Call for Papers: Sinn and Bedeutung 17

Sinn und Bedeutung 17, held at the École normale supérieure in Paris, invites submissions devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, psycholinguistic aspects of meaning, or philosophy of language.

Invited speakers:

• Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
• Rick Nouwen (Universiteit Utrecht)
• Barbara Partee (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
• Liina Pylkkänen (New York University)

Papers will be selected for 45 (35+10) minute oral presentations.
Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author. Abstracts should be anonymous, in the form of a PDF file; they must not exceed 2 pages including all data and references and have to be written in 12 pt with 2.5 cm (1 in) margins on all sides.

Please submit your abstracts via EasyChair: easychair.

Deadline for 2-page abstract submission: April 16
Notification of acceptance: June 4
Conference dates: September 8, 9, 10
Organizers: École normale supérieure, Paris
Contact us at: sub.paris2012@gmail.com
Conference webpage: here.

Linguistics Summer Program in St. Petersburg

Annie Gagliardi talks on Tuesday and Wednesday

Annie Gagliardi, from the University of Maryland, will give two talks on language acquisition. Tuesday's talk will be at 4:30, in Bartlett 219, and is entitled "Bayesian Inference as an Evaluation Metric: Putting Computational Models to Work in Language Acquisition."

Wednesday's talk will also be at 4:30 and is entitled "Unpacking the Black Box: The Inner Workings of the Language Acquisition Device." The talk will be in Herter 217.

For more information about Ms. Gagliardi, go to: http://ling.umd.edu/~acg/

Robyn Orfitelli gives talks on Thursday and Friday

Robyn Orfitelli, from UCLA, will give two talks on language acquisition. Each talk will take place at 4:30.

Her talk on Thursday is entitled "Competence and Performance in Children's Grammar of Null Subjects," and will take place in Dickinson 209.

The talk on Friday is entitled "Argument Intervention in the Acquisition of A-Movement," and will be in Machmer E-37.

The rooms have not yet been nailed down. When they are, the locations will appear here.

For more information about Ms. Orfitelli, go to: http://rorfitelli.bol.ucla.edu/

Paper by Barbara Pearson, Tracy Conner and Janice Jackson to appear in "Developmental Psychology"

"Removing Obstacles for African-American-English-Speaking Children through Greater Understanding of Language Difference" by Barbara Pearson, Tracy Conner and Janice Jackson will appear in a special section of "Developmental Psychology":  Deficit of Difference? Interpreting Diverse Developmental Paths. The abstract of their paper follows:

Language difference among speakers of African-American English (AAE) has often been considered language deficit, based on a lack of understanding about the AAE variety. Following Labov (1972), Wolfram (1969), Rickford (1999), Green (2002, 2011) and others, we define AAE as a complex rule-governed linguistic system, and briefly discuss language structures that it shares with general American English (GAE) and others that are unique to AAE. We suggest ways in which mistaken ideas about the language variety add to children’s difficulties in learning the mainstream dialect and, in effect, deny them the benefits of their educational programs. We propose that a linguistically-informed approach that highlights correspondences between AAE and the mainstream dialect and trains students and teachers to understand language varieties at a metalinguistic level creates environments that support the academic achievement of AAE- speaking students. Finally, we present three program types that are recommended for helping students achieve the skills they need to be successful in multiple linguistic environments.

Angelika Kratzer's Modals and Conditionals now available

Angelika Kratzer's new book on modals and conditionals, which collects many of her classic papers on the subject along with a  guide to how this work bears on recent developments, is now available from Oxford University Press.  The blurb on the Oxford University Press's website describes her book as follows:

This book contains updated and substantially revised versions of Angelika Kratzer's classic papers on modals and conditionals, including 'What "must" and "can" must and can mean', 'Partition and Revision', 'The Notional Category of Modality', 'Conditionals', 'An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought', and 'Facts: Particulars or Information Units?'. The book's contents add up to some of the most important work on modals and conditionals in particular and on the semantics-syntax interface more generally. It will be of central interest to linguists and philosophers of language of all theoretical persuasions.

See: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199234691.do

Congratulations Angelika!

ECO5!

Anisa Schardl writes:

This year, UMass is hosting ECO5, a graduate student workshop on
syntax, on April 7th.  I am emailing to solicit presenters for ECO5.
This could be you!

ECO5 is a place for grad students to present work in progress in a
relaxed atmosphere.  It is especially good for first- and second-year
students.  Good stuff to present might be: your current GP project,
your project for a term paper that may or may not turn into a GP
later, something you were working on as an undergrad/master's student
that you haven't let go of, something cool that you recently
discovered.  No project is too small!

There are five schools involved in ECO5 and each school can send up to
three presenters.  If you're interested in being one of these
presenters, email me and tell me a title for your presentation.  Email
me!

Call for Papers: ESSLLI

The Organizers of ESSLLI 24 write:

The Student Session of the 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Opole, Poland on August 6-17, 2012. We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic & Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and will appear in the student session proceedings. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

ESSLLI 2012 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. Consult the main ESSLLI website (link below) for further information.

SPRINGER PRIZES FOR BEST PAPER AND BEST POSTER

In 2012, Springer has again continued its generous support for the Student Session by offering € 1000 in prizes. These include a a € 500 for Best Paper and € 500 for Best Poster. The prizes are awarded best on the reviews of the submission as well as the oral presentation.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:

Authors must be students, i.e., may not have received the Ph.D. degree before August 2012. All submissions must be in PDF format and be submitted to the conference EasyChair website. Submissions may be singly or jointly authored. No one may submit more than one singly and one jointly authored paper.

There are two types of papers. Long papers of up to 8 pages will be considered for both oral presentation and the poster session. Short papers of up to 4 pages will be considered as submissions for the poster session.

Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information, and must be must be received by March 20, 2012.

More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website: http://loriweb.org/ESSLLI2012StuS/
Links to previous years' proceedings are also available there.

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to esslli2012stus@loriweb.org.

For general inquiries about ESSLLI 2012, please consult the main ESSLLI 2012 page, http://esslli2012.pl/.

Gustavo Freire and Joel Walters speak at LARC/Acquisition Lab tomorrow

The LARC/Acquisition Lab will meet Monday,  Feb 13, at 5:20 in the Partee Room (South College 301) for the following two presentations.

"Experimental Ideas on Event and Indirect Causatives"
Gustavo Freire

"Codeswitching as a possible diagnostic in SLI"
Joel Walters
Professor at Bar-Ilan University

Everyone Welcome!

David Smith speaks at Yale

David Smith, from the Computer Science department, will give a talk at the Friday lunch series at Yale University on February 17. A title and abstract follow.

Efficient Inference for Declarative Approaches to Language

Much recent work in natural language processing treats linguistic
analysis as an inference problem over graphs.  This development opens
up useful connections between machine learning, graph theory, and
linguistics.  In particular, we will see how linguists can
declaratively specify linguistic inference problems, in terms of hard
and soft constraints on grammatical structures.  The first part of the
talk formulates syntactic parsing as a graphical model with the novel
ingredient of global constraints.  Global constraints are propagated
by combinatorial optimization algorithms, which greatly improve on
collections of local constraints.  The second part extends these
models for efficient learning of transformations between
non-isomorphic structures.  These noisy (quasi-synchronous) mappings
have applications to adapting parsers across domains, projecting
parsers to new languages, learning features of the syntax-semantics
interface, and reranking passages for information retrieval.

Call for papers: Formal Approaches to Heritage Language

The Language Acquisition Research Center at UMass will host a conference on Formal Approaches to Heritage Language on April 21-22.

They are soliciting abstracts for presentations or posters on both theoretical and acquisition issues that connect Heritage to L1 or L2 research. Priority will be given to work that addresses specific theoretical domains, such as, but not limited to: aspect, binding, quantification, movement, agreement, case, tense, and mood.

Abstract deadline: February 29, 2012

For more information, contact: Luiz Amaral, Barbara Pearson or Tom Roeper

Seth Cable interview in "Faculty Profiles"

A profile and interview with Seth Cable appears in the Humanities and Fine Arts "Faculty Profile" series. Take a look:

http://www.umass.edu/hfa/faculty/profiles/sethcable.html

Congratulations Seth!

Katya Pertsova presents Brown Bag lunch on Thursday

Joe Pater writes:

Katya Pertsova, a visitor this semester from UNC Linguistics, will be presenting a Brown Bag practice talk this Thursday February 9th at noon in Dickinson 214. Feel free to bring lunch if you'd like.

The talk is entitled "Logical complexity in morphological learning".

Visiting Assistant Professor position at University of Rochester

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester invites applications for a one year non-tenure track appointment as a visiting assistant professor to begin July 1, 2012; possibility of renewal. We seek candidates with a proven record of research in formal pragmatics and semantics, a record of excellence in teaching, and strong evidence of interest in interdisciplinary work. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in hand before the appointment starts. Duties include teaching established courses in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum and working with graduate students in allied fields such as experimental psychology and computer science.

Excellence in teaching is required, and breadth of teaching interest is highly desirable. The Department of Linguistics is part of a larger, active interdisciplinary community consisting of faculty and students doing research in cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience, and we seek candidates who are likely to further those connections. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience.

Applicants should send a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, teaching evaluations if possible, and arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to: Professor Joyce McDonough, c/o Carla Gottschalk (carla.gottschalk@.rochester.edu). Review of applications will begin on 1 March, 2012 and continue until the position is filled.

The University of Rochester, an Equal Opportunity Employer, has a commitment to diversity and encourages applications from candidates from groups underrepresented in higher education.

Application Deadline: 1-March-2012 (Open until filled)

Email Address for Applications: carla.gottschalk@.rochester.eduContact Information:Joyce McDonoughEmail: joyce.mcdonough@rochester.edu

Spring Colloq series announced

The Colloq Monsters (Claire Moore-Cantwell and Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten) write:

We are pleased to announce the schedule of colloqs for the Spring semester:

March 2: Colin Phillips (University of Maryland)

March 9: Kai von Fintel (MIT)

March 30: Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State U.) --Semantics Guru

April 13: Hamida Demirdache (University of Nantes) --Syntax Guru

April 20 *4:00pm*: John Drury (Stony Brook) --ICESL colloq

April 27: Gaja Jarosz (Yale) 

Newton International Fellowships now open

From their notice:

A new round of Newton International Fellowships - an initiative to fund research collaborations and improve links between UK and overseas researchers - has now opened. The Newton International Fellowships are funded by the British Academy and the Royal Society and aim to attract the most promising early-career post-doctoral researchers from overseas in the fields of the humanities, the natural, physical and social sciences. The Fellowships enable researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution with the aim of fostering long-term international collaborations.Newton Fellows will receive an allowance of £24,000 to cover subsistence and up to £8,000 to cover research expenses in each year of the Fellowship. A one-off relocation allowance of up to £2,000 is also available. In addition, Newton Fellows may be eligible for follow-up funding of up to £6,000 per annum for up to 10 years following completion of the Fellowship to support activities which will help build long term links with the UK. The scheme is open to post-doctoral (and equivalent) early-career researchers working outside the UK who do not hold UK citizenship.

Applications are to be made via the Royal Society’s online application system which is available at https://e-gap.royalsociety.org/

The closing date for applications is Monday 16 April 2012.

Further details are available from the Newton International Fellowships website: www.newtonfellowships.org

UMass Linguist spotted by the Hampshire Gazette's "style team"

The February 3rd issue of the local newspaper -- the Hampshire Gazette -- devoted a full page spread to first year graduate student Mike Clauss. The short, but informative interview, can be found by typing his name into the search box at http://www.gazettenet.com/

Unfortunately, the full page color photograph is not reproduced online.

University of Cambridge invites applications for PhD studentships in Linguistics

University of Cambridge, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

Applications are invited for three PhD studentships covering the period 1 October 2012 to 30 September 2015, working under the general supervision of Professor Ian Roberts in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages (although each student will in fact be assigned to a four-member PhD committee). This award has become available as a result of an ERC Advanced Grant “Rethinking Comparative Syntax” (see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/research/recos/). Successful applicants for these awards are expected to begin PhD study on 1 October 2012 and will receive a student stipend sufficient to meet the fees and maintenance requirements.

Qualification requirements

Candidates should hold or be in the process of obtaining a Master's degree (or equivalent) in Linguistics, with a specialisation in Syntax, and have attained or expect to obtain a mark of distinction. Excellent writing skills in English and knowledge of some language(s) other than English are desirable. Eligible candidates must submit an advanced proposal of research relevant to the “Rethinking Comparative Syntax” project, specifying how their research would contribute to the typological and theoretical goals of the project. Applicants are encouraged to look at the project website (http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/research/recos/) to identify one or more areas of research to which they feel they would be able to contribute via their doctoral work. Applicants can be from the UK, EU or overseas.

Closing date 14 March 2012.

Application Procedure

Candidates will fall into two brackets:

1. You may already be applying/have applied for a PhD in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and have timed your application to meet funding deadlines such as that set for the AHRC (13 January 2012).

2. You may only be interested in applying for this studentship.

1. If you have already made an application for the PhD through the Board of Graduate Studies, please email Siobhán Carew (sw334@cam.ac.uk) and give her your Application Number. Please note that applicants who have already submitted a PhD application will need to write a 500-1000 word research proposal specifically for this application, along the lines outlined above and below. ALL supporting documents must be uploaded by 14 March 2012 at the very latest.

2. Applications from candidates who intend to apply only for this studentship should be made directly to the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages. Successful candidates will be asked to make a formal application through the Board of Graduate Studies. Applications should be made on the University graduate application form (GRADSAF), available at: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/gradstud/prospec/pdf/gradsaf1213.pdf, and include the following supporting documents: two academic references transcripts or degree certificates English Language Score Report (if English is not your first language) 500-1000 word research proposal Completed applications should be emailed or posted to Ms Siobhán Carew, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, tel: (01223) 335010, email: sw334@cam.ac.uk, by the closing date of 14 March 2012. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

In the Research Statement, candidates are required to outline their original research proposal and explain how it will fit the Project, “Rethinking Comparative Syntax”. Applicants should specify Professor Ian Roberts as supervisor on their application forms and are encouraged to contact Professor Roberts (igr20@cam.ac.uk) to discuss the ERC project, Cambridge College selection, and their applications.

The ERC project

The ERC Advanced Grant “Rethinking Comparative Syntax” endeavours to reconceptualise principles-and-parameters theory along new lines. The central idea is to organise parameters into hierarchies, which define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories may act in concert; this creates macroparametric effects from the combined action of many microparameters. The highest position in a hierarchy defines a macroparameter, a major typological property, lower positions define successively more local properties. Parameter- setting in language acquisition starts at the highest position as this is the simplest choice; acquirers will "move down the hierarchy" when confronted with primary linguistic data incompatible with a high setting. Hence the hierarchies simultaneously define learning paths and typological properties. The project aims to investigate five hierarchies: those determining word-order, null arguments, word structure, discourse-configurationality and case/agreement alignment. These five hierarchies, although not exhaustive, combine to give a typological footprint of many languages, as well as providing the basis for the study of the interaction of micro- and macroparametric interactions. In this way, the claim that formal comparative syntax has little to offer typological studies can be met. Also, a clear diagnostic is provided for showing that these hierarchies represent genuine syntactic variation, and not merely morphophonological variation as suggested by Berwick & Chomsky (2011). Last, a more purely theoretical component of the project aims to show that the nature of the hierarchies is determined, not directly UG, but by UG interacting with "third-factor" principles of simplicity and efficiency.

Johnson speaks at Yale

Kyle Johnson will present "Squashing Tangled Trees," at Yale's colloquium Monday, February 6.

Kristine Yu speaks at University of Maryland

Kristine Yu will present "Morphosyntax-prosody mapping in Samoan," at the University of Maryland on February 3. An abstract follows.

Samoan is a Polynesian language with an ergative case marking system. While ergative and oblique case are marked segmentally, the absolutive case has been thought to be unmarked. I will present fieldwork data in Samoan supporting the hypothesis that absolutive case is marked by a lexical high tone, although this is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping, since high tones also mark other grammatical structures, as well as prosodic boundaries. I will discuss implications of this finding for prosodic typology and for the syntax-phonology interface.