WHISC goes to the beach

With this issue of WHISC, the 2010-2011 volume officially closes. Our hardworking staff is already lathering on the sunscreen and blowing up the beach toys.

WHISC returns in September.

Lab Jobs for undergraduate Linguistics Students

Alexandra Jesse writes:

I direct the Language, Intersensory Perception, and Speech (short: LIPS) lab in the Psychology Department. We are currently looking for undergraduate research assistants to work in the lab in the upcoming Fall and Spring semester.

Research within the LIPS lab looks at how (young and older) listeners recognize speech from hearing and seeing a speaker talk. In particular, we are interested in the time-course of recognizing words, both from listening and from lip-reading, how listeners adjust to a speaker's idiosyncratic pronunciations, and what happens to these processes when people get older. 

You can also visit our website for more information:
http://lips.psych.umass.edu

Typical tasks of our research assistants are:
- help with finding, recording, and editing of speech materials for the experiments
- assist with recruitment, scheduling, and testing of participants
- attend & prepare for weekly lab meetings
- do administrative research-related tasks

The typical commitment of our research assistants is 9hrs/week, for 3 credits.  

If you are interested in this position, please contact me for more information and/or for an application form.

Martin Walkow defends dissertation

Martin Walkow will defend his dissertation "Goals, Big and Small" on Friday the 13th (of May). For the location and time, look for the adverts around the department.

Graduation this Weekend

The graduating class of 2011 will matriculate this Friday and Saturday. Of our linguistics majors, those seniors eligible to graduate this year are:

Pamela Angel
Daniel Benowitz
Sean Bethard
Maria Bonilla
Rachel Borden
Stephanie Clement
Jennifer Cusworth
Amilyn DeCarteret
Aurora Feeney-Kleinfeldt
Roxanne Frattaroli
Jordan Galler
Teresa Gotal
Jeffrey Haigler
Elissa Kraemer
Jessica Lee
Saul Lee
Nicholas Leoutsakos
Eliza Mandel
Thomas Mizrahi
Erica Reinholz
Aaron Schein
Eric Swotinsky
Zachary Waegell

Congratulations linguists!

Grant and Lima get University Fellowships

The prestigious University Fellowships have been announced for the 2011-12 academic year, and the linguistics department's Suzi Lima and Meg Grant are both recipients. The University Fellowships are awarded to graduate students throughout the university based on research accomplishments: there are only 18 given to continuing graduate students. Linguistics was the only department to be awarded more than one fellowship.

Congratulations Meg and Suzi!

RUMMIT meets this week

R(utgers)UM(ass)MIT, the annual area meeting of phoneticians and phonologists, meets Monday, May 16, in Rutgers. The talks this year include:

From Rutgers:

Vandana Bajaj -- Hindi Bilingual Joke Wellformedness: A Study of
Laryngeal Contrast Perceptibility

Aaron Braver -- (Im)perceptible incomplete neutralization: Two
experiments on flapping in American English

Peter Staroverov -- Sonority and the acoustics of Russian word-final
consonant clusters

from UMass:

Kevin Mullin -- The Necessity of Diacritics for Descriptive Adquacy

Claire Moore-Cantwell -- Epenthesis Typology in Harmonic Serialism

Brian Smith -- Paradigm Gaps and Spell-Out in OT and HG

From MIT

Suyeon Yun -- String-based domains of duration preservation

Coppe van Urk -- On the distribution of clashes
For more information, get in touch with John Kingston.

Cable in Moscow

Seth Cable writes:

Last weekend, I attended MOSS 2 (the second Moscow Syntax and Semantics conference). Also in attendance were the following UMass-related folks: Barbara Partee, Ana Arregui and Malte Zimmerman. Ana presented the second talk of the conference, a joint work with Maria Luisa Rivero and Andres Salanova titled "Imperfectivity: Capturing Variation Across Languages." On the next day, I presented an invited talk titled "The Optionality of Movement and EPP in Dholuo." Malte presented the third invited talk, titled "Contrastive Discourse Particles: Effects of Information Structure and Modality." Overall, it was an incredible program, and also featured fascinating talks by folks from all over Europe, Asia and North America. The program can still be found here:

http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/korotkova/moss/program.html

SALT 21 meets on May 20-22

The 21st meeting of Semantics and Linguistics Theory will meet on May 20-22 at Rutgers. Our own Angelika Kratzer is one of the invited speakers; she will be presenting "What *can* can mean."

Daniel Altshuler, of Hampshire College, is also presenting a paper: "Towards a more fine-grained theory of temporal adverbials."

UMass grad student Maria Biezma will be presenting a poster: "Conditional Inversion and Givenness."

UMass alumni Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito will also be presenting a poster: "Two types of epistemic indefinites: private ignorance vs. public indifference"

And UMass alumni Ilaria Frana and Kyle Rawlins will be presenting the poster: "Unconditional concealed questions and the nature of Heim's ambiguity"

More information can be found at: http://salt.rutgers.edu/.

Johnson in the Basque Country

Kyle Johnson will present ten lectures at the Universidad del País Vasco in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain in the last two weeks of this month. The lectures are on a "Typology of Movement," but, it is rumored, actually show off difficult to draw three dimensional phrase markers.

Acquisition Lab Meeting on Monday at 6PM

The Last Acquisition Lab Meeting of the semester is  Monday May 2nd, in the Partee Room (South College 301) at  6:00 PM. (NOTE THE NEW TIME.)

The presentations will be:

"Economy of Representation and Implicature at DP for plurals"
Terue Nakato-Miyashita and Tom Roeper

and

"Preliminary data from a survey on quantifier intuitions from speakers of  African American English"
Barbara Pearson

Everyone Is Welcome!

Becker and Fainleib at Experimental Phonology Working Group

On Tuesday May 3rd at 10 am the Experimental Phonology Working Group will hear a presentation by Michael Becker and Lena Fainleib on "The naturalness of product-oriented generalizations". A draft of the paper can be found here (http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1036).

Emily Elfner takes SSHRC at McGill

Emily Elfner has been awarded a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada two year fellowship. She will undertake her research at McGill University, where she will join UMass alumni Junko Shimoyama, Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Bernhard Schwarz. She will be working at Michael Wagner's prosody lab.

Congratulations Emily!

Claire Bowern speaks at colloq

Claire Bowern, of Yale University gave the department colloquium on Friday April 29th. An abstract of her talk, Computational Pylogenetics and Australian Languages, follows.

I present the first proposal for the internal subgrouping and higher order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than 25 primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree would be impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relations, or because relevant languages are not sufficiently well attested. Here I show that the Pama-Nyungan tree has considerable internal structure, and that language contact and missing data do not impede reconstruction unduly. This work shows the power of combining historical reconstruction with computational approaches to phylogenetic inference and provides an illustration of the way in which language can give us new insights into unsolved problems in prehistory.

Jesse Harris goes to Pomona

Jesse Harris has accepted a tenure-track job at Pomona College in Southern California. Pomona is part of a consortium of five prestigious schools nestled at the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, and is described (on their website) as blending "New England charm and South California beauty." It is the happy valley with a better climate. Pomona's linguistics and cognitive science department is top notch --- our own Meredith Landman has been teaching there for the past couple of years, and they recently hired Michael Diercks, a Bantuist from Georgetown.

Jess will be shipping off to his new career at the end of Fall 2011.

Congratulations Jesse!

Chris Davis goes to Kyoto University

Chris Davis has received a two-year  Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers. He'll use it to study focus-sensitive particles and their interaction with mood and force. His work will involve fieldwork in the islands of the Ryukus, principally Ishigaki, but he'll be based at Kyoto University where he will work with Yukinori Takubo.

Congratulations Chris!

Oiry's book now available

Magda Oiry's dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance questions is now available. It can be purchased at:

http://www.amazon.fr/LAcquisition-Questions-Longue-Distance-Enfants/dp/6131570221/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304255416&sr=1-1

Second Year mini conference

The second year graduate students will present their generals papers work at the annual Second Year's mini-conference on Thursday, May 5, from 9-3 in Herter 301.

Speas wins Distinguished Academic Outreach Award

John McCarthy reports:

Peggy Speas is this year's recipient of  the Distinguished Academic Outreach Award. "The Distinguished Academic  Outreach Awards, established in 1997, recognize and encourage  superlative individual achievement in outreach as an incentive to  further community engagement on the part of the academic enterprise.

Recipients receive a cash award."

She will receive the award (the plaque, not a wad of cash) at the UMass 
Honors Dinner on Founder's Day, Friday, April 29.

Class of 2016 Announced

Alice Harris writes:

It’s a great pleasure for us to welcome the students listed below into the graduate program.

Michael Clauss, mclauss@hawaii.edu, is finishing an M.A. at the University of Hawaii, where he’s working on differential case marking in Tamil, Hind, other  SE Asian languages, serial verbs, pro-drop, and other issues in syntax.

Hannah Greene, Osmiroid@gmail.com, is finishing an M.A. at the University of British Columbia, where she has done fieldwork fieldwork on Kwakwala; she is interested in event semantics.

Stefan Keine, stkeine@uni-leipzig.de, we all know already.  He is back at the University of Leipzig, working on formal syntax and semantics, with special interests in Chinese and in case and agreement.

Jérémy Pasquereau, jepasque@hotmail.com, is completing an M.A. at the University of Lyon and is interested in documented under-studied languages, especially languages of the Caucasus.

Shayne Sloggett, shayne.sloggett@gmail.com, graduated from UCSC and is working as a research assistant in Colin Phillip’s lab at the University of Maryland, with interests in syntax, psycholinguistics, and their interaction.

We look forward to seeing all of them in August or September.

Amanda Rysling, ajrysling@gmail.com, who is completing her B.A. at NYU, has also been accepted into the Fall class, but she will defer matriculation until the fall of 2012 so that she can accept a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland for 2011-12.  Ms. Rysling is interested in experimental approaches to phonology and phonetics, and in Polish.

 

 

Summer Research for Undergraduates

John McCarthy writes:

Joe Pater and I have a NSF grant that includes funding to provide 
summer research experience for undergraduate linguistics majors. It pays 
a stipend of $1500. To participate, you would need to be living in the 
area for most of the summer.

To apply, write to Joe and me listing the linguistics courses you've 
taken, the grades you've received, and the names of one or two of our 
faculty who are most familiar with your work. If you have computer, lab, 
or statistics skills, please include that information with your 
application.

The deadline for applications is April 26. Students graduating or 
leaving at the end of this semester are ineligible -- sorry.