Call for papers: LSALAA 2013

Workshop on Languages with and without articles 2013

The workshop will be held Feb 28 - March 1st 2013
Salle de conférences, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris.

Invited speakers :

- Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
- Östen Dahl (Stockholm)

Call deadline : November 25, 2012.

The workshop is organised by the project "Calcul de la référence nominale: langues avec et sans articles" of the Fédération Typologie et Universaux du Langage (CNRS FRE 2559) which aims to bring together researchers in

-- L1 and L2 language acquisition,
-- sign language linguistics and
-- comparative syntax and semantics.

We encourage submissions exploring the linguistic means used to establish the reference of a nominal expression, including, but not limited to, the following questions:

- what is the role of definite and indefinite articles in establishing the
reference of the DP?

- how are the effects of definite and indefinite articles achieved in
languages that lack those articles?

- what are the semantic distinctions involved in languages that
distinguish two distinct definite articles (see Ebert 1970, Löbner 1985
and much subsequent literature) or two indefinite articles (see von
Heusinger, Klaus & Klein, Udo (to appear) The Distribution of two
Indefinite Articles in Uzbek and references cited there)?

- what is the difference between definite and demonstrative determiners?

We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics, L1 and L2 acquisition of (in)definiteness in spoken and sign languages.

We invite submissions for 25-minute presentations (plus ten-minute
discussions).

Abstracts should be at most 2 pages in length (including examples and
references) written in French or English.

Abstracts must be anonymous and should be sent by e-mail (plain ASCII, rtf, ps or pdf) to : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Please write the (first) author's name plus the word 'abstract' in the
subject line of your message (e.g., 'Dupont abstract'), and include author name(s), affiliation, contact information and the title of the abstract in the body of the email. For co-authored papers indicate the email address that we should use for correspondence.

Website :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Journees-LSALAA-2013-Workshop-.html E-mail : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Abstract Submission Deadline : 25 nov / 25 Nov 2012
Notification of Acceptance : 20 déc / Dec 20th, 2012
Workshop :  Thur 28 Feb and Fri 1st March 2013

PhD position at Brandeis University

The Linguistics faculty of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University invites applications for a Ph.D. position under the supervision of Dr. Sophia A. Malamud, starting in September 2013. In addition to tuition remission, there is a stipend of $22,000 renewable for 4 years.

Individuals are encouraged to apply who have an interest in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, computational approaches to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, and/or linguistic annotation for meaning-related phenomena. The research topic will lie in the overlapping areas of modality, mood, sentence type, speech act modifiers, modelling of dialogue, and indirectness.

Applicants should have a Bachelor's or Masters degree or equivalent in linguistics, computational linguistics, speech technology, cognitive science, computer science, or a related discipline.

For more details on the linguistics faculty at Brandeis Computer Science, or on Dr. Malamud specifically, see

Sophia Malamud, Assistant Professor (website)
Brandeis Research Lab for Linguistics and Computation faculty (website)

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the project. Please contact Sophia A. Malamud (smalamud at brandeis.edu), attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV.

Details regarding the PhD program can be found at http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/computerscience/phd.html

For more information on the application procedure, please see the Graduate School website (http://www.brandeis.edu/gsas/apply/index.html) 

In order to ensure full consideration for funding, applications (including all supporting documents) need to be received by January 15, 2013.

Phonetics Lab Meetings

John Kingston writes:

Schedule of upcoming Phonetics Lab meetings:

Tuesday 9 October = a UMass Monday:
   On-going and prospective experiments, John Kingston;
   Prospective grant proposal, all.

Monday 22 October:
   Abstracts of papers to be presented at the Fall meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in St. Louis, all;
   Abstracts to be submitted by us to the Spring meeting (see separate announcement), all.

Monday 5 November:
   Kirikiri tone, Kristine Yu.

All meetings are held 4-5:30 PM in Bartlett 6.
Bagels, occasional baked goods, cheese, and spreads, including one for vegans, are provided. For now, bring your own coffee.

Phonology Reading Group meeting tomorrow!

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

The next meeting of the phonology reading group will happen:

Tuesday October 9
6:30 pm
36 Orchard st. #3, in Northampton (Kristine's place)

Brian Smith will be presenting his work on phonologically conditioned
ineffability using UR constraints.

Bring snacks/drinks if you can!

call for papers: SALT 23

*** SALT23 *** Final Call for Abstracts ***

Semantics and Linguistics Theory 23 will be held at UC Santa Cruz, May 3-5, 2013. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics.

Abstracts must not exceed 3 pages (please note the new page limit)  on letter-size paper, including examples and references, with 1 inch
margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title but should not identify the author(s). The abstract must
be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author, or 2 joint abstracts per author.

SALT does not accept papers that by the time of submission have
appeared or have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed
journal. Preference will be given to presentations not duplicated at
other major conferences (including LSA, NELS, WCCFL).

To submit an abstract, please go to the following EasyChair page:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt23

Abstract submission opens on October 8, 2012. The deadline for
abstract submission is December 2, 2012 11:59 PM, PST.

More details about the conference are/will be available on the SALT 23 webpage:

http://babel.ucsc.edu/salt/

Please direct any inquiries to:

salt23ucsc@gmail.com

Important Dates

Submission deadline: December 2, 2012, 11:59pm PST
Notification of acceptance: Early February 2013
Conference date: May 3 - May 5, 2013

Cable's paper accepted to Journal of Semantics

Seth Cable's paper, "Reflexives, Reciprocals, and Contrast" was accepted to the Journal of Semantics.

Congratulations Seth!

UMass at GALANA

The fifth meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America meets at the University of Kansas October 11-13. The program includes several UMass citizens, including:

Jeremy Hartman with Yasutada Sudo and Ken Wexler "Principle B and Phonologically Reduced Pronouns in Child English"

Angelik van Hout with I. Barcia del Real Marco and M. J. Ezeizabarrena "Comprehension vs. production asymmetries in the acquisition of PF and IPF aspect in Spanish"

Angelik van Hout with A. Schouwenaars and P. Hendriks "Word order overrules number agreement: Dutch children's interpretation and production of which-questions"

Tom Roeper and Seth Cable with Rama Novogrodsky "The interpretation of "each" and "every" in language acquisition"

Karen Jesney "A Learning-Based Account of L1 vs L2 Cluster Repair Differences"

Suzi Lima "The acquisition of the count/mass distinction in Yudja (Tupi)

For more information, go to http://www.galana2012.ku.edu/home.html

Call for Papers: ICA 2013

The Call for Papers for ICA 2013, a joint meeting of the 21st
International Congress on Acoustics, the 165th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, and the 52nd meeting of the Canadian
Acoustical Association, to be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2-7
June 2013, is now posted online at acousticalsociety.org. Please note that a printed copy of the Call for Papers will no longer be sent to
members by postal mail.

The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 15 November 2012. Over 90
special sessions are being organized and a Proceedings containing all papers will be published. Other events include 5 plenary lectures by recognized experts, an exposition showcasing the latest products in all fields of acoustics, and a technical tour of La Maison Symphonique-home to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The opening ceremonies for ICA 2013 will be an exciting and entertaining event. An evening concert at Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste will feature the orchestral group I Musici.

Seth Cable at Yale

Last Monday, October 1, Seth Cable presented his paper "Distance Distributivity and Pluractionality in Tlingit (and Beyond)" at the Monday Colloquia series Yale University's Linguistics Department.

Miriam Butt presented "Deep Natural Language Processing"

Miriam Butt gave a talk last Friday, October 5. Miriam is
Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics
(Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft) at the University of Konstanz. She is best known for her theoretical linguistic work on complex predicates and on grammatical case, and for her computational linguistic work in large-scale grammar development within the Pargram project. Recently she has been also involved in interdisciplinary work on the visualization of linguistic data.

The title, and abstract, of her talk was:

Deep Natural Language Processing

This talks provides a look at the capabilities of deep linguistic
natural lanuguage processing in the context of ParGram, an
international effort at building grammars for languages as diverse as
English, French, Welsh, Wolof, Georgian, Urdu, Japanese, Indonesian,Arabic and Murrinh-Patha.  The aim is to build these grammars using not only the same theoretical assumptions (based on Lexical-Functional Grammar) but also the same computational methods.  While the process of computational grammar devleopment is, of course, inherently interesting, we will also discuss the broader uses of computational grammars, for example in systems like IBM's Watson and Powerset's information retrieval system.

The underlying development platform XLE/XFR (used by Powerset and in the ParGram effort) was developed at PARC over a number of years.  The talk will focus on the various powerful analysis possibilities this system allows for, including a version of Optimality Theory and an integration of statistical information to constrain and inform both parsing and generation. The talk will also touch on the assumptions about the underlying grammar architecture that are made, e.g., with respect to the morphology-syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.

Roeper and Amaral at the Acquisition Lab/LARC meeting on Monday

The Acquisition Lab/LARC meeting is Monday, October 1, in Herter 301 at noon. Tom Roeper and Luiz Amaral will give presentations on:

1) Age effects and the acquisition of recursive possessives in Wapichana

2) Updates on their collaboration with Brazilian partners and the 2013's conference on Recursion at UFRJ

3) Parsing effects in Recursion in Karaja

Everyone is welcome!

Valentine Hacquard gives department colloq on Friday

Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland) will give the department colloquium this Friday, October 5, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30. There will be a dinner reception for her at Rajesh Bhatt's house in Northampton.

Title: Attitude Problems

Children seem to lack a full understanding of verbs like 'think' until their fourth birthday, but show no such difficulties with verbs like ‘want’. A common explanation for this asymmetry links it to conceptual development. Under this view, children lack the ability to attribute beliefs to themselves and others (theory of mind) until age 4. On the other hand, the concept of desire is held to develop much earlier. Thus, children do not have the same difficulties with verbs reporting desires than with those reporting beliefs. However, several issues cast doubt on this conceptual development hypothesis. This talk explores an alternative, semantic explanation for the asymmetry in children's understanding of think and want, which doesn't rely on a fundamental change in conceptual structure.

Weir speaks at SRG on Thursday

Andrew Weir will give a practice talk for NELS entitled " 'why' Stripping targets voice phrase" at the S Reading Group this Thursday, October 4, at 6:30. The meeting is at Barbara and Volodja's place (50 Hobart Lane). BYOD(inner), or bring dinner-money.

Schardl at the LSA

Anisa Schardl will give a poster on "Simple Partial Movement and Clefts" at this year's LSA meeting in Boston. 

Congratulations Anisa!

NECPhon 2012 this Saturday at Maryland

The Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop meets Saturday, October 6, at the University of Maryland. There will be two talks by members of the UMass linguistics community.

Joe Pater will present joint work with UMass alumnus Elliott Moreton in a paper entitled "Incremental Maximum Entropy phonotactics and the Shepard complexity hierarchy"

and

Presley Pizzo will give a talk entitled "An online model of constraint induction for learning phonological alternations"

Bolozky speaks at the Ling Club meeting on Wednesday

Amanthis Miller writes:

We are happy to invite you to  come see Professor Bolozky at Ling Club speaking on "Two recent  phonological phenomena in Israeli Hebrew phonology and  their possible  implications". He was kind enough to write an abstract, which is down there below the dotted line. All are welcome to come, there will probably be pizza!

When: Wednesday 10/3 at 5.20 PM
Where: 301 South College - Partee Room
RVSP: jccahill@student.umass.edu

If you have any questions, please email Jeremy or me! See you there!

****************

 Two phonological phenomena in Israeli Hebrew (IH) will be  introduced, pre-tonal lengthening (PTL) and i > e centralization (CENT), both of which had precedents in Ancient Hebrew. Both have recently been observed in IH in generally-similar environments, but their scope of application is limited to certain colloquial registers  and to some groups of speakers, and even then the processes involved  are not applied consistently. Still, the motivation for each could be  similar, at least in part, to what it was in ancient Hebrew.  

Historical PTL was probably intended to distinguish Hebrew lexical items from comparable Aramaic ones among the predominantly bilingual population; in IH it may signal a general rhythmic change, but may  also constitute an attempt to avoid opacity-causing qualitative vowel reduction (as in English). CENT was and is just an “ease of  articulation” phonetic process. Both apply to unstressed vowels.   

Since PTL generally applies in open syllables, and CENT in closed ones, a single possible explanation is suggested ---  in terms of syllable structure ---  that can account for both.

Acoustical Society of America meeting in Montreal

John Kingston writes:

The spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held relatively nearby in a very interesting city, Montreal, 2-7 June 2013.

It's a joint meeting with the International Congress on Acoustics and the Canadian Acoustical Association. I'm writing to you now because the deadline for a 200 word abstract is (as always) very early, 15 November 2012, and because this is a potentially interestingly different venue to present your work. Abstracts are submitted via:

acousticalsociety.org

All submissions are accepted, although you have to join the society at the meeting in order to register. This is VERY cheap for students (and VERY expensive for anyone else).

Could we consider an expedition north next June? We'll discuss this at the next Phonetics Lab meeting, 10 October 2012.

Kristine has proposed that we discuss selected abstracts from the fall meeting at the lab meeting after that on 22 October 2012. She'll be sending around an announcement about that shortly. That will give a chance to can see what an ASA abstract is like and what kind of papers are given at the meeting.

The last time a lot of us from the Lab went was to the meeting in Providence in 2006. We gave a brace of posters and got excellent and intense feedback. (I recommend giving a poster because talks are just 15 minutes total which leaves little time for discussion.)

Magda Oiry joins faculty!

Starting this academic year, Magda Oiry has joined the Linguistics Department faculty. Magda completed a dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance dependencies by French learners at the University of Nantes in 2008, and is an expert on both the syntax of questions and their acquisition. She will have a joint appointment with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Welcome Magda!

Mike Clauss and Jon Nelson at the LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting

Magda Oiry writes:

Mike Clauss and Jon Nelson will be presenting their work this coming Monday in the LARC / Acquisition lab meeting: 

 

- "Wh clauses in polar questions" by Mike 

- "Recursion in Second Language acquisition" by Jon.

 

Monday, the 24th in Herter 301 at 12.

 

Everyone is welcome!

Conner and LaCara at the German Society of Linguistics meeting

The Thirty Fourth annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics meets this March in Potsdam. They have a special workshop on "Parenthesis and Ellipsis" that will include papers by Nick LaCara and Tracy Conner. Mr LaCara's paper is entitled "Inversion, Deletion, and Focus in "as" Parentheticals," and Ms Conner's paper is "Overt Functional Heads License Ellipsis: A Unified Account of VP-Ellipsis and Ellipsis in Possessive DPs."

Congratulations Tracy and Nick!