WHISC

The department newsletter is named after the department’s former home: South College. Perhaps WHISC has become enough name-like to no longer hit our readers’ ears as “What’s Happening in South College,” but to the extent that it does, its suitability for our masthead has waned. 

We seek a new name. Our hardworking reporters are hired for their lack of imagination, and WHISC’s office drones are sadly lacking in this virtue as well. Months of in-house brainstorming have yielded only “This Week in Preview” and “This Week In Local Linguistics,” neither sufficiently inventive. We therefore turn to our readers for help.

Please send us your suggestions. We are especially desirous of short, euphonious names. It must be able to be rendered in the Roman alphabet. We will award a prize to the best entry.

Send your suggestions to Kyle Johnson (kbj@linguist.umass.edu) by October 10.

SNEWS

Jon Ander Mendia writes:

I'm pleased to announce that this year SNEWS, the South New England  Workshop on Semantics, will take place at UMass, on the 15th of  November (Saturday, room tba). SNEWS is an annual workshop for  graduate students in Linguistics to present their work and receive  feedback in an informal setting. Topics of presentations generally  fall into the categories of semantics, pragmatics,  semantics/pragmatics interface, experimental and psycholinguistic  investigations of semantic/pragmatic phenomena, acquisition, etc.

The workshop is meant to encourage the development and exchange of  ideas through friendly interaction between students and faculty from  different universities in the area. It is also a great opportunity to  know other young semanticists and linguists in general with similar  interests. Universities that have participated in the past include  UConn, UMass, Harvard, MIT, Brown, and Yale.

At SNEWS only graduate students are allowed to present, although  faculty members are welcome to attend. Moreover, in order to encourage  participation and capitalize on the friendly and informal environment  of the workshop, there is no call for papers: students only need to  submit the title for their talks before October 31st. Each talk will  be 20' plus 10' for questions. In principle, it is possible to  accommodate as much as 2-3 participants from each university, but this is subject to change until I have heard back from all the universities and have a more educated estimation of the number of  interested participants.

More announcements and information will be available soon at the  website (you can check the old one here). If you are currently working on a semantic/pragmatics project, I  strongly encourage you to participate! You only need to let me know  what the title of your talk will be. Please, feel free to ask me any  further questions.

Dillon is at the Frontiers in Psychology

A paper by Brian Dillon and colleagues has appeared in Frontiers in Psychology. It examines the memory retrieval operations employed in sentence comprehension by studying how sentences involving the Mandarin reflexive “ziji” are processed on-line. The paper is called “The structure-sensitivity of memory access: evidence from Mandarin Chinese,” and you can view an abstract here.

Call for Papers: Indigenous Languages and Experimental Linguistics

Suzi Lima writes:

Cilene Rodrigues (PUC-Rio) and I are organizing a symposium at Abralin in February 2015 (http://ixcongresso.abralin.com.br). Abralin is the Brazilian equivalent of the LSA, and this year it will take place in Belem, in the north of Brazil. Our symposium is called "Línguas Indígenas e Linguística Experimental" (Indigenous Languages and Experimental Linguistics). As this is an international conference, English will be one of the languages of our symposium.

 

Abstract can be submitted online at the following address: 

 

http://ixcongresso.abralin.com.br/login/ 

 

You will find our symposium under "Eixo Temático: Psicolinguística," then you can select our "simpósio". 

 

The deadline for submitting abstracts is November 16, 2014. The conference will take place from February 25 to 28, 2015. Please contact me should you have any questions.

PostDoc at University of Nantes

Applications are invited for a post-doc position in theoretical linguistics (syntax/semantics/pragmatics interfaces) and psycholinguistics (heritage language acquisition and knowledge), at the University of Nantes, France.
 
The position is funded by the FP7 (the European Union’s 7th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development) collaborative research project AThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience) on multilingualism. The project involves 16 institutions located in 8 European countries and runs from March 2014 until March 2019. https://vre.leidenuniv.nl/vre/atheme/public/.
 
The research fellow will join the Nantes Linguistics Lab (LLING) to work on AThEME’s WP3 Heritage languages & language users in the EU, coordinated by Hamida Demirdache (LLING) & Janet Grijzenhout (Baby Speech Laboratory (BSL), University of Konstanz).
 
The goal of our project is to experimentally investigate Heritage Language (HL) knowledge and acquisition at the morpho-syntax/semantics interface.
The post-doctoral researcher will be in charge of conducting an experimental study targeting 2nd generation (adolescent) HL users of Arabic from the Nantes area, to test comprehension (vs. production) of negative sensitive items in Arabic.
 
The successful candidate will have an expertise in both theoretical and experimental syntax/semantics; in particular, of experimental methodologies to probe language comprehension and elicit production data in controlled discourse contexts. Primary duties include working with the coordinators and members of the lab to design, conduct, and write up the experiments associated with WP3. Knowledge of Arabic is an asset, but is not required. Individuals who are prepared to take a lead role in developing experimental research at the syntax/semantics interface are especially encouraged to apply. The position has a term of appointment of 2 years with a possible renewal.
 
QUALIFICATIONS:  A Ph.D in linguistics, psycholinguistics or a related field is required.
 
TO APPLY: A cover letter explaining qualifications for the position, a CV, a research statement, and one or more representative publications or other writings should be sent to the application email address below. Please also arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to that address. Review of material will begin on September 1, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. The (flexible) start date of the postdoctoral position is January 31, 2015.
 
 Application Email: hlpostdoclling@gmail.com

Workshop on Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships this Thursday

The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for students in the humanities and social sciences offers up to $38,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.  The Graduate School Office of Professional Development is hosting a panel session and optional proposal writing workshop to help students take control of the application process and develop a competitive application.
 
Panelists include:

·        Dr. Nick Bromell, Professor of English, who has served on fellowship faculty review panels
·        Dr. Emiliano Ricciardi, Assistant Professor in Music History and recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
·        Heidi Bauer-Clapp, Coordinator of Grants and Fellowships, Office of Professional Development
·        Kathleen Baldwin, Coordinator of Graduate Writing, Office of Professional Development
·        Lauren Goodman, Graduate Writing Consultant, Office of Professional Development
 
The optional workshop (1:30-2:30 pm) will focus on developing the proposal portion of the application. Participants will have the opportunity to receive peer feedback on a proposal draft, which could include anything from the full five-page proposal to a list of bullet-points to address in the proposal. To participate in the writing workshop, bring a hard-copy of the proposal draft on Sept. 11th.
 
Fellowship applications are due October 22nd.  For more information see their website:

https://www.acls.org/programs/dcf/
 
Sessions later this month will target fellowships from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Ford Foundation – stay tuned!

LARC meets on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

I'm pleased to announce that this semester's first LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) meeting will be held next Friday, Sept 12, at 11:30 in room N451, ILC.  

All are welcome to attend. We'll use the first meeting to make introductions and plan a presentation schedule for future meetings. If you're interested in presenting this semester but can't make it next Friday, let me or Tom R. know.

This is the last email that will go out to the ling-dept email.  To subscribe to the ling-acquisition mailing list, go here:

https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-acquisition

S Reading Group

Leland Kusmer writes:

It's time to kick off this year's Syntax/Semantics Reading Group (SRG)! (Or maybe that should be SSRG?)

SRG is an informal meeting of S-siders to talk about the field, practice presentations, talk over preliminary projects, and more. We usually meet about every other week and rotate between hosts in Northampton. The GLSA generously provides dinner.

I'd like to have our first meeting next week, and then roughly every other week after that. I've set up a Doodle poll to figure out what nights of the week might work on an on-going basis.

http://doodle.com/54mkw2pyd7uzidkp

Also, I'm looking to establish a roster of potential hosts for SRG. If you're interested in hosting even once this semester, please let me know. Hosts get to pick the food for the evening!

Psycho Workshop meets this Thursday

The first meeting of the Psycho Workshop will be Thursday, September 11, in ILC N451.

Kristine Yu in JASA

Kristine Yu’s  article, "The role of creaky voice in Cantonese tonal perception)," has been published online in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Vol.136, No.3). The article can be accessed through the issue's table of contents here.

Congratulations Kristine!

Call for papers: GALANA 6

Abstract submissions are welcomed for the 6th bi­annual conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition ­- North America (GALANA 6). GALANA 6 will take place on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, MD on February 19­-21, 2015. This conference aims to provide an outlet for cutting edge work on language acquisition, relating results in first and second language acquisition to detailed hypotheses about developing grammatical representations, the mechanisms by which these representations are acquired, and the information processing mechanisms through which these representations are engaged in real time language use by first and second language learners. Invited speakers include Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers) and Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh, Bilingualism Matters). For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

In addition to the general session, there will be a special session entitled “Learning in generative grammar: 50 years since the Evaluation Metric”. It has been 50 years since the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which first introduced the idea of an evaluation metric as a way for learners to choose between alternative grammars that were compatible with their exposure. In the intervening years, conceptions of Universal Grammar (UG) have changed, and our understanding of children's grammatical knowledge at various ages has similarly advanced, but theories of how children use UG to interpret the data and how they use the data to select a grammar from UG have not been at center stage. In recent years, however, there has been a steady increase in work returning to this question, asking how different models (including rule learning, parameter setting, constraint ranking) of UG might help learners to use the input effectively to acquire a grammatical system. Invited speakers for this special session include Janet Fodor (CUNY Graduate Center), Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine), Bruce Tesar (Rutgers), and Charles Yang (UPenn). We also invite abstracts submissions for several additional talks that address the question of how a given grammatical formalism or set of grammatical principles helps to solve particular learnability problems in linguistics.

Abstract submissions should be anonymous and should be uploaded as .pdf attachments to the EasyChair site (not typed into the text box). Submissions should fit on one page with 1” margins and 12­ point font, with an extra page allowed for examples, tables, figures and references.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due: October 6th, 2014 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time.

Notifications by: November 21, 2014

IMPORTANT WEBSITES:

GALANA 6: https://sites.google.com/site/2015galana/

EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=galana6

Has Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, read John Ross's Dissertation?

the evidence.

Dissertation Research Grants

The Graduate School is now accepting Spring 2014 proposals for the Dissertation Research Grant program for doctoral students who have achieved candidacy. The program offers up to a maximum of $1,000 fordissertation research related expenses. Grants are awarded once per semester through a competitive proposal process. The submission deadline for fall semester is Tuesday, 14th October 2014. A subcommittee of the Graduate Council will review proposals and determine awards. Detailed information on the program including allowed and prohibited expenses, submission and eligibility requirements and process can be found here.

Commonwealth College Research Assistant Fellowships

Commonwealth Honors College students who are currently sophomores or juniors and have a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher are eligible to apply. These Fellowships are working fellowships that pay $9.00 per hour (in accordance with 1/1/15 increase in Mass. minimum wage) up to a maximum of $1,000 for students to work on a faculty member's research project. The program is designed to provide supplemental financial assistance, to give students an opportunity to gain experience in their academic field, and to help prepare them to undertake their own research.

Students must submit an application jointly with a faculty member.

For application guidelines and a link to the online application system (FGS), please go to the Commonwealth Honors College website or paste the direct link into your browser:

https://www.honors.umass.edu/scholarship/research-assistant-fellowships

Students must register and submit their essay online.  Since applications may not be revised online, students and their faculty sponsors must communicate regarding revisions before the student submits their essay.

Deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 7, 2014.

Commonwealth College grants

Grants of up to $1,000 are available to junior and senior Commonwealth Honors College students, with priority given to seniors working on honors thesis research.  Applicants must have a cumulative GPA of 3.4 or higher and must submit a six-page proposal outlining their project accompanied by an endorsement from their faculty sponsor. Every recipient is asked to present his or her work at the statewide Undergraduate Research Conference in spring
2015. These grants of up to $1,000 are for direct costs only and do not provide a stipend or wage.

For application guidelines and a link to the online application system
(FGS), please go to the Commonwealth Honors College website or paste the
direct link into your browser:

https://www.honors.umass.edu/scholarship/honors-research-grants

Students must work with their faculty sponsor on their proposal and submit the completed proposal online.  Proposals may not be revised online, therefore, students and their faculty sponsors must communicate regarding revisions before the student submits the proposal.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 7, 2014.

CEU fellowship applications

The CEU Institute for Advanced Study (CEU IAS) is pleased to invite applications for its fellowships for the academic year 2015/2016. CEU IAS fellows spend 6-10 months in Budapest and pursue their own research in the lively intellectual community of the other fellows, the university and the city of Budapest. CEU IAS Fellowships are highly competitive and will be awarded on the basis of scholarly excellence.

Calls are open for the fellowships listed below. You may apply for all or any of the fellowships at the same time but the application process and the requirements are not the same.

SENIOR AND JUNIOR CORE FELLOWSHIPS- about 15 awarded each year

HUMANITIES INITIATIVE JUNIOR FELLOWSHIPS- 2 awarded each year

THYSSEN@CEU IAS FELLOWSHIPS - 2 awarded each year

Application deadline for all three is October 19, 2014.

More information can be found here.

Call for papers: WSCLA

We the WSCLA planning committee are pleased to announce that the University of Arizona will host the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of the Languages of the Americas this spring, from January 23-25, 2015.

This conference is a unique event that brings together linguists working with any of the indigenous languages of North, Central and South America. This will be the first time it is hosted at the University of Arizona (and high time too!) and also the 20th anniversary of this wonderful conference.

Abstracts are invited for papers in any area of formal linguistics (including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) within any theoretical framework. We welcome papers that address diachronic, sociolinguistic, or applied topics from a formal perspective, and we are especially interested in papers seeking to correlate the interests of formal linguists and the concerns of indigenous communities.

Abstracts should be submitted to the EasyChair website at this link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscla2015

Abstract submission guidelines:

Please submit your abstract for a paper in .pdf format at  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wscla2015, following the requirements listed below, before midnight PST on October 10, 2014.

Abstracts should be anonymous. Author name(s) should not appear in the abstract or file name. Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages in length including references and examples (minimum 12 pt font size, 1 inch margins). Submissions are limited to two abstracts per author, including at most one single-authored abstract. (In other words, you may contribute to two co-authored abstracts, or one co-authored abstract plus one single-authored abstract.)

Please write to wscla2015@gmail.com with any questions.

BU Language Acquisition Conference program

The program for the 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development has been released. The conference meets from November 7-9. The  keynote speaker is Richard Aslin (University of Rochester) who will deliver the talk “From sounds to words to grammatical categories: The role of distributional learning,” The Plenary Speaker is Katherine Demuth (Macquarie University) whose talk is “Prosodic effects on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Evidence from perception and production.” Our own Barbara Pearson has, with Joan Maling, organized the poster symposium “Linguistics for Everyone: Engaging a broader public for the scientific study of language acquisition.”

Pre-registration starts on September 1 and closes on October 28. For more information about registering, go here.

The UMass linguistic community is represented by the following posters:

A. Aravind and Jill de Villiers: “Implicit alternatives insufficient for children’s SIs with some"

Valentina Brunetto and Tom Roeper: “Are rare constructions late in acquisition? The case of near-reflexivity"

Alumna Suzi Lima, with P. Li and J. Snedeker: “Acquiring the denotation of object-denoting nouns in a language without partitives."

Jill de Vliiers, with A. Pace, P. Yust, A Iglesias, M. Wilson, K Hirsh-Pasek, R. Golinkoff, A Takehesu Tabori, K. Strother-Garcia, K Ridge: “Examining the Validity of a Compuater-based Language Assessment for Preschool Children."

Alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier, with S. Shittu: “Perceptual attrition of lexical tone among L1 Yoruba-speaking children in Canada."

Michael Clauss: “The Syntax and Semantics of Free Relative Clauses in Child English."

Alumni Angeliek Van Hout and Bart Hallebrandse, with C Lindenbergh: “The acquisition of sentence ellipsis in Dutch preschoolers."

Alumnus Terue Nakato: “Gender Information of Possessive Pronouns: How does it work in Child English?"

Alumna Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, with A. Catilla-Earls, T Peterson, D. Massam and S. Behar: “Children’s acquisition of complex modification."

Alumna Angeliek Van Hout, with I Strangmann, and A. Slomp: “Context and the acquisition of Dutch eh-questions: The effect of topicality and thematic roles."

Barbara Pearson: “Linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity in quantified expressions: Implications for mathematics teaching and test of monolingual and bilingual students."

The complete schedule can be found here.

Town Meeting this Friday

The Town meeting will happen on Friday, September 5, in the main lobby of the department. (The “main lobby” is that area outside Michelle and Tom’s offices, immediately beyond the front door to the department.) The Town Meeting is the occasion upon which all the new members of the department meet the established members of the department. It is also a time at which much of the human infrastructure of the department is revealed (e.g., who is graduate program director? what is a graduate program director? what is a guru?). And finally, it is where photographs or linguists are produced for the department website and directory. We’ll start taking individual photos at 2:30. Since many of the old photos were lost in the move, you should come to this even if you had a photo in South College. The town meeting will start at 3:15, with the group photo happening directly afterwards.

Lyn Frazier honored at Faculty Convocation

Lyn Frazier, along with seven other UMass faculty, will receive the award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity at the Tenth Annual Faculty Convocation on Friday, September 12. Join us in congratulating Lyn on this high honor.