What's Happening in South College

29 November 2015

Call for Papers: NonFinite Subjects

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes is organizing the conference NonFinite Subjects, to be held in Nantes (France) on April 1-2, 2016.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Misha Becker, University of North Carolina

Hazel Pearson, ZAS Berlin

Michelle Sheehan,

Anglia Ruskin University

Sandhya Sundaresan, University of Leipzig

MEETING DESCRIPTION
The conference aims at providing a forum for discussion of recent, highquality research on the subject position of non-finite structures. Theworkshop focuses on recent findings that shake the standard assumptions onthe syntax and semantics of the subject position of non-finite structures.By scrutinizing data that does not quite fit standard approaches tonon-finite subjects, we seek to question the premises and basic tenetsunderlying standard approaches in order to develop more explanatoryanalyses of the distribution and interpretation of non-finite subjects.

We invite submission of abstracts on the syntactic, semantic and psycholinguisticaspects of this topic, with potential questions thatinclude, but are not restricted to the following issues:

Lexical subjects freely alternating with PRO

The classical approach assumes a strict correlation between finiteness andtypes of subjects: finite constructions display lexical subjects, whilenon-finite ones only allow PRO (here used pretheoretically) or NP-traces.However, a multiplicity of data contradicts this generalization.

In many languages lexical DPs alternate with PRO in non-finitestructures (see in particular Sundaresan & McFadden 2009), includingEnglish gerunds (Reuland 1983, Pires 2007), personal infinitive constructions in Romance (Elordieta 1992, Mensching 2000, Herbeck 2011),and raising structures across a variety of languages (Szabolcsi 2009).

Structures that are apparently finite allow PRO-like non-overtsubjects in alternation with lexical subjects in languages such asBrazilian Portuguese, a phenomenon dubbed 'finite control' (for discussion cf. Rodrigues 2004, Ferreira 2007, Holmberg et al. 2009, Modesto 2011).What are the theoretical consequences of this non-complementary distribution? Should the PRO vs. lexical subject dichotomy be abandoned?The standard approach relied on Case theory (Chomsky 1981). But given theaforementioned facts, can Case still be said to play a role with respect tothe realizational properties of subjects (cf. Sigurðsson 1991, 2008,Landau 2006, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009, Duguine 2013)?

'Overt PRO'

Languages such as Hungarian, Korean, Italian or Portuguese allow overt pronouns with the properties of Obligatory Control PRO (Borer 1989, Szabolcsi 2009, Barbosa 2009, Duguine 2013). How does the existence of 'overt PROs' fit in current approaches to non-finiteness (and in particular to control/raising)? Should we conclude that the silent nature of PRO is nothing more than a circumstantial fact (cf. Livitz 2013, Sundaresan 2014,Duguine 2015, Herbeck 2015)? Furthermore, 'overt PROs' appear to be limitedto pro-drop languages (Barbosa 2009). Is this a causal correlation? Overt PROs are pronouns in many languages, but have reflexive or anaphor-like properties in languages such as Korean (Borer 1989, Lee 2009). Can a unified explanation be given of this cross-linguistic variation?

Beyond infinitives: degrees of (non-)finiteness and subjects

From a cross-linguistic perspective, the finiteness vs. non-finiteness dichotomy is intricate. Besides infinitives, languages display othernon-inflected structures, such as gerundive constructions, or nominalizations whose subject positions can have properties that contrast with those of infinitives (cf. Pires 2007). Moreover, certain subjunctives,in particular in languages that lack non-inflected constructions, such as Greek and other Balkan languages, have been shown to display OC properties,while in other languages (e.g. Romance languages) the subject of subjunctives is typically obviative (cf. Szabolcsi 2010). A further relevant topic is that of inflected infinitives and the variety of subjects they allow (cf. Sheehan 2013, 2014). How can this range of phenomena be accounted for? How do we correlate the typology of (non-)finiteness and the distribution/interpretation of subjects and what theoretical implications should we draw?

From a more general perspective on clausal structure, assuming a whole spectrum of non-finiteness (Haddican & Tsoulas 2012, Wurmbrand 2014), is there a corresponding array of subjects and how do the precise features of this continuum interact with the typology of subjects? Are the properties of the C-layer relevant in this regard (Rizzi 1997, Adger 2007)? What about tense and/or agreement (Wurmbrand 2001, 2014, Landau 2004)?

Interpretation of finite vs. non-finite subjects

Beyond forcing the subject to be non-overt, a further tenet of the standard approach is that non-finiteness also forces the subject to be anaphoric/referentially dependent. To what extent does this correlationhold since, as noted above, in many languages referentially free expressions (overt or null) also occur in nonfinite constructions. How can these differences be accounted for?

Should we abandon the idea that (non-)finiteness and referential dependence are causally related? In which case, should we still maintain the hypothesis that the silence of PRO-like expressions is related to their anaphoric nature (cf. Livitz 2013)? Is the notion of syntactic dependency with respect to an antecedent relevant for characterizing the types of subjects found in non-finite constructions? Ultimately, should we consider (at least) PRO and /pro/ to be two facets of a single phenomenon (cf.Duguine 2015, Herbeck 2015; see also Sundaresan 2014)?

Selection

There is also the issue of the relation with the higher finite structure.Are the properties of non-finite subjects determined by the matrix verb that selects the non-finite construction (Borer 1989, Sundaresan & McFadden 2009, Pearson 2013, Grano 2015)? What then determines the nature ofsubjects of e.g. non-finite clauses in adjunct position or subject position?

Experimental evidence

How do children acquire the intricate patterns of finiteness and the corresponding subject properties? Are the different constructions discussed above processed differently? More generally, what experimental orpsycholinguistic evidence can be brought to bear on the issues discussed above?

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples, tables, figures and references, with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins onall 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. To submit an abstract, please go to the following Easy Chai rpage: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfs2016

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submissions: December 11, 2015

Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2016

Conference dates: April 1-2, 2016

CONFERENCE WEBSITE:

https://sites.google.com/site/nonfinitesubjects/

CONTACT

nonfinitesubjects@gmail.com

Dillon in print

Brian Dillon, Wing-Yee Chow and Ming Xiang's paper, "The relationship between anaphor features and antecedent retrieval: Comparing Mandarin ziji and ta-ziji," has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology.

22 November 2015

SSRG next Monday

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will meet Monday, November 30th. At that meeting, we'll be discussing two papers from the journal Syntax:

Hunter, Tim. (2015) "Deconstructing Merge and Move to make room for adjunction." Syntax volume 18, issue 3.

Jenks, Peter. (2014) "Generalized Clausal Modifiers in Thai Noun Phrases." Syntax volume 17, issue 4.

Call for papers: AAA

The Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 3

Call for Papers

Date: July 6-8, 2016

Call deadline: February 8, 2016

Location: Tübingen, Germany

Website: http://semanticsofaaa.wordpress.com/

::: Meeting Description :::
The TripleA workshop series aims at providing a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages. Its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.

::: Invited Speakers :::
Sigrid Beck (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

Chris Davis (University of the Ryukyus)

Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers University)

Letuimanu’asina Emma Kruse Va’ai (National University of Samoa)

Jenneke van der Wal (University of Cambridge)

::: Call for Papers :::
We invite submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Submissions should present original formal work on any interpretive aspect of the languages under discussion which should have originated from own fieldwork or experimentation.

We particularly encourage Ph.D. students to apply. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via Easy Chair no later than February 8, 2016.

::: Abstract Submission Link :::
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=triplea3

::: Local Organizing Committee :::
Polina Berezovskaya, Vera Hohaus Anna Howell, Konstantin Sachs

Psycholinguistics job in Genoa

RESEARCH POSITION IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS – EXPERIMENTAL PRAGMATICS
Project: EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions
Place: Genoa (Italy)
Department: DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences, Psychology Unit
Principal Investigator: Dr. Filippo Domaneschi
E-mail: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it
Phone: +39 010 20953710

N. 1 – 2-years contract (1 year contract renewable 1 year).

Title: Psycholinguistic analysis of the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions

Short Title: Presuppositions and Cognitive Processes

Description: Applications are now being accepted for a 2-years (1+1) full-time research position in psycholinguistics with specialization in experimental semantics/pragmatics.

The successful candidate will become member of the DISFOR – Department of Educational Sciences – Psychology Unit, University of Genoa (Italy) and will join Dr. Filippo Domaneschi’s SIR project “EXPRESS – Experimenting on Presuppositions” financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project investigates by psycholinguistic experimental methods the cognitive processes involved in processing presuppositions with a particular focus on the cognitive load required to process the information communicated as taken for granted.

This position is 100% research and involves no teaching obligations. Responsibilities of the researcher will include: lab activities, contributing original research avenues, and presenting and publishing results.
The planned start date is the beginning of February, and the project will run for 2 years (1 year renewable 1 year).

Required skills:
(i)Solid training in linguistic semantics and pragmatics.(ii)Experience in psycholinguistic experimental work.(iii)Programming skills with Lab software (e.g. E-Prime, Presentation, Psychopy).(iv)Statistical skills (e.g. SPSS, R).

For Italian candidates – further details about the submission can be found at:
https://unige.it/concorsi/assricerca/

For foreign candidates – info about the submission procedure will be provided directly by Dr. Filippo Domaneschi at: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

Deadline: 17.12.2015
Info: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it

15 November 2015

Laura McPherson gives department colloq

Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) will give the department colloquium this Friday at 3:30 in N400. The title of her talk is “Constraint Interaction and the role of spell-out in Dogon tonosyntax,” and an abstract follows.

The Dogon languages of Mali share a unique system of replacive grammatical tone in the DP, where a word’s lexical tone is completely overwritten by tonal overlays in particular morphosyntactic positions. Unlike more typologically common systems of replacive tone, which tend to be triggered by morphemes or morphological features and are confined to a single word, Dogon overlays in the DP may span multiple words and are triggered by certain c-commanding syntactic categories or positions (hence, tonosyntax). In cases where a word is targeted by more than one potential trigger, the Dogon languages differ in their resolutions. I argue that these changes are inherently morphological in nature, despite occurring at the phrase-level rather than the word-level, and propose a construction-based model in which phrase-level morphological constructions encode idiosyncratic phonological changes sensitive to both syntactic category and syntactic structure. Constructional schemas are implemented in the grammar as constraints (construction constraints). The variation found in the Dogon language family is descriptively quite complicated, with no two languages working in exactly the same way, but in this talk, I show that the surface patterns falls out naturally in a maximum entropy (Goldwater and Johnson 2003, Hayes and Wilson 2008) model with weighted constraints, capable of capturing both within-language and between-language variation.

Additionally, data from the tonosyntax of possession and relative clauses provide evidence for the role of phases in determining morphophonological form. In particular, the application of tonal overlays is often, though (crucially) not obligatorily, blocked on material that has spelled out in a previous cycle. I argue that these effects provide evidence for transcyclic faithfulness constraints, which penalize alterations to the morphophonological form of spelled out material in later grammatical cycles. Like all constraints, these too are shown to be violable, with different Dogon languages displaying varying degrees of faithfulness to phasal targets. Thus, the Dogon data show that while spelled out material may be resistant to later phonological changes, it is not immune to it, as argued by proposals such as Lowenstamm (2010) or Newell and Piggott (2014).

SSRG Tomorrow!

Leland Kusmer writes:

For the SSRG meeting next week (Monday the 16th), we'll be doing an overview session of the journal Syntax. We looked at this journal in our first overview session last year, so the goal is to cover newer issues and also some of those issues we missed in the last round. As such, I've put together a sign-up sheet that includes only those issues we haven't yet done.

Remember that the overview session is intended to comprise very short, high-level overviews — you should aim for maybe 5 minutes for the entire issue. We'll then select a few papers that sound interesting to the group which we can all read for the next meeting.
Please claim issues here:

bit.ly/SSRGReadsSyntax

Tu+ on Saturday, November 21

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here: http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh, at 9 Myrtle St. in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Marcus Maia and Aniela Franca at LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday at noon in ILC N451. All are welcome! Two talks will be presented:

A Computational Efficiency Principle in action in the processing of recursively embedded PPs in Brazilian Portuguese and in Karaja - Marcus Maia (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

An ERP Evaluation of the comprehension of PP embedding and coordination in Karaja and in Portuguese - Aniela França (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Barbara at U Michigan

Barbara Partee writes:

I will be part of a small workshop on the Origins of Formal Semantics organized by Rich Thomason at the University of Michigan November 19-21. The other invited participants are Max Cresswell, Hans Kamp, Jeff Pelletier, Martin Stokhof, and Ivano Caponigro.

I will give an opening ‘topic-framing’ talk, and will also be part of a closing panel on UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rich, Barbara, and Ivano (who is working on a biography of Montague) earlier worked up a set of questions that were circulated to all the workshop members, including lots of questions about who influenced whom about various topics, the connections among people like Montague, David Lewis, Arthur Prior, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel; counterfactual conjecture questions like how and whether formal semantics would developed if Montague hadn’t lived or hadn’t done any of what he did, as well as what a possible world might look like in which he didn’t die so young.

The program is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/lpw15/program.html

Tom and Jeremy at Jackson Street School

Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper will make a presentation at “Science Night" at the Jackson Street School on November 19th. There talk will be on acquisition and psycholinguistics.

UMass at BUCLD

The Fortieth meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development happened over this weekend, and UMass was represented by:

Mike Clauss and Jeremy Hartman gave the paper “Syntactic cues in adjective learning"

Elliott Moreton gave the talk “Phonological pattern learning involves both implicit and explicit processes” with K. Pertsova.

Amy Schafer gave the poster “Mapping prosody to reference in L2” with A. Takda, H. Rohde and T. Grüter.

Tom Roeper, Anca Sevecenco and Barbara Pearson gave the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative prepositional phrases and relative clauses in child English.”

Roeper in Connecticut

Tom Roeper is giving a talk “Recursion and Disorders” at Connecticut College tomorrow, November 16.

ECOM Workshop at UConn

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 various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

Information about the workshop can be found at the workshop webpage. You may find the schedule, abstracts and information about visiting Storrs at the workshop page. Registration for the workshop, which is free, but required, is available by following this link. The workshop is open to the public and ECOM encourages attendance by researchers in the cognitive sciences from nearby institutes to attend.

Workshop Schedule:
  Thursday, November 19th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
            2:00-2:25PM                Registration
            2:25-2:30PM             Welcome
            2:30-3:45PM                Timothy Jay (Psychology, Massachusetts College) - "Doing Research with Taboo Words"
            4:00-4:40PM                Trip Glazer (Philosophy, Georgetown) - "Contemptuous Speech"
            4:40-5:20PM              Helen L. Daly (Philosophy, Colorado College) - "Silently Insulting"
            5:30-6:45PM                Ljiljana Progovac (Linguistics, Wayne State) - "Expressive Language in the Evolution of Grammar"
            6:45-7:15PM                Reception

Friday, November 20th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
        9:30-10:00AM              Breakfast - Coffee & Bagels
          10:00-11:15AM           Mark Richard (Philosophy, Harvard) - "Why Do We Care About Slurs?"
        11:30-12:10PM           Bianca Cepollaro (SNS & IJN) & Tristan Thommen (IJN) - "What's Wrong with the Truth-Conditional Accounts of Slurs?"
        12:10-12:50PM           Andrew Morgan (Philosophy, Virginia) - "Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Language that 'Has it Both Ways'"
          12:50-2:00PM              Lunch! (sandwiches, etc. provided)
        2:00-3:15PM                 Dean Pettit - "Objectivity and Emotion"
        3:30-4:10PM                 John Voiklis (CPS, Brown)* - "Building a Moral Lexicon to Study (and Implement) Moral Communication
        4:10-4:50PM                 Laura Niemi (Psychology, Harvard)** - "Implicit Causality and Moral Inference"
          5:15-6:30PM                 Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Delaware) - "Evidentiality Across Languages"
          7:00PM                             Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIRED

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 various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

7:00PM Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIREDThe 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 various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

08 November 2015

Howard Lasnik gives department colloquium on Friday

Howard Lasnik (University of Maryland) will give the department colloquium on Friday at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title of his talk is "Clause-mates, Phases and Two Families of Questions.” An abstract is here.

Partee, Green and Harris honored at the LSA

Alyson Reed, Executive Director of the Linguistic Society of America, writes:

I am pleased to inform you that three current members of the faculty at UMass Amherst, will be honored at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

· Dr. Barbara Partee will receive the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award

· Dr. Lisa Green will be inducted as a Fellow of the LSA

· Dr. Alice Harris will begin her term as the 92nd President of the LSA (at the conclusion of the meeting)

We have already notified the recipients of these awards, but wanted to be sure their colleagues in the department are also made aware of these important honors. For additional background information on the award, please visit our website: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards.

Congratulations to Barbara, Lisa and Alice!

David Erschler at Hampshire College

David Erschler will be giving a talk entitled “Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork” at Hampshire College on Wednesday, November 18 at noon in Adele Simmons Hall. An abstract follows.

Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork

I will discuss the importance of doing theoretically-oriented linguistic field work and the urgency to perform such field work on modern spoken Yiddish (Hassidic Yiddish). I will illustrate this via a discussion of two phenomena from Yiddish syntax: the position of the finite verb (the so called "verb-second") and the structure of relative clauses in Yiddish.

Barbara Partee on the road!

Barbara Partee writes:

On Wednesday, November 4, I was in Wrocław, Poland as an invited speaker in a surprise event honoring Bożena Rozwadowska on her 60th birthday: “Bożena’s Birthday: A Special Linguistic Workshop”. Bożena was our Ph.D. student here 1984-87, and she would have completed her Ph.D. here (on thematic roles in Polish nominalizations, especially nominalizations of psych-verbs and other verbs with interesting argument structure) if she had been able to get a fourth year of leave of absence from her teaching obligations at the University of Wrocław. I still consider her one of my Ph.D. students even though she had to complete her Ph.D. in Poland instead. I gave an invited talk: “Polish influences in the History of Formal Semantics”. The next day I flew home, and on Nov 6 and 7 was at the Hornucopia workshop in honor of her UCLA Ph.D. Larry Horn at Yale, as reported in the last WHISC, where we couldn’t report Bożena’s event for fear of spoiling the top-secret surprise, which was indeed a real surprise.

Call for Papers: SALT

SALT 26

The 26th Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference will take place on May 12–15, 2016, at The University of Texas at Austin. There will be keynote presentations by:

Sigrid Beck, University of Tübingen
Edit Doron, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Rick Nouwen, Utrecht University
Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University

In addition to the regular sessions of SALT 26 there will be a one day special session on Presupposition, with presentations on theoretical, experimental, fieldwork-based, or corpus-based approaches to presupposition, presupposition triggering, or presuppositional inference. We are happy to announce three further invited speakers for this session:

Lauri Karttunen, Stanford University
Stanley Peters, Stanford University
Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University

Call for Papers

We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (with an additional 10 minutes for questions) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics with relevance to linguistic theory. The special session on presupposition has the same submission and reviewing process as the main session.

Call URL: http://salt.ling.utexas.edu/26/call
Submission URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt26

Submission Details

Deadline: December 20, 2015, 11:59 pm Central Standard Time (UTC-6)

As with SALT 25, there will be a short period for authors and reviewers to exchange feedback. Author feedback is scheduled for February 5–12, 2016.

Requirements

Abstracts must be anonymous. The main text should be at most 3 pages (US Letter or A4) in length, including examples, with an optional fourth page for references. The abstract should use a 12pt font and 1 inch margins (for US Letter) or 3 cm margins (for A4) on all four sides. The abstract must be submitted as a single PDF file. These limitations will be strictly enforced. In addition to the intellectual merit of the abstract, clarity and readability will also be taken into account in reviewing.

SALT 26 will feature a poster session. Poster presentations will be published as regular papers in the proceedings. Poster presenters will be asked to give a short “lightning round” presentation prior to the poster session.

Policies

Authors may be involved in at most two abstracts and may be the sole author of at most one abstract.

SALT does not accept papers that at the time of the conference have been published or have been accepted for publication. In addition, preference will be given to presentations that are not duplicated at other major conferences.

If the work or a close variant of it is under submission to or accepted for publication or presentation in any other major venue (such as a national or international conference or a journal/book chapter), we request that the authors create a small section titled “Additional Submission” after the references at the end of the paper. This section should include the other venue(s) for which the work has been submitted, the status of those submissions, and an indication of any major aspects of the SALT abstract not submitted elsewhere. We require that authors update us by email if/when there is a relevant change in the status of other submissions.

Proceedings

All papers presented at the main or the special session of the conference will be published in a SALT 26 volume following the conclusion of the conference, edited at Cornell University and published by the Linguistic Society of America.

Easychair Instructions

On the EasyChair submission page, there are several additional options to pay attention to:

A checkbox to indicate if you want your abstract to be considered for poster presentation (if you do not check this, your paper will be considered only for oral presentation).
A checkbox to indicate if you would like your abstract to be considered for the Special Session on Presupposition.
An extensive (but not comprehensive) list of topics that will be used to help assign reviewers. Select all topics relevant to your paper (we estimate most papers will select 1-3 topics).
You may use the Keywords textbox to prioritize or add additional topics.

Submit your abstract here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt26

01 November 2015

UUSLAW on Saturday

Smith College will host the “University of Massachusetts, University of Connecticut and Smith College Language Acquisition Workshop” (UUSLAW) on Saturday, November 7. The talks, below, will be in McConnell Hall 103.

9.30am Coffee, tea and bagels Foyer of McConnell

10 am Andie Faber (U.Mass) “Assigning and incorporating grammatical gender in L1 and L2 speakers of gendered languages”

10.40am Emma Nguyen (U.Conn) "Some thoughts on English-speaking children's comprehension of long passives"

11.20am Ryosuke Hattori (U.Conn) "On The Majority Influence in English-Chinese Japanese Trilingual Acquisition"

11.50pm Mantoa Smouse (UCT, visiting Smith) “The Acquisition of Disjoint Morphemes in isiXhosa”

12.30-2 Lunch break (we will provide, but other options available locally!) Foyer of McConnell

2pm Kadir Gökgöz (U.Conn) "IX arguments in code-blending: asymmetries between subjects and objects"

2.30pm Meghan Armstrong (U. Mass) “Catalan-speaking children's multimodal perception of disbelief”

3.10pm Vanessa Petroj (U. Conn) "Article Distribution in English-ASL Code-blended Whispered Speech"

3:50pm tea break Foyer of McConnell

4.10pm Renato Lacerda (U.Conn) "Contrastive topicalization in early English: initial questions"

4.40pm Michael Clauss, Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson (U.Mass) “Examining restrictiveness and the semantic correlates of recursion”

Dillon in Connecticut

Brian Dillon gives a colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut on Friday, November 6, entitled "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives."

Barbara Partee at Hornucopia!

Barbara Partee will be at Yale November 6-7 to participate in Hornucopia (https://campuspress.yale.edu/hornucopia/) -- a workshop in honor of Laurence R. Horn on the occasion of his retirement. She'll be giving an invited talk: An ever-so-brief history of semantics, pragmatics, and Larry.

Call for Papers: ACAL 47

2nd Call for Papers: 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 47)

We are now accepting papers for the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, to be held at UC Berkeley, March 23-26, 2016. The general session will take place March 23-25, while a special workshop on "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa" will take place March 25-26.

General Session

For the general session we welcome papers on any area of African linguistics. The general conference will consist of talks, poster sessions, and plenary talks by prominent researchers on African languages.

Special Workshop: Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa

In addition to the general session, we welcome papers on the special theme "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa." Africa contains several distinct linguistic areas which are often claimed to hold special importance for the reconstruction of African proto-languages and our understanding of African pre-history. This workshop will focus on exploring the fine-grained areal distribution of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Africa with debates about genetic affiliation and historical migration patterns as a backdrop.

Deadline

The deadline for submission is Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 11:59pm PST (UTC-8:00). Please be advised that late submissions may not be considered. Because of visa requirements, prospective international participants are urged to submit their abstracts at the earliest date possible. Participants will be notified about the outcome of their submission by early January 2016.

Review process

All abstracts will be blind reviewed for their originality, quality, and relevance. Main session talks will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation with a 10 minute question and answer period. Poster presentations will take place at a dedicated time with no simultaneous oral sessions. An important factor in considering your abstract will be its appropriateness for a 20-minute talk.

Abstract Guidelines

All abstracts should be anonymous and written in English with glosses or translations for words or examples in any other language. Each abstract, including the title and any data in figures or tables, must not exceed 500 words. Data must include interlinear glosses following the Leipzig Glossing Rules. The 500-word abstract should be single-spaced and in a unicode font no smaller than 11 point, and in .pdfor .doc/.docx format. Abstracts must be be submitted electronically via EasyChair. Example abstracts from other conferences can be found on the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Submission Instructions

Submissions are restricted to one single-authored paper and one co-authored paper per individual. Your abstract must be submitted online using the EasyChair website, which will give you additional instructions, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acal47. If you have never used EasyChair before, you will need to register at https://www.easychair.org/account/signup.cgi?conf=acal47

Contact Information

For more information, you may email the conference organizers at acal47@berkeley.edu or visit the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Graduate Program in Linguistics at the University of Kansas

The Linguistics Department at KU has undergone significant changes in the past decade to position itself as a unique program that unites linguistic theory and experimental research. We have particular strengths in experimental phonetics and phonology, first and second language acquisition, developmental psycholinguistics, second language psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, the cognitive neuroscience of language, linguistic fieldwork, and theoretical syntax and semantics. Our faculty members and graduate students study a broad range of languages including understudied language varieties in Asia and the Americas. The department has six active research labs, which have all successfully competed for external funding and provide support for graduate studies. The department has both head-mounted and remote eye trackers, an EEG laboratory, and on the KU medical center campus, cortical MEG, fetal MEG and MRI systems. We offer both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. We invite you to explore our graduate degree program further at our website: http://linguistics.ku.edu/

Funding

The Linguistics Department has several fellowships that will be available in the 2016-2017 academic year. All doctoral students who are admitted to the program will be offered five-year packages that include graduate teaching or research assistantship positions. We will be able to award one Chancellor’s Fellowship, the university's most prestigious graduate award, which offers a very generous funding package. All Ph.D. applicants will be automatically considered for these awards.

Placement

Recent Ph.D. graduates of our program have enjoyed successful job placement as postdoctoral researchers and tenure-track professors at a variety of institutions around the world. Recent graduates have attained postdoctoral positions at universities such the University of Chicago, New York University, University of Reading, Oxford University, the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition, and Language, and tenure-track appointments at colleges and universities such as Indiana University, Mississippi State University, Harding College, Hankyung National University in Korea, and the University of Costa Rica.

Lawrence, KS

Lawrence is a dynamic college town located 45 minutes from downtown Kansas City. We have an art theatre, a local brewery, multiple museums, great coffee shops, several natural foods grocers, many farmers markets, and the most amazing sunflower fields you will ever see.

Apply

Information on admission requirements is available at: https://linguistics.ku.edu/admission

The deadline to apply for the Fall 2016 semester is January 1, 2016.

If you have questions, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Alison Gabriele at gabriele@ku.edu.

Syntax Workshop

Lisa Green writes:

The schedule for the remaining activity is below.

November 6th: Discussion of "How to Neutralize a Finite Clause Boundary:Phase Theory and the Grammar of Bound Pronouns: by Thomas Grano and Howard Lasnik

November 13th: David Erschler talks

November 20th: Open

November 27th: Thanksgiving break (We will not meet.)

December 4th: Rodica Ivan talks

26 October 2015

Armstrong in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, 10/30 at 12pm in N451. All are welcome! Meghan Armstrong will present a talk titled: "Tasks for eliciting expressive prosody in mother-child dyads"

25 October 2015

SSRG tomorrow

Leland Kusmer:

Our next meeting will be this coming Monday, October 26th, at 7:30pm as usual. Two of our visitors — Lisa and Georgia — will be presenting their own work. The meeting will take place at the home of Lisa, Michael, and Jai Eun — 183 Bridge Street in Northampton.

As always, please remember to RSVP so that we can get food for you:

http://doodle.com/poll/crziepiqbyqqe3k5

Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Agreement at UMass

The departments of Linguistics and Psychology are hosting a workshop on Agreement Thursday and Friday of this week (Oct. 28 and 30). Registration is free, but if you plan on attending, you should rsvp here. Thursday’s talks are on “Agreement and Linear Order,” and Friday’s on “Experimental and theoretical approaches.” Thursday’s talks are in ILC N400 and Friday’s talks are in ILS S211.

For a schedule and more information, go here.

Tracy Conner in Kentucky

Tracy Conner gave a talk entitled “The Effects of Morphosyntactic Variation on Ellipsis Licensing” at the University of Kentucky last Monday, Oct. 19.

AAUW dissertation fellowships

The American Association of University Women has dissertation fellowships designed to help pay for living expenses in the year that a woman is writing her dissertation. The fellowships are available to citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. They are due on November 15, 2015. You can learn more here.

Tu+ program available

Deiz Ozylidiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here:

http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here:

http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Alice Harris at Oxford

Alice Harris will be giving an invited talk at Oxford University on Monday, October 26, entitled “Affix order, multiple exponence, and morphological reconstruction."

Roeper in India

Tom Roeper gave a keynote talk at the Thirty-Seventh International Conference of Linguistic Society of India, hosted by the Centre of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi last week. The title of his talk was “Recursion: from theory to acquisition in cross-linguistic Perspective.” He also gave a two week workshop on connecting acquisition experiments to fieldwork on newly researched Northern Indian languages. Tom is a guest at the Institute for Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is also giving a lecture entitled “Strict Interfaces: Why modern theories of UG entail greater Innateness."

18 October 2015

Jill de Villiers presents at LARC

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, Oct. 23, at noon in ILC N451 to hear Jill de Villiers present: “How to make a child language assessment in a language with no history of assessments (or even research); some lessons learned.” All are welcome!

Claire Halpert gives talk on Friday

Syntax guru Claire Halpert will give a talk on Friday, Oct. 23, in ILC N400 at 3:30. (The title and abstract follow.) Claire has taken up residence in N472 until October 30, and she can be reached at halpert@umn.edu.

Escape clause

In this talk, I investigate the syntactic properties of clausal arguments, looking in particular at whether A-movement is permitted out of finite clauses and at whether these clauses themselves may undergo movement or establish agreement relationships. In English, argument clauses show some puzzling distributional properties compared to their nominal counterparts. In particular, they appear to satisfy selectional requirements of verbs, but can also combine directly with non-nominal-taking nouns and adjectives. Stowell (1981) and many others have treated these differences as arising from how syntactic case interacts with nominals and clauses. In a recent approach, Moulton (2015) argues that the distributional properties of propositional argument clauses are due to their semantic type: these clauses are type e,st and so must combine via predicate modification, unlike nominals. In contrast to English, I show that in the Bantu language Zulu, certain non-nominalized finite CPs exhibit identical selectional properties to nominals, therefore requiring a different treatment from those proposed in the previous literature. These clauses, also like nominals, appear to control phi-agreement and trigger intervention effects in predictable ways. At the same time, these clauses differ from nominals (and nominalized clauses) in the language in certain respects. I will argue that these properties shed light on the role that phi-agreement plays in the transparency/opacity of finite clauses for A-movement and on the nature of barrier effects in the syntax more generally.

Clauss at MIT

Mike Clauss gives a talk at the Acquisition Lab at MIT Wednesday, Oct. 21, where he will present “Classifying Adjectives without Semantic Information," joint work with Jeremy Hatrman.

Call for papers: Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The Department of English, Linguistics/TESOL Program at Central Connecticut State University is pleased to announce the 12th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, to be held from May 12 to May 15, 2016. As a special feature, we are hosting a one-day session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic Languages.

Invited Speakers:

- Mark Baker (Rutgers University)

- Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware)

- Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto)

2nd Call for Papers:

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10-minute discussions) and for posters on topics dealing with formal aspects of any area of theoretical Altaic linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Additionally, abstracts covering any area of theoretical linguistics of sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages are welcome. We are using Easy Abstracts at the LINGUIST List for the submission and the blind review process.

The address for abstract submission is: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/WAFL12

Authors are invited to submit anonymous abstracts to any of the following sessions:

- General session: May 13-15

- Special session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages: May 12

- Poster session: TBA

Authors should indicate what session they are submitting an abstract to. Abstracts should be a maximum of one page in length excluding references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2.5 cm/1 inch. There is a maximum of two abstracts per person, one of which must be co-authored.

Important Dates:

- Deadline for submission: November 30, 2015, 11:59pm EST

- Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2016

Language. Cognition and Neuroscience issue on "Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics"

The special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on “Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics,” edited by our own Alice Harris with Elisabeth Nordcliffe and Florian Jaeger has appeared. The issue has thirteen papers on language production and comprehension with a focus on understudied languages. You can learn more here.

Job at Yale

Claire Bowern writes:

The Department of Linguistics at Yale University is seeking to make a tenure-track appointment at the level of Assistant or Associate Professor (without tenure) to begin in Fall 2016. The area of specialization is open and full consideration will be given to candidates in all areas, but we are particularly interested in candidates in phonetics/experimental phonology and semantics/pragmatics. Special consideration will be given to candidates whose scholarly interests complement and connect with those of the current department faculty and other departments and research units at Yale. Evidence of successful teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will also be taken into consideration in making an appointment. Candidates should be assured of completing the requirements for the Ph.D. by the summer of 2016 at the latest.

The application will need to include a current CV, a research statement outlining the candidate's research program, evidence regarding teaching qualifications, and two or three representative pieces of research. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of reference to be submitted to this website. To ensure full consideration, applications should be submitted by November 15, 2015. We expect to interview potential candidates at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Washington, DC in January 2016 (though attendance at that meeting is not a requirement for consideration).

For more information, go here: http://apply.interfolio.com/31809

Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax

Johan Brandtler writes:

This e-mail is to encourage you to submit any current work on the Scandinavian languages to the December issue of Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax. Over the years, WPSS has proven an invaluable resource for on-going research within Scandinavian linguistics, and each issue is e-mailed personally to more than 200 researchers over the world (in addition to being published on the WPSS webpage).

If you want to contribute to the December issue, please send your paper electronically to this address no later than November 15, 2015. As you might already know, articles published in WPSS can subsequently appear (revised or unrevised) in other publications.

Please see the WPSS homepage for current and previous issues:

http://projekt.ht.lu.se/grimm/working-papers-in-scandinavian-syntax/

Job at NYU

The Department of Linguistics and the Center for Data Science at New York University seek an assistant professor to fill a tenure-track position in natural language processing, beginning September 1, 2016, pending administrative and budgetary approval. We are looking for outstanding applicants with demonstrated excellence in teaching and an active research program that uses quantitative, computational methods and other digital technologies to address substantive questions about natural language.

The successful candidate will be expected to engage collaboratively withthe faculty in both the Linguistics department and the Center for Data Science. Responsibilities include teaching in both the CDS and the Department of Linguistics at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD level, aswell as supervising student research.

Review of applications will begin on December 1, 2015. To apply, see the NYU Department of Linguistics web site. Instructions for electronic submission of documents can be found under the link 'Employment’. Applicants should submit an application including a description of their research program; a teaching statement; curriculum vitae; work samples, and three references.

For further information about this position, please contact Professor ChrisBarker <chris.barker@nyu.edu>.

11 October 2015

Syntax Guru arrives

This year's syntax guru arrives on Tuesday, October 13. She is Claire Halpert, from the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD from MIT in 2012 with a dissertation on Zulu agreement and argument structure. She has worked on raising constructions, Aspect and modality, Case, movement typology and locality constraints and the syntax-prosody interface, frequently drawing on her fieldwork in Zulu. You can learn more about her work, and see a likeness, at http://www.tc.umn.edu/~halpert/.

Claire will be in residence until the end of October. Make your appointments early and often -- she can be reached at halpert@umn.edu. Claire will give a talk on Friday, October 23, in N400 at 3:30. A title and abstract follow.

Escape clause

Screening of "Rising Voices" on Friday

Peggy Speas writes:

The Linguistics Department will present a special screening of the film 'Rising Voices: Revitalizing the Lakota Language’ on Friday Oct. 16, at 3:30pm, in room S404 of the Integrated Learning Center. We hope to have at least one of the filmmakers on hand for this special screening. The film will also be shown on Sunday Oct. 18 at the Academy of Music in Northampton, at 4 pm. If you miss both of these, you can still see the film when it is aired on PBS in November.

For more information about the film, go to http://risingvoicesfilm.com/

For information about the screening at the Academy of Music, go to:

http://aomtheatre.com/event/rising-voiceshothaninpi/

Agreement Workshop @ UMass

Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon and Adrian Staub write:

The Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst are hosting a workshop on agreement in natural language, aimed at bringing together researchers investigating agreement from theoretical and experimental points of view. The goal of this workshop is to promote cross-talk between researchers investigating agreement from grammatical and psycholinguistic perspectives. This workshop will particularly focus on the ways in which linear order can affect agreement processes, as well as the question of how best to model linear order effects on agreement. Presenters include:

Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
Jonathan Bobaljik (UConn)
Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)
Julie Franck (Université de Genève)
Maureen Gillespie (University of New Hampshire)
Laura Kalin (UConn)
Lap-Ching Keung (UMass Amherst)
Andrew Nevins (UCL)
Adrian Staub (UMass Amherst)
Francesco Vespignani (Università di Trento)
Martin Walkow (MIT)
Jana Willer-Gold (UCL)
Ellen Woolford (UMass Amherst)

The workshop takes place on October 29th and 30th at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We invite anyone who is interested to attend. Registration is free and all are welcome, but if you plan to attend, please visit our website and RSVP:

http://people.umass.edu/bwdillon/AgreementWorkshop/

Please feel free to contact Brian Dillon (brian@linguist.umass.edu) if you have any questions about the workshop or about visiting Amherst during this time. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you in Amherst!

UMass at NELS

The Forty-Sixth meeting of the North East Linguistic Society is this weekend, Oct. 16-18 at Concordia University in Montreal. Our own Rajesh Bhatt is one of the invited speakers. He will be presenting joint work with Vincent Homer in a paper entitled “PPIs and Movement in Hindi-Urdu.” UMass is well represented in the rest of the program, which can be found here, as well.

Alumnus Jason Overfelt is presenting the paper “When Variable Re-binding Bleeds ACD"

Seth Cable is presenting “The Special Implicatures of Optional Past Tense: The Tlingit Decessive and ‘Discontinuous Past'

Alumna Maribel Romero is presenting “POS and the relative proportional reading of ‘many’ "

Jon Ander Mendia is presenting “Focusing on scales: Superlatives as scalar modifiers"

Alumni Maria Biezma and Kyle Rawlins present “Or what?: Challenging the speaker"

Visitor Andrew Murphy is presenting, with Sampson Korsah, “Tonal reflexes of successive-cyclic movement in Asante Twi"

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Nino Grillo, has the poster “Event Kinds and Pseudo Relatives"

Stefan Keine and Ethan Poole have the poster “Semantic vs. syntactic intervention in ‘tough’-constructions."

Alumni Paula Menendez Benito and Luis Alonso-Ovalle have the poster “Modal Selectivity in the Nominal Domain: Spanish “Uno Cualquiera"

Jérémy Pasquereau has the poster “Overt movement of comparative quantifiers in European French"

Alumnus Bernhard Schwarz, with Alexandra Simonenko, have the poster “Two accounts of factive islands"

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Jeremy Zehr, have the poster “Experimental Evidence for Entailed vs non-Entailed Presuppositions"

Call for papers: Conference on Sonority

CUNY Phonology Forum: CONFERENCE ON SONORITY

Sponsored by the MA/PhD Program in Linguistics at the City University of New York

January 14-15, 2016, at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., New York City

CALL FOR PAPERS

Sonority is thought to play a central role in the organization of segments into syllables, and more specifically, to determine the nature of syllable-internal consonant clusters, possible coda segments, syllabic consonants, glide-vowel alternations, epenthesis sites, tone-bearing units, and even, in some languages, sonority-based stress patterns. Investigations into sonority have focused on its role in synchronic grammar, its status as universal and innate, and whether the full sonority scale reflects a single phonetic correlate. The topic has received much attention from both theoretical and laboratory phonologists, and this forum seeks to showcase work from both approaches.

We invite papers from any subdivision of cognitive science such as formal linguistics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, phonetics, philosophy, psychology, etc. We also encourage diversity in methods so we welcome both formal and experimental approaches to the topic of sonority.

INVITED SPEAKERS:
To be announced.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

We invite both oral presentations and posters. Abstracts should consist of a one-page description of the paper (12pt font) with a second page for references, data and/or illustrations; please specify if you wish to submit for a poster, an oral presentation, or are fine with either. Talks will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be anonymous, on one A4/letter page (12 pt. font) with a second page for references, data and/or illustrations. Abstracts should be emailed as a .pdf attachment to phonoforum@gmail.com no later than 23:59 EDT on 31 October 2015.

IMPORTANT DATES:
31 October 2015 – deadline for abstract submission1 December 2015 – notification of acceptance14-15 January 2016 – Conference on Sonority

CONTACT:

phonoforum@gmail.com

http://cunyphonologyforum.ws.gc.cuny.edu/

Phonology job at Rutgers

The Department of Linguistics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (New Brunswick) invites applicants for a tenure‐track Assistant Professor position in linguistics with a specialization in phonology, beginning September 1, 2016. We seek applicants whose research interests complement those of the current faculty and who can contribute breadth and depth to the department with respect to research, teaching, and advising at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Applicants must have completed all degree requirements for a Ph.D. in linguistics or a related field by August 31, 2016.

Applications should include a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, a research statement, sample publications, a teaching statement, teaching evaluations if available, and three letters of reference addressed to Linguistics Search Committee (address below). The cover letter should include a list of those writing letters of reference and a list of all the materials that have been, or will be, submitted. All materials should be submitted via Interfolio (http://apply.interfolio.com/31902).

Review of applications will begin November 1, 2015 and continue until the position is filled. For full consideration, applications should be submitted by November 15, 2015. Inquiries about the search should be sent to Ms. Marilyn Reyes (lingdept@rci.rutgers.edu).

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, military service or any other category protected by law. As an institution, we value diversity of background and opinion, and prohibit discrimination or harassment on the basis of any legally protected class in the areas of hiring, recruitment, promotion, transfer, demotion, training, compensation, pay, fringe benefits, layoff, termination or any other terms and conditions of employment.

Open until filled

Application Address:

Linguistics Search Committee

Dept. of Linguistics, Rutgers University

18 Seminary Place

New Brunswick NJ

USA

Application URL: http://apply.interfolio.com/31902

Contact Information: Ms. Marilyn Reyes

lingdept@rci.rutgers.edu

Call for papers: Dealing with Bad Data

Workshop at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam (The Netherlands), March 17-19, 2016.

Call for Papers

In recent years, linguistic theory has significantly expanded its empirical scope. If it has indeed ever been true that theories were built exclusively on the researcher’s own armchair judgements, such is definitely no longer the case. More and more, researchers have turned their attention to databases and corpora of all kinds, to experimental results, and to many other types of data sources. This development went hand in hand with an expansion of the scope of the theories, and collaborations with e.g. historical linguistics, dialectologists, sociolinguists, and psycholinguists.

We believe that this is a positive development; but we also believe that some issues have not been sufficiently discussed. In this workshop we aim to tackle the issue of how to deal with ‘bad data’: many data that we have to deal with has not been collected with exactly the questions in mind that we want to ask. E.g., we have to use the results of a dialect survey of a few decades ago as the money is lacking to set up a new survey; or certain data are simply lacking for a particular historical period.

We invite papers on all these issues. Which problems do you encounter in your work, and how do you solve them? Is there any privileged type of data to answer certain questions? Do we need more methodological standards and if so what should they look like? How can we make sure that we keep an integrated theory in which the results of different kinds of empirical explorations can all be accomodated? What is the relation between our methodological choices and central hypotheses of the theory of mental grammar?

Sketch of the issues

We distinguish between (at least) four classes of problems: (i) Incomplete data, (ii) Noisy data, (iii) One-sided data, (iv) Conflicting data.

Ad i), As we mentioned above, both in historical and dialectological surveys, data from some period or some region may be missing, either because (in dialectology) we do not have any data for some area at all, or because for different areas there are different gaps in the data we have. Also, in a lot of typological work, ‘typological gaps’ have been taken as significant: if a certain phenomenon does not occur in any language then the theory should be restricted accordingly. This idea has come under attack: the languages we have actually studied in detail is probably not a representative sample of all languages in the world, and those in turn stand in an unknown relationship to all possible languages.

Ad ii), generative grammar (and many related types of theorizing) has been based on the division between I-language and E-language (or competence and performance), where the research object has been reduced to I-language, among other things for reasons of manageability: E-language is influenced by too many complicated factors. Although native speaker judgements can also not be said to be ‘pure’ reflections of I-language, it seems clear that the ‘new’ kinds of data indeed show the influences of many kinds of noise.

Ad iii), in many cases, the data that are given do not show everything we need to know. For instance, if we study a historical corpus, we can only learn that certain constructions did occur, not whether or not the constructions that we do not find were ungrammatical, or just did not occur by accident. We would need to complement them by judgment data, but this is obviously lacking. Inversely, people sometimes demand that ‘just’ judgements are not enough and need to be complemented by e.g. Google data on actual occurrences.

Ad iv): When we combine data from different types of data resources in our research, e.g. judgement data and language use data, these may show conflicting patterns. How do we resolve such conflicts?

Invited speakers

The following speakers have confirmed their participation: Paul de Lacy, Paula Fikkert, Paul Kiparsky, Cecilia Poletto, Keren Rice, Christina Tortora, Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck, Charles Yang.This list will hopefully be extended by a few more names.

Submission of abstracts

You can submit a 2-page abstract (excluding references) for a 30 minutes talk on EasyChair before December 1, 2015. You are allowed to submit multiple abstracts, but we may decide to only accept one abstract per author, and the choice will be ours.

Deadline of submission: December 1, 2015

Notification of acceptance: December 22, 2015

Website address: http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/baddata/

Phonetics job at UC, Santa Barbara

The Linguistics Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to hire a linguist specializing in phonetics. The appointment will be a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level, effective July 1, 2016. The ideal candidate will use primary data collected through one or more methodological paradigms to explore the importance of phonetics for our understanding of phonology, and more generally, linguistic theory. We especially seek candidates with expertise in speech perception and/or articulation. Important criteria for this position include research on multiple languages and thorough training in linguistics. The candidate should also have the potential to link the theoretical implications of his or her research to other subdisciplines in linguistics, and to interact with colleagues and students across disciplinary boundaries at UCSB. Candidates must have demonstrated excellence in teaching and will be expected to teach a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in phonetics, phonology, and general linguistics and to contribute to the department’s undergraduate minor in Language and Speech Technologies. For more information on the department, see www.linguistics.ucsb.edu.

A Ph.D. in linguistics or a related field is expected by the time of appointment. To ensure full consideration, all application materials, including letters of reference, should be received by November 6, 2015. The position will remain open until filled. Applicants must complete the online form at https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/apply/JPF00566and must submit online the following in PDF format: letter of application, statement of research interests, curriculum vitae, and 2 writing samples. Applicants should request at least 3 academic letters of reference to be sent directly to https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/apply/JPF00566 by the November 6 deadline. Materials submitted via fax or hard copy will not be accepted. Inquiries may be addressed to the Search Committee at Phoneticssearch@linguistics.ucsb.edu.

Applicants selected for an interview will have the option of either a Skype video interview with the search committee or an in-person interview at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Washington, D.C. (January 7-10, 2016); interviews in either format will be considered equivalent. Our department has a genuine commitment to diversity, and is especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through research, teaching and service. The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

LEARN MORE

More information about this recruitment: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu

Syntax job at UC, Santa Cruz

The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a position in syntax, at the (tenure track) Assistant Professor or (tenured) Associate Professor level. Applicants at the level of Associate Professor should have a demonstrated record of teaching and research in syntactic theory that will contribute significantly to this area of the Department’s research profile and teaching mission. Applicants at the level of Assistant Professor should have the teaching potential and research expertise in syntactic theory that will enable them to contribute to this area. We would welcome applicants with a secondary strength in an area that interfaces with syntactic theory.

The successful candidate must be able to work with students, faculty and staff from a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds. We are especially interested in candidates who can contribute tothe diversity and excellence of the academic community through their research, teaching, and service.This position carries a five-course equivalency workload, which normally means teaching four courses over three quarters and carrying other academic and service responsibilities.

RANK: Assistant Professor or Associate Professor

SALARY: Commensurate with qualifications and experience; academic year (9-month) basis

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. or equivalent foreign degree in Linguistics or a closely related field; record of research and teaching. Degree expected to be conferred by June 30, 2016.

POSITION AVAILABLE: July 1, 2016, with academic year beginning September 2016. Degree must be conferred by June 30, 2016 for appointment July 1, 2016.

TO APPLY: Applications are accepted via the UCSC Academic Recruit online system, and must include a letter of application that indicates which level you are applying for (Assistant or Associate), curriculum vitae, research statement, teaching statement (with evaluations, if desired), 1-3 writing sample or publications, and 3-5 confidential letters of recommendation*. Applicants are invited to submit a statement addressing their contributions to diversity through research, teaching and/or service. Documents/materials must be submitted as PDF files.

Apply at https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00302

Refer to Position #JPF00302-16 in all correspondence.

*All letters will be treated as confidential per University of California policy and California state law. For any reference letter provided via a third party (i.e., dossier service, career center), direct the author to UCSC’s confidentiality statement at http://apo.ucsc.edu/confstm.htm

CLOSING DATE: Review of applications will begin on November 16, 2015.

To ensure full consideration, applications should be complete and letters of recommendation received by this date. The position will remain open until filled, but not later than 6/30/2016.

Barbara Pearson in Berlin

Barbara Pearson will be in Berlin October 16 to present joint work with Giang Pham at a conference on the Acquisition of Discourse Phenomena across Languages and Populations (ADILP) held at the Centre for General Linguistics, better known as ZAS, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Giang Pham was a member of the faculty at UMass in the department of Communication Disorders from 2013 to 2015, but as of 8/2015 is at San Diego State University in their School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Pham and Pearson's topic is "Relations across Age, Vocabulary, and Narratives in Vietnamese and English." Giang will present a related poster for the two authors, "The Weaker First Language Still Matters: Associations between Vietnamese Vocabulary and English Narratives" at the American Speech Language and Hearing Association Annual Meeting in Denver in November 2015.

Linguistics job at UC, Irvine

The Program in Language Science (http://linguistics.uci.edu) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is seeking applicants for a tenure-track assistant professor faculty position. We seek candidates who combine a strong background in theoretical linguistics and a research focus in one of its sub-areas with computational, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, or logical approaches.

The successful candidate will interact with a dynamic and growing community in language, speech, and hearing sciences within the Program, the Center for Language Science, the Department of Cognitive Sciences, the Department of Logic and the Philosophy of Science, the Center for the Advancement of Logic, its Philosophy, History, and Applications, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience & Engineering, and the Center for Hearing Research. Individuals whose interests mesh with those of the current faculty and who will contribute to the university's active role in interdisciplinary research and teaching initiatives will be given preference.

Interested candidates should apply online at https://recruit.ap.uci.edu/apply/JPF03107 with a cover letter indicating primary research and teaching interests, CV, three recent publications, three letters of recommendation, and a statement on previous and/or past contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Application review will commence on November 20, 2015, and continue until the position is filled.
The University of California, Irvine is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.

Phonology job at Wayne State

The Department of English at Wayne State University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor, Advanced Assistant Professor, or Associate Professor in Linguistics with a specialization in Phonology. A second specialization is highly desirable. PhD required at time of appointment.

The interdepartmental Linguistics Program at Wayne State offers the BA and MA. Wayne State University is an urban research university with the highest Carnegie designation of RU/VH [Research University, very high research productivity]. Duties include a sustained research program, a teaching load of 2-2, and departmental/university service.

The WSU Jobs site is now open. All applications must be submitted online. To submit an application, applicants should go to the application website below and upload the following: letter of application, CV, and one writing sample (PDF of a published article or a manuscript of approximately 15-30 pages).

Applicants should also arrange to have 3 letters of recommendation sent electronically to Ljiljana Progovac, Director of Linguistics (email below). All materials are due by November 1, 2015.

Wayne State University offers more than 370 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 28,000 students in metropolitan Detroit. Wayne State is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Application Deadline: 01-Nov-2015

Application Deadline: 01-Nov-2015
Application URL: http://jobs.wayne.edu

Contact Information: Ljiljana Progovac, Director of Linguistics <progovac@wayne.edu>

Postdoc in Applied Cog Sci Lab at Penn State

From this ad:

We’re beginning new, NSF-funded research in the areas of linguistics and computational social science. Generally, we seek to model cognitive processes using large-scale datasets and experimentation. Our recent core contributions have been in psycholinguistic models of natural-language dialogue and in decision making. Our work in cognitive science is fueled by advances in computing. In turn, we translate progress in cognitive science to contributions in computer science, recently in cybersecurity and machine learning. We are looking for a postdoc with training in one or more of the following areas:

cognitive science (e.g., computational psycholinguistics and data-driven modeling),

deep connectionist representations, and

natural language processing and information retrieval.

While the successful applicant is likely to focus on some areas, strong practical computational skills and a research interest in cognition or linguistics are required. Duties will include contributing to a project that combines crowd-sourcing and natural language processing to curate a dataset for peace research. Beyond that, the post-doc is primarily expected to build a strong research agenda, but may also collaborate in the graduate students’ projects and teach. The initial appointment would be for one year and is renewable. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in a relevant area (or be in the final stages of obtaining one) and a strong record of publications.

Matt Wagers spoke on Wednesday

Matt Wagers (UCSC) gave an impromptu talk at the Psycholinguistics Workshop last Tuesday, Oct. 6. The title of his talk was “I see nothing! Processing phonetically-null DPs in a verb-initial language."