Weir defends

Andrew Weir will defend his dissertation, "Fragments and Clausal Ellipsis," on Tuesday, May 6 in Machmer W23 at 2:30. Come cheer him on!

Reception for class of 2014

The Linguistics Department in conjunction with the Philosophy Department will be holding a reception in honor of the graduating class of 2014 on Wednesday, May 7. It’ll be in room 160 of the Commonwealth Honors college, right next to Roots Cafe from 12 to 2. All are welcome, but drop Tom Maxfield (maxfield@linguist.umass.edu) a note letting him know if you plan on attending so that enough refreshments are ordered.

Call for papers: Pronouns in Embedded Contexts

Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Location: University of Tuebingen; Tuebingen, Germany Date: 7-9 November 2014

Call Deadline: July 20th 2014

Meeting Description:

Embedded environments (e.g. clausal complements of attitude predicates) provide a window into the nature of pronouns: pronouns in such environments not only exhibit classic distinctions, such as that between bound and referential pronouns; they also participate in a broader range of phenomena, e.g. a distinction between de se and de re readings may emerge if they refer to the attitude holder. This workshop aims at investigating pronouns in such environments in order to shed new light on interactions between (i.) their syntactic properties (e.g. personal vs. clitic vs. null vs. demonstrative pronouns) and (ii.) their semantic properties (e.g. ‘de se’ pronouns vs. syntactically bound ‘de re’ pronouns vs. accidentally coreferring ‘de re’ pronouns). The goal of this workshop is to bring together recent advances on the behavior of pronouns in embedded contexts and how it bears on the correct analysis of pronominal elements.

Invited Speakers:

Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst)

Hazel Pearson (ZAS Berlin)

Orin Percus (Université de Nantes)

Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University) Yael Sharvit (UCLA)

Commentators for invited talks:

Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen) Regine Eckardt (University of Göttingen) Natasha Korotkova (UCLA)

Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) Igor Yanovich (University of Tübingen)

The workshop will be accompanied by a special discussion session led by the main organisers. In the current syntactic and semantic literature, it is a controversial question whether a unified treatment can be given for certain subsets of words that fall into the traditional category ‘pronoun’ (e.g. the subset of personal pronouns). The aim of this special session is to engage in a general discussion on possible research directions that emerge from investigating the behavior of pronouns in embedded contexts.

Special Session: On the (Non-)Uniformity of Pronouns Patrick Grosz & Pritty Patel Grosz (University of Tübingen) Sarah Zobel (University of Tübingen)

commentary: Cornelia Ebert (University of Stuttgart)

Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics InterfaceLocation: University of Tuebingen; Tuebingen, Germany Date: 7-9 November 2014Call Deadline: July 20th 2014Meeting Description:Embedded environments (e.g. clausal complements of attitude predicates) provide a window into the nature of pronouns: pronouns in such environments not only exhibit classic distinctions, such as that between bound and referential pronouns; they also participate in a broader range of phenomena, e.g. a distinction between de se and de re readings may emerge if they refer to the attitude holder. This workshop aims at investigating pronouns in such environments in order to shed new light on interactions between (i.) their syntactic properties (e.g. personal vs. clitic vs. null vs. demonstrative pronouns) and (ii.) their semantic properties (e.g. ‘de se’ pronouns vs. syntactically bound ‘de re’ pronouns vs. accidentally coreferring ‘de re’ pronouns). The goal of this workshop is to bring together recent advances on the behavior of pronouns in embedded contexts and how it bears on the correct analysis of pronominal elements.Invited Speakers:Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst)Hazel Pearson (ZAS Berlin)Orin Percus (Université de Nantes)Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University) Yael Sharvit (UCLA)Commentators for invited talks:Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen) Regine Eckardt (University of Göttingen) Natasha Korotkova (UCLA)Thomas Weskott (University of Göttingen) Igor Yanovich (University of Tübingen)The workshop will be accompanied by a special discussion session led by the main organisers. In the current syntactic and semantic literature, it is a controversial question whether a unified treatment can be given for certain subsets of words that fall into the traditional category ‘pronoun’ (e.g. the subset of personal pronouns). The aim of this special session is to engage in a general discussion on possible research directions that emerge from investigating the behavior of pronouns in embedded contexts.Special Session: On the (Non-)Uniformity of Pronouns Patrick Grosz & Pritty Patel Grosz (University of Tübingen) Sarah Zobel (University of Tübingen)commentary: Cornelia Ebert (University of Stuttgart)

TA/TO Training Session on Monday, May 12

Peggy Speas writes:

There will be a Linguistics TA/TO training session held on Monday May 12, from 1 to 3 pm in Herter 601. Everyone is welcome - We'll be talking about all levels/types of TAs and TOs, and it's always helpful to have experienced TA/TOs there to help out. 

Caroline Heycock speaks tomorrow

Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh, and inaugural syntax guru) will speak in Rajesh Bhatt’s seminar tomorrow (Monday, April 28) in the Partee room at 4PM. The title of her talk is “What copular clauses might tell us about agreement (and vice versa).” An abstract follows. 

In Andrea Moro's influential 1997 book on copular clauses, the
agreement found in English specificational copular clauses was
contrasted with that in their Italian counterparts:

1. a.  The culprit *am/is me.
   b.  Il colpevole sono/*è io
        the culprit    am/*is I

Moro attributes this difference to the pro-drop status of Italian, but
den Dikken (1998) already showed that this explanation would not
extend to what appears to be a similar pattern in Dutch and German.
In more recent work (den Dikken 2013) it is argued that obligatory
agreement with the second DP in Dutch in number, but not person,
follows from—among other premisses—the predicate inversion analysis of
specificational copular clauses, given the assumption that predicates
do not have phi-features.

In this talk I will present current work, most of it done in
collaboration with Jutta Hartmann (Tübingen), in which we have begun
to explore the agreement possibilities of these sentences in a number
of different Germanic languages. I will discuss some of the variation
that we have found within Dutch, German, and Faroese, some of which we
attribute to the possibility of an agreement probe in C that is
independent of the probe in T. I will also present evidence that the
agreement facts actually do not support an predicate inversion
analysis—but that at least under one analysis they do support the
involvement of inversion.

PRG tomorrow evening

Ivy Hauser and Carol Hughto write:

The last PRG meeting of the semester will take place this coming Monday, 4/28 at 7p.  We plan to have an informal gathering at Amanda's house and we can discuss last week of class p-side related things (final projects, what happened at RUMMIT, etc.).  We will of course have dinner.  As always, everyone is welcome!

Deniz Ozyildiz at WAFL 10

Graduate student Deniz Ozyildiz has a poster at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, which meets this weekend (May 2-4) at MIT. His poster is entitled “Turkish possessives are not exceptional.” For more information, go here.

Ricki Cohen in the digital Humanities

Linguistics major Ricki Cohen was featured at a showcase of student work on the digital humanities last Thursday, April 23, in Herer Hall. Ms Cohen’s program that analyzes proverbs and generates potentially new ones was one of four projects that were presented.

Pearson at Broader Impacts Summit

Barbara Pearson presented a poster at the Broader Impacts Infrastructure Summit April 16-18 in Arlington, VA. You can learn more here.

Tonal Spaces

Kristine Yu writes:

I'm pleased to announce a workshop on tonal spaces on June 2-3 at UMASS, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation Mutual Mentoring Grant for building a prosody community. We'll have the following invited speakers (with some preliminary talk titles given below):

Christian DiCanio, Haskins Laboratories/University at Buffalo (SUNY)
James Kirby, University of Edinburgh
John Kingston, University of Massachusetts
Jianjing Kuang, University of Pennsylvania
Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania: Tone without pitch
Bert Remijsen, University of Edinburgh: Further evidence for contrastive alignment in falling contours
Yi Xu, University College London: Articulatory dynamics of tone production and articulatory- and learning-based computational modelling

Registration open for ESSLLI 2014

The registration for the 26th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2014) is now open. ESSLLI 2014 will be held in Tübingen, Germany, August 11-22, 2014.

In order to register, go to http://www.esslli2014.info/registration/registration.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. Under the auspices of FoLLI (the Association for Logic, Language, and Information), ESSLLI brings together logicians, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers to study language, logic, and information, and their interconnections. The school hosts approximately 50 courses at both introductory and advanced levels, and brings together around 500 participants from all over the world. Along with the courses, ESSLLI hosts workshops and invited lectures, providing opportunities for in-depth discussion of current research.

The ESSLLI Organizing Committee is pleased to be able to offer a limited number of waivers of participation fees and student travel grants to highly motivated and talented students. Preferences will be given to students who actively participate in the Student Session. See more details at: http://esslli2014.info/registration/grant-information

Lyn Frazier gets Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award

The Graduate School made available this year two new awards, one for graduate faculty and another for graduate staff. It is with great pleasure that WHISC announces that our own Lyn Frazier, along with Eric Decker of Food Science and Erin Baker of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, are inaugural winners of the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. Congratulations Lyn!

Oiry and Hartman at LARC

For the final meeting of the semester, Magda Oiry and Jeremy Hartman will present their ongoing work on the acquisition of factives. Thursday, April 24, at 9:45 in the Partee room.

Veneeta Dayal gives department colloq on Friday

Veneeta Dayal will present “What Polar kayaa tells us about Speech Acts” in the department colloquium this Friday, April 25, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. An abstract of her talk follows.

I first present the findings of Bhatt and Dayal (2014) about a wh expression kyaa that optionally occurs with polar and alternative questions, but not wh questions:

1a.  (kyaa) tum cai piyoge

        What  you  tea will-drink     

        “Will you drink tea?”

b.   (kyaa) tum cai piyoge         yaa cofii

       What  you  tea will-drink   or   coffee     

       “Will you drink  TEA or COFFEE?”

c.  *kyaa kaun cai piyegaa

      What who tea will-drink     

       “Who will drink tea?’

Polar kyaa is analyzed as a Speech Act operator QUEST in ForceP, rather than a Y/N question operator.  While this is fairly unremarkable for matrix questions, embedded contexts present a more nuanced picture.  The empirical generalization is that polar kyaa can occur in those embedded contexts in which the embedded question is discourse-active, in the sense of Dayal and Grimshaw (2009).  The second part of the talk draws out the theoretical implications of this generalization, focusing on current approaches to polar questions and embedded speech acts, such as Farkas and Roelofsen (2012), Krifka (2009, 2014), among others.

PSYCH EM on Wednesday

The long-postponed PSYCH EM meeting will take place this Wednesday, April 23, at Brian Dillon’s home at 8PM. 

2014 entering class announced

Please welcome the new members of the graduate program, who will be arriving this Fall.

Thuy Bui, who is from Viet Nam and is currently a student at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She is interested in working on Vietnamese syntax and has worked on adverbs and yes/no questions.

Rodica Ivan, who is from Romania and has studied at the University of Bucharest, as well as in Venice. She is interested in relativization strategies in Romanian, complementizers, and language acquisition, as well as many other topics.

Petr Kusliy, who is from Russia and studied philosophy at the Russian State University and the Institute of Philosophy. He has studied with Barbara in Moscow. He is interested in the semantics of attitude reports and the semantics of tense.

Deniz Ozyildiz, who is from Turkey but studied at Nanterre University in France and at UCLA; he is currently in the cognitive science program at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He is interested in syntax, semantics, and fieldwork, and has worked on tensed verbs in Turkish and on shifting indexicals.

Georgia Simon, who is an American student at Rutgers. She is interested in prosody and pragmatics, and has experience doing research using experimental methods.

RUMMIT on Saturday

The annual RUMMIT meeting is this Saturday at MIT. RUMMIT brings sound scientists from the northeast together to share ongoing research. WHISC has heard that UMass phonologist Robert Staubs will be presenting. As more details become available, they’ll be posted here.

Barbara Partee at Harvard on Monday, April 28

Barbara Partee gives the IX annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Guest lecture at Harvard University on Monday, April 28, in 113 Sever Hall from 4-6PM. The title of her lecture is “The History of Formal Semantics: Changing Notions of Semantic Competence.”  For more information, go here.

Roeper on the road

Tom Roeper writes:

Last week I gave a talk on "Minimal Rules and Unlabelled Nodes in Multi-lingualism: How rules apply across grammars” at a small workshop on Multilingualism at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar organized by Liliane Haegeman and Michel deGraff.

Then this week I was invited to give a plenary keynote lecture at the 10th anniversary of the Experimental Methods in Acquisition Research (EMLAR) conference in Utrecht on "There are No methods, only Theories".

Each of these conferences revealed the burgeoning vitality of empirical research in acquisition---and impressive attention to what the details of bilingualism can reveal, and new projects throughout Europe are being developed, particularly in Norway, England, Greece, Belgium, and China.

Hartman at LARC

Magda Oiry writes:

Jeremy Hartman will present his work on Root infinitives at LARC on Thursday 9:45 in the Partee room. All are welcome!