Jesse Harris defends dissertation

Jesse Harris will defend his dissertation, "Processing Commitments" at 1PM in Dickinson 212 on Monday, November 28. All are welcome.

Congratulations Jesse!

Michael Clauss talks at the LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting

Michael Clauss will give "Modal morphology in Child Tamil," at the LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting on Monday, November 28, at 5:15 in the Partee Room (South College 301).

All are welcome!

Discussion of Wilson and Obdeyn (2009)

Joe Pater writes:

Brian Dillon and I have organized a group discussion of Wilson and Obdeyn's (2009) "Simplifying subsidiary theory: statistical evidence from Arabic, Muna, Shona, and Wargamay." 

The meeting will take place in the Partee room (South College 301) at 2:30 pm November 30th. I've put a copy of the difficult-to-find paper here:

http://people.umass.edu/hgr/WilsonObdeynSeptember2009.pdf

All are welcome!

Colin Wilson gives department colloquium

Colin Wilson, of Johns Hopkins, will give the following talk at the department colloquium on Friday, December 2 at 3:30 in Machmer E-37.

Bayesian inference for constraint-based phonology

Bayesian mathematics and associated algorithms provide a general solution to the problem of inferring structure from incomplete, ambiguous, and noisy data. In this talk, I apply these methods to the specific problem of learning constraint-based grammars of phonology, focusing in particular on the relative roles of the likelihood -- which depends on the language-specific sound pattern -- and the prior -- which embodies assumptions made by the learner independently of the data. Previous research has proposed a rich set of prior assumptions (e.g., that inputs are identical to outputs in early phonological learning, and that certain classes of constraints are biased to be higher-ranked), which are (approximately) enforced by an increasingly complex battery of learning mechanisms. I argue that the prior can be greatly simplified, perhaps even made completely unbiased, by embracing the learner's uncertainty about the inputs and weightings/rankings that underly the observable data. Formal analysis of an unbiased learner, together with simulations from an implementation that uses Gibbs sampling, suggest that a rich prior is not needed to ensure 'restrictiveness' or other empirically-motivated properties of phonological learning.

Call for Papers: Conference on Language, Discourse and Cognition

*The 6th Conference on Language, Discourse, and Cognition (CLDC 2012)*

Date:     May 4th to 6th , 2012
Venue:   Tsai Lecture Hall on the main campus of National Taiwan University
Taipei, Taiwan

Website: http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~cldcntu/

The 6th Conference on Languages, Discourse, and Cognition (CLDC 2012) will be held from May 4th to 6th in 2012, hosted by Graduate Institute of Linguistics, Department of Psychology, Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center at National Taiwan University, and Linguistic Society of Taiwan.

The CLDC, as an annual international conference, aims to provide a forum for researchers interested in language, discourse, and cognition to report new research findings, exchange innovative ideas and share their frameworks in these areas. Although CLDC was launched only five years ago, the topics relevant to language, discourse, and cognition themes as well as the interdisciplinary exchange stimulated over the last few years have given rise to a growing body of critical findings, making CLDC an important annual event in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics/Functional Linguistics in East Asia. We hope that the CLDC 2012 meeting will continue to attract a greater number of international researchers to participate in the dialog.

The CLDC 2012 will focus on research associated with Cognitive Linguistics /Functional Linguistics and interdisciplinary research. The meeting will be comprised of a general session with the theme of “COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS/ FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND INTERDISCIPLNARY STUDIES” and a special session with the theme of “EMOTION, LANGUAGE, and COGNITION.”

Summer Research Experience for Linguistics Undergraduates

Sheila Kennison from Oklahoma State University writes:

We are pleased to announce that we will be holding our summer research
experience for undergraduates again in summer 2012.  The goal of this
program is to provide 12 undergraduate students with an in-depth, hands-on
research experience focused on the biological basis of animal  and human
behavior. Students will be trained in the application of the scientific
method to develop hypotheses, design and conduct research studies involving
either animal or human subjects.  Students will also be trained in the
responsible conduct of research. Students will be mentored by full-time,
Ph.D.-level faculty members who are tenured/tenure-track faculty with strong
programs of research. Students selected for the program will be expected to
devote at least 40 hours a week for research; thus, it is not possible to be
enrolled in courses or other activities during the program.

Program dates: June 2, 2012-July 29, 2012

Application deadline: February 1, 2012

To be eligible, students must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident who is
currently enrolled in an undergraduate program.  Each student will reside in
a campus dormitory (at no cost to the student) and receive $500 per week to
cover food and other living expenses.  Students will receive a $500 travel
stipend to pay for their travel to and from campus and a $500 additional
stipend, if students present research at an academic conference.

Information about how to submit an application is available at
http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/kennison/osunsfreu.htm.

We especially welcome applications from students from underrepresented
groups, including first generation college students and students from rural
areas.

PLC deadline delayed to Monday

The organizers of the Penn Linguistics Circle write:

It has been pointed out that the Call for Papers for this year's PLCcontained an error, in that it specified the deadline as Thursday, November 15 (a day/date combination that is not realized this year). To avoid penalizing anyone who might have been confused by this, as well as to allow extra time for the preparation of submissions, we have decided to extend the deadline until Monday, Nov. 21.

As a reminder, instructions for abstract submission can be found at
the PLC website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc36/

We are looking forward to your submissions.

Seth Cable invited to teach at 2013 LSA Summer Institute

Congratulations to Seth Cable, who has just received an invitation to teach an introductory semantics course at the 2013 LSA Summer Institute in Ann Arbor.

Congratulations Seth!

Luiz Amaral and Andie Faber at Acquisition Lab/LARC today

Acquisition Lab / LARC meeting is today, Monday November 14 at 5:15 in the Partee Room

Luiz Amaral and Andie Faber will give the talk:

"A Unification-based Approach to Nominal Agreement in Adult Second
Language Grammars"

Everyone is Welcome!

Lisa Green elected to LSA Executive Committee

Lisa Green has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. Her three-year term will begin this January.

Congratulations Lisa!

The UMass invasion of NLLT continues

UMass is taking "Natural Language and Linguistic Theory" by storm. Last week, WHISC reported two articles that have been accepted by that august journal authored by members of the linguistics department (faculty and students alike), and this week WHISC learns that two other UMass papers have been accepted. They are:

"Synchronic explanation," by Paul de Lacy and John Kingston (A critique of Blevins's Evolutionary Phonology and an argument for a synchronic phonological grammar).

and,

"Passivization, Reconstruction and Edge Phenomena: Connecting English and Japanese nominalizations," by Angeliek van Hout, Masaaki Kamiya and Thomas Roeper.

Congratulations!

Cable talks in the undergrad linguistics club meeting

Jeremy Cahill writes:

Seth Cable will be giving an informal presentation on the Tlingit language for the Ling Club on Tuesday, November 15th at 5:15 in the Partee Room (South College 301).

All interested undergrads are invited.

Ling Club contact email: jccahill@student.umass.edu.

UMass at the BU Language Acquisition Conference

Tom Roeper writes:

From BU, Bart Hollebrandse Angeliek van HOut,  and Kazuko Yatsushiro
were co-authors with 17 and 25 others, respectively, of two reports
from the COST project, run by Uli Sauerland, which was a European outgrowth
of the DELV project.  The papers dealt with co-ordinated experiments
on Tense and Quantification across all of those languages.  The DELV
figured prominently in a new COST project on Bililngualism and SLI presented
by Cornelia Hamann in the plenary lecture at BU as well.

Ana Perez presented a paper on Recursion developing a Canadian wing to
the UMass work on the project,  And Jill deVilliers and Tom Roeper
presented their recent work on Tense and Truth in the (fortunately) endless
saga of wh-movement in acquisition.

A video on East Sutherland Gaelic

Barbara Partee writes:

There is a wonderful video -- not new, but I just learned about it last
week, about Nancy Dorian's work on the dying language East Sutherland
Gaelic. The video itself is in Gaelic (including Nancy's), with English
subtitles. It's really interesting on many levels, can be fascinating for
students as well as for linguists. (It may make you cry, though.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7647046783946085652

If you lose this message, you can easily find the video just by googling on
Nancy Dorian. (She was already famous for her first-of-its-kind book
Language Death.)

Emily Elfner defends Dissertation on Tuesday

Emily Elfner will defend her dissertation: "Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish" on Tuesday, November 8th at 4PM in Bartlett 206.

All are welcome!

Peter Klecha speaks in SRG on Thursday.

Anisa Schardl writes:

This Thursday, Peter will be talking at SRG about imprecision and
modality.  It'll be at Barbara's, 50 Hobart Lane in Amherst, starting
at 6pm.  I'll bring dinner, you bring money or your own dinner.  If
you need me to pick up something special (e.g. vegan, lactose-free)
for you, email me and let me know.  This will be one of your last
chances to talk to Peter about his work before he leaves, so be there!

Paper by Peggy Speas and Jill deVilliers accepted to NLLT

WHISC has learned that Natural Language and Linguistic Theory has accepted "Direct Evidentials, Case, Tense and Aspect in Tibetan: Evidence for a General Theory of the Semantics of Evidentials," a paper co-authored by  Kalsang, Jay Garfield, Margaret Speas and Jill deVilliers.

Congratulations!

The Guru: before and after

Angelika Kratzer writes:

Here are two pictures of our Fall Semantics Guru, taken a few years apart in the same environment.

 

 

UMOP 38 is out

UMOP 38: Processing Linguistic Structure, edited by Jesse A. Harris and Margaret Grant is now available!

Here is how its advert blurb describes the volume:

This volume consists of a collection of working papers on sentence processing covering a wide range of topics, including pied-piping, ellipsis in adult sentence processing and acquisition, and processing effects associated with anticipating upcoming linguistic structure. Addressing numerous theoretical and experimental issues, papers in the volume may appeal to a wide audience interested in sentence processing.

Table of contents: http://www.people.umass.edu/harris/umop/UMOP38_toc.pdf

It can be purchased from the Graduate Linguistic Students' Association
http://glsa.hypermart.net/

Bhatt and Walkow in NLLT

"Locating Agreement in Grammar: An Argument from Agreement in Conjunctions" by Rajesh Bhatt and Martin Walkow has been accepted for publication by Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

Congratulations!