on the schedule:

"Ambiguity advantages in attachment and pronominal reference: Evidence from eye movements during reading” by Margaret Grant, Brian Dillon and Shayne Sloggett

"Adjective sprouting in much-less ellipsis” by alumni Katy Carlson and Jesse Harris.

"SNAP judgments: Small N acceptability paradigm (SNAP) for linguistic judgments” by Jeremy Hartman, with Kyle Mahowald, Peter Graff and Edward Gibson.

Department Potluck Picnic

The annual beginning-of-the-year potluck picnic/party will happen at Barbara and Voldja’s place  (50 Hobart Lane in Amherst) on Saturday, September 6. It starts at 3:30 and continues into the evening. WHISC has been informed that casual dress is acceptable. Sporting events include badminton and croquet (casual dress is acceptable for these activities as well). Feel free to bring equipment for more strenuous activities. 

Bring things to eat and drink. There will be a charcoal grill provided, and it’ll be hot by 4:30 or so. International foods are encouraged, as are adventuresome dishes.

Also bring friends, family, children, colleagues, hangers-on, partners, companions and Philosophers. But no dogs please.

Here is a message from Barbara regarding Hobart Lane’s notorious parking issues:

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

Masashi Hashimoto defends

Masashi Hashimoto will defend his dissertation, “Experiencing in Japanese: The Experiencer Restriction Across Clausal Types,” on Friday, August 29, in the Seminar Hub (N400).