Preregister for BUCLD

The deadline to pre-register for BUCLD 37 is Tuesday, October 23, 2012. By pre-registering not only will you receive a reduced rate for the conference, but you will also be able to check-in at the registration desk quickly and proceed to the various exciting talks without waiting in line. Regular full-price registration will continue to be available online from Wednesday, October 24 through Tuesday, October 30. To register, please visit the following website: http://www.bu.edu/bucld/conference-info/registration/

 For general information on the conference including the full schedule, please visit: http://www.bu.edu/bucld

 You can also register for the Society for Language Development Symposium “Neuroplasticity and language” on Thursday November 1, 1-4pm through our website. The SLD would also like to announce a new student award. Please see their website for more information: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/sld/symposium.html

John Hale gives department colloq on Friday

John Hale, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Cornell, will present the department colloquium on Friday, October 26, at 3:30PM in Machmer E-37. The title and abstract of his talk follow.

Experience as a Control Strategy for Incremental Parsing

This talk presents a family of computer models that are intended to capture syntactic aspects of incremental human sentence comprehension. These algorithmic models build on the Garden Path Theory of Frazier, Clifton & colleagues as well as the seminal work of Rick Lewis. However, they go beyond these classic approaches by introducing experience as a key element of the control strategy. The talk assesses the implications of this move by looking at attachment ambiguities and garden path sentences. Along the way, we re-encounter some classic questions about the inter-relationships between learning, grammar and cognitive architecture that can be answered, at least provisionally, by expressing the model within Soar 9, where reinforcement learning is applicable at all levels of abstraction. This demonstration illustrates one way that grammar might fit into the rest of cognition.

Pasquereau talks at Linguistics Club on Wednesday

Jeremy Cahill writes:

Next Wednesday, Jérémy Pasquereau, a UMass Amherst PhD student in  
linguistics, will speak at Linguistics Club.

Speaker: Jérémy Pasquereau
Title:   "Language description & endangered/understudied languages: an  
apprentice's view from the Caucasus."
Time:    Wednesday, October 24 at 5:30 PM
Place:   301 South College
RSVP:    jccahill@student.umass.edu

Jérémy writes: "My presentation will have two main parts: one about  
linguistic diversity and obsolescence and another one about 'my  
personal experience.'"

For more on Jérémy's work: http://blogs.umass.edu/jpasquer/

All are welcome. Antonio's pizza will be provided.

Barbara and Volodja at Rutgers

Barbara and Volodja will be at Rutgers from late Sunday October 21 to early Wednesday. They will meet with colleagues and students, Barbara will conduct a couple more interviews for her history project, and Barbara will give two talks.

October 22, 2012. An invited seminar talk in Gilbert Harman and Ernie Lepore's Philosophy of Language Seminar on Semantics and Pragmatics, http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Courses/PHI534-2012-13/. Barbara's topic: Context dependence and implicit arguments.

October 23, 2012. Invited talk in the Rutgers Cognitive Science colloquium series http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ruccs/index.php/talks/ruccs-colloquia “Psychologism and Anti-psychologism in the History of Semantics”.

Aleksei Nazarov sings on Saturday

Aleksei Nazarov writes:

You are all cordially invited to the Amherst College Choral Society
Family Weekend Concert, which will take place Saturday, October 27 at
12 PM, in Buckley Recital Hall (the modernist building closest to the
B43 bus stop) at Amherst College. The Amherst College Concert Choir,
of which I am a member, will sing, among others, a chorus from an opera recently composed by Cheryl Zoll's husband, Eric Sawyer. Other works to be performed include parts of Brahms' motet "Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen?", the gospel classic "Elijah Rock", the beautiful number "Gold" from the musical "Once", and good ol' traditional Amherst College songs ("The Amherst team is out to win today"). The concert is FREE for Five College students with ID, $5 for children and senior citizens, $10 for general admission. 

Tickets may be reserved by email to mchernin@amherst.edu or phone call to (413) 542-2484.

Dan Swingley visited UMass on Friday

Dan Swingley, University of Pennsylvania, gave the department colloquium last Friday, October 19. The title and abstract of his talk follows.

Phonetic learning and phonological interpretation

What do infants learn when they begin to discover their language? Cognitive psychologists considering phonological development generally favor perceptual-learning, "bottom up" accounts of phonetic category learning, and tend to identify such categories with phonological categories.  Clinicians generally view the lexicon as more important and hold that much of the developmental action takes place after the first year.  I will argue for a hybrid in which the lexicon is important, but right from the beginning.  Young infants learn words and sounds at the same time--but take a long time to figure out how phonological categories should be interpreted.  I will discuss possible solutions to the problem of phonetic category discovery, and experiments on phonetic interpretation in word learning and word recognition.

Maria Turrero in Acquisition Lab/LARC

Maria Turrero will present the following paper in the acquisition lab / LARC meeting:

"Spanish L2 speakers and wh- island constraints: experimental ideas"

The meeting is Monday, October 15, in Herter 301 at noon.

Everyone is welcome!

Poole at SRG

Anisa Schardl writes:

SRG will be meeting this Thursday at 6:30pm at the home of Partee et
al., 50 Hobart Lane in Amherst.  Ethan Poole will be talking about
partitive case in Finnish.  Bring money for pizza or BYOD.

Pater talks at McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting

Joe Pater will present on "learning probabilities over derivations" at the next McCarthy-Pater grant group meeting, Friday, October 19,  in the Partee room at 11. He'll be talking about the work on Harmonic Serialism in the paper below, and will also discuss the general approach, including  about how it can be applied to other derivational approaches to OT, with a summary of some work on learning in stratal OT that Alex Nazarov and he did last semester.

Staubs, Robert and Joe Pater. To appear. Learning serial constraint-based grammars. In John McCarthy and Joe Pater, eds. Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox Press. http://people.umass.edu/pater/staubs-pater-serial-learning.pdf

UMass at NELS

The annual North East Linguistics Society meeting takes place October 19-21 at the City University of New York. UMass will be well represented:

Papers:

Andrew Weir (graduate student) "Why-stripping targets Voice Phrase"

Seth Cable (faculty) "Distance distributivity and pluractionality in Tlingit (and beyond)"

Elliott Moreton (alumnus) with Katya Pertsova "Pastry phonotactics" (delicious!)

Michael Becker and Maria Gouskova (alumni) "Source-oriented generalizations as grammar inference in yer deletion"

Posters:

Maria Biezma (alumna) (with Daniel Siddiqi and Andrew Carnie) "Counterfactuality in non-standard subjunctive conditionals"

 

Call for papers: LSALAA 2013

Workshop on Languages with and without articles 2013

The workshop will be held Feb 28 - March 1st 2013
Salle de conférences, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris.

Invited speakers :

- Daniel Büring (Universität Wien)
- Östen Dahl (Stockholm)

Call deadline : November 25, 2012.

The workshop is organised by the project "Calcul de la référence nominale: langues avec et sans articles" of the Fédération Typologie et Universaux du Langage (CNRS FRE 2559) which aims to bring together researchers in

-- L1 and L2 language acquisition,
-- sign language linguistics and
-- comparative syntax and semantics.

We encourage submissions exploring the linguistic means used to establish the reference of a nominal expression, including, but not limited to, the following questions:

- what is the role of definite and indefinite articles in establishing the
reference of the DP?

- how are the effects of definite and indefinite articles achieved in
languages that lack those articles?

- what are the semantic distinctions involved in languages that
distinguish two distinct definite articles (see Ebert 1970, Löbner 1985
and much subsequent literature) or two indefinite articles (see von
Heusinger, Klaus & Klein, Udo (to appear) The Distribution of two
Indefinite Articles in Uzbek and references cited there)?

- what is the difference between definite and demonstrative determiners?

We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics, L1 and L2 acquisition of (in)definiteness in spoken and sign languages.

We invite submissions for 25-minute presentations (plus ten-minute
discussions).

Abstracts should be at most 2 pages in length (including examples and
references) written in French or English.

Abstracts must be anonymous and should be sent by e-mail (plain ASCII, rtf, ps or pdf) to : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Please write the (first) author's name plus the word 'abstract' in the
subject line of your message (e.g., 'Dupont abstract'), and include author name(s), affiliation, contact information and the title of the abstract in the body of the email. For co-authored papers indicate the email address that we should use for correspondence.

Website :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Journees-LSALAA-2013-Workshop-.html E-mail : pcabredo //AT// univ-paris8.fr

Abstract Submission Deadline : 25 nov / 25 Nov 2012
Notification of Acceptance : 20 déc / Dec 20th, 2012
Workshop :  Thur 28 Feb and Fri 1st March 2013

PhD position at Brandeis University

The Linguistics faculty of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University invites applications for a Ph.D. position under the supervision of Dr. Sophia A. Malamud, starting in September 2013. In addition to tuition remission, there is a stipend of $22,000 renewable for 4 years.

Individuals are encouraged to apply who have an interest in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, computational approaches to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, and/or linguistic annotation for meaning-related phenomena. The research topic will lie in the overlapping areas of modality, mood, sentence type, speech act modifiers, modelling of dialogue, and indirectness.

Applicants should have a Bachelor's or Masters degree or equivalent in linguistics, computational linguistics, speech technology, cognitive science, computer science, or a related discipline.

For more details on the linguistics faculty at Brandeis Computer Science, or on Dr. Malamud specifically, see

Sophia Malamud, Assistant Professor (website)
Brandeis Research Lab for Linguistics and Computation faculty (website)

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the project. Please contact Sophia A. Malamud (smalamud at brandeis.edu), attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV.

Details regarding the PhD program can be found at http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/computerscience/phd.html

For more information on the application procedure, please see the Graduate School website (http://www.brandeis.edu/gsas/apply/index.html) 

In order to ensure full consideration for funding, applications (including all supporting documents) need to be received by January 15, 2013.

Phonetics Lab Meetings

John Kingston writes:

Schedule of upcoming Phonetics Lab meetings:

Tuesday 9 October = a UMass Monday:
   On-going and prospective experiments, John Kingston;
   Prospective grant proposal, all.

Monday 22 October:
   Abstracts of papers to be presented at the Fall meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in St. Louis, all;
   Abstracts to be submitted by us to the Spring meeting (see separate announcement), all.

Monday 5 November:
   Kirikiri tone, Kristine Yu.

All meetings are held 4-5:30 PM in Bartlett 6.
Bagels, occasional baked goods, cheese, and spreads, including one for vegans, are provided. For now, bring your own coffee.

Phonology Reading Group meeting tomorrow!

Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:

The next meeting of the phonology reading group will happen:

Tuesday October 9
6:30 pm
36 Orchard st. #3, in Northampton (Kristine's place)

Brian Smith will be presenting his work on phonologically conditioned
ineffability using UR constraints.

Bring snacks/drinks if you can!

call for papers: SALT 23

*** SALT23 *** Final Call for Abstracts ***

Semantics and Linguistics Theory 23 will be held at UC Santa Cruz, May 3-5, 2013. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics.

Abstracts must not exceed 3 pages (please note the new page limit)  on letter-size paper, including examples and references, with 1 inch
margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title but should not identify the author(s). The abstract must
be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author, or 2 joint abstracts per author.

SALT does not accept papers that by the time of submission have
appeared or have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed
journal. Preference will be given to presentations not duplicated at
other major conferences (including LSA, NELS, WCCFL).

To submit an abstract, please go to the following EasyChair page:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt23

Abstract submission opens on October 8, 2012. The deadline for
abstract submission is December 2, 2012 11:59 PM, PST.

More details about the conference are/will be available on the SALT 23 webpage:

http://babel.ucsc.edu/salt/

Please direct any inquiries to:

salt23ucsc@gmail.com

Important Dates

Submission deadline: December 2, 2012, 11:59pm PST
Notification of acceptance: Early February 2013
Conference date: May 3 - May 5, 2013

Cable's paper accepted to Journal of Semantics

Seth Cable's paper, "Reflexives, Reciprocals, and Contrast" was accepted to the Journal of Semantics.

Congratulations Seth!

UMass at GALANA

The fifth meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America meets at the University of Kansas October 11-13. The program includes several UMass citizens, including:

Jeremy Hartman with Yasutada Sudo and Ken Wexler "Principle B and Phonologically Reduced Pronouns in Child English"

Angelik van Hout with I. Barcia del Real Marco and M. J. Ezeizabarrena "Comprehension vs. production asymmetries in the acquisition of PF and IPF aspect in Spanish"

Angelik van Hout with A. Schouwenaars and P. Hendriks "Word order overrules number agreement: Dutch children's interpretation and production of which-questions"

Tom Roeper and Seth Cable with Rama Novogrodsky "The interpretation of "each" and "every" in language acquisition"

Karen Jesney "A Learning-Based Account of L1 vs L2 Cluster Repair Differences"

Suzi Lima "The acquisition of the count/mass distinction in Yudja (Tupi)

For more information, go to http://www.galana2012.ku.edu/home.html

Call for Papers: ICA 2013

The Call for Papers for ICA 2013, a joint meeting of the 21st
International Congress on Acoustics, the 165th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, and the 52nd meeting of the Canadian
Acoustical Association, to be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2-7
June 2013, is now posted online at acousticalsociety.org. Please note that a printed copy of the Call for Papers will no longer be sent to
members by postal mail.

The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 15 November 2012. Over 90
special sessions are being organized and a Proceedings containing all papers will be published. Other events include 5 plenary lectures by recognized experts, an exposition showcasing the latest products in all fields of acoustics, and a technical tour of La Maison Symphonique-home to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The opening ceremonies for ICA 2013 will be an exciting and entertaining event. An evening concert at Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste will feature the orchestral group I Musici.

Seth Cable at Yale

Last Monday, October 1, Seth Cable presented his paper "Distance Distributivity and Pluractionality in Tlingit (and Beyond)" at the Monday Colloquia series Yale University's Linguistics Department.

Miriam Butt presented "Deep Natural Language Processing"

Miriam Butt gave a talk last Friday, October 5. Miriam is
Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics
(Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft) at the University of Konstanz. She is best known for her theoretical linguistic work on complex predicates and on grammatical case, and for her computational linguistic work in large-scale grammar development within the Pargram project. Recently she has been also involved in interdisciplinary work on the visualization of linguistic data.

The title, and abstract, of her talk was:

Deep Natural Language Processing

This talks provides a look at the capabilities of deep linguistic
natural lanuguage processing in the context of ParGram, an
international effort at building grammars for languages as diverse as
English, French, Welsh, Wolof, Georgian, Urdu, Japanese, Indonesian,Arabic and Murrinh-Patha.  The aim is to build these grammars using not only the same theoretical assumptions (based on Lexical-Functional Grammar) but also the same computational methods.  While the process of computational grammar devleopment is, of course, inherently interesting, we will also discuss the broader uses of computational grammars, for example in systems like IBM's Watson and Powerset's information retrieval system.

The underlying development platform XLE/XFR (used by Powerset and in the ParGram effort) was developed at PARC over a number of years.  The talk will focus on the various powerful analysis possibilities this system allows for, including a version of Optimality Theory and an integration of statistical information to constrain and inform both parsing and generation. The talk will also touch on the assumptions about the underlying grammar architecture that are made, e.g., with respect to the morphology-syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.