Abstract Writing Workshop

Seth Cable and Jeremy Hartman will be conducting an abstract writing workshop as part of the Fall Professional Development series Monday, November 3, in N400 (the seminar hub). The workshop starts at 10AM.

PRG tomorrow

Ivy and Coral write:

PRG will be meeting this Monday 11/3 at 7:30pm.  Presley will be discussing her work with experimental software development.  Presley also volunteered to host us but she has already hosted the meeting before last.  If anyone else would like to host let us know!  

Please RSVP so we will know how much food to get. 

Workshop on Recursion on Wednesday

Workshop on Recursion

1-5PM

Wednesday November 5, 2014

N400 ILC

Everyone is invited to a small workshop on Recursion and Experimentation (with work from Dutch, Japanese, Wapachana, Spanish, English)

Goals:

a) to contrast experiments in different languages and different methods

b) see if Abstract Triggers can be made experimentally clear.

1:00-1:15 Introduction and Question Agenda (bring your questions) on experimentation, bilingualism, pedagogy 100-115 

1:15-1:45 Bart Hollebrandse (University of Groningen): Recursion in NEMO! (Amsterdam Library Results)

1:45-2:15 Jon Nelson (UMass) 'L1 and L2 PP recursion--experimental ideas and observations'

2:15-2:45 Terue Nakato (Kitasato University): Multiple No's in Japanese: Is Recursion Difficult for Children?

2:45-3:15

3:15-3:45 Ana Perez   (Uniersity of Toronto) The acquisition of the varieties of recursion: Preliminary remarks  

3:45-4:15 Luiz Amaral  (UMass) Recursion in Wapachana   3:15-3:45 

4:15-4:30 Tom Roeper (UMass) Comments on talks: Connecting Theory and  Experiment. Are there Abstract Triggers for Recurison?         

4:30-5:15   General discussion: 4:15-5:15 (including Piraha Researchers on skype)  

What challenges exist for extending experimentsacross languages?Is bilingualism a special challenge for recursion?Does pedagogy follow from good experiments?

Pizza dinner at Tom’s house at 6:30. All are welcome!

Kratzer at Pronouns Workshop

Angelika Kratzer is an invited speaker at workshop at Tübingen University November 7-9. The Workshop is the second in a series of meetings that Tübingen has hosted on pronouns. This one focuses on “pronouns in embedded contexts at the syntax-semantics interface."

SSRG on Thursday

At 7:30, Thursday, November 6, SSRG will be meeting in Northampton to present papers from Syntax. If you haven’t claimed an article to present, you can still do so here.

Kansas University's Linguistics Department

The Linguistics Department at KU has undergone significant changes in the past decade to position itself as a unique program that unites linguistic theory and experimental research. We have particular strengths in experimental phonetics and phonology, first and second language acquisition, developmental psycholinguistics, second language psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, the cognitive neuroscience of language, linguistic fieldwork, and theoretical syntax and semantics. Our faculty members and graduate students study a broad range of languages including understudied language varieties in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The department has six active research labs, which have all successfully competed for external funding and provide support for graduate studies. The department has both head-mounted and remote eye trackers, an EEG laboratory, and on the KU medical center campus, cortical MEG, fetal MEG and MRI systems. We offer both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. We invite you to explore our graduate degree program further at our website: http://linguistics.ku.edu/

Funding

The Linguistics Department is able to offer financial support in the form of fellowships and graduate teaching or research assistantships. In the 2015-2016 academic year we will be able to award one Chancellor’s Fellowship, a prestigious award administered by KU for which there are only six each year, which offers a generous funding package for 5 years of doctoral study. Multi-year funding packages will also be available for students who can serve as Graduate Research Assistants on two funded grant projects: a project on prosody and second language speech segmentation (directed by Dr. Annie Tremblay, atrembla@ku.edu) and a project on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects  (directed by Dr. Jie Zhang, zhang@ku.edu).

Students who are interested in these research positions should contact these faculty members directly. In addition, funding will be available on a competitive basis for other fellowships and Graduate Teaching Assistantships in the department. All applicants will be automatically considered for these awards.

Placement

Recent Ph.D. graduates of our program have enjoyed successful job placement as postdoctoral researchers and tenure-track professors at a variety of institutions around the world. Recent graduates have attained postdoctoral positions at universities such the University of Chicago, New York University, University of Reading, the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition, and Language, and tenure-track appointments at colleges and universities such as Indiana University, Mississippi State University, Harding College, Hankyung National University in Korea, and the University of Costa Rica. 

Lawrence, KS 

Lawrence is a dynamic college town located 45 minutes from downtown Kansas City. We have an art theatre, a local brewery, multiple museums, great coffee shops, several natural foods grocers, many farmers markets, and the most amazing sunflower fields you will ever see. 

Apply

Information on admission requirements is available at: https://linguistics.ku.edu/admission

The deadline to apply for the Fall 2015 semester is January 1, 2015.  

If you have questions, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Alison Gabriele at gabriele@ku.edu. 

UMass at BUCLD

This weekend Boston University hosts the Thirty Ninth annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. UMass is represented by:

A. Aravind and Jill de Villiers (poster) "Implicit alternatives insufficient for children's SIs with some"

Suzi Lima, P. Li and J. Snedeker ``Acquiring the denotation of object-denoting nouns in a language without partitives.''

A. Pace, P. Yust, J. de Villiers, A. Iglesias, M. Wilson, K. Hirsh-Pasek, R. Golinkoff, A. Takahesu Tabori, K. Strother-Garcia, K. Ridge: Examining the Validity of a Computer-Based Language Assessment for Preschool Children

Mike Clauss ``The Syntax and Semantics of Free Relative Clauses in Child English.''

Valentina Brunetto and Tom Roeper: "Are rare constructions late in acquisition? The case of near-reflexivity"

C. Lindenbergh, A. van Hout, B. Hollebrandse: "The acquisition of sentence ellipsis in Dutch preschoolers"

S. Shittu and Ann-Michelle Tessier: "Perceptual attrition of lexical tone among L1 Yoruba-speaking children in Canada"

A. Perez-Leroux, A. Castilla-Earls, T. Peterson, D. Massam, S. Bejar: "Children’s acquisition of complex modification"

B. Zurer Pearson: "Linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity in quantified expressions: Implications for mathematics teaching and testing of monolingual and bilingual students"

Emmanuel Chemla speaks tomorrow

Emmanuel Chemla (Institut Jean Nicod and École Normale Supérieure) will give the last of his three lectures tomorrow, October 27, at 4:00 in the seminar hub (ILC N400). He will present joint work with Lewis Bott, Mora Maldonado and Benjamin Spector which uses priming studies to investigate linguistic representations and operations. His talk is presented in conjunction with Lyn Frazier and Brian Dillon’s joint seminar.

UMass at NELS 45

The Forty Fifth annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society is being hosted by MIT Friday, Oct. 31 to Sunday, November 2. UMass is well represented by past and present students. 

Papers:

alumna Amy Rose Deal is giving "Properties of probes: Evidence from Nez Perce complementizer agreement"

alumnus Andrew Weir is giving "Fragment answers in English: A PF-movement account"

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, along with Lynda Kennedy, Jacopo Romoli, Cory Bill, Stephen Crain and Rafaella Folli is giving "Scalar implicatures vs. presuppositions: The view from Broca’s aphasia"

alumna Karen Jesney is giving "Counterbled-Counterfeeding in Harmonic Grammar"

and 

Megan Somerday is giving "(Some) partial reduplication is full reduplication"

Posters:

alumnus Keir Moulton along with Nino Grillo is giving "Pseudo-relatives: Big but transparent"

alumna Ana Pérez-Leroux along with Tyler Peterson, Anny Castilla-Earls, Susan Béjar and Diane Massam is giving "Structural complexity and the acquisition of recursive locative PPs"

Jason Overfelt is giving "Cyclic Linearization and constraints on remnant movement"

Ethan Poole is giving "Deconstructing quirky subjects"

Aleksei Nazarov is giving "Non-maximal feet as reduction domains in Dutch"

Seth Cable is giving "Semantics of graded tense in complement clauses: Evidence that future is not a tense"

For more information, go here.

Call for papers: 39th Penn Linguistics Conference

Papers on any topic in linguistics and associated fields are welcome, including, but not limited to, phonology, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and sign languages.

Abstracts are due by November 14, 2014. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be given by January 23, 2015.

PLC39 will be held on March 20-22, 2015 on the Univ. of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. For more information please visit the PLC website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/

Writing Effective Grant Proposals: Part 1

On Friday, October 31, the Office of Professional Development is giving the first of a two-part workshop on writing effect grant proposals. This two-hour workshop starts at 10AM in 917 Campus Center. The second session takes place on November 7, and participants are expected to attend both sessions. Pre-registration is required.

For more information, and for the other events that the Office of Professional Development has this week, go here.

Call for papers: 6th annual QUEUC

Undergraduate students are invited to submit essays for the sixth annual QUEUC. The Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference is the largest of its kind in Canada, with previous delegates from coast to coast, and has now reached an international level with delegates from the United States.

Bishop’s University will host the conference, in Sherbrooke, on March 13-14, 2015.  

The deadline for students to submit essays is Jan. 16, 2015.
Successful submissions will be top-quality research essays of 7-8 pages. Papers from all fields of literary and critical theory will be considered. Students from all areas of study within the Humanities and Social Sciences, not just English, are encouraged to submit.
In addition to two days of engaging panels, QUEUC 2015 includes a range of exciting events such as an English-themed Cranium night, a wine and cheese, a plenary speaker, and themed events. The deadline to register as a presenter or a delegate is March 1, 2015.

About QUEUC

Since its inception in 2009, QUEUC has blossomed into the most successful English Undergraduate conference in Canada. QUEUC’s mission is to enable students from across Canada to connect and share their research in a comfortable, collaborative environment that fosters the pursuit of knowledge and the love of learning. This is a chance to network, build connections, and encounter different worldviews and perspectives all while highlighting undergraduate academia and scholarship.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact us at queuc@ubishops.ca. Check out our website for information about how to submit papers, how to register, and to answer all your burning questions: http://www.ubishops.ca/queuc/  

Area Workshops

Here’s a rundown of this week’s activities in the area workshops.

Semantics Workshop: Wednesday, 12:20-1:20, ILC N451

This meeting is the second, and final, session concentrating on abstract writing.

Psycholing Workshop(s)

Psycholinguistics workshop has two meetings this week. On Tuesday evening (10/28) we will meet at Brian's house (17 Union Street, Northampton) at 7pm. Alex Drummond will talk to us about Ibex Farm 2.0, an update to the web-based experimental software Ibex. On Thursday afternoon (3pm in ILC N400), John Kingston will talk about Detection Theory.

Syntax Workshop: Thursday 4:00-5:00, ILC N451

David Erschler will be discussing Benjamin Bruening's recent paper  "Precede and Command Revisited" (Language 90(2)). It can be downloaded here.

Sound Workshop: Thursday, 1:00-2:15, ILC N451

In this week's Sound Workshop, Ivy Hauser and Coral Hughto will present their ideas for the GPs. Those interested in preparing for Ivy's presentation may wish to read:
Schwartz, J.-L., Boe, L.-J., Badin, P., & Sawallis, T. R. (2012). Grounding stop place systems in the perceptuo-motor substance of speech: On the universality of the labial-coronal-velar stop series. Journal of Phonetics, 40.1, 20-36.

Visiting position in Japanese and Linguistics

The Department of Asian Studies at Williams College invites applications for athree-year open-rank full-time visiting position in Japanese and linguistics beginning September 2015. The successful candidate will teach five courses over two semesters, including at least three language courses. We welcome candidates who can teach all levels of Japanese language and also contribute courses on Japanese linguistics or related topics (taught in English) to the broader curriculum. Minimum requirements include native or near-native proficiency in Japanese; Ph.D. or ABD; strong teaching experience at the college level; and ability to teach all levels of language courses in close coordination with departmental colleagues. All offers of employment are contingent upon completion of a background check. Further information is available here: http://dean- faculty.williams.edu/prospective-faculty/background-check-policy/.

To apply, please submit letter of application, curriculum vitae and 3 recommendations. Candidates are recommended to submit a link to a sample video clip of language teaching in Japanese. The deadline to submit application materials is January 1, 2015. More information at http://apply.interfolio.com/26736

Williams College is a coeducational liberal arts institution located in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. The college has built its reputation on outstanding teaching and scholarship and on the academic excellence of its approximately 2,000 students. Please visit the Williams College website (http://www.williams.edu). Beyond meeting fully its legal obligations for non- discrimination, Williams College is committed to building a diverse and inclusive community where members from all backgrounds can live, learn, and thrive.

Halloween prices

The Candy Monster writes:

We are swift approaching Halloween and the cheap candy that follows in its wake, so I felt this would be a good time to remind everyone that the continued presence of candy in the department depends on the satiation of a certain ceramic pig. If you have spare change lying around, now would be an excellent time to free yourself from the hassle of counting it; we will also happily take cash donations as well. The pig has been unhappily hungry of late, and the goal is make a sizable purchase right after Halloween.

jobs for linguists

IXL Learning is an educational technology company located in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We’re dedicated to shaping the future of education and solving the real-world challenges faced by students and teachers around the planet. We are reaching out to your school because we have a number of open positions available for the following majors: 

-English

-Linguistics

-Social Sciences

-Humanities

We are actively hiring graduates to join our Content Development team as we expand our new language arts component.  To learn more about this position please click here: Product Analyst - Language Arts. 

A full listing of our openings can be found on our Careers Page (www.ixl.com/jobs).

PRG on Monday

Coral and Ivy write:

The next meeting of PRG will be on Monday, October 20 at 7:30 pm. Ivy will be hosting us, and Coral will be talking about her possible GP ideas. As always, there will be food!

Please let us know if you are interested in hosting or presenting in the future.

Dave Kush in Psycholinguistics Proseminar

On Monday 10/20, Dave Kush (Haskins Laboratories) will be visiting the psycholinguistics Proseminar (LINGUIST712), where he will talk about some of his recent work on the processing of bound-variable anaphora. He will give his talk at 2:30pm, in ILC458. The talk is entitled "Relational Constraints and Antecedent Retrieval: Evidence from Bound-Variable Pronouns.” Abstract follows.

All are welcome!

Interpreting a pronoun during incremental sentence processing typically requires identifying and accessing potential antecedents from memory. According to the grammar, there are two kinds of constraints that determine whether a previously-seen NP can serve as an antecedent for a pronoun: (i) morphological constraints, which enforce feature-match relations between the NP and the pronoun, and (ii) syntactic constraints, which determine the NP's eligibility based on its relative structural position to the pronoun. 

In this talk I first discuss reasons to think that cue-based models of antecedent retrieval should be able to implement morphological, but not relational, constraints. I then present results from 2-3 eye tracking experiments that indicate that antecedent retrieval displays unexpected sensitivity to the c-command/scope constraint on bound-variable anaphora. In light of these findings I explore methods for achieving this apparent relational sensitivity within the confines of a cue-based architecture. 

Phonology Grant meeting on Monday

Joe Pater writes:

The next phonology grant meeting will be Monday October 20th at 9 am. We’ll continue talking about accounts of opacity in Harmonic Serialism and about targeted constraints in HS - the discussion will be led by Robert and me.

All are welcome!

Omer Preminger gives department colloquium

Omer Preminger (University of Maryland) will give the department colloquium at 3:30 on Friday, October 24, in the seminar hub (ILC N400). The title of his talk is “The syntax (and morphology) of non-valuation.” An abstract follows.

First, I review recent work showing that for several classes of features, what was traditionally thought of as one member in a set of possible feature values actually corresponds to the absence of valued features altogether. Examples include: “nominative”; “singular”; and “3rd person” (cf. Nevins 2007). While this has been argued before regarding, e.g., the morphology of pronouns (Harley & Ritter 2002), I will argue that this holds at the level of syntactic computation.

Next, I show that this move amounts to more than a mere relabeling of the feature space (e.g. designating one value in each feature set as the “non‑value”). Instead, this view makes available new analytical possibilities with respect to the way different syntactic operations interact, and revives types of interactions (in particular, bleeding) that are impossible in Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) generate-and-filter architecture (esp. when coupled with a phase-level, all-at-once application of operations, as in Chomsky 2008).

I will argue that this view of (non‑)valuation leads to empirical advancements in the domains of case assignment and agreement intervention, advances that are unavailable on the standard view that takes categories like “3rd person”, “singular”, and “nominative” to be the result of successful valuation.