Rising Voices screens in Northampton

On October 18, the Academy of Music in Northampton will be screening a documentary on the revitalization of the Lakota language. Go here for information about the film, and a trailer, and here for information about the screening at the Academy of Music. The movie is free, but reservations are required.

UMass at Sinn und Bedeutung

The Twentieth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung met at the University of Tubingen September 9-12. UMass alumna Junko Shimoyama was among the invited speakers, and there were many members of the UMass community in the program.

Alumnus Florian Schwarz gave a paper (with Jacopo Romoli and Cory Bill) entitles “Reluctant Acceptance of the Literal Truth — Eye Tracking in the Covered Box Paradigm."

Alumna Maribel Romero gave a paper (with Andreas Walker) entitled “counterfactual Donkeys: A Strict Conditional Analysis."

Alumna Amy Rose Deal gave the paper “Mass and count without the signature property: Yudja and Nez Perce."

Barbara Partee along with UMass alumna Irene Heim gave presentations at the workshop for Arnim von Stechow

Alumnus Marcin Morzycki gave a talk entitled “Toward a General Theory of Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives."

Alumnae Ana Arregui and Maria Biezma gave a poster entitled "Discourse Rationality and the Counterfactuality Implicatures in Backtracking Conditionals"

Alumnae Ilaria Frana and Paula Menendez Benito gave a poster entitled “The Hypothetical Future in Italian and Spanish."

Alumna Maria Nella Carminati gave a poster (with Francescas Foppolo and Panzeri) entitled “The Incremental processing of telic predicates."

Alumni Ilaria Frana and Kyle Rawlins gave a poster entitled “Italian Negation and mica in questions and assertions.” 

For more information, go here.

Amy Rose Deal sends us this picture of some of the UMass-ers in attendance. (From left to right: Maribel Romero, Kylito Rawlins, Ilaria Frana, Maria Biezma, Paula Menendez Benito and Amy Rose Deal.)

UMass at TbiLLC 2015

The Eleventh Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation is meeting this weekend at Tbilisi State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. UMass is represented by:

Jeremy Pasquereau who is presenting “Overt movement of comparative quantifiers in European French"

and

Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt who are conducting a workshop on Obligatoriness, as well as presenting a paper “PPIs and Movement."

Ashwini Deo gives department colloquium on Friday

Ashwini Deo (Yale) will give the department’s first colloquium of the semester this Friday, September 25, at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title and abstract of her talk follow.

Title: The Semantic and Pragmatic underpinnings of Grammaticalization Paths

It is a well-established fact that meanings associated with functional linguistic expressions evolve in systematic ways across time. But we have little precise understanding of why and how this happens. We know even less about how formal approaches to the meanings of functional categories like tense, aspect, negation can be reconciled with the typologically robust findings of grammaticalization research. In this talk, I will take a first step towards such an understanding by analyzing a robustly attested semantic change in natural languages — the progressive-to-imperfective shift.

The facts can be described as follows: At Stage 0, a linguistic system L possesses a single imperfective or neutral aspectual marker X that is used to express two contextually disambiguable meanings α and β. At Stage 1, a progressive marker Y arises spontaneously in L in order to express α in some contexts. At Stage 2, Y becomes entrenched as an obligatory grammatical element for expressing α while X is restricted in use to expressing β. At Stage 3, Y generalizes and is used to express both α and β. X is gradually driven out of L. Stage 3 (structurally identical to Stage 0) is often followed by another instantiation of Stage 1, with the innovation of a new progressive marker Z. The trajectory to be explained is thus cyclic. The analysis I provide has a semantic component that characterizes the logical relation between the progressive and imperfective operators in terms of asymmetric entailment. Its dynamic component rests on the proposal that imperfective and progressive sentences crucially distinguish between two kinds of inquiries: phenomenal and structural inquiries (Goldsmith and Woisetschleger 1982). The innovation and entrenchment of progressive marking in languages is shown to be underpinned by optimal ways of resolving both kinds of inquiries in discourse given considerations of successful and economic communication. Generalization is analyzed as the result of imperfect learning. The trajectory — consisting of the recruitment of a progressive form, its categorical use in phenomenal inquiries, and its generalization to imperfective meaning — is modeled within the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory. 

PRG this Wednesday

Coral Hughto and Ivy Hauser write

This semester's first meeting of PRG will be on Wednesday 23 September at 7:30pm. PRG is an informal gathering to talk about half-baked ideas, interesting papers, works-in-progress, or anything else. PLEASE EMAIL US IF YOU WILL BE COMING! The current plan is to meet downstairs in Haymarket (in Northampton), but if enough people RSVP we will host the meeting somewhere else.

Jarosz speaks at LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday 9/25 at 12PM in N451. All are welcome! Gaja Jarosz will present:

Acquisition of Onset Clusters in Polish: Sonority Sequencing and Input Sensitivity 

SpectroLunch this Friday

The second meeting of the weekly SpectroLunch meets this Friday at 11am in N400. SpectroLunch is a venue in which participants practice spectrogram reading and WHISC has learned that this week’s meeting will feature “Peggy’s Animals pt. 2.” 

Job at University of Potsdam

The University of Potsdam, Human Sciences Faculty invites applications for:

W 1- Junior Professorship for “Variation and Variability in Grammatical Systems”  

The specialization for the junior professorship includes the investigation and modeling of variation and variability in grammatical systems, with an emphasis on non-European languages. Particular attention should be given to structural similarities and differences between different languages, and to how these inform grammar-theoretical or typological modeling. 

 The prospective junior professor will have demonstrated expertise (in research and teaching) in the comparative evaluation of variation and variability of non-European languages. A specialization in morphology and morphosyntax, complemented by expertise in phonology or syntax and/or a specialization in the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, or Afro-Asiatic language families, is desired. 

 A successful applicant has a solid foundation of the underlying theories and models, works with empirical methods in data acquisition and analysis (e.g., systematic field research, corpus research, experimental methods, etc.), and can demonstrate how grammar-theoretical or typological modeling can be advanced through the inclusion of cross-linguistic variation and within-language variability. 

 The junior professor will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics at the University of Potsdam. Furthermore, it is expected that the applicant will partake in the research activities of the Research Area in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Potsdam, and will actively contribute to the acquisition of larger joint research projects. Very good command of the English language is a prerequisite for the position, experience with international cooperation and the acquisition of third-party funding are desired. 

 According to State law (§ 45 Brandenburgisches Hochschulgesetz - BbgHG), preconditions for the appointment as a Junior Professor include a completed university education, teaching skills, and a special qualification for academic work, which is usually demonstrated though an outstanding PhD thesis. International experience, an outstanding publication record and a teaching record are advantageous. The total time for completion of the PhD and subsequent post-doc employment should not have exceeded six years. 

 Appointments are made according to §§ 40 and 46 BbgHG. The appointment as a civil servant or a public employee will be made for up to four years in the first instance and can be extended to up to 6 years in total, conditional upon a positive evaluation. 

The University of Potsdam strives to increase the proportion of women in research and teaching and specifically encourages female applicants to apply for this position. Handicapped applicants will be given preference in case of equal suitability. People with an immigration background are specifically encouraged to apply. 

 The University of Potsdam offers dual career support and coaching for newly-appointed professors: http://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/neue-beschaeftigte/information-for-newly-appointed-professors.html

 Applications (with a presentation of your research interests, curriculum vitae, copies of academic certificates and documents, a list of publications, a list of conducted courses, a list of externally funded projects) should be sent to the University of Potsdam ausschreibungen@uni-potsdam.de no later than 1^st of October 2015.

Job at University of Delaware

Position Title Assistant Professor in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics

Location Newark, DE

Job Title: Neurolinguist/psycholinguist

Job Rank: Assistant Professor

Specialty Areas: Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics

Description: College of Arts & Sciences,Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Tenure-track Faculty Position in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics

The University of Delaware Department of Linguistics and CognitiveScience invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor.  The position is expected to begin September 1, 2016.  The successful candidate will have a Ph.D. in linguistics or a related field, with a specialization in neurolinguistic or psycholinguistic research on language disorders and/or first language acquisition.  The Ph.D. must be in hand prior to the start of the appointment.

We seek individuals who demonstrate the drive and vision to develop an innovative, cutting-edge, and internationally recognized researchprogram in neurolinguistics or psycholinguistics with a focus onlanguage disorders and/or first language acquisition. Preference will be given to scholars who can contribute to our undergraduatepre-professional program in speech/language pathology.  Applicants who can conduct fundable research at the new UD Multi-Modal Imaging Center (http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2015/apr/functional-mri-042415.html) ,scheduled to open in the spring of 2016, are also particularly encouraged to apply. This 11,600 square foot research facility will house a Siemens 3T Magnetom Prisma scanner, and the suite will beequipped with state-of-the-art MR-compatible visual and auditory stimulation equipment, eye-tracking, response devices, and physiological measurement hardware.

The successful applicant will be expected to teach a subset of thefollowing undergraduate courses: First Language Development,Introduction to Communication Disorders, Psycholinguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, and general courses inlinguistics and cognitive science.  They will also be expected tooffer graduate courses in areas of their specialization. The teaching load is 2+2.  Other duties include supervision of graduate students, undergraduate student advising, involvement in curricular development,and performance of University and Department service.

The Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science is housed in the University of Delaware’s College of Arts andSciences. The department runs an internationally-renowned PhD programin Linguistics, a Master’s degree in Linguistics and CognitiveScience, a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics. The Department also offers,via a university-wide Cognitive Science committee, an interdisciplinary Certificate in Cognitive Science as part of graduate degrees across schools and departments. The department has state-of-the-art laboratories in phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics, including a 128-channel ERP lab. The department is part of a university-wide cognitive science community, including adiverse set of researchers from various departments and colleges.  The Department also has ties to a new Clinical Master’s Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders, anticipated to begin admitting students in academic year 2016-2017. This program includes a new Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic (http://sites.udel.edu/cscd/clinic/), to open fall 2015.

The University of Delaware combines a rich historic legacy with acommitment to education and the latest in advanced technology. With external funding exceeding $200 million per year, the University ranks among the top 100 universities in federal R&D support for science and engineering. Enhanced by state-of-the-art facilities, research is conducted across all seven colleges and numerous interdisciplinary institutes and centers. Other relevant facilities on campus include the new 103,000 square foot Health Sciences Complex, a state-of-the-art facility that includes labs for human-based studies and an active outpatient clinic; a 194,000 square foot Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory; and the DelawareTechnology Park, where entrepreneurial and academic research labs are co-located. The Delaware Health Sciences Alliance (DHSA), a partnership among the University of Delaware, Christiana Care HealthSystem, Nemours / Al duPont Hospital for Children, and Thomas Jefferson University, provides infrastructure and opportunity for innovative clinical and translational collaborations.
 
Applicants should apply online at www.interfolio.com and submita cover letter, a statement of current and long-term research plans, a statement of teaching experience and philosophy, a CV, three representative research publications, and three letters of recommendation. 

Inquiries, but not application materials, should be emailed to Arild Hestvik, Chair of the Search Committee, hestvik@udel.edu. Review of applications will begin on October 18, 2015, and will continue until the position is filled.

Application Deadline:  18-Oct-2015  (Open until filled)

Call for papers: SNEWS 2015

Jon Ander Media writes:

The call for SNEWS 2015 is out. As always, the workshop is meant to be   a friendly venue for graduate students in Linguistics to present their  work in semantics. Presentations about ongoing research are most  welcome. On average, the goal is to have  2-3 presenters from each  school.

Those interested in presenting should let me know by September 30th, although titles are not due until October 31st. There is no need to send an  abstract and no need to provide a title (for the moment). This year SNEWS will be organized and hosted by Harvard.

Below you can find the relevant information:

- What: The talks should be 20 min + 10 min for questions.

- When: November 21, 2015

- Where: Department of Linguistics, Harvard University

- Who can present: Graduate students at the participating schools: Brown, Harvard, MIT, UConn, UMass, Yale.

- Who can attend: Graduate students, post-docs, visitors at the participating schools; faculty are encouraged to attend!

- What to expect: A day in which you get to hear about what other fellow graduate students are doing and chat with them over breakfast, lunch, and during coffee breaks (food and beverages provided). An evening which you are warmly invited to spend at a party hosted by one of our graduate
students.

- Short description of SNEWS:

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) is an annual workshop for graduate students in Linguistics to present their research and receive feedback in an informal setting. Topics of  
presentation generally fall into any of the following categories (broadly defined): semantics, pragmatics, semantics/pragmatics interface, experimental and psycholinguistic investigations into semantic/pragmatic phenomena, etc. The workshop is meant to encourage the development and exchange of ideas through friendly interaction between students and faculty from different universities in the area. Universities that have participated in the past include UConn, UMass, Harvard, MIT, Brown, and Yale.

Cog Sci Mixer

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

In order for us, the grad students involved in the UMass Cognitive Science initiative, to get acquainted with each other, both personally and professionally, it's a good idea to get together and chat! So I'm trying to set up a date for the first CogSci mixer of the fall semester. We had a few similar events last year and they were successful and fun!
If you're interested in attending the mixer, please fill out the doodle poll below. http://doodle.com/poll/88w4u3ee9f4ecd83

We'll meet at a local cafe or restaurant. Everybody will have the opportunity to present themselves and give a quick, informal overview of their work and their interests. 

If you can't make it on any of these dates, but you're interested in meeting everybody, please let me know so that we can arrange for another date.

Please also circulate the information to your department and to everybody who you think might be interested. People can also sign up to be on our website and mailing lists:
http://blogs.umass.edu/cogsci/contact-and-mailing-lists/

Call for papers: ECOM

The Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group is pleased to announce that it will be hosting its second annual interdisciplinary workshop this November on "Expressive Language: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Origins", to be held November 19-20, 2015 at the University of Connecticut. 

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology) — of systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes, through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

Our invited speakers are:

Timothy Jay (Psychology, Massachusetts College)

Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Delaware)

Dean Pettit (Philosophy, UNC-Chapel Hill)

Ljiljana Progovac (Linguistics, Wayne State)

Mark Richard (Philosophy, Harvard) 

We also invite abstracts of short papers by junior researchers (25-30mins) on the topics of the conference. Please submit abstracts in PDF format to Nathan Kellen by October 20th.  (Authors of accepted papers will be notified during the following week.) 

Elan Dresher last Friday

Elan Dresher of the University of Toronto (PhD UMass 1978) gave a talk last Friday Sept. 18th. The title and abstract follow.

Contrastive Hierarchy Theory: An Overview.

In this talk I will present an overview of contrastive hierarchy theory, aka Modified Contrastive Specification (MCS) or ‘Toronto School’ phonology. I will set out the main tenets of this theory, and briefly review their antecedents in the history of phonology. I will then illustrate various applications of the theory to topics in synchronic and diachronic phonology, as well as its implications for typology.

LSA's Program is published

The Ninetieth meeting of the Linguistic Society of America takes place Jan. 7-10 in Washington D.C. and their conference schedule has recently been posted. You can find information about the conference, as well as information about accommodations and registration, here. UMass is well represented:

Alumna Gillian Gallagher presents “Rapid phonotactic generalization: Behavioral evidence and a Bayesian model” with Tal LInzen and Timothy O’Donnell.

Meghan Armstrong presents  "Epistemic stress shift in American English" with Scott Schwenter.

Barbara Pearson and Tom Roeper presents “Linguistic and Pragmatic Ambiguity of Quantified Expressions in Mathematics Word Problems"

Robert Staubs, Coral Hughto and Joe Pater present “Grammar and learning in syntactic and phonological typology” with Jennifer Culbertson.

Alumnus Jonah Katz presents “Cue integration and fricative perception in Seoul Korean” with Sarah Lee.

Alumna Cherlon Ussery presents “The Typology of Mandarin Infinitives” with Lydia Ding and Rebecca Liu

Nick LaCara presents “Verb phrase movement as a window into head movement"

Alumnus Jeff Runner presents “Locality effects in long-distance reflexive retrieval: the case of Mandarin Chinese ziji” with Yuhang Xu.

Stefan Keine presents “Positions versus items in the syntax of superraising” 

Joe Pater, Lisa Sanders, Robert Staubs, Benjamin Zobel and alumna Claire Moore-Cantwell present “Phonological learning in the laboratory: ERP evidence"

Aleksei Nazarov presents “Ambiguity of analysis: Learning Dutch stress with input inference"

Robert Staubs presents “Learning morpheme segmentation with distributions over underlying representations"

Thuy Bui presents “Menominee Agreement: Two probes for Two Hierarchies"

Alumnus Florian Schwarz presents “Local Accommodation and Presupposition Trigger Class: Results from the Covered Box Task” with Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin and “Entailed Presupposiitons: Experimental Evidence for a Distinction Between Triggers” with Jeremy Zehr and “Two Types of Definites in American Sign Language” with Ava Irani.

Ivy Hauser presents “VOT variation and perceptual distinction"

Tom Ernst presents “The Semantics of Domain Adverbs” with Timothy Grinsell

Alumna Maria Gouskova presents “Sublexical phonotactics of English -er suffixes” with Suzy Ahn

Alumna Jennifer Smith presents “Segmental noun/verb phonotactic differences are productive too"

 

The LSA Program

Last weekend, our own Rajesh Bhatt assisted Marlyse Baptista, David Robinson and  alumnus Andries Coetzee in putting together the LSA program. He has sent WHISC the following photo of the process.

Memorial for Emmon Bach, and department picnic, this Saturday

The department picnic occurs this Saturday, September 19, and will be preceded by a memorial tribute to Emmon Bach, long-time pillar of the department and a beloved colleague, teacher, and friend to many of us. You may have received a separate invitation from John Kingston to that -- let me know if you didn't so that we can make sure you will get future notices in case of any changes (e.g. if it rains); in any case, everyone is welcome to both parts of the combined event. The Emmon remembrance will include music, reminiscences, tributes, to which everyone is welcome to contribute, planned in advance or spontaneously. If you're interested in contributing some live music, contact Kristine Yu (krisyu@linguist.umass.edu).

The Emmon event will start at 2, and the picnic proper will start at 3:30. In case of rain, the Emmon event will probably be moved to the department, but the picnic will be at 50 Hobart Lane rain or shine.
If you're coming from out of town, you don't have to contribute to the potluck part -- just let me know and we'll make sure there's plenty! 

And please let me know of people who should be added to the mailing list; and at the same time you can invite them to come (and urge relevant people to get themselves onto the ling-colloq mailing list.)

For more information about the picnic — directions, etc, — go here.

SSRG meets tomorrow, Monday September 14

The first meeting of the Syntax/Semantics Reading Group meets at 7:30pm, Monday the 14th, at Leland Kusmer’s apartment in Northampton. Food will be provided by the GLSA.

Sound Workshop on Mondays

John Kingston writes:

Sound Workshop will meet Mondays 11:15-12:05 in N451, starting this Monday, September 14.

Chuck Clifton speaks on Wednesday

Chuck Clifton (Psychology) will give the first cognitive brown bag talk this semester on Wednesday, September 16, at noon in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.

How readers and listeners use their knowledge of grammar - and how they go beyond it

The realization that our ability to produce and comprehend language requires use of detailed and elaborate knowledge of syntax fueled the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. Over the following 20 years, we learned a great deal about how readers and listeners used this knowledge in real time to interpret sentences. The success of these analyses of how language comprehension was driven by grammatical knowledge led to competing analyses, emphasizing how various sources of extra-grammatical knowledge contribute to language comprehension. In the years since the peak of the debate between these contrasting positions, more nuanced approaches have developed. These approaches extend the analysis of grammar's contributions to incorporate effects of prosody, semantics, and pragmatics, and recognize that different types of grammatical relations might be processed differently. Other recent approaches have gone beyond grammar to consider the role language statistics might play in comprehension. Currently, my colleagues and I are exploring how language users employ their knowledge of what speakers and writers are likely to intend, and what kinds of errors they are likely to make in producing language, to arrive at interpretations of sentences that violate the grammatical requirements of the language.

In the first part of this talk, I will summarize the changing views of how we comprehend what we read and hear, providing illustrations of theoretical claims and examples of experimental evidence. In the second part of the talk, I will describe some of the work my colleagues and I are currently doing on what we call "acceptable ungrammaticality," in which readers' and listeners' interpretations of language are guided by what they know of how writers and speakers can misuse the grammar of their language.

LARC this Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

LARC will meet this Friday 9/18 at 12PM in N451.  All are welcome!  Rita Mathur, visiting us from Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed University, Pune, India, will present:

"Study of Parameter Setting: evidence from a few case studies of Hindi and English speaking bilingual children aged 2-7 year old"

Lisa Green: LSA Fellow

WHISC is pleased to announce that Lisa Green has been named to the class of 2016 Linguistic Society of America’s Fellows. She joins nine other of “the field’s leading linguists,” including UMass alumnus Kai von Fintel. You can learn more here.

Alice Harris on the road

Alice Harris was in New York at a leadership workshop for the American Council of Learned Societies on Friday, September 11, and from there, has gone to Austin Texas where she is an invited speaker at a Workshop entitled "Historical Linguistics and Typology: Assessing a Partnership.” She is giving her paper, "Affix Order, Multiple Exponence and Morphological Reconstructions,” today. You can learn more here.

Department colloqs schedule announced

Katerina Vostrikova and Stefan Keine write:

GLSA is excited to announce the colloqs schedule for this semester:

Ashwini Deo September 25

Howard Lasnik November, 13

Laura McPherson November, 20

Jon Sprouse December, 4

Masashi Hashimoto goes to Hiroshima

Congratulations to UMass alumnus Masashi Hashimoto, who has accepted a postdoc at Hiroshima University.

Tom Ernst in Language

Congratulations to Tom Ernst, whose paper “Modification of Stative Predicates” has been accepted for publication in Language.

Phonology Reading Group

Ivy Hauser and Coral Hughto write:

Phonology reading group plans to meet this semester every other week.  PRG has been used as an informal place to present sound related work, do paper discussions, recap conferences, etc.  What we do this semester is up to us and we can discuss what would be useful at the first meeting.  Dinner always provided by the GLSA. 

We've tentatively scheduled meetings for 7:30p Wednesdays (exactly which weeks we meet will be determined later). If you want to be involved in PRG and this time cannot work for you please get in touch with us.

Seth Cabe at Triple A

Seth Cable gave the talk, “Graded Tenses in Complement Clauses: Evidence that Future is not a Tense” at the conference “The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages” which was hosted by the University of Tübingen June 3-6. You can learn more here.

Call for papers: Prosody and Information Structure

*Prosody and Information Structure in Stuttgart (PINS)*
March 22-23, 2016

*Aim*

Starting out from the (not uncontroversial) assumption thatinformation-structural categories are universal and definable inabstract interpretive terms, this workshop aims at bringing togetherresearchers interested in the prosodic manifestation ofinformation-structural categories within and across languages, includingboth cross-linguistic comparisons as well as language contact situationsof various kinds (L2, FL, Heritage languages).
The workshop welcomes both semantic-pragmatically oriented as well asprosodically oriented contributions. We particularly invite experimentaland corpus-based studies.

*Important dates*

Deadline for Submission: October 11, 2015

Notification of Acceptance: November 16, 2015

Workshop: March 22-23, 2016

*Invited Speakers*

- Sasha Calhoun (Victoria University of Wellington)

- Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (LLF CNRS, Université Paris Diderot)

- Caroline Féry (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

- Michael Wagner (McGill University Montréal) (to be confirmed)

*Call for papers*

We invite the submission of abstracts for oral or poster presentations.Abstracts should be anonymous, in English, and should not exceed onepage (2.5 cm margins, 12pt font size), with an extra page for examples,figures and references. Please submit your abstract as a pdf documentusing EasyChair.

*Info*

http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/events/PINS/index.en.html

*Topics of interest*

Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Recent advances in the theory of information structure

- Which are the information-structural categories that are expressed prosodically in a language (including both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- Is the prosodic marking of information structure interpreted categorically by listeners (in both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- How does rhythm interact with the prosody of information structure?

-Are there prosodic effects which have no pragmatic interpretation? (Forexample: are prenuclear accents optional? Are there cases of deaccentuation which occur for purely phonological, non-meaning-related,reasons?)

- How do the results of production and perception studies on the prosody of information structure find their way into prosodic annotation systems for a language? How important is it that a pitch accent categorization reflects meaning differences?

- How can the results obtained from controlled studies be transferred to corpus data of spontaneous speech?

- What are semantic-pragmatic contexts suitable for the elicitation ofI S-prosody beyond question-answer pairs and/or explicit contrast structures?

- Which distinctions of referential information status (e.g. coreference anaphora, bridging anaphora, deixis, newness of discourse referents) and lexical information status (e.g. word repetition, synonymy, hypernymy, meronymy, discourse-newness of content expressions) are expressed by prosody (including both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- By means of which cues (pitch accents, phrasing) are these categories expressed?

- What kinds of speaker bias can be expressed in positive and negative polar questions, and how is this influenced by prosody?

- What is the role of implicit Questions under Discussion (QUDs) in the determination of information structure, and how can they be used in experimental and corpus linguistics?

- What is the interplay between discourse structure and information structure? What effects does discourse structure have on prosody?

- What is the relationship between at-issueness and prosody? How is not-at-issue material (e.g. appositions or evidentials) realized prosodically?

WHISC returns

Classes start this week, and with them so does WHISC. As in previous years, WHISC posts news about the goings-on in the Linguistics department at UMass. The posts usually appear on Sundays. If you have an item that you would like to see in WHISC, send it to umass.whisc@gmail.com by the Friday preceding the Sunday you’d like to see it posted. (The staff at WHISC are slow and long in the tooth. They will appreciate a bit of lead time.)

Welcome back!

Town Meeting on Friday

The introductory Town Meeting occurs this Friday (Sept. 11)  in the department seminar room (ILC N400) at 3:30. This gathering is a chance for us to welcome the new members of the department, and for them to get their first look at us. Photographer Brian McDermott from Communication and Journalism be on hand at 2:30 to take pictures. If you have not had your picture taken for the department directory, or if you would like to replace the one we have, please come at 2:30. 

Department Picnic and memorial to Emmon Bach

Barbara and Volodja write:

This year the picnic, which occurs on Saturday September 19, will be preceded by a memorial tribute to Emmon Bach, long-time pillar of the department and a beloved colleague, teacher, friend to many of us. You may have received a separate invitation from John Kingston to that -- let me know if you didn't so that we can make sure you will get future notices in case of any changes (e.g. if it rains); in any case, everyone is welcome to both parts of the combined event. The Emmon remembrance will include music, reminiscences, tributes, to which everyone is welcome to contribute, planned in advance or spontaneously. If you're interested in contributing some live music, contact Kristine Yu (krisyu@linguist.umass.edu).

The Emmon event will start at 2, and the picnic proper will start at 3:30. In case of rain, the Emmon event will probably be moved to the department, but the picnic will be at 50 Hobart Lane rain or shine.
If you're coming from out of town, you don't have to contribute to the potluck part -- just let me know and we'll make sure there's plenty! 

And please let me know of people who should be added to the mailing list; and at the same time you can invite them to come (and urge relevant people to get themselves onto the ling-colloq mailing list.)

For more information about the picnic — directions, etc, — go here.

Call for papers: Tonal Aspects of Languages 2016

The Fifth international symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages will be held in Buffalo, New York May 24-27. The special theme of these year’s meeting is "Tone in the brain and the world: Bridging linguistic and psychological perspectives.” The deadline for submission of papers is December 1, 2015. For more information, go here.

Semantics Workshop

Seth Cable writes:

I’m writing to let you all know that the meetings of the Semantics Workshop this fall will be at the following time-space coordinates:

Wednesdays, 12:20 - 1:10

Room N451 (of the Integrative Learning Center)

Our first meeting will be Wednesday (September 9th). We’ll discuss our general goals for the semester, and set a preliminary agenda.

Call for papers: Speech Prosody 2016

Speech Prosody 2016 will be held in Boston May 31-June 3, 2016. This year’s theme is “Prosody and Individual: Unity and Difference Within and Across Speech Communities.” The deadline for submission of regular papers is November 15. (They are also accepting proposals for Special Sessions. The deadline for those proposals is September 15.) You can learn more about the conference here.

Psycholinguistic Workshop

Amanda Rysling writes:

The Psycholinguistics Workshop this semester will meet on Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 in N400.
There are also going to be some talks or events not at that time, which will be announced on the ling-psych mailing list. Anyone who wants to present something, whether at a daytime meeting or during a special evening/reading group session, should let me know. 

Call for papers: LabPhon 15

Cornell University is hosting the fifteenth meeting of LabPhon July 13-16, 2016. The call for abstracts for 20 minute talks, as well as posters, can be found here. This year’s themes are: Perceptual dynamics, Prosodic organization, Lexical dynamics and memory, Phonological acquisition and changes over the lifespan, and social network dynamics.

Two page abstracts are due on December 1.  You can learn more about the conference here.

Phonology Grant Group meetings

Joe Pater writes:

We’ve settled on Thursday 4-5 as the meeting time for the phonology grant group. Our first meeting at that time will be Thursday the 24th, but we’ll have a meeting this week at the special time of 1:45 Friday (the 11th). I’l try to get N400, but if I can’t, I’ll e-mail the ling-phonology list (newcomers can sign up to this list and others here: http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php.html).

Syntax Workshop

Rajesh Bhatt and Lisa Green write:

The Syntax Workshop this semester will meet on Fridays from 2:15 to 3:05, location TBA. Our first meeting will be on Friday September 11. We will attend to organizational matters and then we already have a speaker lined up for the meeting! An announcement will be forthcoming.

Program for AIMM 3 is posted

UMass will host the third meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting October 2-4. UMass is represented by:

Hsin-Lun Huang presents the paper “Argument Structure and Causativity in Mandarin Resultatives."

Kristine Yu presents the paper “Tonal Marking of Absolutive Case in Samoan."

Jaieun Kim (with Inkie Chung) presents the poster “Locality in Suppletive Allomorphy of GIVE in Korean."

You can learn more here, and register here.

The Rhythmic structure of songs and finger drums

http://blogs.umass.edu/pater/2015/08/28/finger-drums-for-everyone/

AMP 2015 Program announced

The program for the 2015 Annual Meetings on Phonology has been announced, and features talks and posters by the following UMassers:

Alumna Claire Moore-Cantwell gives a talk entitled “The phonological grammar is probabilistic: new evidence pitting abstract representation against analogy."

Alumna Gilian Gallagher gives a talk entitled “Vowel height and dorsals: allophonic differences cue contrasts"

Faculty Gaja Jarosz gives a talk entitled “Learning opaque and transparent interactions in Harmonic Serialism."

Alumnus Wendell Kimper gives the talk “Asymmetrical generalisation of harmony triggers” (Wendell has been at the University of Manchester for the past three years, explaining his quaint orthography.)

Alumna Karen Jesney will give the poster “On the relationship between learning sequence and rate of acquisition"

Alumna Presley Pizzo, with faculty Joe Pater, will give the poster “Learning alternations affect phonotactic judgments"

Alumna Suzanne Urbanczyk will give a tutorial on fieldwork on indigenous languages.

The conference meets October 9-11 at UBC in Vancouver. You can learn more here.

Program for GALA 2015 is posted

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes is hosting the twelfth meeting of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition this weekend: September 10-12. UMass is represented by:

Alumna Suzi Lima, who with Peggy Lis and Jesse Snedeker, is presenting the paper “Acquiring the denotation of object-denoting nouns"

Alumnus Bart Hollebrandse, who with Natasa Knezevic and Hamida Demirdache, is presenting “Vowel epenthesis in children’s oral and written productions of consonant clusters."

Michael Clauss is presenting “Free relatives in acquisition: Mislabeling or Generalized Move-Wh rule?

Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson, who with Anca Sevcenco, is presenting the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative PPs and relative clauses in child English."

Bart Hollebradse, who with Marleen Kremer and Angeliek van Hout, is presenting the poster “Asymmetries in Dutch children’s development of definiteness."

You can learn more here.

Sang-Im Lee-Kim at Haskins

Sang-Im Lee-Kim will be giving a talk on May 28th at the Haskins Lunch Talk Series, entitled “The role of static vs dynamic cues in vowel transitions: the case of sibilant place contrast."

Weir goes Norwegian

Andrew Weir writes:

I am very happy and excited to say that, in August, I will be taking up a position as Associate Professor in Modern English Language and Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

[If anyone is wondering about the apparently rapid promotion: there are only two ranks in the Norwegian system, associate professor and full professor. The Norwegian title is "Førsteamanuensis".]

Cable at AAA

Seth Cable is giving an invited talk at a workshop sponsored by the Universities of Tübingen and Potsdam called “The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages.” The workshop is hosted by the University of Potsdam, June 3-5. For more information, go here.

Call for papers: The Amsterdam Colloquia

Angelika Kratzer writes:

The Amsterdam Colloquia aim at bringing together linguists, philosophers, logicians, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who share an interest in the formal study of the semantics and pragmatics of natural and formal languages.

The 2015 edition will be held at the University of Amsterdam on 16-18 December.

The 20th Amsterdam Colloquium will feature two workshops on Negation and on Reasoning in Natural Language; and one evening lecture, jointly organized with the E.W. Beth Foundation.

Furthermore, there will be a special issue of the journal Topoi with selected contributions presented at the Colloquium, both in the main programme and in the workshops.

For information, go to http://www.illc.uva.nl/AC/AC2015/

Kristine Yu at AFLA 22

Kristine Yu is giving her talk “Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan,” at AFLA 22 this Thursday, May 21, at McGill University in Montreal. You can learn more about the conference here.

UMass at Manchester

UMass is well represented at the 23rd Manchester Phonology Meeting, which is taking place May 28-30. 

Alumna Nancy Hall is giving the paper “The phonetics of epenthetic vowels under emphasis spread in Levantine Arabic."

Alumna Karen Jesney is giving the paper “Weighted scalar constraints and implicational process application” with Brian Hsu

Gaja Jarosz is giving the paper “Phonotactic probability and sonority sequencing in Polish initial clusters."

Alumnus Elliott Moreton is giving the paper “Implicit and explicit phonology: what are artificial-language learners really doing?” with Katya Pertsova

Kevin Mullin and Joe Pater are giving the talk “Harmony as iterative domain parsing."

Aleksei Nazarov is giving the paper “Learning as a window on lexical versus grammatical representation of stress."

Alumna Jennifer Smith is giving the paper “Experimental evidence for aggressive core-periphery phonology in Guarani” with Justin Pinta

Alumnus Michael Becker is giving the talk “Fewer grammars, more coverage for the English past tense.” with Blake Allen.

Alumna Gillian Gallagher is giving the talk “The features content of phonotactic restrictions."

Alumnus Brian Smith is giving the talk “A unified constraint-based account of the English indefinite article."

Alongside the Manchester Phonology Meeting there is a workshop entitled “W(h)ither OT?” on May 27th at which several UMassies will be speaking:

Joe Pater gives the talk “Violable constraints in Classical Universalist Phonology and beyond."

Wendell Kimper gives the talk “What changes and what stays the same: is Harmonic Serialism with positive constraints still Optimality Theory?"

and

Michael Becker gives the talk “MaxEnt as a baseline theory of grammar." 

Pater, Pizzo and Staub

Joe Pater writes:

I have been in Paris this year at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, on a Research in Paris Fellowship from the City of Paris, hosted by Sharon Peperkamp. Presley Pizzo will be visiting the LSCP next week to give a presentation on Speriment, software she has written for designing web-based experiments that are hosted by PsiTurk.

https://github.com/presleyp/Speriment

https://psiturk.org

In case you happen to be in Paris, the meeting will take place the Salle de Réunion in the Pavillon Jardin of the LSCP at 29 rue d’Ulm from 14:00 to 16:00 next Wednesday May 20th. 
I was also an international chair at the LabEx-EFL, and June 16th in Paris he will be participating in a roundtable with two other LabEx-EFL chairs, Mark Liberman and Adrian Staub. Adrian, of UMass Cognitive Psychology, will also be giving a series of lectures in June (http://www.labex-efl.org/?q=en/node/305)

Cable in Alaska

Seth Cable will be heading to Alaska to conduct fieldwork on Tlingit this August.  Seth anticipates working with James Crippen and Rose Marie Dechaine from UBC.

Pearson and Roeper at Rutgers

Barbara Pearson will present a joint paper with Tom Roeper entitled "Cross-linguistic Ambiguity of Quantified Expressions: Implications for Mathematics Teaching and Testing of Bilingual Students" at the Tenth International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB10), conveniently hosted by Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, May 20 to 24.  En route to NJ, she will attend the NSF sponsored workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan on "Bilingualism and Executive Function: An Interdisciplinary Approach," May 18 and 19.

More information about ISB10, including the full program is found at http://isb10.rutgers.edu/

Kristine Yu in Leipzig

Kristine You will be delivering her paper “Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan” on June 12 at the conference “Morphosyntactic Triggers of Tone: New Data and Theories,” hosted by Leipzig University. For more information, go here.

Roeper at Caen

Tom Roeper will be presenting a poster at a conference on “The pragmatics of Negation and Polarity” at the University of Caen on May 19-20. The poster, with Masaaki Kamiya from Hamilton College is entitled “Neg-feature extraction from nominalization: NPI and tag question.” For more information go here.

ETAP 3

The third meeting of Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody is being hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign May 28-30. Kristine Yu will be giving a talk with Ed Stabler entitled “A parsing model for crowding, speech rate and syntax of tone.” Mt. Holyoke professor Mara Breen will also be giving a talk, with Johanna Kneifel, entitled “Rhythmic context affects on-line ambiguity resolution in silent reading.” And UMass alumna Emily Elfner will be giving her talk “Prosodic juncture strength and syntactic constituency in Connemara Irish.” For more information, go here.

Yu off to New Zealand

Kristine Yu will be conducting fieldwork on Samoan in Auckland, New Zealand this July.

UMass at WAFL11

The Univesity of York is hosting the eleventh meeting of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics Jun 4-6. UMass will be represented by

Deniz Ozyildiz (graduate student) who will be giving the talk “Move to mI, but only if you can."

Masashi Hashimoto (new alumnus!) who will be giving the talk “A syntactic-semantic analysis of the experiencer restriction in Japanese."

Mioko Miyama (visiting scholar) who will be giving the talk “A Choice Function Analysis of the EitherOr Construction in Japanese."

and

Peter Sells (UMass alumnus) who, with Shin-Sook Kim, will give the talk “Digging Deeper into non-modifying Constructions in Japanese and Korean."

Roeper in Toronto

Tom Roeper gave the plenary lecture at a workshop on “Complexity and Recursion in Acquisition” hosted by the University of Toronto last Thursday (May 14). The title of his talk was “Is there a Recursion Trigger: Adapting Merge, Search, Label to an acquisition model."

WHISC goes on holiday

This is the last WHISC post for the 2014-15 year. Look for the next post in the third week of August.

Barbara Partee gives UConn Lecture Series

This week, Barbara Partee will be giving a series of lectures at the UConn Lecture Series entitled "The History of Formal Semantics.” There will be an interlude by Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee on the integration of formal and lexical semantics.

Lecture 1: Logic and language: A history of ideas and controversies

Lecture 2: The starring role of quantification in the history of formal semantics

Lecture 3 (Borschev and Partee): Ontology and the integration of formal and lexical semantics

Lecture 4: Psychologism and Anti-psychologism in the history of formal semantics

For information and program, go here.

Christopher Baron gets Baggett

Graduating linguistic major Christopher Baron has been awarded the highly prestigious Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland. Baggett Fellowships are full-time post baccalaureate research positions and many illustrious linguists have started their careers as Baggett Fellows. For more about the Baggett programs, go here, and for past fellows, research assistants and summer scholars, go here.

Congratulations Christopher!

Barbara is invited speaker at Pronouns: Syntax, Semantics, Processing

Barbara will be part of a mini-summer school event on pronouns in Moscow June 16-19. She'll be one of three invited lecturers, along with Colin Phillips and Eric Reuland, giving four lectures each on various aspects of anaphora. There will also be a mini-conference with submitted papers. The event is hosted by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Barbara will, probably predictably, lecture about the history of theories of anaphora. For more information, go here.

Barbara, Katrina and Petr at mentoring workshop this July

Barbara Partee writes:

I have been invited to participate in an unusual sort of workshop outside of Moscow, July 6-11. It's a "philosophy paper development workshop" in which four Western professors will be together with 8-10 young Russian and Ukrainian philosophers who have written papers in English for which they would like some mentoring help with getting them into shape to publish in a Western journal. Everyone will be staying in a pension near the Moscow River, with intensive sessions at which the young participants present their work and the faculty and fellow participants all help critique it. For purposes of this workshop, our own Ekaterina Vostrikova and Petr Kusliy are presenting themselves as young philosophers of language (that's also true!) and have applied, and I think it is very likely that they will be accepted. So this is going to be fun! 

Dillon at Stony Brook

Brian Dillon gave a talk last Friday, May 8, at Stony Brook University’s linguistics colloquium. His talk was entitled “Which Noun Phrases is the verb supposed to agree with…and when?” You can learn more here.

Miniconference on Monday

The Mini-conference, in which generals papers writers present their work, will be Monday, May 4, in ILC N400 starting at 9:15. A schedule of talks follows.

9:15 Coffee
9:30  Ivy Hauser                   
          Dispersion (and lack thereof) in consonant inventories
10:00 Coral Hughto             
          Typological implications of an Interactive Learning Model
10:30-11:00 Break with refreshments
11:00  Caroline Andrews     
          Predictive parsing in long distance dependencies
11:30  Ekaterina Vostrikova         
          "Then" in conditionals
12:00  Sakshi Bhatia            
          Causation in Hindi-Urdu: Instruments and Subjects
12:30-1:15 Lunch break
1:15-1:45  Leland Kusmer
          Constituency paradoxes: Evidence from Akan
1:45-2:15 Jyoti Iyer
          Additive and exhaustive readings of Tamil particle -um

Call for papers: BUCLD

THE 40th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

NOVEMBER 13-15, 2015

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.

Any past presenters or attendees with photos from previous BUCLD events are encouraged to share them with the organizing committee at langconf@bu.edu.

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

FURTHER INFORMATION

General conference information is available at:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld

Questions about abstracts should be sent to langconf@bu.edu.

Call for Papers: PSUxLing2

The Penn State Undergraduate Exhibition in Hispanic and General Linguistics is hosting their second annual undergraduate conference. Undergraduates are invited to submit an abstract for a poster to be presented in a two-hour poster session at Penn State University. The deadline for abstracts is May 15. You can learn more here.

Call for papers: TbiLLC 2015

On Septemer 22, the Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be hosting a workshop entitled: “How to make things happen in the Grammar — the implementation of Obligatoriness.”  The workshop is organized by our own Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt. Talks are 45 minutes in length, and the two-page abstracts are due May 21, 2015. For more information, go here.

Grasping Ellipsis

May 4 and 5, Unicamp in Campinas, Sao Paulo, is hosting a “Grasping Ellipsis: its syntax, semantics, acquisition and processing. UMass is well represented:

UMass alumni Katy Carlson and Jesse Harris are giving the talk “Favoring a broad QUD in focus-sensitive coordination."

UMass alumnus and marathoner Satoshi Tomioka is giving the talk “Semantic definedness and a focus-semantic constraint on Ellipsis."

UMass faculty Kyle Johnson is giving the talk “Where’s Ellipsis?"

UMass student Nicholas LaCara is giving the talk “Ellipsis is not Spell-out: What Scandinavian tells us about ellipsis and phases."

Workshop on Copulas Across Languages

The program for the Workshop on Copulas Across Languages, which will be hosted by the University of Greenwich on June 18-19, has just been released and it includes several UMass linguists:

Alumnus Johannes Jonsson will be giving a talk with Ilja Hlin Gudhbjornsdottir, Rannveig Sverrisdottir and Kristin Lena Thorvaldsdottir, entitled “A sign language copula."

UMass student Tracy Conner will be giving the talk “Ellipsis Licensing and Constraints on Copula Optionality in African American English."

UMass faculty Lisa Green will be giving a plenary talk entitled “The Copula, Aspect, and Variation in African American English."

Trivia Answer

On March 1, WHISC posted the following trivia question, sent in by Angelika Kratzer:

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.

The answer is:

Heymann Steinthal: Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (‘Fundamentals of Linguistics’), 1871.  

https://archive.org/details/abrissdersprach00mistgoog

 

Here is the German:

Von der Sprache ist schon bemerkt, dass sie so wenig gelehrt und gelernt werden kann, wie Sehen und Hören. Wer hat wohl je bemerkt, dass man Kinder sprechen gelehrt hätte? Vielleicht aber hat Mancher schon beachtet, wie vergeblich das Bemühen ist, das man wohl zuweilen anstellt, das Kind zu lehren. Mit Gewissheit aber setze ich voraus, dass Jeder, wer Gelegenheit gehabt hat, ein Kind vom zweiten bis zum vierten Lebensjahre zu beobachten, oft genug darüber erstaunt war, wie urplötzlich das Kind ein Wort oder eine Wortform gebraucht hat. Selten weiss man, woher das Kind das hat. Es hat es ergriffen bei irgend einer Gelegenheit; und ergreifen heisst erzeugen. — Man sollte also gar nicht vom Lernen der Sprache bei Kindern reden. Denn wo keine Lehre, da ist kein Lernen. Nur was der Gärtner mit Samen tut, aus dem er Pflanzen ziehen will, nur das tun wir mit unsern Kindern, um sie zur Sprache zu bringen: wir bringen sie in die nötigen Bedingungen geistigen Wachstums, nämlich in die menschliche Gesellschaft. Aber so wenig der Gärtner wachsen macht, so wenig machen, lehren wir das Kind sprechen; nach dem Gesetze, dort der Natur, hier des Geistes, entsteht dort die Blume, hier die Sprache im Bewusstsein des Kindes.

Seid Tvica speaks on Thursday

Seid Tvica, (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk this Thursday, April 30, at 12:20 in ILC: N451. A title and abstract follows.

Rich Agreement Hypothesis beyond Indo-European

It is well-established in the literature that many Germanic and Romance languages differ in the placement of adverbs, appearing either before or after the finite verb. This typological distinction is standardly accounted for via v-to-I movement, arguably triggered by the subject agreement features that are assumed to be located at I (cf. Roberts 1985; Kosmeijer 1986; Rohrbacher 1994; Vikner 1995;Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998; Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014, among many others). The observed correlation between the properties of agreement morphology and verb movement gave rise to the so-called “rich agreement hypothesis” (RAH) which, in its strong version, states thatin controlled environments the finite verb moves to a vP-external position if and only if the agreement morphology is rich (cf. Koenemanand Zeijlstra 2014). Building on the work done so far in this talk, I present the results of a typological investigation of RAH, showing that RAH holds across many languages, well beyond the Indo-European family. In particular, I will discuss verb movement in three unrelated non-Indo-European languages.

Diversity Linguistics

This weekend, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig is hosting the conference “Diversity Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect.” UMass is represented by David Erschler, who will be giving his paper “A universal on generalized sluicing.” For more information, go here.

The Three Rogers

Angelika Kratzer writes:

Every time Roger visits for a colloquium, we take a picture of him in front of the same painting in our kitchen. Here is the current series of 3: Roger-way-back-when, Roger-then, Roger-now. 

 

Postdoc at Hebrew University

The Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (http://scholars.huji.ac.il/llcc) is looking for post-doctoral fellows. Earliest start date: Fall 2015. The positions are initially for one year, renewable for another year. The ideal candidate for a position is someone who already submitted their Phd dissertation, is working in syntax, semantics and/or formal pragmatics, and has an interest in experimental work. The fellow will be primarily a member of the LLCC but will also have an opportunity to interact extensively with members of the Department of Linguistics and the Safra Center for Brain Science (ELSC). Apart from contributing to the research environment of the LLCC and pursuing their own research, the fellow will have some (minor) local responsibilities. Pay: 7,500-10,500 NIS per month (Euro 1,750-2,400). Applicants should send a CV, a 1-page research statement, and a link to their publications to Luka Crnic (luka.crnic@mail.huji.ac.il) or to Yosef Grodzinsky (yosef.grodzinsky@mail.huji.ac.il), to whom all inquiries should be addressed.

GLOW 2015

The annual meeting of Generative Linguistics of the Old World met in Paris Wednesday through Saturday of last week, and UMass was represented by:

UMass alumnus Winnie Lechner, with coauthors Giorgos Spathas, Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou, presented their paper “On deriving the typology of repetition and restitution."

UMass students Stefan Keine and Ethan Poole presented their paper “Intervention in tough-constructions."

UMass alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, presented their paper “Mismatching Pseudo-Relatives Describe Event Kinds."

UMass citizens Coral Hughto, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs presented their paper “Grammatical agent-based modeling of typology."

UMass prospective faculty Gaja Jarosz presented her paper “Phonotactic probability and sonority sequencing in Polish initial clusters."

Tom Ernst was also in attendance at the States/Events Workshop on the last day of the conference. You can learn more here.

Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The program for the eleventh Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics has been announced. The Workshop will be at the University of York on June 4-6. UMass is represented by Deniz Ozyildiz, who is presenting the paper "Move to mI, but only if you can."

UConn Workshop for Irene Heim

The UConn Logic group has its annual workshop on May 2-3. Each year their workshop is dedicated to the work of a single person, and this year they're honoring Irene Heim. The workshop is announced here: http://logic.uconn.edu/workshop/. 

Saturday, May 2

9-10:30 Barbara PARTEE (UMass) Irene Heim in the History of Formal Semantics (Invited) 

10:30-11:35 Lucas CHAMPOLLION (NYU) The weak/strong ambiguity in donkey sentences cannot be explained away. 

11:50-1:20 Thomas Ede ZIMMERMANN (Frankfurt) Type-shifting and the proportion problem (Invited) 

2:30 - 3:35 Paul DEKKER (Amsterdam) Indexical Inference 

3:35 - 4:40 Matthew MANDELKERN (MIT) Taking things for granted (Graduate Student Prize) 

4:55 - 6:25 Hans KAMP (Stuttgart/Texas) Presuppositions after 1983 (Invited) 

Sunday, May 3

9 - 10:30  David BEAVER (Texas) “The X” files (Invited) 

10:30 - 12  Simon CHARLOW (Rutgers) The scope of alternatives (Invited) 

12:15 - 1:45 Irene HEIM (MIT) Keynote

Kaufmann gives first department colloq on Tuesday

Magdalena Kaufmann (UConn) will give a department colloquium on Tuesday, April 21, at 4:00 in N400. The title and abstract of her talk follows.

Embedded imperatives: venturing into the cross-linguistic picture

Many languages are taken to have grammatical marking of imperative clauses (verbal morphology, clause type particles). For a long time, the standard assumption had been that such markers cannot occur in embedded sentences  ("Imperatives cannot be embedded"). More recent research has discovered a series of counter-examples to this generalization. At the same time, it remains to be acknowledged that embedding is severely restricted cross-linguistically. Building on, and extending, what I discussed in Kaufmann (2012, ch. 6.1), I investigate patterns in the exceptions to the putative ban on embedded imperatives. I focus on data from English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Slovenian (specifically, the interpretation of the imperative subject), and I suggest an account in terms of clashes between shiftable (in the sense of Schlenker 2003) and unshiftable indexicality. While the talk will focus mostly on imperatives in reported speech, I will discuss some connections to imperative marking in relative clauses and in matrix wh-sentences.

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.