Ming Xiang speaks on Wednesday

Ming Xiang (University of Chicago)  will talk on  "The memory structure of covert dependencies” on Wednesday, April 22, at 5:30 in N400. An abstract of her talk follows.

While modeling the cross-linguistic structural variation, linguistic analysis often postulates abstract “covert” representations that do not have any morpho-phonological reflexes in the surface word string. Little is known as to whether such representations are actually constructed in language comprehension and production. In this talk, I will examine the processing of Mandarin wh-in-situ questions, which share the same word order with regular declarative sentences but  have a semantics identical to their English counterpart wh-questions. Drawing on data from production, eyetracking-reading, and speed-accuracy tradeoff paradigms, I will address two questions: (i) Does the parser construct a covert non-local syntactic dependency in processing? (ii) What are the parsing mechanisms that support such non-local dependencies? How similar/different are they from the processing of overt non-local dependencies?

Caroline Andrews in Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

This week we'll be hearing from Caroline Andrews in the Psycholing workshop. She will be presenting on her first GP in preparation for the second year mini conference in a few weeks. The title of her talk is "Predictive Parsing in Licensor-Licensee Dependencies".

As usual for afternoon meetings, we'll be convening at 2:30 on Thursday in N400. 

Bogal-Allbritten at Maryland

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will be presenting a portion of her dissertation research at the University of Maryland this coming Tuesday as a guest speaker at a meeting of their S-Lab group. The talk is titled ‘Building attitudes of belief and desire in Navajo.’

The 2015 entering graduate class

WHISC is pleased to announce next year’s entering graduate class. They are:

Carolyn Anderson graduated from Swarthmore in 2014 with interests in formal semantics and fieldwork, having worked on Moroccan Arabic and Zapotec. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Canada, working on the use of technology in fieldwork and the ethics of fieldwork.

Alex Goebel comes to us from Tübingen University. He has worked in the syntax-semantics interface but has broad interests, especially in cognitive linguistics. Alex has also studied philosophy and through that developed an interest in modals.

Chris Hammerly has recently learned that he won an NSF Fellowship. He majored in linguistics and psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, graduating in 2014. He is currently a Baggett Fellow at the University of Maryland doing research in psycholinguistics. Chris is also part Ojibwe and is interested in learning the language.

Jaieun Kim majored in economics at Sogang University in South Korea, and completed an M.A. in linguistics there in 2014. She was also a visitor at the University of Hawaii for a year. She plans to work on syntax, the acquisition of syntax, and psycholinguistics, and her interests include comparing acquisition across languages.

Brandon Prickett is interested in experimental phonology and in computational models of phonological learning. He has graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will soon complete his M.A. there.

Michael Wilson studied linguistics and Spanish at the University of Texas at Austin. At UMass he will work on experimental methods in lexical semantics and syntactic alternations, as well as in theoretical syntax and semanics.

Rong Yin did her undergraduate work in English at Nankai University in China, then came to the U.S., where she completed an M.A. in linguistics at Syracuse University. She wants to work on syntax and semantics and is interested in fieldwork and in statistical tools.

Barbara Partee at Bard College

Barbara will visit her old friend Robert Martin, philosopher and cellist, at Bard College this Thursday and Friday. On Thursday the 23rd she’ll give a public talk, “Logic and Linguistics: A History of Ideas and Controversies”. On Friday the 24th she’ll give a guest presentation in Bob’s philosophy of language class, a longer version of her talk “The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics”. On Thursday evening she (and Volodja and Barbara’s granddaughter Rachael) will attend a rehearsal of the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, which is preparing for their final concert of the year on May 2. Read more about Bob Martin’s successful dual career in music and philosophy here. Barbara and Bob got acquainted at the historic 1971 summer institute in linguistics and philosophy at UC Irvine. Barbara reports that she hasn’t seen him since the Sequoia Quartet played in Old Deerfield sometime in the early 1980’s.

Overfelt in print!

Jason Overfelt has had two papers recently accepted for publication. One is “Unbounded Successive-Cyclic Rightward DP-Movement,” which will appear in Lingua, and the other is “Rightward DP-Movement Licenses Parasitic Gaps: A reply to Postal 1994,” which will appear in Linguistic Inquiry.

Extended deadline for the Amazonian Linguistics Summer School

Piero Fioralisso writes:

I would like to inform you that we have decided to extend the application deadline to the Amazonian Lingusitics Summer School until May 1st. We hope this extra time helps your students in the case they are considering the option of taking part of the program.

For information about the curricula, go here. And for general information, see this.

Barbara is a Winner!

Barbara Partee has won the Linguist List Fund Drive Drawing! Her prize is a subscription to the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. Linguist List permits prize recipients to transfer their prizes; the subscription will actually go to Luiz Amaral, who can make good use of it.

Congratulations Barbara!

XPrag.de fellowships

XPrag.de offers four fellowships to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each starting between October 2015 and April 2016.

Application deadline: June 20th, 2015.

 

In the  priority program SPP 1727 "New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental evidence (XPrag.de)" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience are collaborating in 16 individual scientific projects at eight different German institutions.

 

Experimental Pragmatics is a new interdisciplinary field of research which has emerged within the last decade. It combines research in Gricean pragmatics with the formal models of modern grammar and the powerful experimental methods of psychology and neuroscience. As a result, Experimental Pragmatics can theoretically state and then empirically test much more precise hypotheses than research in pragmatics previously could. Experimental Pragmatics is thereby expected to lead to a new theory of mechanisms involved in language understanding. Four starting points make substantial progress in pragmatics possible, namely Pragmatic Theory, Formal Models, Embodied Cognition and Experimental Methods.

 

Experimental Pragmatics fruitfully connects the four starting points, and it already has shown its potential to go beyond these starting points to establish new insights in all four areas. 

 

XPrag.de offers a Start-up Funding program to support outstanding recent Ph.D. graduates for a time period of 12 months each. Each funded fellow will join an individual XPrag.de project to prepare her/his own research proposal for the second funding period of XPrag.de (May 2017 - April 2020), which usually is an application for the fellow's own funding. The research proposal is supposed to be submitted to the DFG by end of October 2016.

 

The applicant must choose a suitable post doctoral supervisor for the time of the fellowship in advance.  Any PI of a current XPrag.de project in Germany is eligible to act as supervisor. Beyond the support by the supervisor on a regular basis successful candidates will be offered additional support in the form of research training opportunities, funds for pilot experiments, workspace, etc.  Fellows can also participate in the bottom-up programs of XPrag.de such as the workshop program as well as the mentoring program and the emergency daycare program. Fellows will receive a grant of 1400 € per month. 

 

For more information about XPrag.de, an overview of participating projects and contact data of principal investigators visit our website: www.xprag.de.

 

Requirements:

 

Applicants must hold a Ph.D. degree by the start of the fellowship. 

 

Please submit a 2-page (maximum) outline of your project idea and lay out your career planning. Additionally, please provide your CV, sample writings, contact details of two references, and two letters: one letter of commitment of the potential hosting institution in which the host commits to provide adequate workspace.

 

In a second letter the potential supervisor needs to affirm that s/he will act as supervisor and hold at least monthly meetings with the fellow and that s/he will provide access to equipment and funding for necessary pilot experiments. 

All application documents must be submitted as a single pdf to xprag.de@gmail.com. The application deadline is June 20th, 2015 and applicants will be notified by July 15th, 2015.

 

Proposals are evaluated and ranked by the steering committee of XPrag.de with respect to their potential to be accepted by the DFG as XPrag.de project for the 2017-2020 funding period. 

Homer and Bhatt at EGG

The Eastern Generative Grammar Summer School will be taking place this summer (July 27 to August 7) in Brno, Czech Republic. UMass is represented by Vincent Homer, who will be teaching an introductory course in semantics and a topics in semantics course with Rajesh Bhatt. For more information, go here.

ESSLLI 2015 Registration

27th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI 2015) / Barcelona, Spain

August 3rd 2015 - August 14th 2015
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

http://www.esslli2015.org

* Deadline for early registration with accommodations: April 30 2015 *
* Deadline for early registration without accommodations: June 14 2015 *

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is an annual event organized under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI). It brings together logicians, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers to study language, logic, information, and their interconnections. ESSLLI attracts several hundred participants from all over the world, both senior and junior and is a great place to learn and network -- and have a lot of fun in the process.

There will be 42 courses at introductory and advanced levels, as well as 6 workshops, 4 evening lectures (by Albert Atserias, Chris Barker, Raquel Fernández, and Hans Kamp), and a week-long student session to foster interdisciplinary discussion of current research. Most courses and workshops are one week long. Courses are offered in the areas of Language and Logic, Language and Computation, and Logic and Computation. Check our website for details on the program and registration procedure: http://www.esslli2015.org.

IMPORTANT! The deadline for registration with accommodations is around the corner: April 30 2015. After that we can't guarantee accommodations except for those students who are accepted at the Student Session or who get a grant.

Grant information is available on the registration page. We thank our sponsors (ASL, EACL, SIGLEX) for making these grants possible. We also thank the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the EACSL.

Questions? E-mail esslli2015@gmail.com

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten at Semantics Workshop

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten will be presenting in the Semantics Workshop, which meets this week tomorrow, Monday, April 13, at 9AM in N451.

Michael Wagner gives department colloquium

Michael Wagner (McGill University) gives the department colloquium this Friday (April 17) at 3:30 in N400. The title and abstract are below.

 

Additivity and the syntax of 'even'

 

Beaver & Clark (2003, 2010) observe that certain focus operators such as ‘only' and ‘even' differ in various ways from focus sensitive operators such as 'always'. This talk presents analysis that derives at least some of these differences from a difference in their syntax: ‘only' takes two syntactic arguments, a focus constituent which can be of any type, and a second argument, which has to compose with the first to form a proposition (following similar syntactic proposals in Rooth 1985, Mccawley 1995, Krifka 1996). The distribution of ‘only' is further constrained by a constraint that assures that the size of the focus constituent must minimized (potentially motivated semantically, as proposed in Wagner 2006). Adverbs like ‘always', by contrast, operate over a single argument. 

 

A challenges to this view is the syntax of ‘even', which seem to place it between the two categories of focus operators. We can get a better understanding of the syntax of ‘even' once we control for whether ‘even' is used additively or not. Whether ‘even’ carries an additive presupposition remains controversial. While Horn (1969), Karttunen and Peters (1979), Wilkinson (1996) and many others have argued that it does, Stechow (1991), Krifka (1992) and Rullmann (1997) reached the opposite conclusion. This talk identifies a new syntactic generalization about when ‘even' triggers an additive presupposition, which provides further evidence for the analysis of the syntax of focus operators advocated here. It also reconciles the contradictory findings about additivity in the earlier literature.  The analysis offers a new perspective on syntactic constraints on the distribution of related focus operators in German noted in Jacobs (1983) and Büring & Hartmann (2001). 

Professional Development Workshop: Research Ethics

As part of the Spring Professional Development Workshops, Alice Harris, John Kingston and Tom Roeper will give a presentation on Research Ethics this Friday, April 17, at 10AM.

Barbara at CUNY

Barbara Partee will give a linguistics colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center on April 16 on "The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics". While she is in New York, she will also do a few more interviews for her history of formal semantics project. 

UUSLAW on Saturday

The University of Connecticut Storrs hosts UUSLAW (UConn-UMass-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) this Saturday, April 18. UMass is represented by:

Mike Clauss, who gives the paper “Generalized Move-Wh in Acquisition: Free Relatives and Embedded Wh"

Amanda Rizun and Jeremy Hartman, who give the paper “The `Question Under Discussion’ and the Interpretation of Quantifiers."

Andie Faber “Assigning and Producing Grammatical Gender on Novel Nouns in L1 and L2 Spanish."

Marcia Nascimento and Luiz Amaral, who give the paper “Experimental Ideas to Test the Acquisition of Evidentials in Kaingáng"

and

Barbara Pearson, who gives the paper "Cross-linguistic Ambiguity of Quantified Expressions: Implications for Mathematics Teaching and Testing of Bilingual Students."

If you are planning on going from UMass, and are looking for a ride, contact Andie Faber, Tom Roeper or Luiz Amaral.

Dissertation Writing Retreats

Dean John McCarthy writes:

I am writing to you to draw your attention to the dissertation writing retreats that will be offered this summer under the joint sponsorship of the Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development and the University Writing Center. These week-long workshops offer extensive structured time to write, receive feedback, and develop effective writing strategies. Doctoral students who have already begun writing or who will be ready to begin writing by summer are welcome to apply. Three workshops are currently planned:

June 1-5, 2015 from 9am-4pm (CNS, Engineering, SPHHS, Nursing)

June 15-19 from 9am-4pm (SBS, Education, HFA, ISOM)

August 3-7 from 9am-4pm (Open to all disciplines) 

This is the second summer in which we have offered these workshops, and the results from last summer – writing blocks overcome, chapters finished, dissertations defended – demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. These workshops offer more than just a quiet place to write; they also provide expert guidance in the process of writing and how to increase productivity. 

Please urge your advisees to apply by April 17. They can find the application materials and further information here: http://www.tinyurl.com/summerdissretreats.

There is, of course, no charge to participants, and the Graduate School provides childcare scholarships of up to $150 to participants who need them.

Take Quechua!

Carlos Molina-Vital, lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese department and visiting professor of Linguistics at Hampshire College, is teaching an introductory course on Quechua in the Fall. The course is in English, and there is a Quechua 2 planned for Spring 2016. Here is how the course is described:

Quechua is not hard to learn. It is spoken by more people in the Americas than any other indigenous language (10-12 million speakers). No irregular verbs, clear structures. A great way to start learning a less-common language! It gives you a gateway to the Andean world, past and present.Our studies will examine current Andean culture in its context. Topics include high-altitude agriculture, religious syncretism, social-organization. We will study the Quechua world through basic Southern Quechua grammar (spoken in the Southern Peruvian Andes and Bolivia).

It meets MWF 11:15-12:05, and you’ll find it in SPIRE as Spanish 397Q-01.

Dillon in Frontiers in Psychology

Brian Dillon’s paper “Teasing apart encoding interference and retrieval interference in the processing of anaphors,” as just been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology. Congratulations to Brian, and his co-authors: L. Jäger, L. Benz, J. Roesler and S. Vasishth.

UMass at FASAL 5

The fifth meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages is meeting this weekend at Yale University. UMass is well represented. Sakshi Bhatia gives her paper "Causation in Hindi-Urdu: Agents and Subjects." Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer give their paper "PPIs and movement in Hindi-Urdu." Mike Clauss and some of his friends were also in attendance. For more information, go here.