UMass is hosting the third meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting this weekend. The meeting starts this Friday, October 2, with a tutorial from 2:30 to 5:30 on Building digital resources by Kie Zuraw and Matt Wagers. The talks start on Saturday at 9:00 and the conference ends on Sunday. UMass is represented by Hsin-Lun Huang who will be giving the paper “Argument structure and causatively in Mandarin resultatives,” Kristine Yu who will be giving the paper “Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan,” and Jaieun Kim who (with Inkie Chung) will be giving the poster “Locality in Suppletive Allomorphy of GIVE in Korean.” For more information, go here.
28 September 2015
27 September 2015
SSRG tomorrow
Leland Kusmer writes:
We'll be meeting this coming Monday, the 28th of September, at 7:30. This will be our SSRG Reads LI meeting. If you haven't signed up to present an issue, there are still some unclaimed! You can sign up here:
We'll meet at the home of Katia and Rodica.
As always, please RSVP so I know how much food to get:
Wendell Kimper in Sound Workshop on Friday
Wendell Kimper will give a practice talk for his AMP talk this week in Sound Workshop, which this week meets at 1:15 Friday, Oct. 2.
Andrew Murphy in Syntax Workshop this Friday
Andrew Murphy will give a talk this Friday in Syntax Workshop, which meets in N458 at 2:15. The title of his talk is "Cumulativity and Opacity in Syntactic Derivations: Arguments for Weighted Constraints."
Workshop on Modality across Categories
Pompeu Fabra University will host the Workshop on Modality Across Categories, November 5th and 6th in Barcelona. Invited speakers include Angelika Kratzer and alumna Aynat Rubinstein (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The program also includes two talks by alumnus Andrew McKenzie: “Control Incorporation and Intensional Compounds” and (with Lydia Newkirk “Modal restrictions from complement type of ‘almost’."
You can learn more here.
SSILA hosts a special symposium in honor of Emmon Bach
Pat Shaw, past president of SSILA, writes:
Our esteemed and cherished colleague, Emmon Bach, was serving as elected President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) at the time of his sudden passing in November 2014. In honour of his memory and of his many diverse contributions to scholarship based on his extensive work with the Native languages of North America and with Native communities engaged in language documentation, conservation, and revitalization, SSILA is hosting a special symposium at the 2016 SSILA/LSA annual meetings to be held January 7-10 in Washington, DC.
More details forthcoming in the meeting program.
Keine and Bhatt is accepted to NLLT
“Interpretive Verb Clusters,” a paper by Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt, has been accepted to Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations!
LSA Spotlight
Alumnus Kai von Fintel is the subject of the Linguistic Society of America's September Member Spotlight.
Call for papers: BLS
Joe Pater is an invited speaker to a special session on Learnability at this year’s meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. A description, and call for abstracts, follows.
The 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS42) will take place Friday through Sunday, February 5th-7th, 2016, on the UC Berkeley campus. BLS42 welcomes abstract submissions from all areas of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. Abstracts that make use of experimental methods in combination with formal-theoretical analysis are especially encouraged.
The period for submissions is now open. Please submit your abstracts through our EasyChair conference page by 11:59 pm PSTon November 1st, 2015.
General Session
The general session welcomes abstracts from the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical/comparative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
General Session Invited Speakers:
Liina Pylkkänen, New York University
Meghan Sumner, Stanford University
Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University
Special Session: Learnability
The special session will focus on learnability and welcomes papers on theoretical, experimental, computational, and other approaches to the learning of grammatical systems.
Special Session Invited Speaker:
Joe Pater, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Parasession: Austronesian Linguistics
The areal parasession will focus on the languages of the Austronesian family. The session welcomes descriptive and theoretical papers from all areas that draw the majority of their data from Austronesian languages.
Parasession Invited Speaker:
Joey Sabbagh, University of Texas, Arlington
Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts are due by November 1st, 2015, 11:59 pm PST. Please submit all abstracts through EasyChair. Authors will be notified of acceptance by December 1st.
Authors may maximally submit one single-authored abstract and one co-authored abstract. Abstracts, including titles, data, and examples, must fit onto 1 page with 1" margins and 12pt font. References may be included on a separate page. Abstracts must be anonymous; omit names or phrasing (e.g. my paper (Author 20XX)) that would otherwise reveal author identity. Surname-year citations (Author 20XX) that do not identify the author of the abstract as the author of the cited paper are acceptable.
Please fill out all required fields in EasyChair and check at least one box indicating a topic corresponding to the linguistic subfield(s) of greatest relevance to your abstract. All submissions will be anonymized for review.
Links:
Check our website for general information and updates concerning the conference. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.
Contact:
Address correspondence concerning abstract submissions tobls_submissions@berkeley.edu. Address general correspondence to bls@berkeley.edu.
Rising Voices screens in Northampton
On October 18, the Academy of Music in Northampton will be screening a documentary on the revitalization of the Lakota language. Go here for information about the film, and a trailer, and here for information about the screening at the Academy of Music. The movie is free, but reservations are required.
UMass at Sinn und Bedeutung
The Twentieth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung met at the University of Tubingen September 9-12. UMass alumna Junko Shimoyama was among the invited speakers, and there were many members of the UMass community in the program.
Alumnus Florian Schwarz gave a paper (with Jacopo Romoli and Cory Bill) entitles “Reluctant Acceptance of the Literal Truth — Eye Tracking in the Covered Box Paradigm."
Alumna Maribel Romero gave a paper (with Andreas Walker) entitled “counterfactual Donkeys: A Strict Conditional Analysis."
Alumna Amy Rose Deal gave the paper “Mass and count without the signature property: Yudja and Nez Perce."
Barbara Partee along with UMass alumna Irene Heim gave presentations at the workshop for Arnim von Stechow
Alumnus Marcin Morzycki gave a talk entitled “Toward a General Theory of Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives."
Alumnae Ana Arregui and Maria Biezma gave a poster entitled "Discourse Rationality and the Counterfactuality Implicatures in Backtracking Conditionals"
Alumnae Ilaria Frana and Paula Menendez Benito gave a poster entitled “The Hypothetical Future in Italian and Spanish."
Alumna Maria Nella Carminati gave a poster (with Francescas Foppolo and Panzeri) entitled “The Incremental processing of telic predicates."
Alumni Ilaria Frana and Kyle Rawlins gave a poster entitled “Italian Negation and mica in questions and assertions.”
For more information, go here.
Amy Rose Deal sends us this picture of some of the UMass-ers in attendance. (From left to right: Maribel Romero, Kylito Rawlins, Ilaria Frana, Maria Biezma, Paula Menendez Benito and Amy Rose Deal.)
20 September 2015
UMass at TbiLLC 2015
The Eleventh Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation is meeting this weekend at Tbilisi State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. UMass is represented by:
Jeremy Pasquereau who is presenting “Overt movement of comparative quantifiers in European French"
and
Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt who are conducting a workshop on Obligatoriness, as well as presenting a paper “PPIs and Movement."
Ashwini Deo gives department colloquium on Friday
Ashwini Deo (Yale) will give the department’s first colloquium of the semester this Friday, September 25, at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title and abstract of her talk follow.
Title: The Semantic and Pragmatic underpinnings of Grammaticalization Paths
It is a well-established fact that meanings associated with functional linguistic expressions evolve in systematic ways across time. But we have little precise understanding of why and how this happens. We know even less about how formal approaches to the meanings of functional categories like tense, aspect, negation can be reconciled with the typologically robust findings of grammaticalization research. In this talk, I will take a first step towards such an understanding by analyzing a robustly attested semantic change in natural languages — the progressive-to-imperfective shift.
The facts can be described as follows: At Stage 0, a linguistic system L possesses a single imperfective or neutral aspectual marker X that is used to express two contextually disambiguable meanings α and β. At Stage 1, a progressive marker Y arises spontaneously in L in order to express α in some contexts. At Stage 2, Y becomes entrenched as an obligatory grammatical element for expressing α while X is restricted in use to expressing β. At Stage 3, Y generalizes and is used to express both α and β. X is gradually driven out of L. Stage 3 (structurally identical to Stage 0) is often followed by another instantiation of Stage 1, with the innovation of a new progressive marker Z. The trajectory to be explained is thus cyclic. The analysis I provide has a semantic component that characterizes the logical relation between the progressive and imperfective operators in terms of asymmetric entailment. Its dynamic component rests on the proposal that imperfective and progressive sentences crucially distinguish between two kinds of inquiries: phenomenal and structural inquiries (Goldsmith and Woisetschleger 1982). The innovation and entrenchment of progressive marking in languages is shown to be underpinned by optimal ways of resolving both kinds of inquiries in discourse given considerations of successful and economic communication. Generalization is analyzed as the result of imperfect learning. The trajectory — consisting of the recruitment of a progressive form, its categorical use in phenomenal inquiries, and its generalization to imperfective meaning — is modeled within the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory.
PRG this Wednesday
Coral Hughto and Ivy Hauser write
This semester's first meeting of PRG will be on Wednesday 23 September at 7:30pm. PRG is an informal gathering to talk about half-baked ideas, interesting papers, works-in-progress, or anything else. PLEASE EMAIL US IF YOU WILL BE COMING! The current plan is to meet downstairs in Haymarket (in Northampton), but if enough people RSVP we will host the meeting somewhere else.
Jarosz speaks at LARC on Friday
Jon Nelson writes:
LARC will meet this Friday 9/25 at 12PM in N451. All are welcome! Gaja Jarosz will present:
Acquisition of Onset Clusters in Polish: Sonority Sequencing and Input Sensitivity
SpectroLunch this Friday
The second meeting of the weekly SpectroLunch meets this Friday at 11am in N400. SpectroLunch is a venue in which participants practice spectrogram reading and WHISC has learned that this week’s meeting will feature “Peggy’s Animals pt. 2.”
Job at University of Potsdam
The University of Potsdam, Human Sciences Faculty invites applications for:
W 1- Junior Professorship for “Variation and Variability in Grammatical Systems”
The specialization for the junior professorship includes the investigation and modeling of variation and variability in grammatical systems, with an emphasis on non-European languages. Particular attention should be given to structural similarities and differences between different languages, and to how these inform grammar-theoretical or typological modeling.
The prospective junior professor will have demonstrated expertise (in research and teaching) in the comparative evaluation of variation and variability of non-European languages. A specialization in morphology and morphosyntax, complemented by expertise in phonology or syntax and/or a specialization in the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, or Afro-Asiatic language families, is desired.
A successful applicant has a solid foundation of the underlying theories and models, works with empirical methods in data acquisition and analysis (e.g., systematic field research, corpus research, experimental methods, etc.), and can demonstrate how grammar-theoretical or typological modeling can be advanced through the inclusion of cross-linguistic variation and within-language variability.
The junior professor will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics at the University of Potsdam. Furthermore, it is expected that the applicant will partake in the research activities of the Research Area in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Potsdam, and will actively contribute to the acquisition of larger joint research projects. Very good command of the English language is a prerequisite for the position, experience with international cooperation and the acquisition of third-party funding are desired.
According to State law (§ 45 Brandenburgisches Hochschulgesetz - BbgHG), preconditions for the appointment as a Junior Professor include a completed university education, teaching skills, and a special qualification for academic work, which is usually demonstrated though an outstanding PhD thesis. International experience, an outstanding publication record and a teaching record are advantageous. The total time for completion of the PhD and subsequent post-doc employment should not have exceeded six years.
Appointments are made according to §§ 40 and 46 BbgHG. The appointment as a civil servant or a public employee will be made for up to four years in the first instance and can be extended to up to 6 years in total, conditional upon a positive evaluation.
The University of Potsdam strives to increase the proportion of women in research and teaching and specifically encourages female applicants to apply for this position. Handicapped applicants will be given preference in case of equal suitability. People with an immigration background are specifically encouraged to apply.
The University of Potsdam offers dual career support and coaching for newly-appointed professors: http://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/neue-beschaeftigte/information-for-newly-appointed-professors.html
Applications (with a presentation of your research interests, curriculum vitae, copies of academic certificates and documents, a list of publications, a list of conducted courses, a list of externally funded projects) should be sent to the University of Potsdam ausschreibungen@uni-potsdam.de no later than 1st of October 2015.
Job at University of Delaware
Position Title Assistant Professor in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics
Location Newark, DE
Job Title: Neurolinguist/psycholinguist
Job Rank: Assistant Professor
Specialty Areas: Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics
Description: College of Arts & Sciences,Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Tenure-track Faculty Position in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics
The University of Delaware Department of Linguistics and CognitiveScience invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position in Neurolinguistics or Psycholinguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor. The position is expected to begin September 1, 2016. The successful candidate will have a Ph.D. in linguistics or a related field, with a specialization in neurolinguistic or psycholinguistic research on language disorders and/or first language acquisition. The Ph.D. must be in hand prior to the start of the appointment.
We seek individuals who demonstrate the drive and vision to develop an innovative, cutting-edge, and internationally recognized researchprogram in neurolinguistics or psycholinguistics with a focus onlanguage disorders and/or first language acquisition. Preference will be given to scholars who can contribute to our undergraduatepre-professional program in speech/language pathology. Applicants who can conduct fundable research at the new UD Multi-Modal Imaging Center (http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2015/apr/functional-mri-042415.html) ,scheduled to open in the spring of 2016, are also particularly encouraged to apply. This 11,600 square foot research facility will house a Siemens 3T Magnetom Prisma scanner, and the suite will beequipped with state-of-the-art MR-compatible visual and auditory stimulation equipment, eye-tracking, response devices, and physiological measurement hardware.
The successful applicant will be expected to teach a subset of thefollowing undergraduate courses: First Language Development,Introduction to Communication Disorders, Psycholinguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, and general courses inlinguistics and cognitive science. They will also be expected tooffer graduate courses in areas of their specialization. The teaching load is 2+2. Other duties include supervision of graduate students, undergraduate student advising, involvement in curricular development,and performance of University and Department service.
The Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science is housed in the University of Delaware’s College of Arts andSciences. The department runs an internationally-renowned PhD programin Linguistics, a Master’s degree in Linguistics and CognitiveScience, a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics. The Department also offers,via a university-wide Cognitive Science committee, an interdisciplinary Certificate in Cognitive Science as part of graduate degrees across schools and departments. The department has state-of-the-art laboratories in phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics, including a 128-channel ERP lab. The department is part of a university-wide cognitive science community, including adiverse set of researchers from various departments and colleges. The Department also has ties to a new Clinical Master’s Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders, anticipated to begin admitting students in academic year 2016-2017. This program includes a new Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic (http://sites.udel.edu/cscd/clinic/), to open fall 2015.
The University of Delaware combines a rich historic legacy with acommitment to education and the latest in advanced technology. With external funding exceeding $200 million per year, the University ranks among the top 100 universities in federal R&D support for science and engineering. Enhanced by state-of-the-art facilities, research is conducted across all seven colleges and numerous interdisciplinary institutes and centers. Other relevant facilities on campus include the new 103,000 square foot Health Sciences Complex, a state-of-the-art facility that includes labs for human-based studies and an active outpatient clinic; a 194,000 square foot Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory; and the DelawareTechnology Park, where entrepreneurial and academic research labs are co-located. The Delaware Health Sciences Alliance (DHSA), a partnership among the University of Delaware, Christiana Care HealthSystem, Nemours / Al duPont Hospital for Children, and Thomas Jefferson University, provides infrastructure and opportunity for innovative clinical and translational collaborations.
Applicants should apply online at www.interfolio.com and submita cover letter, a statement of current and long-term research plans, a statement of teaching experience and philosophy, a CV, three representative research publications, and three letters of recommendation.
Inquiries, but not application materials, should be emailed to Arild Hestvik, Chair of the Search Committee, hestvik@udel.edu. Review of applications will begin on October 18, 2015, and will continue until the position is filled.
Application Deadline: 18-Oct-2015 (Open until filled)
Call for papers: SNEWS 2015
Jon Ander Media writes:
The call for SNEWS 2015 is out. As always, the workshop is meant to be a friendly venue for graduate students in Linguistics to present their work in semantics. Presentations about ongoing research are most welcome. On average, the goal is to have 2-3 presenters from each school.
Those interested in presenting should let me know by September 30th, although titles are not due until October 31st. There is no need to send an abstract and no need to provide a title (for the moment). This year SNEWS will be organized and hosted by Harvard.
Below you can find the relevant information:
- What: The talks should be 20 min + 10 min for questions.
- When: November 21, 2015
- Where: Department of Linguistics, Harvard University
- Who can present: Graduate students at the participating schools: Brown, Harvard, MIT, UConn, UMass, Yale.
- Who can attend: Graduate students, post-docs, visitors at the participating schools; faculty are encouraged to attend!
- What to expect: A day in which you get to hear about what other fellow graduate students are doing and chat with them over breakfast, lunch, and during coffee breaks (food and beverages provided). An evening which you are warmly invited to spend at a party hosted by one of our graduate
students.
- Short description of SNEWS:
The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) is an annual workshop for graduate students in Linguistics to present their research and receive feedback in an informal setting. Topics of
presentation generally fall into any of the following categories (broadly defined): semantics, pragmatics, semantics/pragmatics interface, experimental and psycholinguistic investigations into semantic/pragmatic phenomena, etc. The workshop is meant to encourage the development and exchange of ideas through friendly interaction between students and faculty from different universities in the area. Universities that have participated in the past include UConn, UMass, Harvard, MIT, Brown, and Yale.
Cog Sci Mixer
Deniz Ozyildiz writes:
In order for us, the grad students involved in the UMass Cognitive Science initiative, to get acquainted with each other, both personally and professionally, it's a good idea to get together and chat! So I'm trying to set up a date for the first CogSci mixer of the fall semester. We had a few similar events last year and they were successful and fun!
If you're interested in attending the mixer, please fill out the doodle poll below. http://doodle.com/poll/88w4u3ee9f4ecd83
We'll meet at a local cafe or restaurant. Everybody will have the opportunity to present themselves and give a quick, informal overview of their work and their interests.
If you can't make it on any of these dates, but you're interested in meeting everybody, please let me know so that we can arrange for another date.
Please also circulate the information to your department and to everybody who you think might be interested. People can also sign up to be on our website and mailing lists:
http://blogs.umass.edu/cogsci/contact-and-mailing-lists/
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