Schwarzschild gives second department colloq

Roger Schwarzschild (MIT) will give the second department colloquium this week on Friday, April 24, at 3:30 in N400. The title of his talk is “The Paradox of Mass Plurals,” and an abstract follows.

The nouns used in (1) below are 'lexical plurals'.

(1) He keeps the *books*
     He gave me bad *directions*.

They contrast with the plurals in (2) below:

(2)  He bought two books.
       They went in two different directions.

Other examples of lexical plurals are *coffee-grounds, proceeds, measles,canned-goods, remains, special effects, dregs, fumes*

I adopt the split analysis of plurality (Acquaviva 2008, Lowenstamm 2008, Alexiadou 2011, Kramer 2012) according to which the plural [*s*] in (1) is the realization of n[+PL], a morpheme that nominalizes category-neutral roots.  The [*s*] in (2) is the realization of Num[+PL].  The plurals in (1) and (2) do not block one another, since they are formed from different pieces (compare:  irregular *men* which blocks **mans*).   The meanings of lexical plurals are idiosyncratic -- a common feature of words formed from roots, noted by the above cited references. But problems remain.

Lexical plurals are always mass nouns.  Assuming there is some semantic basis to the mass/count distinction, the meanings of lexical plurals are predictable *to some extent* and that needs to be explained.  Moreover, this feature of lexical plurals is not a peculiarity of English. Ojeda (2005), from whom the title of this talk was borrowed unchanged, provides examples of 'mass plurals' in Zuni and in Lingala (Bantu).  He further records that "according to Welmers (1973, 159), there is a semantic correlation in the large Bantu family between being a noun that denotes masses or liquids and being a noun that belongs to the plural Class 6.” (see also Taraldsen 2010:fn8 on Nguni). These then are the questions I'll address:

Q1 Why does the combination of a root and n[+PL] produce a mass noun?

Q2 What, if anything, is plural about the meanings of these nouns?

Q3 Assuming that the idiosyncratic meanings of lexical plurals are encoded in the root, how do we guarantee that this meaning *only*surfaces in the presence of n[+PL] (rather than in any syntactic context that requires a mass meaning)?

  - Following Schwarzschild (2011), I'll argue that simple nouns are  predicates of states. This will allow for two kinds of pluralization,  within a state and among states, corresponding to inner, n[+PL] and outer  Num[+PL] plurals. 

- Next, I'll argue that a state is in the extension of a count noun only  if it is a state with a single participant. It follows, that n[+PL] are non-count.  And, given certain mereotopological assumptions about liquids (Grimm 2012), it will follow that liquid nouns must denote multi-participant states -- hence are candidates for n[+PL] marking.

- Finally Q3 has to do with a correlation between word meaning and  morpho-syntactic context. I'll propose a way to tie these two together  using ideas from Artstein (2004) about focus below the word level.

Ming Xiang speaks on Wednesday

Ming Xiang (University of Chicago)  will talk on  "The memory structure of covert dependencies” on Wednesday, April 22, at 5:30 in N400. An abstract of her talk follows.

While modeling the cross-linguistic structural variation, linguistic analysis often postulates abstract “covert” representations that do not have any morpho-phonological reflexes in the surface word string. Little is known as to whether such representations are actually constructed in language comprehension and production. In this talk, I will examine the processing of Mandarin wh-in-situ questions, which share the same word order with regular declarative sentences but  have a semantics identical to their English counterpart wh-questions. Drawing on data from production, eyetracking-reading, and speed-accuracy tradeoff paradigms, I will address two questions: (i) Does the parser construct a covert non-local syntactic dependency in processing? (ii) What are the parsing mechanisms that support such non-local dependencies? How similar/different are they from the processing of overt non-local dependencies?

Caroline Andrews in Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

This week we'll be hearing from Caroline Andrews in the Psycholing workshop. She will be presenting on her first GP in preparation for the second year mini conference in a few weeks. The title of her talk is "Predictive Parsing in Licensor-Licensee Dependencies".

As usual for afternoon meetings, we'll be convening at 2:30 on Thursday in N400. 

Bogal-Allbritten at Maryland

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will be presenting a portion of her dissertation research at the University of Maryland this coming Tuesday as a guest speaker at a meeting of their S-Lab group. The talk is titled ‘Building attitudes of belief and desire in Navajo.’

The 2015 entering graduate class

WHISC is pleased to announce next year’s entering graduate class. They are:

Carolyn Anderson graduated from Swarthmore in 2014 with interests in formal semantics and fieldwork, having worked on Moroccan Arabic and Zapotec. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Canada, working on the use of technology in fieldwork and the ethics of fieldwork.

Alex Goebel comes to us from Tübingen University. He has worked in the syntax-semantics interface but has broad interests, especially in cognitive linguistics. Alex has also studied philosophy and through that developed an interest in modals.

Chris Hammerly has recently learned that he won an NSF Fellowship. He majored in linguistics and psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, graduating in 2014. He is currently a Baggett Fellow at the University of Maryland doing research in psycholinguistics. Chris is also part Ojibwe and is interested in learning the language.

Jaieun Kim majored in economics at Sogang University in South Korea, and completed an M.A. in linguistics there in 2014. She was also a visitor at the University of Hawaii for a year. She plans to work on syntax, the acquisition of syntax, and psycholinguistics, and her interests include comparing acquisition across languages.

Brandon Prickett is interested in experimental phonology and in computational models of phonological learning. He has graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will soon complete his M.A. there.

Michael Wilson studied linguistics and Spanish at the University of Texas at Austin. At UMass he will work on experimental methods in lexical semantics and syntactic alternations, as well as in theoretical syntax and semanics.

Rong Yin did her undergraduate work in English at Nankai University in China, then came to the U.S., where she completed an M.A. in linguistics at Syracuse University. She wants to work on syntax and semantics and is interested in fieldwork and in statistical tools.

Barbara Partee at Bard College

Barbara will visit her old friend Robert Martin, philosopher and cellist, at Bard College this Thursday and Friday. On Thursday the 23rd she’ll give a public talk, “Logic and Linguistics: A History of Ideas and Controversies”. On Friday the 24th she’ll give a guest presentation in Bob’s philosophy of language class, a longer version of her talk “The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics”. On Thursday evening she (and Volodja and Barbara’s granddaughter Rachael) will attend a rehearsal of the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, which is preparing for their final concert of the year on May 2. Read more about Bob Martin’s successful dual career in music and philosophy here. Barbara and Bob got acquainted at the historic 1971 summer institute in linguistics and philosophy at UC Irvine. Barbara reports that she hasn’t seen him since the Sequoia Quartet played in Old Deerfield sometime in the early 1980’s.

Overfelt in print!

Jason Overfelt has had two papers recently accepted for publication. One is “Unbounded Successive-Cyclic Rightward DP-Movement,” which will appear in Lingua, and the other is “Rightward DP-Movement Licenses Parasitic Gaps: A reply to Postal 1994,” which will appear in Linguistic Inquiry.

Extended deadline for the Amazonian Linguistics Summer School

Piero Fioralisso writes:

I would like to inform you that we have decided to extend the application deadline to the Amazonian Lingusitics Summer School until May 1st. We hope this extra time helps your students in the case they are considering the option of taking part of the program.

For information about the curricula, go here. And for general information, see this.

Barbara is a Winner!

Barbara Partee has won the Linguist List Fund Drive Drawing! Her prize is a subscription to the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. Linguist List permits prize recipients to transfer their prizes; the subscription will actually go to Luiz Amaral, who can make good use of it.

Congratulations Barbara!

XPrag.de fellowships

XPrag.de offers four fellowships to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each starting between October 2015 and April 2016.

Application deadline: June 20th, 2015.

 

In the  priority program SPP 1727 "New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental evidence (XPrag.de)" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience are collaborating in 16 individual scientific projects at eight different German institutions.

 

Experimental Pragmatics is a new interdisciplinary field of research which has emerged within the last decade. It combines research in Gricean pragmatics with the formal models of modern grammar and the powerful experimental methods of psychology and neuroscience. As a result, Experimental Pragmatics can theoretically state and then empirically test much more precise hypotheses than research in pragmatics previously could. Experimental Pragmatics is thereby expected to lead to a new theory of mechanisms involved in language understanding. Four starting points make substantial progress in pragmatics possible, namely Pragmatic Theory, Formal Models, Embodied Cognition and Experimental Methods.

 

Experimental Pragmatics fruitfully connects the four starting points, and it already has shown its potential to go beyond these starting points to establish new insights in all four areas. 

 

XPrag.de offers a Start-up Funding program to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each. Each funded fellow will join an individual XPrag.de project to prepare her/his own research proposal for the second funding period of XPrag.de (May 2017 - April 2020), which usually is an application for the fellow's own funding. The research proposal is supposed to be submitted to the DFG by end of October 2016.

 

The applicant must choose a suitable post doctoral supervisor for the time of the fellowship in advance.  Any PI of a current XPrag.de project in Germany is eligible to act as supervisor. Beyond the support by the supervisor on a regular basis successful candidates will be offered additional support in the form of research training opportunities, funds for pilot experiments, workspace, etc.  Fellows can also participate in the bottom-up programs of XPrag.de such as the workshop program as well as the mentoring program and the emergency daycare program. Fellows will receive a grant of 1400 € per month. 

 

For more information about XPrag.de, an overview of participating projects and contact data of principal investigators visit our website: www.xprag.de.

 

Requirements:

 

Applicants must hold a Ph.D. degree by the start of the fellowship. 

 

Please submit a 2-page (maximum) outline of your project idea and lay out your career planning. Additionally, please provide your CV, sample writings, contact details of two references, and two letters: one letter of commitment of the potential hosting institution in which the host commits to provide adequate workspace.

 

In a second letter the potential supervisor needs to affirm that s/he will act as supervisor and hold at least monthly meetings with the fellow and that s/he will provide access to equipment and funding for necessary pilot experiments. 

All application documents must be submitted as a single pdf to xprag.de@gmail.com. The application deadline is June 20th, 2015 and applicants will be notified by July 15th, 2015.

 

Proposals are evaluated and ranked by the steering committee of XPrag.de with respect to their potential to be accepted by the DFG as XPrag.de project for the 2017-2020 funding period. 

Homer and Bhatt at EGG

The Eastern Generative Grammar Summer School will be taking place this summer (July 27 to August 7) in Brno, Czech Republic. UMass is represented by Vincent Homer, who will be teaching an introductory course in semantics and a topics in semantics course with Rajesh Bhatt. For more information, go here.

ESSLLI 2015 Registration

27th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI 2015) / Barcelona, Spain

August 3rd 2015 - August 14th 2015
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

http://www.esslli2015.org

* Deadline for early registration with accommodations: April 30 2015 *
* Deadline for early registration without accommodations: June 14 2015 *

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is an annual event organized under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI). It brings together logicians, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers to study language, logic, information, and their interconnections. ESSLLI attracts several hundred participants from all over the world, both senior and junior and is a great place to learn and network -- and have a lot of fun in the process.

There will be 42 courses at introductory and advanced levels, as well as 6 workshops, 4 evening lectures (by Albert Atserias, Chris Barker, Raquel Fernández, and Hans Kamp), and a week-long student session to foster interdisciplinary discussion of current research. Most courses and workshops are one week long. Courses are offered in the areas of Language and Logic, Language and Computation, and Logic and Computation. Check our website for details on the program and registration procedure: http://www.esslli2015.org.

IMPORTANT! The deadline for registration with accommodations is around the corner: April 30 2015. After that we can't guarantee accommodations except for those students who are accepted at the Student Session or who get a grant.

Grant information is available on the registration page. We thank our sponsors (ASL, EACL, SIGLEX) for making these grants possible. We also thank the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the EACSL.

Questions? E-mail esslli2015@gmail.com

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten at Semantics Workshop

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will be presenting in the Semantics Workshop, which meets this week tomorrow, Monday, April 13, at 9AM in N451.

Michael Wagner gives department colloquium

Michael Wagner (McGill University) gives the department colloquium this Friday (April 17) at 3:30 in N400. The title and abstract are below.

 

Additivity and the syntax of 'even'

 

Beaver & Clark (2003, 2010) observe that certain focus operators such as ‘only' and ‘even' differ in various ways from focus sensitive operators such as 'always'. This talk presents analysis that derives at least some of these differences from a difference in their syntax: ‘only' takes two syntactic arguments, a focus constituent which can be of any type, and a second argument, which has to compose with the first to form a proposition (following similar syntactic proposals in Rooth 1985, Mccawley 1995, Krifka 1996). The distribution of ‘only' is further constrained by a constraint that assures that the size of the focus constituent must minimized (potentially motivated semantically, as proposed in Wagner 2006). Adverbs like ‘always', by contrast, operate over a single argument. 

 

A challenges to this view is the syntax of ‘even', which seem to place it between the two categories of focus operators. We can get a better understanding of the syntax of ‘even' once we control for whether ‘even' is used additively or not. Whether ‘even’ carries an additive presupposition remains controversial. While Horn (1969), Karttunen and Peters (1979), Wilkinson (1996) and many others have argued that it does, Stechow (1991), Krifka (1992) and Rullmann (1997) reached the opposite conclusion. This talk identifies a new syntactic generalization about when ‘even' triggers an additive presupposition, which provides further evidence for the analysis of the syntax of focus operators advocated here. It also reconciles the contradictory findings about additivity in the earlier literature.  The analysis offers a new perspective on syntactic constraints on the distribution of related focus operators in German noted in Jacobs (1983) and Büring & Hartmann (2001). 

Professional Development Workshop: Research Ethics

As part of the Spring Professional Development Workshops, Alice Harris, John Kingston and Tom Roeper will give a presentation on Research Ethics this Friday, April 17, at 10AM.

Barbara at CUNY

Barbara Partee will give a linguistics colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center on April 16 on "The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics". While she is in New York, she will also do a few more interviews for her history of formal semantics project. 

UUSLAW on Saturday

The University of Connecticut Storrs hosts UUSLAW (UConn-UMass-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) this Saturday, April 18. UMass is represented by:

Mike Clauss, who gives the paper “Generalized Move-Wh in Acquisition: Free Relatives and Embedded Wh"

Amanda Rizun and Jeremy Hartman, who give the paper “The `Question Under Discussion’ and the Interpretation of Quantifiers."

Andie Faber “Assigning and Producing Grammatical Gender on Novel Nouns in L1 and L2 Spanish."

Marcia Nascimento and Luiz Amaral, who give the paper “Experimental Ideas to Test the Acquisition of Evidentials in Kaingáng"

and

Barbara Pearson, who gives the paper "Cross-linguistic Ambiguity of Quantified Expressions: Implications for Mathematics Teaching and Testing of Bilingual Students."

If you are planning on going from UMass, and are looking for a ride, contact Andie Faber, Tom Roeper or Luiz Amaral.

Dissertation Writing Retreats

Dean John McCarthy writes:

I am writing to you to draw your attention to the dissertation writing retreats that will be offered this summer under the joint sponsorship of the Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development and the University Writing Center. These week-long workshops offer extensive structured time to write, receive feedback, and develop effective writing strategies. Doctoral students who have already begun writing or who will be ready to begin writing by summer are welcome to apply. Three workshops are currently planned:

June 1-5, 2015 from 9am-4pm (CNS, Engineering, SPHHS, Nursing)

June 15-19 from 9am-4pm (SBS, Education, HFA, ISOM)

August 3-7 from 9am-4pm (Open to all disciplines) 

This is the second summer in which we have offered these workshops, and the results from last summer – writing blocks overcome, chapters finished, dissertations defended – demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. These workshops offer more than just a quiet place to write; they also provide expert guidance in the process of writing and how to increase productivity. 

Please urge your advisees to apply by April 17. They can find the application materials and further information here: http://www.tinyurl.com/summerdissretreats.

There is, of course, no charge to participants, and the Graduate School provides childcare scholarships of up to $150 to participants who need them.

Take Quechua!

Carlos Molina-Vital, lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese department and visiting professor of Linguistics at Hampshire College, is teaching an introductory course on Quechua in the Fall. The course is in English, and there is a Quechua 2 planned for Spring 2016. Here is how the course is described:

Quechua is not hard to learn. It is spoken by more people in the Americas than any other indigenous language (10-12 million speakers). No irregular verbs, clear structures. A great way to start learning a less-common language! It gives you a gateway to the Andean world, past and present.Our studies will examine current Andean culture in its context. Topics include high-altitude agriculture, religious syncretism, social-organization. We will study the Quechua world through basic Southern Quechua grammar (spoken in the Southern Peruvian Andes and Bolivia).

It meets MWF 11:15-12:05, and you’ll find it in SPIRE as Spanish 397Q-01.

Dillon in Frontiers in Psychology

Brian Dillon’s paper “Teasing apart encoding interference and retrieval interference in the processing of anaphors,” as just been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology. Congratulations to Brian, and his co-authors: L. Jäger, L. Benz, J. Roesler and S. Vasishth.

UMass at FASAL 5

The fifth meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages is meeting this weekend at Yale University. UMass is well represented. Sakshi Bhatia gives her paper "Causation in Hindi-Urdu: Agents and Subjects." Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer give their paper "PPIs and movement in Hindi-Urdu." Mike Clauss and some of his friends were also in attendance. For more information, go here.

Michel DeGraff gives Freeman Lecture

Michel DeGraff will deliver the Freeman Lecture this Friday, 10 April 2015 at 3:30 PM in the Integrative Learning Center, N 151. The title of his talk is "Kreyol pale, Kreyol konprann: Power/knowledge at the crossroads of history, linguistics & education in Haiti."

Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He specializes in syntax, morphology, language change, Creole studies, Haitian Creole, education in Haiti, and the linguistics-ideology interface. In his Freeman Lecture, he will discuss his participation in and the rationale, accomplishments and prospects of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, which is a project for the development, evaluation and dissemination of active-learning resources in Kreyòl (the national language of Haiti and one of its two official languages) to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education plus leadership and management in Haiti.

Benu Pareek at LARC

Jeremy Hartman writes:

The LARC meeting on Wednesday, 4/8 at 12:15 in Room N451 will feature Benu Pareek (Jawaharlal Nehru University), who will speak about:

 "Verb Agreement in Hindi and its Acquisition"

All are welcome!

Anna Howell speaks at the Semantics Workshop

UMass visitor from Tübingen, Anna Howell, will be presenting at the Semantics Workshop this Thursday, April 9, at 1PM in N451.

Roeper and Pearson get NSF

An NSF Grant titled “Science Live” Workshop on the Acquisition of Recursion Across Languages” ( $29000) has been awarded to Tom Roeper (in collaboration with Bart Hollebrandse and Barbara Pearson) to work on a museum exhibit and related experimentation on recursion (based on the work of Ana Perez, Terue Nakato, Luiz Amaral, Jon Nelson and Anca Sevcenco). The museums include  the Dutch National Science Museum local Massachusetts museums and then others. The project will engage graduate and undergraduate collaborators as well.

Larry Solan on forensic linguistics

UMass alumnus Larry Solan was a member of the Diane Rehm show on Wednesday, April 1, which focused on “How Technology is Changing Criminal Linguistic Evidence in Court.” Take a listen here.

Larry Hyman gives department colloq

Larry Hyman will give the department colloquium on Friday, April 3, at 3:30 in N400. The title of his talk is “Multiple argument marking in Bantoid,” and an abstract follows.

Given the typological similarities between the geographically and genetically distant Atlantic, Kordofanian and (Narrow) Bantu languages, it is generally assumed that early Niger-Congo had a synthetic structure with extensive noun class marking and derivational verb extensions (causative, applicative, etc.). However, other Niger-Congo languages show varying degrees of analyticity, some coming close to the endpoint of one morpheme per word. Much of the variation is quite clearly areal. In this paper I am concerned both with the mechanisms of change that lead from syntheticity to analyticity in the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland area, as well as the different strategies that are adopted as these languages lose their verbal extensions. The Bantoid languages I report on are typologically quite diverse. I am particularly concerned with what has replaced dative (recipient, benefactive) and instrumental applicative marking on verbs which historically allowed multiple object noun phrases (send-APPL chief letter, cook-APPL child rice, cut-APPL knife meat). The languages of this area show a remarkable variation: (i) Some languages allow multiple objects (typically with restrictions), while others do not (including some which have relic verb extensions); (ii) some have replaced verb extensions with serial verbs (take knife cut meat give child), others use adpositions (cut meat with knife for child). Still others have adopted multiple strategies for marking such arguments. In this study I sort out these strategies and attempt a micro-mapping of who has developed what where—and grammaticalizing from what (nouns? verbs?)? I will show that even adpositional languages have extensive verb serialization which they exploit for other functions (aspectual, directional, comparatives etc.), thereby raising the question of why only some Bantoid languages use serial verbs for argument marking. Although information is lacking for many languages, there does appear to be a southerly band of languages which mark datives and instruments with serial verbs. Information from Nigeria suggests that a similar distinction separates much of Lower Cross-River from Upper Cross River languages as well.

Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

This week we're meeting in the evening to hear from Amanda Rysling and Deniz Ozyildiz, who will be giving practice talks for PhoNE. Amanda will be telling us about "[...] a detection theoretic analysis of sensitivity to lexical restriction", while Deniz will be presenting on "A parallel OT analysis of exceptional stress in Turkish". Each talk should last about 20 minutes, with 10 minutes each for questions and feedback.

We'll meet this Tuesday (March 31) at 7:30pm. As in the past, the meeting will take place in Amanda's and my apartment. Light refreshment will be provided.

Poole and Keine talk on Wednesday

Ethan Poole and Stefan Keine will be giving auditioning their GLOW talk on Wednesday, April Fools Day, from 1:30 to 2:30 in N451. The talk is entitled “Intervention in tough constructions."

Nick LaCara speaks in the syntax workshop

The syntax workshop meets on Thursdays at 10AM in ILC N451. This Thursday, April 2, Nick will narrowly miss giving an April Fool’s presentation of his paper “Ellipsis is not Spell-Out: What Scandinavia tells us about ellipsis and phrases.” 

Abstract

This paper investigates two contemporary theories of ellipsis licensing from the perspective of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Scandinavian languages exhibit verb movement in main clauses in the form of verb-second order, but contrary to the predictions of Goldberg (2005) they do not show verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis in VPE contexts. I argue that phase-based approaches to ellipsis (Gengel 2007, Holmberg 2001, Rouveret 2012, a.o.) cannot adequately capture this fact. Instead, following Sailor (2014), I argue in favor of Aelbrecht’s (2010) derivational approach to ellipsis, which captures the facts in Scandinavian languages straightforwardly.

Ivy Hauser is a Bloch Fellow

Our own Ivy Hauser has been selected as the Bloch Fellow by the Linguistic Society of America. The Bloch Fellowship includes tuition, travel, and subsistence money for the recipient to attend the Linguistics Institute this summer at the University of Chicago. The Bloch Fellow is an important position, since she is an ex-officio member of the Executive Committee of the Society with full voting rights and is the Chair of the LSA’s Committee on Student Issues and Concerns. Thus, the Bloch Fellow represents student members in important ways. Ivy will begin in May by attending a meeting of the Executive Committee, and she will serve for two years in this capacity.  For more information see the LSA web site.

The Lingle

The first general meeting of the undergraduate linguistic majors will take place this Friday, April 3, from 6-7PM in ILC N400.  The purpose of this inaugural Lingle is to review the resources and requirements of the various linguistics majors, get feedback from students about the major, and plan future events. All linguistic majors, actual and prospective, are invited to attend.

Homer and Bhatt speak in the department colloq

In connection with the department’s open house this week, Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer will give the department colloquium this Friday, March 27, at 3:30 in N400. The title of their talk is “Move Something.” The abstract follows:

Typically, PPIs cannot be interpreted in the scope of a clausemate negation (barring shielding and rescuing). This means that when a given PPI is such that its scope is uniquely determined by its surface position, as is the case with e.g. would rather, the effect of putting it under a clause-mate negation is plain ungrammaticality.  With indefinites, such as some, things are different: they can appear in that same configuration, provided that they are interpreted with wide scope over negation, which, in their case, is an available option.

In fact, indefinites are independently known to be able to take free wide scope: it is thus a priori possible that a mechanism whereby indefinite PPIs escape out of anti-licensing environments is the same that gives them wide scope out of syntactic islands, i.e. they can be interpreted by choice functions. In this talk, we address the question of the nature of the mechanism at play when, for polarity purposes, elements take wider scope than where they appear on the surface. We present arguments from Hindi-Urdu that, when a PPI surfaces in an anti-licensing environment, the wide scope mechanism that salvages it is movement (overt in Hindi-Urdu), not existential closure of a function-variable.

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.