Call for papers: ESSLLI

*ESSLLI 2016 STUDENT SESSION*

Held during the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

Bolzano, Italy, August 15-26, 2016

*EXTENDED Deadline for submissions: March 15th, 2016*
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2016

*ABOUT:*
The Student Session of the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Bolzano, Italy, August 15th to 26th (http://esslli2016.unibz.it). We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic & Computation.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 selected papers will appear in the Student Session proceedings by Springer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

*ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS:*
Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for oral presentations and one for posters. This means that papers are directly submitted either as oral presentations or as poster presentations.
Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present smaller research projects and research in progress.

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*
Authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Each author may submit at most one single and one jointly authored contribution. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages for an oral presentation or 4 pages for a poster presentation (including examples and references). Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information. More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website:
http://www2.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/esslli-stus-2016/.

*SPONSORSHIP AND PRIZES*
As in previous years, Springer has kindly agreed to sponsor the ESSLLI student session. The best poster and best talk will be awarded Springer book vouchers of 500€ each.

*FURTHER INFORMATION:*
Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to marisa.koellner@uni-tuebingen.de and rziai@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de.

ESSLLI 2016 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. For further information, including registration information and course listings, and for general inquiries about ESSLLI 2016, please consult the main ESSLLI 2016 page: http://esslli2016.unibz.it.

Frana gets the De Vincenzi prize

Ilaria Frana has received the Marica De Vincenzi prize for best paper by an Italian researcher selected for IGG (Incontro Grammatica Generativa). The paper was “Mica as a Common Ground Management operator” (collaborative work with Kyle Rawlins). The prize is offered by “Fondazione Marica De Vincenzi Onlus”. WHISC as acquired the celebratory group picture from the event (from left to right: Nino Grillo, Francesca Foppolo, me and Carlo Gerace.)

EvoLang 2016

For the first time in 12 years the Evolution of Language (EvoLang) conference is taking place in the United States. There is still time to register, so don’t let this unique opportunity pass you by. EvoLang 2016 is organized by the University of Southern Mississippi and will take place March 21st-24th in New Orleans, LA at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Tulane University campus. A wide variety of disciplines
will be represented, including: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, primatology, biology, animal behavior, and computer science. The conference opens with a variety of workshops and there is an opening night reception at Mardi Gras World with food and an open bar that is included in your registration. Some notable attendees include Simon Kirby, Tecumseh Fitch, and Terrence Deacon, as well as our plenary speakers. If you are interested in attending please visit our website http://www.usm.edu/gulfcoast/evolang-2016 to register and see the schedule of speakers. Make sure you sign up for the banquet at the Audubon Tea Room on Thursday night. There will be live music and amazing food. Registration is closing soon, so make sure to register ASAP.

UMass hosts FASAL 6 this weekend

The Sixth meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages will meet March 12-13 at UMass. The talks are all held in ILC N400 and there is no registration fee. Everyone is welcome.

UMass is represented by:

Sakshi Bhatia and Ethan Poole who are giving the talk “Deriving subject and anti-subject orientation"

Alumna Amalia Gnanadesikan who will be presenting the poster “Coda-Onset Asymmetries in Dhivehi"

and

UMass visitor Konstantin Sachs who will be presenting the paper “A Movement Approach for Multi-Head Correlatives — Evidence from NPIs and Islands”

For more information, go here.

Tracy Conner in LARC on Wednesday

Tracy Conner will present her work in LARC on Wednesday, March 9, at 12:15 in ILC N458.

Daniel Altshuler at Semantics Seminar Journal Club

Angelika Kratzer writes:

Daniel Altshuler from Hampshire College will join the Semantics Seminar Journal Club this coming Wednesday (March 9) to facilitate discussion of the paper “On double access, cessation, and parentheticality”, which he co-authored with Valentine Hacquard, Thomas Roberts, and Aaron White. Everyone is welcome - you don’t have to be in the seminar, and you don’t have to be in the Journal Club. The Journal Club meets every Wednesday in N400 at 4:15 PM. You can download the paper here:

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/kratzer/altshuler-et-al.pdf

Daniel will give a short presentation of the paper, but since it’s a Journal Club, the discussion will assume that everyone has looked at the paper in one way or other. 

NASSLI 2016

Kristen Syrett writes:

The North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information 2016 is being hosted by Rutgers this July.  More information is available on the NASSLLI 2016 website, which we continue to update. The local organizing committee would like to spread the word that early bird registration is now in effect, until April 15. In addition, we are pleased to advertise information about the student scholarships and presentations during the student session. Please encourage your students to apply for either/both, and to attend NASSLLI. We have a great lineup of classes and instructors!

WHISC notes that those great instructors include Hampshire College faculty Daniel Altshuler and UMass alumni Kyle Rawlins and Craige Roberts.

Study Linguistics in St. Petersburg this summer

John Bailyn writes:

Study with world-class Linguists and Psychologists through the Linguistics Intensive track of Stony Brook’s “Explore St. Petersburg!” Study Abroad Program, which will be held this summer for the 14th year IN ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA. The dates are JULY 9 – AUGUST 7, 2016. More information can be found here: http://advancedrussian.org/

• Earn 3-6 credits
• Study together with students from other countries
• Research internships available
• No knowledge of Russian  required (all seminars in English)
• Mini-fellowships of $500 and $1000 available

APPLICATION DEADLINE IS MARCH 15, 2016!

*Late applications possible (until April 1) if space remains*

For information about how to apply, go here.

 NYI's lineup of Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology faculty for summer 2016 includes:

John F. Bailyn (Stony Brook) Musical Cognition, Syntax

MILOJE DESPIC (UConn) Syntax, Morphology

SABINE IATRIDOU (MIT) Syntax, Semantics

MARC VAN OOSTENDORP (Leiden) Phonology

ROUMYANA PANCHEVA (USC) Syntax, Semantics

MARIA POLINSKY (UMD) Experimental Syntax, Universals

IRINA SEKERINA (CUNY) Psycholinguistics,Cognitive Psychology

SERGEI TATEVOSOV (Moscow State) Formal Semantics

SUSI WURMBRAND (UConn) Syntax

Additionally, there will be Cultural studies and Women's and Gender studies faculty as well!

Robert Staubs goes to Mitre

Congratulations to Robert Staubs, who has been hired as a Senior Data Scientist by Mitre Corporation.

Pater on the road

Joe Pater presented "Learning in Typological Prediction: Grammatical Agent-Based Modeling” (joint work with Jennifer Culbertson, Coral Hughto and Robert Staubs) yesterday (March 5th) at the UNC Chapel Hill Spring Colloquium. He’ll be taking the talk on the road again Friday March 11th when he presents it in the University of Maryland Colloquium series.

Conner and Park get Dissertation Fellowships

Congratulations to Yang-Sook Park and Tracy Conner who have each been awarded a Summer 2016 Dissertation Fellowship. Congratulations!

NEST at UMass

UMass hosted the annual meeting of New England Sequencing and Timing yesterday, March 5. UMass was represented by the paper “Lexical knowledge is available, but not always used, very early,” by Amanda Rysling, John Kingston, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen, Jeffrey Starns and Anthony Yacovone. You can find a full schedule of events here.

Dillon, Staub, Levy and Clifton in Language

Dillon, Staub, Levy and Clifton's paper, "Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with? Object agreement in American English", has been accepted for publication in Language. 

DEAFinitions at Hampshire

Hampshire College is hosting a Dear Studies Conference March 25-26. All talks are at Franklin Patterson Hall on the Hampshire College campus. Registration is obligatory, but appears to be free. You can learn more here.

Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics edited by Jeff Lidz, William Snyder, and UMass faculty Joe Pater, will be appearing in May, and its cover and table of contents can now be seen on the OUP website.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-developmental-linguistics-9780199601264?cc=us&lang=en&#

The volume contains chapters by UMass faculty Gaja Jarosz and Tom Roeper (co-authored with Jill de Villiers), and alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier.

UMass at LabPhon 15

Two submissions from UMass Linguistics to Laboratory Phonology 15, to be held at Cornell University, 13-16 July 2016, have been accepted for presentation as posters:

Kevin Mullin: Phonotactically-mediated compensation for coarticulation

Amanda Rysling, John Kingston, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen and Jeffrey Starns: Lexical knowledge is available, but not always used, very early

Lisa Sanders, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater, Robert Staubs and Benjamin Zobel: ERP evidence for the ecological validity of artificial language learning

Call for papers: Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop

The 31st edition of the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop will be a historic one as this will be the first CGSW to be held in Africa. Stellenbosch University in South Africa’s beautiful Western Cape Province will be hosting this meeting, which will take place on 2-3 December 2016.

Invited Speakers

Roland Hinterhölzl (Venice)

Jason Merchant (Chicago)

Tarald Taraldsen (Tromsø)

Call for papers

We invite abstracts for thirty-minute talks (followed by ten minutes of discussion) on any aspect of comparative Germanic syntax, including diachronic syntax. Given the location of the conference, we are also very interested in research focusing on lesser studied Germanic varieties, particularly those that have developed and/or been used in contact situations, including “extraterritorial” varieties ofcontinental Germanic. Papers focusing on formal aspects of “non-standard” varieties and on phenomena like code-switching are also very welcome, as are papers considering how aspects of the structure of non-Germanic languages spoken in southern Africa (may) have impacted on the structure of Germanic languages spoken in this part ofthe world.

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts should not exceed two pages, with 2.5cm margins on all sides and a font size of 12pt. This includes data, references and diagrams.

Each author may submit no more than one single-authored and one co-authored abstract, or two co-authored ones.

Abstracts must be anonymous and prospective presenters should submit their abstract in pdf to:
http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/cgsw31/cgsw31/about/submissions#online

Submissions

The deadline for submission is 31 May 2016.

Notification of acceptance by 1 July 2016.

Further informationPlease feel free to visit the conference website at the following address:

http://conferences.sun.ac.za/cgsw31.

Here, you will (in due course) find information regarding CGSW 31 itself, a pre-CGSW31 workshop involving international researchers (seebelow), visa applications, travel, and accommodation.

For local (Stellenbosch-related) information, please contact Erin Pretorius: erink@sun.ac.za

For directly CGSW-related information, please contact Theresa Biberauer: mtb23@cam.ac.uk

29th CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics

The University of Florida Gainesville is hosting the Twenty Ninth meeting of the CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics March 3-5. UMass is represented by:

Lap-Ching Keung and Adrian Staub who are presenting the paper “Closest conjunct agreement in English: A comparison with number attraction."

Alumna Katy Carlson, with Benjamin Lee, Sarah Nelson and Blake Clark, is presenting the poster “Comparative ellipsis has an object bias, though subjects are more frequent."

Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Computation of Agreement is Verb-Centric Regardless of Word Order."

Alumni Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson are presenting the poster “Correlate not optional: PP sprouting in ‘much less’ ellipsis."

Alumnus Greg Carlson, with Thais M. M. de Sa, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima and Micheal Tanenhause present the poster “Experimental evidence that “weak definite” noun phrases are not interpreted as generics"

Jérémy Pasquereau and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Grammaticality illusions are conditioned by lexical item-specific grammatical properties."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Sonia Michniewicz and Jessica Rett present the poster “Incremental interpretation in cases of individual/degree polysemy"

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Alyssa Ibarra, present the poster “Informational focus in Spanish pronoun resolution: answering the QUD"

Brian Dillon, with Akira Omaki and Zoe Ovans, present the poster “Intrusive reflexive binding inside a fronted wh-predicate."

Brian Dillon, Nicolleta Biondo and Francesco Vespignani present the poster “Structural Constraints strongly determine the attachment of termporal adverbs."

Adrian Staub, with Francesca Foppolo, Carlo Cecchetto, Caterina Donati and Vincenzo Moscati present the poster “Minding the gap: The parser avoids relative clause analyses whenever it can."

Alumnus Paul de Lacy, with Karin Stromswold and Gwendolyn Rehrig present the poster “Passive sentences can be predicted by adults."

Shayne Sloggett and Brian Dillon present the poster “Person blocking effects in the processing of English reflexives."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Kelly-Ann Blake and Frederick Gietz present the poster “Prediction and inhibition of syntactic structure: Evidence from either (of the)… or."

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Yahang Xu, presents the poster “Reflexive Retrieval in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the local search hypothesis."

Alumnus Michael Terry and alumna Masako Hirotani, with Erik Thomas and Sandra Jackson present the poster “The processing of third person singular -s by African American English speaking second graders: an auditory ERP study."

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Kyeong-min Kim and Chung-hye Han, present the poster “The syntax of null objects: evidence from inter-speaker variation."

For more information, go here.

Cable at MIT

Seth Cable gave a colloquium talk at MIT last Friday, February 19. The title of his talk was: “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages).” An abstract follows.

Some languages appear to have a morpheme that combines the meaning of past tense with a variety of additional implications, the nature of which depend upon the aspectual marking of the verb. For non-perfective verbs (imperfective, habitual, future,etc.), the additional implication is that the event/state in question fails to extend into the present. For perfective verbs, however, the additional implication is either that (i) the result state of the event fails to extend into the present, or (ii) some natural, expected consequence of the event failed to occur. Importantly, unlike the superficially similar ‘cessation implicatures’ of past tense in languages like English, these aforementioned implications cannot be directly cancelled. Consequently, prior authors have viewed these additional inferences as semantic in nature, as being encoded directly in the lexical semantics of the morpheme (Leer 1991; Copley 2005; Plungian & van der Auwera 2006). Under this view, the morphemes in question express a special category of tense, one that has been labeled ‘discontinuous past’ by Plungian & van der Auwera (2006).

Through in-depth investigation of one such ‘discontinuous past’ marker in the Tlingit language, I argue that – to the contrary – the special inferences of these morphemes are not semantic, and are instead defeasible pragmatic inferences. Consequently, putative instances of ‘discontinuous past’ are in their semantics simply past tenses. I provide a formalized analysis of the pragmatic inferences associated with these past tenses, whereby they ultimately follow from (i) the optionality of the tense markers in question, and (ii) a special principle relating to the inherent topicality of the utterance time. The empirical and analytic results align well with a restrictive theory of cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics, one where the only tense categories across language are Past, Non-Future, and (maybe) Present (Cable 2013).

Tony Woodbury visits this week

John Kingston writes:

Tony Woodbury, from the University of Texas Austin, will be visiting from 22 Feb-5 Mar to work with our colleague in Anthropology, Emiliana Cruz, and me. Let me know if you'd like to get together with him.