Introducing Tim Hunter: Syntax Guru

Tim Hunter arrives Monday to take up residence as this year’s syntax guru. Tim received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Maryland, and held post-doctorates at Cornell and Yale before taking up his present post at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation, published by John Benjamins in 2011, explores a way of breaking down the movement and merge operations into more fundamental operations, and uses this to model how movement and structure building operations interact. He meshes this syntax with a neo-Davidsonian semantics to characterize the “argument/adjunct” distinction that syntacticians often use. He has worked on a variety of the classic problems in movement theory: rightward movement, parasitic gaps, relative clauses, remnant movement and the constraints on these constructions. He has also done work on the semantics of certain quantifiers, and their connection with other cognitive systems, as well as the acquisition of determiners by four-to-five year olds. He’s also done work on the formal aspects of minimalist grammars. Some of his work has made direct connections between the form of minimalist grammars and on-line processing. You can get (much) more information from his webpage.

Tim will be in Peggy Speas’s office (N402) during his stay, which ends April 17. You can reach him at timh@umm.edu. His stay is short: be sure to get guru’d early!

Tim Hunter talks in Syntax Workshop

Tim Hunter, this year’s syntax guru, will give a talk in the Syntax Workshop this Thursday,  March 26. We’ll meet in N400, instead of the regular room, and the talk will start at 9:30, rather than the usual 10:00. The title of his talk is “On Finding New Ways to test Old Theories,” and an abstract follows.

This talk will consist of two loosely-connected halves.

The point of departure for the first part is the observation of a surprising exception to the phenomenon known as "vehicle change". These observations have direct consequences for our understanding of the relationship between ellipsis and movement. The generalization that emerges can also be used to construct novel tests that bear on the island-insensitivity of constructions like sluicing, and on whether the EPP is active inside ellipsis sites.

In the second part, I will present an approach to integrating minimalist syntax with information-theoretic sentence complexity metrics, from which it follows that two grammars that are extensionally equivalent --- two grammars which produce the same structures, and differ only in what primitive derivational operations they use to build those structures --- can nonetheless give rise to distinct predictions concerning sentence comprehension difficulty. This provides a linking hypothesis that connects sentence processing observations to subtle questions about the derivational operations that comprise human grammars (merge, move, re-merge, agree, etc.).

Open House

Ivy Hauser writes:

Six admitted students will be visiting our department on Thursday and Friday March 26-27.  We encourage you to attend any activities you can during this time and help us make the students feel welcome!  Here is the schedule.

Thursday 3/269a-10a - Continental breakfast available in the department, meet and greet time

Mid-morning - Students go to classes and meet with faculty

Lunch - Small grad student groups take prospective students to lunch on campus

Afternoon - Students go to classes and meetings

7:00pm - Grad student RG meeting and dinner in Northampton

8:30pm - Grad student outing at the Foundry in Northampton

Friday 3/27

9a-10am - Continental breakfast available

Mid-morning - Students go to classes and meet with faculty

Lunch ~12:30pm - Grad student lunch/forum in the department 

3:30pm - Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer give a colloquium talk

Evening - Department party at Kristine Yu's house in Northampton

Saturday 3/28

Casual small group brunches and outings, airport drop offs

5 Colleges Prosody Evening

Kristine Yu writes:

The inaugural get-together for the Five Colleges prosody community will be happening March 25, 5pm at the lovely abode of our colleague Heather Pon-Barry (CS, Mount Holyoke) in Northampton. This community is led by Meghan Armstrong (UMass, Hispanic Linguistics), Mara Breen (Mount Holyoke, Psychology), Heather Pon-Barry (Mount Holyoke, CS), and Kristine Yu (UMass, Linguistics).

Everyone---especially students---is welcome.  We will be chatting informally about ongoing work, including work that will be presented at ETAP 3 in May.  

Future events will be posted to the ling-prosody list by me, so please get on that (http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php) if you're interested.

Call for papers: AIMM3

We are pleased to announce the third meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM3), to be held October 2-4, 2015 in the linguistics department at UMass Amherst. One of the main purposes of the AIMM is to provide a forum for young investigators to present work in morphology, and students and recent Ph.D.’s are especially encouraged to submit abstracts.

For the 2015 meeting, the theme will be morphological processing, though abstracts on any topic in morphology are welcome. We will have a small poster session in addition to regular sessions. The keynote speaker is Harald Baayen (University of Tuebingen). The title and abstract of his lecture will be available at a later date.

The deadline for abstract submission is April 10. Abstracts will be submitted electronically via Linguist List's EasyAbs system. For more information, visit the conference website at:

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

Formatting guidelines for abstracts are given below:

- Two pages, including examples and references (US letter size)- 11 point type (Ariel font)- One-inch margins- Anonymous- pdf format

The organizing committee:

Alice Harris

John McCarthy

Tom Roeper

Rex Wallace

Shayne Sloggett (student organizer)

WCCFL 33

Simon Fraser University is hosting WCCFL 33 this weekend, and UMass will be out in force. Current residents of the department at WCCFL are:

Stefan Keine, who will be presenting the paper “Locality domains in syntax: evidence from processing

Robert Staubs, who will be giving the paper “Computational modeling of nonfinality effects on stress typology."

Anisa Schardl, who will be giving the poster “Two kinds of partial movement: Evidence from Dholuo and German wh-questions."

Jon Ander Mendia, who will be giving the poster “Typicality Effects and Distributivity."

Alex Drummond, who will be giving the paper “Decomposing the Spanish Causative Reflexive Passive,” with Dave Kush

Kyle Johnson, who will be giving the paper “3D QR"

Members of the UMass diaspora at WCCFL are:

Elliott Moreton and Jen Smith, who will be giving the paper “Emergent faithfulness to proper nouns in novel English blends,” with Katya Pertsova and Brandon Prickett

Amy Rose Deal, who will be giving the paper “TP is a phase in relative clauses."

Andrew Mckenzie, who will be giving the paper “ ‘Almost’ as a variable-force modal,” with Lydia Newkirk

Ana Arregui, who will be giving the paper “Grammaticalizing the size of situations: the case of Bulgarian,” with Maria Luisa Rivero and Nikolay Slakov

Karen Jesney, who will be giving the paper “Positions are defined on the input: Evidence from repairs in child phonology."

Rose-Marie Déchaine, who will be giving the poster “Head-merge, adjunct-merge, and the syntax of root categorization,” with Natalie Weber

Bhatt at UTA

Rajesh Bhatt has been visiting the University of Texas in Arlington this week. He gave a lecture in Joey Sabbagh’s syntax seminar on agreement in Hindi-Urdu and Kutchi on Thursday. And he gave a colloq talk on Friday on Hindi Polar Questions.

Presley Pizzo goes to Originate

Presley Pizzo will be taking a position as a software engineer with Originate (http://www.originate.com/) in September 2015. 

Congratulations Presley!

Language Sciences Summer Scholarship at University of Maryland

 The Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Maryland is sponsoring the Language Sciences Summer Scholarship Program for undergraduates through the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). This program is entering its fourth summer and has been a great success. Each year we aim to build on past achievements and increase visibility to highly qualified students and their mentors.

Given CASL’s status as a university affiliated research center (UARC) – and as the first and only national resource dedicated to addressing the language science needs of the intelligence community (IC) – potential available projects will demonstrate how the research is relevant to, and has potential impact on, national security issues. 

Purpose of this program: 

— To involve undergraduates in cutting-edge language science research. 

— To introduce student scholars to careers in national security, particularly those that may use and benefit from basic-plus-applied language science research. 

— To build links between research in language science on campus, at CASL and across the IC at large.

Application Process

CASL Language Sciences Summer Scholarships are available to undergraduate students with prior training in language sciences who wish to pursue language science research under close faculty supervision in a more in-depth manner than is possible in the context of the classroom. A minimum commitment of eight weeks is typically expected.

Applicants must be currently enrolled as undergraduates.

Required Items

Applicants for a CASL Summer Scholarship must submit:

A cover letter. This should outline the applicant’s background experience and identify faculty mentors of interest (if any). Cover letters should be in PDF format (please name the file in the following format: firstinitial.lastname_cover.pdf).

A current curriculum vitae or resume. This should also be in PDF format (please name the file this way: firstinitial.lastname _cv.pdf).

Deadline

Review of applications will begin immediately, and will continue until the positions are filled. However, for best consideration, completed applications should be received by May 1, 2015. All application materials should be submitted electronically to Hana Kabashi (hkabashi@umd.edu). NOTE: Include "CASL Summer Scholarship" in the subject line.

POC:

Hana Kabashi, hkabashi@umd.edu; 301-226-8916 Senior Research Coordinator

Research positions for undergraduates at University of Maryland

The Dept. of Linguistics at the U of Maryland is looking to fill up to three full-time positions for post-baccalaureate researchers. Starting date for all positions is Summer/Fall 2015. Salary is competitive, with benefits included. The positions would be ideal for individuals with a BA degree who are interested in gaining significant research experience in a very active research group, as preparation for a research career. Applicants must be US or Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and should have completed a BA or BS degree by the time of appointment. The ability to interact comfortably with a wide variety of people (and machines) is a distinct advantage. Applicants may request to be considered for any of the positions.

The positions are open until filled, but review of applications will begin on April 10, 2015.

Details about these positions may be found here:

http://ling.umd.edu/baggett/jobs

Details about Language Science opportunities at the U of Maryland may be found here:

http://languagescience.umd.edu

Keine and Bhatt in print

Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt’s paper, co-authored with Trupti Nisar, “Complete and defective agreement in Kutchi” has appeared in the latest issue of Linguistic Variation. 

Call for papers: BUCLD

Join us for a special 40th anniversary meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development!  

Lila Gleitman (University of Pennsylvania), the keynote speaker of the very first BUCLD meeting, will reprise her role this year. We will also have a celebratory session looking back to where we've come from and where we're going as a field.

We will be accepting two kinds of submissions: abstracts for 20-minute talks or posters (due May 15), and symposium proposals (due April 15; see below.)

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Submissions of abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters will be accepted beginning April 1 at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-submission/

 DEADLINE.All abstract submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2015.

Abstracts must be limited to 500 words, with one extra page for examples, figures, tables, and references. Submissions that present research on any topic in the fields of first and second language acquisition from any theoretical perspectives will be fully considered, including but not limited to: Artificial Languages, Bilingualism, Cognition & Language, Creoles & Pidgins, Dialects, Discourse and Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input & Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics, Pragmatics, Pre-linguistic Development, Reading and Literacy, Signed Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception & Production.

A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-format/

CALL FOR SYMPOSIUM PROPOSALS
We are also soliciting proposals for 90-minute symposia for the Boston University Conference on Language Development on any topic likely to be of broad interest to the conference attendees. The symposium format is open, but has frequently included 2-3 speakers presenting research from differing angles on a common theme.  

Proposals should include a list of the participants, specific topics, and a specification of the format, and should name at least one organizer who will be able to work with the BUCLD organizing committee in setting up the symposium.  Submissions can be sent by email to langconf@bu.edu with "Symposium proposal" indicated in the subject line.  Please limit symposium proposals to 1000 words or fewer.

DEADLINE: All symposium proposal submissions must be received by April 15, 2015.

Decisions on symposia will be made by June.

FURTHER INFORMATION 

General conference information is available at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld

Call for papers: IATL 31

IATL 31, the 31st annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, will be held at Bar Ilan University on October 13-14, 2015. Submissions are invited for 30 minute presentations (+ 10 minutes for discussion) of high quality, previously unpublished research in all areas of theoretical linguistics. We are interested in research which tests theories of language in general, including traditional areas of theoretical linguistics and also experimental areas such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition.

Thematic Session: Experimental and corpus-based research in theoretical linguistics

Recent years have seen a growing number of researchers employ a variety of experimental and corpus-based research methods to examine questions in different fields of theoretical linguistics. Using such methods has not only provided empirical evidence or counterevidence for abstract theories but also allowed investigations of subtle patterns that are nearly impossible to observe reliably using only the more traditional introspective methods of generative grammar. For this special session we invite submissions of papers presenting previously unpublished research which uses experimental or quantitative methods to shed light on theoretical issues.

Invited Speakers

Donka Farkas, University of California, Santa Cruz

Malte Zimmerman, Potsdam University

Proceedings

IATL publishes its proceedings online, as well as in print via MITWPL; the authors of all accepted and alternate papers are invited to submit their papers for the proceedings.

Abstract Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be no longer than two pages, including examples and references. Page format: A4, 2,54cm (one inch) margins on all sides, 12-point font, single line spacing; PDF format only. Submissions are restricted to at most one single-authored and one co-authored abstract.

Please submit abstracts to the IATL EasyChair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iatl31

Log in as an author using your existing EasyChair username and password if you have one; otherwise, register at the site as an author, and when you receive a password, you can enter the site and submit your abstract. The abstract should be submitted in PDF format through the ‘Upload Paper’ section near the bottom of the page. (Note: Higher up on the page, in the ‘Title and Abstract’ section, there is a box for a plain-text abstract. Since we do not require a shorter abstract, you may simply retype the title of the paper in the abstract box.)

Deadline: March 20, 2015

Important Dates

March 20, 2015: Abstract submission deadline

End of May, 2015: Notification of acceptance to authors

October 13-14, 2015: IATL 31

Conference Links and contacts
IATL 31 on IATL website: http://www.iatl.org.il/?page_id=748IATL 31 on EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iatl31

If you have questions or encounter any problems, please contact Gabi Danon at iatl@complexnp.com

Jill Thorson speaks on March 24

Jill Thorson (Northeastern University) will give a talk entitled "The development of intonation and information structure in early speech perception and production" on Tuesday, March 24th at 5:30 in 225 Herter Hall. An abstract follows.

Abstract

Infants are born with sensitivities to their native language s melody and rhythm. This attunement to prosody affects language development over the first years of life, and impacts early attentional processing, word learning, and speech production. The motivation for the first line of research is to investigate how American English-acquiring toddlers are guided by the mapping between intonation and information structure during on-line reference resolution and novel word learning. Specifically, I ask how specific pitch movements (deaccented/H*/L+H*) systematically predict patterns of attention and subsequent novel word learning abilities depending on the referring or learning condition (new/given/contrastive). Results show that the presence of either newness or a pitch accent facilitates attention, and that toddlers learn better from more prominent learning conditions. A second line of research examines the phonological and phonetic realizations of information categories as produced by toddler and adult speakers of English. During a spontaneous speech task designed as an interactive game, a set of target nouns are labeled and analyzed as new, given, or contrastive. Results reveal that toddlers reflect adult phonological patterns for new and contrastive information, as well as demonstrate a sophisticated usage of the acoustic correlates of intonation. Together, this set of studies demonstrates how higher-level components combine to direct attention to a referent in discourse and how this process helps explain mechanisms that are important for novel word learning and early speech production.

Brunetto and Roeper in Siena

Valentina Brunetto and Tom Roeper are delivering their paper “Self as partition trigger: Evidence against a lexical Strongest Meaning Principle in local anaphora” at a workshop on Implicatures and Presuppositions hosted by the University of Siena, this Thursday and Friday.

Call for papers: GALA

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING) is pleased to announce the 12^th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 12) to be held at the University of Nantes, Nantes (France) on September 10-12, 2015.

 

The conference provides a forum for discussion of recent, high quality research on first and second language acquisition,bilingual acquisition, language pathology, the acquisition of sign language and brain imaging research for acquisition and pathology.

 

GALA 2015 will include, in addition to the Main session, four Workshops:

 

Workshop 1:

Heritage Language Acquisition

Native vs. Heritage vs. Second Language Acquisition

(co-organized with Janet Grijzenhout, BSL, University of Konstanz)

 

Invited Speakers:

Elabbas Benmamoun (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Maria Polinsky (Harvard University)

 

 

Workshop 2:

The Role of Prosody in Early Speech Perception

(Co-organized with Judit Gervain, LPP – UMR 8242, CNRS/Paris V)

 

Invited Speaker:

Marina Nespor (SISSA)

 

 

Workshop 3:

Acquisition of Causation: Culmination Entailments and Agency

(Co-organized with Fabienne Martin, University of Stuttgart)

 

Invited Speakers:

Angeliek van Hout (University of Groningen)

Nina Kazanina (University of Bristol)

 

Workshop 4:

Segments & Interactions in Phonological Acquisition

 

Invited Speaker:

Eirini Sanoudaki (Bangor University)

 

Organizing committee:

 

Jiyoung Choi

Hamida Demirdache

Natasa Knezevic

Oana Lungu

Typhanie Prince

Ali Tifrit

Laurence Voeltzel

 

Call for Papers

 

For the Main Session, we invite abstract submissions for 30 minute oral presentations (including 10 minutes for discussion) or posters of original, unpublished work on all subfields of generative language acquisition: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, language pathology, sign language, etc.

 

In addition to the Main Session, there will be four Workshops (see here). The submission rules for the Workshops are the same as those for the Main Session.

 

Submission guidelines:

 

Abstracts should not exceed one page in letter-size or A4 paper, with one extra page for examples, tables, figures and references,with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title and should not reveal the name of the author(s). The abstracts must be uploaded as PDF attachments to the EasyChair site. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.

 

When you submit your abstract on the EasyChair site, you will be asked to provide a short summary of the abstract. Upon submission, please indicate whether your work should be considered for an oral presentation (Main Session or one of the Workshops) or for a poster (or both). Submitting the same abstract to both the Main Session and to one of the Workshops is not allowed.

 

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

 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gala2015

 

Important dates:

Deadline for submissions: April 1^st, 2015, 11:59 PM, CET

Notification of acceptance: May 12, 2015

Conference dates: September 10-12, 2015

 

 

If you have any further questions, please contact us at gala2015@univ-nantes.fr 

Please visit our conference website: www.gala2015.univ-nantes.fr

Call for papers: Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society

This conference is associated with the project Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society (LCIS; http://www.ntnu.edu/lcis) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. The goal of LCIS is to study linguistic complexity in three different areas: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The groundbreaking part of this project is that it will attempt to combine these different sub-disciplines of modern linguistics. Different methodologies and theoretical perspectives will be useful in order to illuminate complementary aspects of language complexity and thus contribute to deepening our understanding of this phenomenon. A unifying aspect of the research is the use of multilingual data. These data have become increasingly important for linguistic methodologies and theories, but also for public policy makers in the sense that they address consequences of migration and children growing up acquiring parts of multiple languages. 

The present two-day conference on October 15-16, 2015 will feature talks addressing linguistic complexity within the three areas mentioned above: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The following speakers have kindly agreed to provide plenary addresses: 

Artemis Alexiadou (University of Stuttgart)

Frans Gregersen (Copenhagen University, Lanchart))

Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University)

Marie Maegaard & Janus Spindler Møller (Copenhagen University, Lanchart) 

Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Reading/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Call for Papers: 

Abstracts are solicited for 20 minute talks plus 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts should be at most 2 pages written in Times New Roman, 12pt font, on A4 or letter paper. Numbered examples should be included in the text and not added separately at the end. 
Abstracts need to be submitted by midnight (CET) on April 24, 2015 via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/lcis. 

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by May 20, 2015.

LabPhon 15

Abby Cohn and Sam Tilsen write:

We are pleased to announce that the 15th Conference on LaboratoryPhonology (LabPhon 15) will be held at Cornell University in Ithaca,NY, in 2016. The overall theme of LabPhon 15 is "Speech Dynamics andPhonological Representation”.

Title: LabPhon 15 - The 15th Conference on Laboratory Phonology

Date: July 13-16, 2016

Place: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA

Save the Date

Phonological representations are dynamic, shaped by forces on diverse time scales.  On the timescale of utterances, interactions between perceptual, motoric, and memory-related processes provide constraints on phonological representations. These same processes, embedded in learning systems and dynamic social networks, shape representations on developmental and life-span timescales, and in turn influence sound systems on historical timescales. Laboratory phonology, through its rich quantitative and experimental methodologies, contributes to our understanding of phonological systems by providing insight into the mechanisms from which representations emerge.

Conference themes:

Production dynamics: How are representations constructed andimplemented in speech, and what does articulation reveal about thedynamics of production mechanisms? How do these mechanisms shape representations on longer timescales?

Perceptual dynamics: What forms of perceptual representation dospeaker-hearers use and what are the temporal dynamics of perception? How does the interaction between perception and production constrain phonological systems on life-span and diachronic timescales?

Prosodic organization: What are the mechanisms of prosodicorganization and how do they give rise to cross-linguistic differences? What are the connections between perception and production of prosodic structure?

Lexical dynamics and memory: How do experience and lexical memoryinfluence phonological representations? What are the relations between lexical representation, production, and perception across diverse time scales?

Phonological acquisition and changes over the life-span: What is the nature of early representations and how do they change? How does learning a second-language interact with existing representations?

Social network dynamics: How does the structure of social networks influence phonological representations on diverse timescales? What are the roles of perception and production in relation to social network dynamics?

Contributions to any of these themes or to any other aspects oflaboratory phonology will be welcome. A call for papers will be circulated in the fall of 2015.

Questions can be addressed to LabPhon15@cornell.eduUpdates will appear on http://labphon.org/labphon15

Gaja Jarosz visits the department

Gaja Jarosz will be visiting the department this Thursday and Friday. She’ll give the department colloquium (title and abstract below) on Friday at 3:30 in ILC N400.

Sonority Sequencing Effects in Polish: Defying the Stimulus?

The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP: Steriade 1982; Selkirk 1984; Clements 1988, 1992) states that syllables with a sonority rise in the transition from the onset to the nucleus are preferred cross-linguistically. Experimental evidence indicates that English speakers exhibit gradient sensitivity to the SSP for onset clusters that are not attested in English (Davidson 2006, 2007; Berent et al. 2007, 2009; Daland et al. 2011). Berent et al. (2007, 2009) show that several lexical statistics of English fail to predict these preferences and suggest that the principle may therefore be innate. However, Daland et al. (2011) show that computational models with the ability to form abstract generalizations on the basis of phonological features and phonological context can detect SSP preferences on the basis of English lexical statistics. In this talk, I explore this controversy using computational and developmental approaches in a language (Polish) with very different sonority sequencing patterns from English. Using computational modeling, I show that a) the lexical statistics of Polish contradict the SSP, b) computational models applied to input estimated from Polish child-directed speech predict reverse-SSP preferences, and c) computational models that encode the SSP straightforwardly predict earlier acquisition of clusters with higher sonority rises. Thus, Polish provides a rare example where predictions of input-based models, even phonologically sophisticated ones, diverge dramatically from predictions expected on the basis of universal principles. I test these predictions by examining the acquisition of onset clusters in Polish. The data come from the spontaneous speech of four typically-developing, monolingual, Polish children aged 1;7-2;6 in the Weist-Jarosz Corpus (Weist and Witkowska-Stadnik 1986; Weist et al. 1984; Jarosz 2010; Jarosz et al. submitted). In conflict with the input-based predictions, the acquisition analyses indicate that development is significantly and gradiently sensitive to the SSP. I discuss the implications for phonological theory.

Dilip Ninan speaks in semantics/philosophy seminar

Seth Cable writes:

I’m writing to let you all know that on Tuesday (March 10th), Dilip Ninan of Tufts University will be providing a special guest lecture to the semantics / philosophy of language seminar. The lecture will be on recent work by Dilip that engages with recent work by others arguing against the existence of special ‘de se’ attitudes and special ‘de se’ readings of propositional attitude sentences. 

This talk will be more on the ‘philosophy of language’ side of things, but will definitely be of interest to all those with an interest in the semantics of propositional attitude sentences, and especially to those interested in the puzzle of ‘de se’ readings. 

The talk is in N400 from 1-3:30.

Call for Papers: Going Heim!

The UConn Logic group is proud to announce its annual logic workshop. The workshop is organized around that work of a researcher that has had a significant and lasting influence on the field. The talks, invited and selected, will be given by critics or contributors to the field who were influenced by the keynote speakers’s work.

2015 Workshop: Going Heim. Linguistic Meaning Between Structure and Use.

Irene Heim is among the most influential scholars in the study of natural-language semantics and pragmatics. Several of her lasting contributions to the field were contained or foreshadowed in her dissertation “The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases” (UMass Amherst, 1982). There, Heim demonstrated that Montagovian semantics and Chomskyan syntax, two schools of thought which had developed independently and were deemed at cross-purposes by many, could in fact be unified to mutual benefit. Heim’s dissertation is also one of the first fully developed accounts in what would come to be known as dynamic semantics. With this workshop, we will celebrate Heim’s recent 60th birthday and use the occasion to reflect on the transformative nature of her early work, its continued influence over the years since, and the present state and trajectory of the field of formal semantics and pragmatics.

Program

Location: University of Connecticut, Storrs

Date: May 2-3, 2015

Keynote: Irene Heim (MIT)

Confirmed Speakers:

• David Beaver (Texas)
• Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
• Hans Kamp (Stuttgart/Texas)
• Barbara Partee (UMass)
• Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)

Call for papers

In addition to keynote and invited presentations, there will be a limited number of contributed talks (45 minutes + 30 minutes of discussion), with at least one slot reserved for a graduate student presentation. The winner of the graduate student competition will receive free accommodation and a travel subsidy.

We invite contributions that address any topic related to Irene Heim’s dissertation, including but not limited to (in)definiteness, static vs. dynamic approaches, QVE, anaphora, pronouns, donkeys, bishops, and sage plants.

Submissions

If you would like to contribute a talk, please send a 2-3 page abstract to magdalena.kaufmann@uconn.edu. 

Please note in your email if you would like to be considered for the graduate student competition.

Deadline for submissions:  March 23th, 2015

Meghan Armstrong in Leipzig

Meghan Armstrong gave a talk at a session on the prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages at the DGfS conference last week in Leipzig. The title of her talk was “The rise-flat-fall contour as an epistemic operator in American English.” You can learn more here.

Barbara and Volodja in California

Barbara writes:

Volodja and I are in California February 20-March 8. I had a meeting February 21 of the Editorial Board of Annual Review of Linguistics in Palo Alto to plan the contents of Volume 3. Reminder to linguists -- Volume 1 has been published, and all of the contents of the inaugural volume are open-access for this first year:

http://www.annualreviews.org/journal/linguistics   

After that, you should be able to get access to both online version and hardcopy through your library; definitely true at UMass.

     Then on February 24, I gave a guest lecture in Sol Feferman & Ivano Caponigro’s Stanford Logic Seminar (Math 391, Phil 391), Formal Semantics of Natural Language: “Naturalizing Montague Grammar with Type-Shifting Principles”. On February 26, Volodja and I were guests of Nuance in Sunnyvale. I gave a talk there for Kathleen Dahlgren’s natural language understanding group (which now includes Ron Kaplan and Ed Stabler and a number of other linguists), “Boolean structure and cross-categorial conjunction in natural language”, and later Volodja and I commented on presentations by group members about their work.

     The halfway point of the trip was a great ride on the Coast Starlight train from San Jose to Los Angeles. In the first week of March, I'll spend some time in the Montague Archives at the UCLA library. On March 6, I’ll give an invited talk for the Syntax and Semantics Colloquium, UCLA: “Montague’s “Linguistic” Work: Motivations, Trajectory, Attitudes”. And on March 7, I’ll give the keynote address for the UCLA/USC Graduate Students Philosophy Conference: “Logic and Language: A History of Ideas and Controversies”. 

Sang-Im at Yale

Sang-Im Lee-Kim gave a talk at the Yale Phonology group last Friday, March 6. The title of her talk was “Neutralization vs. enhancement in sibilant place contrasts: Evidence from phonetic cues and formal bias.” 

Call for papers: Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held on 21-26 September 2015 in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Programme Committee invites submissions for contributions

on all aspects of language, logic and computation. Work of an interdisciplinary nature is particularly welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

 

 * Algorithmic game theory

           * Computational social choice

 * Constructive, modal and algebraic logic

 * Formal models of multiagent systems

 * Historical linguistics, history of logic

 * Information retrieval, query answer systems

 * Language evolution and learnability

          * Linguistic typology and semantic universals

 * Logic, games, and formal pragmatics

 * Logics for artificial intelligence

 * Natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

 * Natural logic, inference and entailment in natural language

 * Distributional and probabilistic models of information and meaning

 

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

 

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2015

 

PROGRAMME

 

The programme will include the following invited lectures and tutorials.

 

Tutorials:

 

Logic: Brunella Gerla (University of Insubria)

Language: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)

Computation: Joel Ouaknine (Oxford University)

 

Invited Lectures:

 

Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts )

Melvin Fitting (Graduate School and University Center of New York)

Helle Hansen (Delft University of Technology)

George Metcalfe (Bern University)

Sarah Murray (Cornell University)

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Queen Mary, University of London)

 

Workshops

 

There will also be a workshop on “Automata and Coalgebra”, organised by Helle Hansen and Alexandra Silva and a workshop on "How to make things happen in grammar: Encoding Obligatoriness”, organised by Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer. More information will be available on the TbiLLC website: http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015 .

 

 

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

 

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

 

IMPORTANT DATES

 

Submission deadline: 31 March 2015

Notification: 31 May 2015

Final abstracts due: 1 July 2015

Registration deadline: 1 August 2015

Symposium: September 21-26, 2015

 

Programme and submission details can be found at:

 

http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015/

Call for papers: The Distinction between Implicatures and Presuppositions

Experimental and crosslinguistic evidence for the distinction between implicatures and presuppositions
Berlin, Germany, July 1-3 2015
https://implicaturesandpresuppositions.wordpress.com

** Extended Submission Deadline: March 15th 2015 **

Aim:

Traditionally, research in formal semantics has established a theoretical distinction between presuppositions and implicatures. This traditional view is based on the different behaviour of presuppositions and implicatures in embedding environments, their (non)ability of being cancelled, and the triggering mechanism behind them. Presuppositions, on the one hand, are said to be lexically triggered inferences, which project under negation and other types of embeddings, and are non-cancellable. Implicatures, on the other hand, are claimed to be triggered by certain linguistic structures only in specific contexts, to not project and to be cancellable. This has led to a formal semantic modeling of presuppositions as prerequisites that have to be fulfilled in the context in order for utterances to be felicitously uttered. Implicatures are modeled as inferences which, in certain contexts, enrich the assertive meaning of an utterance.

This traditional view has been challenged by recent research on presuppositions and implicatures. This recent research primarily takes into consideration experimental as well as cross-linguistic data. It paints a more complicated picture and makes a distinction between both types of inferences less clear cut.

The workshop will provide a forum for researchers working on these two phenomena to discuss their latest insights on the basis of empirical data, such as experimental and/or crosslinguistic data.

Invited Talks:

Emmanuel Chemla (ENS Paris)
Danny Fox (MIT)
Jacopo Romoli (University of Ulster)
Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University)

Organizing Committee:

Nadine Bade (University of Tübingen)
Edgar Onea (University of Göttingen)
Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin)
Sonja Tiemann (University of Tübingen)
Malte Zimmermann (University of Potsdam)

Call for Papers

We invite submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt. Please submit abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 15^th.

EsayChair Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=impres1

Relevant topics include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Presuppositions and Implicatures in online processing
• Presuppositions and Implicatures crosslinguistically
• Factors triggering exhaustivity effects
• Differences between different kinds of Presuppositions and Implicatures

Eric Bakovic visits department

Eric Bakovic will be visiting the department Thursday and Friday. He will be giving the department colloquium on Friday at 3:30 in N400. The title of his talk is "Ensuring the proper determination of identity: a model of possible constraints.” An abstract follows.

Some phonological patterns can be described as sufficient identity avoidance, where 'sufficiently identical' means 'necessarily identical with respect to all but some specific feature(s)'. The first part of the talk addresses this question: why are specific features ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity? In previous work (Bakovic 2005, Bakovic & Kilpatrick 2006, Pajak & Bakovic 2010, Brooks et al. 2013ab), we have found that patterns of sufficient identity avoidance where a specific feature F is ignored also involve F-assimilation in the same contexts. Direct reference to sufficient identity is thus unnecessary: sufficient identity is indirectly avoided because F-assimilation would otherwise be expected, resulting in total identity. Avoiding sufficient identity without assimilation is the better option, as predicted by the minimal violation property of Optimality Theory. This analysis predicts rather than stipulates the features that will be ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity. (Several corollary consequences of the analysis will also be discussed in the talk.) The explanatory value of the analysis, however, is predicated on the absolute non-existence of constraints directly penalizing all-but-F identity, which could be active independently of F-assimilation. The second part of the talk addresses this question: how can such constraints be ruled out formally? I propose a deterministic model of constraint construction and evaluation that results in just the types of constraints necessary for the analysis above. More broadly, the proposed model is intended as a contribution to our formal understanding of what a 'possible constraint' is.

Jyoti Iyer in Syntax Workshop

Jyoti Iyer will be presenting some of her work in the Syntax Workshop on Thursday at 10AM in N451.

Vincent Homer in Leipzig

Vincent Homer is an invited speaker at the session on “Varieties of Positive Polarity Items” at DGfS in Leipzig this week. His talk, entitled “Wide-scope taking PPIs” is on Thursday, March 5. You can learn more here.

Trivial WHISC

In recognition of the high levels of scholarship held by the members of the UMass linguistics community, as well as the recognized prowess in games of trivia that some have earned, WHISC introduces a linguistic trivia question.

The Question:

Who wrote the following passage and when was it written?

Language, as I remarked earlier, is like seeing and hearing in that it can’t be taught or learned. Who has ever seen anybody teach language to a child? Some of you may have experienced how hopeless it is to teach language to children, as has been tried occasionally. I am sure that anybody who has ever had the opportunity to observe a child between the age of two and four was surprised about the sudden use of a word or a word form. We rarely know where the child got it from. The child grabbed it on some occasion or other; and grabbing means creating.  – We thus shouldn’t talk about learning of language by children. If there isn’t any teaching, there isn’t any learning either. What we do with children to lead them towards language is exactly what a gardener does with a seed from which he wants to produce a plant: we provide them with the necessary conditions for growth, namely human society. The gardener doesn’t truly make plants grow. Likewise, we do not teach children how to speak. A flower grows following the laws of nature. In the same way, language is generated in the consciousness of a child following the laws of the mind.

Send your responses to WHISC!

Symposium on Linguistic Inequality on Friday

Linguistic Inequality: Language and Power in the Americas 
March 6, 2015

Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union

Symposium Schedule: 

9:00am-9:15am: Breakfast and Introductions

9:15am-10:45am: Jennifer Leeman, Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics, George Mason University, “Inequality and the Representation of Latin@s in the Era of School Reform: Accent-Based Discrimination in Arizona”

10:45am-11:00am: Break

11:00am-12:30pm: Nelson Flores, Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, “From Social Transformation to Official Antiracism: The Unexamined Whiteness of Bilingual Education”

12:30pm-1:30pm: Lunch

1:30pm-3:00pm: José Del Valle, Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, City University of New York, “Post-Political Language Policies and the Erasure of Inequality”

UMass at GLOW

The program for GLOW 2015, which will take place in Paris this April, has become available and UMass will be there. Ethan Poole and Stefan Keine will be presenting their paper “Intervention in tough-constructions,” and Coral Hughto, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs will be presenting their paper “Grammatical agent-based modeling of typology.” UMass alumnus Winnie Lechner is presenting his paper with coauthors Spathas, Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou “On deriving the typology of repetition and restitution,” and UMass alumnus Keir Moulton is presenting his paper with Nino Grillo “Mismatching Pseudo-Relatives Describe Event Kinds.” You can learn more here.

Tom Roeper doesn't go to Brazil, but Luiz Amaral does

Tom Roeper writes:

In unrewardingly dramatic fashion,  I managed to fail to get on a plane  because of a nosebleed, supposed to go with Luiz Amaral (UMass Spanish dept) to the first meeting  of Abralin 2015 (the Brazilian LSA) near Indian villages in Belem, deep in the Amazon,.  Then after a heroic effort (in my estimation) to get up at 5AM to deliver my talk by skype, the technology failed, but nonetheless, Luiz managed to very successfully present the powerpoint for me on “Is there a recursion trigger?  Adapting Merge, Search, Label to an Acquisition Model” where we also presented a video made by Anca Sevcenco, just visiting at UMass, of our recent experiments at the Holyoke children’s museum. 

The talk was at  a round table on recursion organized by Marcus Maia, a visitor at UMass, where he presented parsing work on recursion in Karaja.  A talk by Luiz on recursive genitives in Wapachana, another by Uli Sauerland, a UMass visitor (also interrupted by technical problems), and Suzi Lima  on her work on Numerals, were given.  This week Luiz is giving a minicourse on  pedagogical grammars, Suzi is giving a course on Experimental Semantics, but mine on adapting acquisition methods to fieldwork unfortunately won’t happen.

Final Call for Papers: Workshop on Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Dispositions

The goal of this workshop is to explore questions about the
morpho-syntax, semantics and underlying ontology of words and
constructions used to describe dispositions. The central aim of the
workshop is to develop a better understanding of how existing and novel
insights from different approaches to dispositions can be integrated
into a single theory of dispositions and their linguistic descriptions.

Invited Speakers:
Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart)
Elena Castroviejo (Madrid)
Ariel Cohen (Ben Gurion)
Bridget Copley (Paris)
Nora Boneh (Jerusalem)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart)
Marika Lekakou (Ioannina)
John Maier (Cambridge, TBC)
Christopher Piñón (Lille)
Stephan Schmid (Berlin)
Barbara Vetter (Berlin)

Questions to be addressed by the Workshop:
1. What are the truth conditions of dispositional statements?
2. How are these truth conditions determined compositionally?
3. In what ways can dispositions be linguistically expressed?
4. What are linguistic tests for dispositionality?
5. Are there distinct notions of ‘disposition’ between which a
linguistic theory of disposition description should distinguish?
6. Among the words that can be used to express dispositionality are
nouns, adjectives and verbs. What systematic connections are there
between the ways in which different parts of speech do this, in
particular between deverbal nouns and adjectives and the underlying verbs?
7. What role do temporal and aspectual sentence constituents play in the
verbal expression of dispositions?
8. How do dispositional statements differ from habitual and frequency
statements?
9. What relations are there between dispositions and causality?
10. One of the constructions that can be used to describe dispositions
are middles. (An example: the German sentence `Dieser Satz liest sich
leicht’ (‘This sentence is easy to read’)). Is ‘middle’ a
morpho-syntactic or a notional concept? Where do the argument positions
of disposition-expressing middles come from? What is the
syntax-semantics interface for these constructions?

For a more detailed outline of the Workshop, please consult the Workshop
homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/general-information

We welcome submissions for a 20 minute talk (followed by 10 minutes of
discussion) or a poster on any topic relevant to the goals of the
workshop. We particularly welcome contributions addressing the
linguistic relevance of philosophical insights on dispositions or the
philosophical relevance of linguistic insights on dispositions.
All submitted abstracts should be written in English and be limited to
two single-spaced pages, complete with examples and bibliography. All
texts should fit within two A4 pages, with 2,54 cm/1-inch margins all
around. Each abstract should start with the title (centered) at top,
above the main text. Use font size 12 throughout (except for examples),
preferably in Times or Times New Roman. The abstract should be
camera-ready. Authors may submit at most one individual and one
co-authored abstract.

Save your abstract as a PDF. Name your abstract with your last name
followed by the suffix pdf (e.g., huang.pdf). Submit your abstract via
the EasyChair Conference, online submission system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dinl2015

Please leave your name and affiliation out of the abstract. Please
indicate whether your abstract is for a talk, a poster or both.

Extended Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015
Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2015

Contact: dispositions.workshop@gmail.com