Magda Oiry writes:
Luiz Amaral will be presenting at the LARC meeting this Thursday (April 3) at 9:45 AM in the Partee room. His talk is: "Experimental ideas to test recursive relative clauses.” (This talk has been rescheduled from last week.)
Everyone welcome!
Alumna Maribel Romero (Konstanz University) will be visiting the department this week. She is giving a talk on biased questions in the semantics seminar on Wednesday, April 2. The seminar meets from 2:30 to 5:15 in the Partee room.
Maribel has worked on a variety of topics in semantics, syntax/semantic, computational semantics, and pragmatics including ellipsis, reconstruction, questions, temporal interpretation, concealed questions, negation, the scope of quantifiers, superlatives, and focus. You can get a more complete picture of her range from her website here. She’ll be available for meetings this coming week, which you can arrange through Angelika Kratzer.
Colin Phillips from the University of Maryland writes:
The Dept of Linguistics at the U of Maryland, is looking to fill up to four full-time positions for post-baccalaureate researchers. Starting date for all positions is Summer/Fall 2014. Salary is competitive, with benefits included. The positions would be ideal for individuals with a BA degree who are interested in gaining significant research experience in a very active lab as preparation for a research career. Applicants must be US or Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and should have completed a BA or BS degree by the time of appointment. The ability to interact comfortably with a wide variety of people (and machines) is a distinct advantage. Applicants may request to be considered for all four positions or any subset. The positions are two Baggett Fellowships, one Research Assistant/Lab Manager, and one MEG Lab Manager.
The positions are open until filled, but for best consideration, applications should be received by April 7th, 2014.
Details about all four positions may be found here:
http://ling.umd.edu/baggett/jobs/
Ellen Woolford gave an invited talk at Georgetown University last Friday, March 21, entitled “No Object Agreement without Subject Agreement."
Vladimir Borschev is giving an invited lecture “On the integration of formal and lexical semantics” at Moscow State University in a seminar led by V.A. Uspensky, M.R. Pentus and P Arkadiev on the applications of mathematical methods in linguistics. His talk is on Saturday, April 12.
The 37th meeting of the Generative Linguistics of the Old World meets April 2-4th in Brussels. UMass is represented by Yangsook Park and Ethan Poole. Ethan Poole will give a talk entitled “A configurational account of Finnish case.” and Yangsook Park will give a talk entitled “Indexicals and the long-distance reflexive `caki’ in Korean.” For a complete schedule, go here.
Seth Cable writes:
I'm writing to let you know that Alejandro Pérez Carballo and I have just set up a blog site where linguists and philosophers can share events / classes / etc. that will be of mutual interest: http://blogs.umass.edu/lingphil/
Our hope is that this will become a resource to members of our campus (and the broader Five College community) who are interested in Logic, Language, Cognition, and related areas.
There's not much up there right now, but that's where you all come in! If you could, please let me know if you know of any additional upcoming events / talks / seminar presentations that would be of interest to and open to philosophers and philosophy students. Anything you want to share with the philosophers, I can post up there for us!
I should mention that we already plan to have linguistics course offerings up there soon. In addition, Alejandro is working on a Calendar of Events folks can subscribe to, as well as a mailing list that announces any updates to the site. Please, if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated!
Alice Harris is an invited speaker at a conference on the Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking held at the University of Konstanz held next weekend, April 5-6. Her talk is “On the Origins of Biabsolutive Constructions in Nakh-Daghestanian Languages.” A complete program can be found here.
The Department of Linguistics at Rice University, located in Houston, Texas, is now accepting applications for a lecturer position in laboratory phonetics and phonology. The successful applicant will be asked to teach courses in both of these areas, an introductory linguistics course, and may teach additional courses in his or her subject area. S/he will also advise undergraduate and graduate students, and participate in departmental activities. This is a one year appointment and the course load is four courses for the year. Deadline for receipt of applications is May 1, 2014. PhD is required by time of appointment; position start date is July 1, 2014.
We especially welcome applications from researchers who share the department’s interest in approaching language from a usage-based perspective with solid empirical grounding in primary data, especially approaches of a cognitive, social-interactional, and/or functional nature. See also our department website.
Application materials include: cover letter, CV, teaching statement, sample of written work, and names and contact information for three references. Past teaching evaluations and/or information about course topics the applicant could teach are also welcome but not required at this time.
Rice University is committed to affirmative action and equal opportunity in education and employment. Rice does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, age, disability or veteran status. Rice University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.
Application Deadline: (Open until filled)
Mailing Address for Applications:
Search Committee Rita Riley
Department of Linguistics MS 23
Rice University
Houston, TX 77005 USA
Contact Information: Rita Riley Email: rriley@rice.edu
Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee will be presenting invited papers at the Slavic Semantics Workshop at Bar Ilan University March 31 and April 1. Vladimir’s paper is entitled “Ontology and integration of formal and lexical semantics,” and Barbara’s is “Montague’s unfinished work: a report from the archives."
Amy Rose Deal (UC, Santa Cruz) will give a talk entitled “Cyclicity and connectivity in Nez Perce relative clauses,” in Rajesh Bhatt’s seminar tomorrow, Monday, March 24. Her talk is in the Partee room at 4:00.
The abstract:
This talk centers on two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce.
First, I argue that relativization involves _cyclic_ A’ movement, even in monoclausal relatives. Rather than moving directly to Spec,CP, the relative element moves there via an intermediate position in an A’ outer specifier of the TP immediately subjacent to relative C. Cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase – a result whose implications extend to an ill-understood corner of the English that-trace effect.
Second, I argue that Nez Perce relativization provides new evidence for an ambiguity thesis for relative clauses, according to which some but not all relatives are derived by a head-raising analysis. The argument comes from connectivity and anticonnectivity in morphological case. These new data complement the range of standard arguments for head-raising, which draw primarily on connectivity effects at the syntax-semantics interface.
(You can get a preview of her talk here.)
The department is hosting prospective students this week, and there are a variety of events scheduled around their visit, including a tour of the new building on Friday afternoon. In addition:
The P Reading Group will meet at Amanda and Shayne’s place at 7PM on Thursday, March 27. Ivy will be presenting a paper.
The S Reading Group will meet at the same time at Mike and Jeremy’s place, where Yangsook will present a paper.
The S and P groups will convene afterwards at the Foundry (24 Main Street, Northampton) at around 8:30 to debrief.
This year’s syntax guru, Gereon Müller, arrives on Monday, March 22, for his four week residence in the department. Professor Müller is professor linguistics and coordinator of the linguistics department at the University of Leipzig. He has done important work on rule interaction, making fundamental contributions to our understanding of what a syntactic derivation is. He is an expert on all things movement: how to treat the A/A’ distinction, island effects, interactions with anaphora, etc., etc. He has also done extensive work on inflectional morphology, including several papers on syncretism. You can get a more complete picture of his work here.
Gereon will be floating in the department. This coming week, he will be housed in Seth’s office from Monday to Thursday, and in Kyle’s office on Friday. Make appointments by writing: gereon.mueller@uni-leipzig.de.
Alexandra Jesse writes:
This is a reminder that Katja Poellmann (Northeastern University) is giving a talk this week in the Cognitive Psychology Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "The many ways listeners adapt to reductions in casual speech".
The abstract is:
Three eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners recognized reduced Dutch words better after having heard the same reduced words, or different reduced words of the same reduction type and whether familiarization with one reduction type helps listeners to deal with another reduction type. In the exposure phase, Group 1 was exposed to /b/-reductions (e.g., manaan instead of banaan, 'banana') and Group 2 was exposed to full-vowel deletions (e.g., p'raat instead of paraat, 'ready'), while a control group did not hear any reductions. In the test phase, all three groups heard the same speaker producing reduced-/b/ and deleted-vowel words that were either repeated (Experiments 1 & 2) or new (Experiment 3). Word-specific learning effects were found for vowel-deletions, but not for /b/-reductions. Generalization of learning to new words of the same reduction type occurred only if the exposure words showed a phonologically consistent reduction pattern (/b/-reductions). In contrast, generalization of learning to words of another reduction type occurred only if the exposure words showed a phonologically inconsistent reduction pattern (the vowel deletions; learning about them generalized to recognition of the /b/-reductions). In order to deal with reductions, listeners thus use various means. They store reduced variants (e.g., for the inconsistent vowel-deleted words) and they abstract over incoming information to build up and apply mapping rules (e.g., for the consistent /b/-reductions). Experience with inconsistent pronunciations leads to greater perceptual flexibility in dealing with other forms of reduction uttered by the same speaker than experience with consistent pronunciations.
Magda Oiry writes:
Luiz Amaral will be presenting in the LARC meeting this Thursday at 9:45 in the Partee room a talk entitled "Experimental ideas to test recursive relative clauses."
Everyone welcome!
Alice Harris gave an invited paper, entitled “On the Origins of Biabsolutive Constructions in Avar, Batsbi, and Nakh-Daghestanian,” at the Fifteenth Spring Workshop on Theory and Method in Linguistic Reconstruction, which took place March 14-16 at the University of Michigan.
Syntax guru, Gereon Müller will present “Buffers in Syntactic Derivations,” at the department colloquium this Friday in Machmer E-37. Because of Open House events, the time of Gereon’s talk is later than the usual colloquium time. His talk starts at 4:30.
An abstract for Gereon’s talk:
Phase-based minimalist syntax can be characterized as a localderivational approach to grammar: Syntactic structures are generatedbottom-up, by alternating operations like Merge, Move, and Agree, andthe accessible window of a derivation is quite small throughout -- itis standardly assumed to be confined to the minimal phase (PIC,Chomsky (2001)). In such an approach, all long-distance dependenciesmust be modelled locally. Thus, unbounded wh-movement is assumed to becomposed of a series of smaller movement steps to intermediate phaseedges, and similar local analyses postulating a decomposition ofseemingly non-local syntactic operations into sequences of smallersteps have been given for other non-local phenomena, likelong-distance reflexivization, non-local case assignment, andlong-distance agreement.
Against this background, I will discuss three movement-relatedphenomena that have so far proven recalcitrant from alocal-derivational, phase-based perspective: improper movement,remnant movement, and resumptive movement. The empirical evidence willmostly come from German. In all three cases, the dilemma is that itseems that information from a syntactic domain A must be used in asyntactic domain B even though it should not be accessible in B --either because A is not present yet (the look-ahead problem), orbecause A is too deeply embedded (a kind of backtracking problem).
First, what is arguably the simplest and most elegant approach toimproper movement (viz., the Williams Cycle; Williams (1974; 2003),Sternefeld (1992), Grewendorf (2003; 2004), Abels (2008), Neeleman &van de Koot (2010), Bader (2011), Keine (2014)) presupposes that inorder to determine whether a given long-distance movement operation islegitimate or not, information about landing sites in the embeddedclause is available (backtracking). Second, it seems that in order todistinguish legitimate and illegitimate cases of remnant movement(involving Freezing, Anti-Freezing, and what has been called theMueller-Takano Generalization; see Mueller (1993; 1998), Takano(1994), Kitahara (1994), Koizumi (1995), Sauerland (1999), Pesetsky(2012)), decisions must be made early in the derivation that depend oninformation which is not available yet (look-ahead). Third, withresumption, the problem is again that at crucial stages of thederivation (viz., when an island can -- or, indeed, must -- becrossed; Sells(1984), Pesetsky (1998), Boeckx (2003), McCloskey(2005)), the relevant information (about whether or not there is aresumptive pronoun in the base position) does not seem to be availableanymore (backtracking).
My goal in this talk is to present a unified analysis of these threephenomena (this implies treating the remnant movement problem as abacktracking rather than a look-ahead problem) that makes crucial useof buffers which temporarily store minimal aspects of the derivationalhistory on a moved item. The locus of this storage is themovement-related feature of the moved item (e.g., [wh]), moreprecisely, its value, which is viewed as a first-in-first-out listthat constantly changes throughout the derivation but must qualify aslegitimate (essentially: respect the functional sequence of heads,f-seq) in criterial positions.
The fourth annual meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages happens this weekend (March 29-30) at Rutgers University. UMass is represented there by:
Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer, who give the paper “The Interpretation of Infinitival negation in Hindi-Urdu."
and
Sakshi Bhatia, who will be giving the paper “Multiple Focus in Hindi-Urdu."
and
Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt, who will be postering: “Auxiliary Deletion and the analysis of T in Hindi-Urdu."
Congratulations to Ethan Poole, who will be presenting “A configurational account of Finnish case” at the Penn Linguistics Circle meeting on Saturday, March 29. For a schedule of talks at PLC, go here.
Held during the 26th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
Tübingen, Germany, August 11-22, 2014
*Deadline for submissions: April 1st, 2014*
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2014
*ABOUT:*The Student Session of the 26th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Tübingen, Germany on August 11-22, 2014. 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 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.
*SEPARATE POSTER SESSION:*Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for the oral presentations and one for the posters. This means that papers can be directly submitted as posters. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present research in progress.
*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*All authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages for an oral presentation and 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://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/drm/dehaan/stus2014/.
*FURTHER INFORMATION:*Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to dehaan@kr.tuwien.ac.at.
ESSLLI 2014 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 2014, please consult the main ESSLLI 2014 page: http://www.esslli2014.info/.