UUSLAW on Saturday

Smith College will host the “University of Massachusetts, University of Connecticut and Smith College Language Acquisition Workshop” (UUSLAW) on Saturday, November 7. The talks, below, will be in McConnell Hall 103. 

9.30am  Coffee, tea and bagels  Foyer of McConnell

10 am Andie Faber (U.Mass) “Assigning and incorporating grammatical gender in L1 and L2 speakers of gendered languages”

10.40am Emma Nguyen (U.Conn)  "Some thoughts on English-speaking children's comprehension of long passives"

11.20am Ryosuke Hattori  (U.Conn) "On The Majority Influence in English-Chinese Japanese Trilingual Acquisition"

11.50pm Mantoa Smouse (UCT, visiting Smith) “The Acquisition of Disjoint Morphemes in isiXhosa”

12.30-2 Lunch break (we will provide, but other options available locally!) Foyer of McConnell

2pm Kadir Gökgöz  (U.Conn) "IX arguments in code-blending: asymmetries between subjects and objects"

2.30pm Meghan Armstrong (U. Mass) “Catalan-speaking children's multimodal perception of disbelief”

3.10pm Vanessa Petroj  (U. Conn) "Article Distribution in English-ASL Code-blended Whispered Speech"

3:50pm tea break  Foyer of McConnell

4.10pm Renato Lacerda (U.Conn) "Contrastive topicalization in early English: initial questions"

4.40pm Michael Clauss, Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson (U.Mass)  “Examining restrictiveness and the semantic correlates of recursion”

Dillon in Connecticut

Brian Dillon gives a colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut on Friday, November 6, entitled  "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives."

Barbara Partee at Hornucopia!

Barbara Partee will be at Yale November 6-7 to participate in Hornucopia (https://campuspress.yale.edu/hornucopia/) -- a workshop in honor of Laurence R. Horn on the occasion of his retirement. She'll be giving an invited talk: An ever-so-brief history of semantics, pragmatics, and Larry.

Call for Papers: ACAL 47

2nd Call for Papers: 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 47)

We are now accepting papers for the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, to be held at UC Berkeley, March 23-26, 2016. The general session will take place March 23-25, while a special workshop on "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa" will take place March 25-26.

General Session

For the general session we welcome papers on any area of African linguistics. The general conference will consist of talks, poster sessions, and plenary talks by prominent researchers on African languages.

Special Workshop: Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa

In addition to the general session, we welcome papers on the special theme "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa." Africa contains several distinct linguistic areas which are often claimed to hold special importance for the reconstruction of African proto-languages and our understanding of African pre-history. This workshop will focus on exploring the fine-grained areal distribution of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Africa with debates about genetic affiliation and historical migration patterns as a backdrop.

Deadline

The deadline for submission is Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 11:59pm PST (UTC-8:00). Please be advised that late submissions may not be considered. Because of visa requirements, prospective international participants are urged to submit their abstracts at the earliest date possible. Participants will be notified about the outcome of their submission by early January 2016.

Review process

All abstracts will be blind reviewed for their originality, quality, and relevance. Main session talks will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation with a 10 minute question and answer period. Poster presentations will take place at a dedicated time with no simultaneous oral sessions. An important factor in considering your abstract will be its appropriateness for a 20-minute talk.

Abstract Guidelines

All abstracts should be anonymous and written in English with glosses or translations for words or examples in any other language. Each abstract, including the title and any data in figures or tables, must not exceed 500 words. Data must include interlinear glosses following the Leipzig Glossing Rules. The 500-word abstract should be single-spaced and in a unicode font no smaller than 11 point, and in .pdfor .doc/.docx format. Abstracts must be be submitted electronically via EasyChair. Example abstracts from other conferences can be found on the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Submission Instructions

Submissions are restricted to one single-authored paper and one co-authored paper per individual. Your abstract must be submitted online using the EasyChair website, which will give you additional instructions, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acal47. If you have never used EasyChair before, you will need to register at https://www.easychair.org/account/signup.cgi?conf=acal47

Contact Information

For more information, you may email the conference organizers at acal47@berkeley.edu or visit the conference website: linguistics.berkeley.edu/acal47/.

Graduate Program in Linguistics at the University of Kansas

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 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 has several fellowships that will be available in the 2016-2017 academic year. All doctoral students who are admitted to the program will be offered five-year packages that include graduate teaching or research assistantship positions. We will be able to award one Chancellor’s Fellowship, the university's most prestigious graduate award, which offers a very generous funding package. All Ph.D. 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, Oxford University, 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 2016 semester is January 1, 2016.

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

Syntax Workshop

Lisa Green writes:

The schedule for the remaining activity is below.

November 6th: Discussion of "How to Neutralize a Finite Clause Boundary:Phase Theory and the Grammar of Bound Pronouns: by Thomas Grano and Howard Lasnik

November 13th: David Erschler talks

November 20th: Open

November 27th: Thanksgiving break (We will not meet.)

December 4th: Rodica Ivan talks

Armstrong in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, 10/30 at 12pm in N451. All are welcome! Meghan Armstrong will present a talk titled: "Tasks for eliciting expressive prosody in mother-child dyads"

SSRG tomorrow

Leland Kusmer:

Our next meeting will be this coming Monday, October 26th, at 7:30pm as usual. Two of our visitors — Lisa and Georgia — will be presenting their own work. The meeting will take place at the home of Lisa, Michael, and Jai Eun — 183 Bridge Street in Northampton.

As always, please remember to RSVP so that we can get food for you:

http://doodle.com/poll/crziepiqbyqqe3k5

Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Agreement at UMass

The departments of Linguistics and Psychology are hosting a workshop on Agreement Thursday and Friday of this week (Oct. 28 and 30). Registration is free, but if you plan on attending, you should rsvp here. Thursday’s talks are on “Agreement and Linear Order,” and Friday’s on “Experimental and theoretical approaches.” Thursday’s talks are in ILC N400 and Friday’s talks are in ILS S211.

For a schedule and more information, go here.

Tracy Conner in Kentucky

Tracy Conner gave a talk entitled “The Effects of Morphosyntactic Variation on Ellipsis Licensing” at the University of Kentucky last Monday, Oct. 19.

AAUW dissertation fellowships

The American Association of University Women has dissertation fellowships designed to help pay for living expenses in the year that a woman is writing her dissertation. The fellowships are available to citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. They are due on November 15, 2015. You can learn more here.

Tu+ program available

Deiz Ozylidiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here:

http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here: 

http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Alice Harris at Oxford

Alice Harris will be giving an invited talk at Oxford University on Monday, October 26, entitled “Affix order, multiple exponence, and morphological reconstruction."

Roeper in India

Tom Roeper gave a keynote talk at the Thirty-Seventh International Conference of Linguistic Society of India, hosted by the Centre of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi last week.  The title of his talk was “Recursion: from theory to acquisition in cross-linguistic Perspective.” He also gave a two week workshop on connecting acquisition experiments to fieldwork on newly researched Northern Indian languages. Tom is a guest at the Institute for Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is also giving a lecture entitled “Strict Interfaces: Why modern theories of UG entail greater Innateness."

Jill de Villiers presents at LARC

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, Oct. 23, at noon in ILC N451 to hear Jill de Villiers present: “How to make a child language assessment in a language with no history of assessments (or even research); some lessons learned.” All are welcome!

Claire Halpert gives talk on Friday

Syntax guru Claire Halpert will give a talk on Friday, Oct. 23, in ILC N400 at 3:30. (The title and abstract follow.) Claire has taken up residence in N472 until October 30, and she can be reached at halpert@umn.edu.

Escape clause

In this talk, I investigate the syntactic properties of clausal arguments, looking in particular at whether A-movement is permitted out of finite clauses and at whether these clauses themselves may undergo movement or establish agreement relationships. In English, argument clauses show some puzzling distributional properties compared to their nominal counterparts. In particular, they appear to satisfy selectional requirements of verbs, but can also combine directly with non-nominal-taking nouns and adjectives. Stowell (1981) and many others have treated these differences as arising from how syntactic case interacts with nominals and clauses. In a recent approach, Moulton (2015) argues that the distributional properties of propositional argument clauses are due to their semantic type: these clauses are type e,st and so must combine via predicate modification, unlike nominals. In contrast to English, I show that in the Bantu language Zulu, certain non-nominalized finite CPs exhibit identical selectional properties to nominals, therefore requiring a different treatment from those proposed in the previous literature. These clauses, also like nominals, appear to control phi-agreement and trigger intervention effects in predictable ways. At the same time, these clauses differ from nominals (and nominalized clauses) in the language in certain respects. I will argue that these properties shed light on the role that phi-agreement plays in the transparency/opacity of finite clauses for A-movement and on the nature of barrier effects in the syntax more generally.

Clauss at MIT

Mike Clauss gives a talk at the Acquisition Lab at MIT Wednesday, Oct. 21, where he will present “Classifying Adjectives without Semantic Information," joint work with Jeremy Hatrman.

Call for papers: Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics

The Department of English, Linguistics/TESOL Program at Central Connecticut State University is pleased to announce the 12th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, to be held from May 12 to May 15, 2016. As a special feature, we are hosting a one-day session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic Languages.

Invited Speakers:

- Mark Baker (Rutgers University)

- Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware)

- Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto)

2nd Call for Papers:

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10-minute discussions) and for posters on topics dealing with formal aspects of any area of theoretical Altaic linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Additionally, abstracts covering any area of theoretical linguistics of sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages are welcome. We are using Easy Abstracts at the LINGUIST List for the submission and the blind review process.

The address for abstract submission is: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/WAFL12

Authors are invited to submit anonymous abstracts to any of the following sessions:

- General session: May 13-15

- Special session on sign languages in the regions of spoken Altaic languages: May 12

- Poster session: TBA

Authors should indicate what session they are submitting an abstract to. Abstracts should be a maximum of one page in length excluding references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2.5 cm/1 inch. There is a maximum of two abstracts per person, one of which must be co-authored.

Important Dates:

- Deadline for submission: November 30, 2015, 11:59pm EST

- Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2016

Language. Cognition and Neuroscience issue on "Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics"

The special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on “Cross-linguistic Psycholinguistics,” edited by our own Alice Harris with Elisabeth Nordcliffe and Florian Jaeger has appeared. The issue has thirteen papers on language production and comprehension with a focus on understudied languages. You can learn more here.

Job at Yale

Claire Bowern writes:

The Department of Linguistics at Yale University is seeking to make a tenure-track appointment at the level of Assistant or Associate Professor (without tenure) to begin in Fall 2016.  The area of specialization is open and full consideration will be given to candidates in all areas, but we are particularly interested in candidates in phonetics/experimental phonology and semantics/pragmatics.  Special consideration will be given to candidates whose scholarly interests complement and connect with those of the current department faculty and other departments and research units at Yale. Evidence of successful teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will also be taken into consideration in making an appointment. Candidates should be assured of completing the requirements for the Ph.D. by the summer of 2016 at the latest.

The application will need to include a current CV, a research statement outlining the candidate's research program, evidence regarding teaching qualifications, and two or three representative pieces of research. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of reference to be submitted to this website. To ensure full consideration, applications should be submitted by November 15, 2015.  We expect to interview potential candidates at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Washington, DC in January 2016 (though attendance at that meeting is not a requirement for consideration).

For more information, go here: http://apply.interfolio.com/31809