The following talks will be presented at the LARC / Language Lab meeting tomorrow, Monday March 12, at 5:20 in the Partee Room (South College 301).
"A Spanish oral learner corpus for L2 language research"
Leonardo Campillos Llanos
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
"Processing of causative alternation structures by Karaja/Portuguese bilinguals"
Marcus Maia
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Everyone welcome!
Jim Cathey will deliver a talk entitled "Object Marking in Finnish" at the Linguistics Club meeting on Friday, March 16 in the Partee Room (301 South College) at 3:30PM. If you plan on going, please let Ling Club President Jeremy Cahill know at jccahill@student.umass.edu
Today, March 10, John Kingston and Shigeto Kawahara present "You got to be discriminating to get contrast" at the New England Sequencing and Timing (NEST) meeting, held at UMass. An abstract of their talk follows.
At NEST in 2007, we presented a study of Italian, Norwegian, Japanese and English speakers' categorization and discrimination of a silent interval that varied in duration (see also Kingston, Kawahara, Chambless, Mash, & Brenner-‐Alsop, 2009). This interval has flanked by vowels in the speech condition and by filtered square waves in the non-‐speech condition – in the speech condition, the silent interval was perceived as a voiceless stop consonant. The preceding vowel's or filtered square wave's duration was varied orthogonally from the silence's duration. Except when a consonant's and a preceding vowel's durations vary inversely in their native language (Italian and Norwegian listeners) and the stimuli were speech, listeners judged the silence to be longer when the preceding sound was longer. We described the general finding as a product of listeners' adding the durations of the two intervals together in all other conditions. These findings accord with those reported by Fowler (1992) but not those reported by Kluender, Diehl, & Wright (1988), whose listeners categorized the silent interval as longer when the preceding vowel or square wave was shorter. Fraisse (1963, 1984) and more recently Nakajima, Hoopen, Hilkhuysen, & Sasaki (1992) showed that so long as the duration ratio between successive intervals is close to 1 and doesn’t exceed 2, listeners judge the second interval as long after a long first interval, but once the ratio greatly exceeds 2, they judge the second as long after a short first interval. This observation may explain our earlier results because most of the duration ratios in our stimuli were in the 1-‐2 range.
At this NEST, we will report new results using more extreme ratios, up to 3, which show that listeners discriminate silences better when their durations vary inversely with the durations of the preceding vowels or non-‐speech sounds. Contrast still did not arise in categorization, even with the largest duration ratios. Kato, Tsuzaki, & Sagisaka (2003) report that listeners treat variation in the onset times of successive vowels but not their offset times as evidence of rate variation. Because manipulating the duration of the silence varied the onset time between successive vowels or square waves in our earlier stimuli, our listeners may have been covertly judging rate rather than the silence's duration relative to the preceding vowel's or square wave's. We may also report the results of an experiment examining this explanation of our earlier results.
The 16th WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF DIALOGUE
PARIS, SEPTEMBER 19-21, 2012
https://sites.google.com/site/semdial2012seinedial/
Invited Speakers:
Eve V. Clark (Stanford University)
Geert-Jan M. Kruijff (DFKI-Saarbrücken)
François Recanati (Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure)
The SEMDIAL series of workshops brings together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue in fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience (see past SemDials).
In 2012 the workshop will be hosted by Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7). The Semdial workshops are always stimulating and fun, and Paris is of course one of the greatest cities to visit, especially in September. SeineDial will be immediately preceded by a workshop on "Dialogue and Contextualism" (a separate announcement on this will appear shortly) and will feature a special session on The Acquisition of Dialogue.
We invite papers on all topics related to the semantics and pragmatics of dialogues, including, but not limited to:
-- models of common ground/mutual belief in communication
-- modelling agents' information states and how they get updated
-- multi-agent models and turn-taking
-- goals, intentions and commitments in communication
-- semantic interpretation in dialogues
-- reference in dialogues
-- ellipsis resolution in dialogues
-- dialogue and discourse structure
-- interpretation of questions and answers
-- gesture in communication
-- intonational meaning in dialogue
-- humour in dialogue
-- natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
-- multimodal dialogue systems
-- dialogue management in practical implementations
-- categorisation of dialogue moves or speech acts in corpora
-- designing and evaluating dialogue systems
-- contextual factors underlying child utterances in dialogue
-- repair in child/adult interaction
Important Dates:
-- May 1, 2012: Paper submissions due at 23:59 UTC-11
-- June 15, 2012: Author notification for full papers
-- June 30, 2012: Poster and demo submissions
-- July 10, 2012: Author notification for posters and demos
-- August 20, 2012: Camera-ready copies
--September 19-21, 2012: Workshop in Paris
Submission is via EasyChair at the following address:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semdial2012
It will be open for submissions no later than May 1, 2012.
Submitted papers should be in the following format.
- Anonymous PDF file
- 8 pages total (including data, tables, figures, and references)
- A4 paper size
- 11pt Times font
- 1 inch (2.5 cm) margins
- 2-column format
Include a one-paragraph abstract of the entire work (about 200 words).
We strongly recommend using the style files provided by ACL-HLT 2011:
http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/conference/conference.php
Peggy Speas was an invited speaker at this year's annual Workshop on Structure and Constituency of Languages of the Americas, which is being held at the University of Chicago this weekend, March 9-11. The title of her talk is "Topics in Navajo."
For more information, see: https://sites.google.com/site/wscla17/
In the latest issue of Language (87.4), appears a paper by Lisa Selkirk and former student Jonah Katz, entitled "Contrastive focus vs. discourse-new: Evidence from phonetic prominence in English"
Congratulations Lisa and Jonah!
James Kelly, UMass library, sends the following notice:
The Department of Special Collections and University Archives
in the Libraries is accepting applications for fellowships in digital
humanities. Experiential Training in Historical Information Resources
(ETHIR) is an initiative designed to provide students with structured,
hands-on experience using and interpreting historical documentary resources.
Graduate students from any department enrolled at UMass Amherst are eligible
to apply. The deadline for applications is April 20, 2012. For more
information visit http://bit.ly/ethir_fellowship.
As part of an effort to integrate Special Collections more fully into the
learning and research mission of the university, the Libraries offer an
opportunity for select undergraduate and graduate students to work in the
Department and develop research ideas, while gaining first-hand experience
in historical and archival praxis. ETHIR fellows will take part in a range
of activities in the digital humanities tied to their research interests,
including preparing new and under-described collections for use by
researchers, creating finding aids that will be made available on the
Department's website, and curating exhibits, digital corpora, or other
interpretive materials.
Two fellows will be selected from the pool of applicants based upon a
three-page statement of purpose, curriculum vitae, letter of support, and
the ability to contribute to the work of Special Collections and University
Archives. Fellows will receive an honorarium of $500, plus hourly
compensation for 150 hours of work, and they may use their awards during
either the summer or the fall terms.
For more information, contact Rob Cox, head of Special Collections and
University Archives, at <mailto:rscox@library.umass.edu>
rscox@library.umass.edu, or (413) 545-6842.
Barbara Partee writes:
It's Linguist List fund drive time! (See the nice succinct appeal
letter below.) I've had an interesting time introducing Russians to the
concept of user-funded non-profit Good Things, and by now Russia is making
a decent showing in the 'horse race' (aka Graduate School Challenge) to see
who gives the most to Linguist List. (It's the fourth-highest country in
Europe right now; last year I think it ended up second.) In the US we have
a well-established tradition of grass-roots philanthropy -- so I like to
see UMass do well in the "Grad School Challenge" too! (In a turnabout,
Volodja's contribution has credited UMass, and mine RGGU in Moscow.) And
don't forget that you can enter the competition among subfields at the same
time. The Linguist List folks do their best to make the fund drive
entertaining, but it's also really serious! Do donate -- every $5 helps!
If you want to see my letter urging all international Linguist List
readers to donate, it's here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-1048.html.
Rooting for UMass and for Linguist List.
The appeals letter:
Dear LINGUIST List Subscribers,
It's that time of year again! We'd like to let all of our subscribers know
that the LINGUIST List Fund Drive has begun!
What if 650 people each gave $100? Or 1300 people each gave $50--and gave
it TODAY? Could we possibly begin and end Fund Drive in a single day?
Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn't it? But logically it's possible. The
LINGUIST List website receives 150,000 page views per week. That's over 6
million views per year. If only 1/30 of our weekly visitors donated $50
today, we would reach our goal. That's one-THIRTIETH, note--not
one-third--of our weekly site visitors.
And that doesn't count the 27,000 people who subscribe to the email list
and perhaps never visit the site. If only 1/415 of the people reading this
message would donate $100 each, we could end Fund Drive today:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm
So what would we at LINGUIST do with our extra time--besides smile a lot?
Well, instead of spending two solid months begging for money, we would
finish some exciting new services 2 months sooner:
- We're almost ready to go live with a Summer School Register that we
hope will be very useful both to prospective students and to the institutions
running summer schools.
- We're about to unveil a conference registration system, called
EasyReg to pair with our highly successful abstracts review service EasyAbs.
- Thanks to Damir Cavar, we're almost ready to present a text-mining
tool that will allow you to search all LINGUIST issues, and perhaps all 150 of
the language-related email lists archived on our site.
- We're planning a Project's Registry where PIs can publicize new
projects and services
Donate now to ensure the ongoing quality and continuation of our services!
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm
On Thursday, March 8th, Tom Ernst will be talking to the SRG about modification of state predicates. His talk will take place at his apartment in Northampton and starts at 6:30.
The Psychology Department at the University of South Carolina is pleased to announce that NSF has recommended funding for our Summer Research Education for Undergraduates program, Summer Research Experience in Brain and Cognitive Sciences (SREBCS). Each summer this program will provide ten undergraduate students the opportunity to engage in research seminars, laboratory exercises, and one-on-one laboratory projects in the exciting and fast growing field of brain and cognitive sciences. The SREBCS builds on the resounding success that our previous summer program experienced across its 17 years of funding. An innovative feature of the SREBCS is the inclusion of a weekly group laboratory that will provide students with a diverse set of hands-on experiences of the methods used in brain and cognitive sciences, such as EEG, MRI and fMRI. In addition, students will discuss implications of research presented by the faculty and engage in research projects within a faculty mentor’s laboratory.
The application deadline for this year’s program is March 28, 2012. The program description and application materials are posted on our website:
http://www.psych.sc.edu/srebcs/
We very much appreciate your encouraging interested and qualified students to apply. The SREBCS is committed to providing opportunities to under-represented groups within the Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Kai von Fintel will present work with Sabine Iatridou at the department colloquium on March 9, 3:30 in Machmer E-37. Reception to follow in 3rd floor lounge. Dinner to be hosted by Angelika Kratzer. A title and abstract follow.
"Imperative Puzzles"
Work by Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou
Abstract:
Imperatives, which are prototypically used to issue commands, can also be used to give permissions:
(1) A: May I open the window? B: Sure, go ahead, open it!
Further, imperatives can serve as quasi-conditional antecedents in "left-subordinating conjunctions":
(2) Study hard and you will pass the class.
(3) Ignore your homework and you will fail the class.
(4) Open the paper and you will find 5 mistakes on every page.
We show that these phenomena present severe challenges for all existing theories of imperatives. We lay out desiderata for a successful analysis and speculate on ways of getting there. Along the way we present data from English, German, and pretty much every language spoken on the Mediterranean Rim.
Rajesh Bhatt will present a talk entitled "South Asia as a linguistic Area," to the Linguistics Club meeting on Tuesday, March 6 at 5:15 in the Partee Room (South College 301). If you plan on attending, let Ling Club president Jeremy Cahill know at jccahill@student.umass.edu
Joe Pater writes:
We've decided to make last year's launch workshop an annual event, as an opportunity for people working on language across campus to find out about each other's research. There will be three talks, by Luiz Amaral (Languages, Literatures and Cultures), Jacquie Kurland (Communication Disorders) and David Smith (Computer Science). We encourage everyone else to present a poster - if you'd like to do so, please send us a title at this e-mail address asap, and by April 1st at the latest. The event will take place in the afternoon - exact time and place TBA. We apologize to those of you who will be observing Passover or Good Friday and cannot make it - this is the only date we could find. This event is sponsored by the Mellon Mutual Mentoring Initiative.
Chuck Clifton writes:
Over the past few weeks, we have been trying to set up a scientific study that is important for many researchers interested in words, word meaning, semantics, and cognitive science in general. It is a huge word association project, in which people are asked to participate in a small task that doesn't last longer than 5 minutes. Our goal is to build a global word association network that contains connections between about 40.000 words, the size of the lexicon of an average adult. Setting up such a network might learn us a lot about semantic memory, how it develops, and maybe also about how it can deteriorate (like in Alzheimer's disease). Most people enjoy doing the task, but we need thousands of participants to succeed. Up till today, we found about 40,000 participants willing to do the little task, but we need more subjects. That is why we address you. Would it be possible to forward this call for participation to graduate and undergraduate students who are fluent in English?
The task can be found on
http://www.smallworldofwords.com
If people would REALLY like to help us, they can forward the call to students, friends, family, etc. or distribute the call through facebook, twitter, etc. (In this way, we succeeded in building a word association network in Dutch over the past years. The network comprises about 13.000 words and was built using more than 4 million word associations, gathered from 100.000 native Dutch speakers. The problem is only: who cares about Dutch data. That is why we want to do the same in English.) Any suggestion about how to reach more participants is welcome (societies that we can e-mail, local communities who want to put this on their website, ...)
Of course the network will be freely available to all interested language researchers when it becomes substantial enough.
We thank you in advance.
THE THIRD LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS MINICOURSE SERIES
Cognitive Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University
A TWO MINICOURSE SERIES
MAY 21 - MAY 25, 2012
Macmillan 115
Monday-Friday; 10AM - 12AM
Dying Languages: What World Linguistic Diversity Means for Us
Anthony Woodbury, University of Texas at Austin
Monday-Friday; 2PM - 4PM
Language Structure, Learning, and Change: Research on Signed and Spoken Languages
Elissa Newport & Ted Suppala, University of Rochester
This event is free and open to the public
Travel to and visiting Brown: http://www.brown.edu/web/about/visit
A list of accommodations: http://www.brown.edu/web/about/accommodations
More information will be posted on a website in the near future.
John McCarthy gave a Keynote Address at the 26th Arabic Linguistics Symposium in New York last week. The title of his address was "Is Phonological Opacity Real? Evidence from Arabic."
At the same conference, Martin Walkow presented "Restrictions on Pronoun Combinations and Parallels between Subject Agreement and Cliticization in Classical Arabic."
The 36th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, which will take place March 23rd-25th at the University of Pennsylvania, will host a number of papers from recent UMass graduates, including:
Martin Walkow will present "Choosing between Persons: Articulated Probes and the Ultra-Strong PCC"
Aynat Rubinstein will present "Figuring out what we 'ought' do do"
Cherlon Ussery will present "A Taxonomy of Agreement in Icelandic: Agree vs Multiple Agree, Syntactic vs Post-Syntactic"
Maria Biezma will present "Only one at least: refining the role of context in building alternatives."
Florian Schwarz, with co-authors Dimka Atanassov and John Trueswell will present "On the processing of 'might' "
The keynote address, entitled "Morpheme Order, Constituency, and Scope" will be delivered by Paul Kiparsky. There will also be an interdisciplinary panel session on Game Theory and Language. For a full schedule of events, see: <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc36/program.html>.
The preregistration deadline for the conference is Wednesday, February
29th. To preregister, please visit the conference website at
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc36/> and follow the link to
the registration form. There is an additional $10 surcharge for
registrations made after the pre-registration deadline, so be sure to
register before then. All registration fees will be collected onsite.
For further information, please email plc36@ling.upenn.edu<mailto:plc36@ling.upenn.edu>
Colin Phillips from the University of Maryland will speak at the department colloquium on Friday, March 2, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30. A title and abstract follow.
Electrophysiology and Language Architecture
In this talk I will discuss two recent lines of research in the cognitive neuroscience of language processing that started from independent puzzles, but that appear to be converging on a common solution. The first puzzle involves apparent discrepancies in the localization results obtained using fMRI and MEG measures of 'semantic' processing. The same tasks and materials yield conflicting localizations when measured using different tools. The second puzzle involves a recent series of studies that undermine received wisdom about the functional status of ERP components and, more interestingly, challenge the widespread view in linguistics and psycholinguistics that semantic composition is tightly coupled to the syntax of a sentence. The solution to both puzzles involves recognizing that the N400, a neural response component traditionally associated with compositional semantic interpretation, is more closely linked to lexical processes and to word-level expectations. This also provides an account of the split personality of the N400 - it is sometimes very 'smart', responding to fine details of the compositional semantic interpretation and pragmatic congruity of linguistic input, but at times it is surprisingly 'dumb', sensitive only to the lexical properties of a word and to associative relations among words. I show how it is possible to turn the dumb N400 into the smart N400. I show that rather than undermining widespread assumptions about language architecture, the electrophysiological evidence instead provides finer-grained evidence on how interpretations are computed on-line. The evidence is drawn from studies in English, Spanish, and Chinese.
The next issue of "English Language and Linguistics" will contain Andrew Weir's paper "Left-edge deletion in English and subject omission in diaries."
Congratulations Andrew!
Kamil Ud Deen (Univeristy of Hawaii) will give two talks this week.
The first is on Monday, February 27, at 4:30 in Dickinson 209. The title is: "The acquisition of raising and passives: implications for linguistic theory."
The second is on Tuesday, February 28, at 4:30 in Herter 217. The title is "Binding in adult and child Thai."
You can learn more about Kamil Ud Deen at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kamil/