UMass at LabPhon 15

Two submissions from UMass Linguistics to Laboratory Phonology 15, to be held at Cornell University, 13-16 July 2016, have been accepted for presentation as posters:

Kevin Mullin: Phonotactically-mediated compensation for coarticulation

Amanda Rysling, John Kingston, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen and Jeffrey Starns: Lexical knowledge is available, but not always used, very early

Lisa Sanders, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater, Robert Staubs and Benjamin Zobel: ERP evidence for the ecological validity of artificial language learning

Call for papers: Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop

The 31st edition of the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop will be a historic one as this will be the first CGSW to be held in Africa. Stellenbosch University in South Africa’s beautiful Western Cape Province will be hosting this meeting, which will take place on 2-3 December 2016.

Invited Speakers

Roland Hinterhölzl (Venice)

Jason Merchant (Chicago)

Tarald Taraldsen (Tromsø)

Call for papers

We invite abstracts for thirty-minute talks (followed by ten minutes of discussion) on any aspect of comparative Germanic syntax, including diachronic syntax. Given the location of the conference, we are also very interested in research focusing on lesser studied Germanic varieties, particularly those that have developed and/or been used in contact situations, including “extraterritorial” varieties ofcontinental Germanic. Papers focusing on formal aspects of “non-standard” varieties and on phenomena like code-switching are also very welcome, as are papers considering how aspects of the structure of non-Germanic languages spoken in southern Africa (may) have impacted on the structure of Germanic languages spoken in this part ofthe world.

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts should not exceed two pages, with 2.5cm margins on all sides and a font size of 12pt. This includes data, references and diagrams.

Each author may submit no more than one single-authored and one co-authored abstract, or two co-authored ones.

Abstracts must be anonymous and prospective presenters should submit their abstract in pdf to:
http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/cgsw31/cgsw31/about/submissions#online

Submissions

The deadline for submission is 31 May 2016.

Notification of acceptance by 1 July 2016.

Further informationPlease feel free to visit the conference website at the following address:

http://conferences.sun.ac.za/cgsw31.

Here, you will (in due course) find information regarding CGSW 31 itself, a pre-CGSW31 workshop involving international researchers (seebelow), visa applications, travel, and accommodation.

For local (Stellenbosch-related) information, please contact Erin Pretorius: erink@sun.ac.za

For directly CGSW-related information, please contact Theresa Biberauer: mtb23@cam.ac.uk

29th CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics

The University of Florida Gainesville is hosting the Twenty Ninth meeting of the CUNY conference on Psycholinguistics March 3-5. UMass is represented by:

Lap-Ching Keung and Adrian Staub who are presenting the paper “Closest conjunct agreement in English: A comparison with number attraction."

Alumna Katy Carlson, with Benjamin Lee, Sarah Nelson and Blake Clark, is presenting the poster “Comparative ellipsis has an object bias, though subjects are more frequent."

Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Computation of Agreement is Verb-Centric Regardless of Word Order."

Alumni Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson are presenting the poster “Correlate not optional: PP sprouting in ‘much less’ ellipsis."

Alumnus Greg Carlson, with Thais M. M. de Sa, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima and Micheal Tanenhause present the poster “Experimental evidence that “weak definite” noun phrases are not interpreted as generics"

Jérémy Pasquereau and Brian Dillon are presenting the poster “Grammaticality illusions are conditioned by lexical item-specific grammatical properties."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Sonia Michniewicz and Jessica Rett present the poster “Incremental interpretation in cases of individual/degree polysemy"

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Alyssa Ibarra, present the poster “Informational focus in Spanish pronoun resolution: answering the QUD"

Brian Dillon, with Akira Omaki and Zoe Ovans, present the poster “Intrusive reflexive binding inside a fronted wh-predicate."

Brian Dillon, Nicolleta Biondo and Francesco Vespignani present the poster “Structural Constraints strongly determine the attachment of termporal adverbs."

Adrian Staub, with Francesca Foppolo, Carlo Cecchetto, Caterina Donati and Vincenzo Moscati present the poster “Minding the gap: The parser avoids relative clause analyses whenever it can."

Alumnus Paul de Lacy, with Karin Stromswold and Gwendolyn Rehrig present the poster “Passive sentences can be predicted by adults."

Shayne Sloggett and Brian Dillon present the poster “Person blocking effects in the processing of English reflexives."

Alumna Margaret Grant with Kelly-Ann Blake and Frederick Gietz present the poster “Prediction and inhibition of syntactic structure: Evidence from either (of the)… or."

Alumnus Jeff Runner, with Yahang Xu, presents the poster “Reflexive Retrieval in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence against the local search hypothesis."

Alumnus Michael Terry and alumna Masako Hirotani, with Erik Thomas and Sandra Jackson present the poster “The processing of third person singular -s by African American English speaking second graders: an auditory ERP study."

Alumnus Keir Moulton, with Kyeong-min Kim and Chung-hye Han, present the poster “The syntax of null objects: evidence from inter-speaker variation."

For more information, go here.

Cable at MIT

Seth Cable gave a colloquium talk at MIT last Friday, February 19. The title of his talk was: “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages).” An abstract follows.

Some languages appear to have a morpheme that combines the meaning of past tense with a variety of additional implications, the nature of which depend upon the aspectual marking of the verb. For non-perfective verbs (imperfective, habitual, future,etc.), the additional implication is that the event/state in question fails to extend into the present. For perfective verbs, however, the additional implication is either that (i) the result state of the event fails to extend into the present, or (ii) some natural, expected consequence of the event failed to occur. Importantly, unlike the superficially similar ‘cessation implicatures’ of past tense in languages like English, these aforementioned implications cannot be directly cancelled. Consequently, prior authors have viewed these additional inferences as semantic in nature, as being encoded directly in the lexical semantics of the morpheme (Leer 1991; Copley 2005; Plungian & van der Auwera 2006). Under this view, the morphemes in question express a special category of tense, one that has been labeled ‘discontinuous past’ by Plungian & van der Auwera (2006).

Through in-depth investigation of one such ‘discontinuous past’ marker in the Tlingit language, I argue that – to the contrary – the special inferences of these morphemes are not semantic, and are instead defeasible pragmatic inferences. Consequently, putative instances of ‘discontinuous past’ are in their semantics simply past tenses. I provide a formalized analysis of the pragmatic inferences associated with these past tenses, whereby they ultimately follow from (i) the optionality of the tense markers in question, and (ii) a special principle relating to the inherent topicality of the utterance time. The empirical and analytic results align well with a restrictive theory of cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics, one where the only tense categories across language are Past, Non-Future, and (maybe) Present (Cable 2013).

Tony Woodbury visits this week

John Kingston writes:

Tony Woodbury, from the University of Texas Austin, will be visiting from 22 Feb-5 Mar to work with our colleague in Anthropology, Emiliana Cruz, and me. Let me know if you'd like to get together with him.

Hammerly at Syntax Workshop

Syntax Workshop on Monday (4:30 in ILC N451) will feature a talk by Chris Hammerly entitled: (Un)interpretability and the representation of morphosyntactic features. Here’s an abstract:

In the talk, I argue that the distinction between uninterpretable and interpretable features is unnecessary. All of the functions that have been attributed to this distinction can either be derived directly from mechanisms of the grammar, or subsumed under other independently motivated representational properties of features. I focus particularly on deriving facts regarding the interpretation of features at LF, with a keen eye towards the use of interpretability in agreement systems. This is very much work in progress, so I ask people to bring their favorite instance of where the interpretability distinction has been used to see if my claim holds up.

LSA February Spotlight: Ivy Hauser

Our own Ivy Hauser is the LSA’s member spotlight this month! Check it out here.

Tony Woodbury gives talk on Friday

Tony Woodbury will give a talk in the colloquium slot at 3:30 PM next Friday 26 February 2016 in ILC N400. The title of his talk is: The ‘genius' of the language: discovering the pervasive plan and unique design in linguistic description.

LARC

Mike Clauss writes:

Next week at the meeting of LARC we're going to try something new: having a reading group discussion.

LARC meetings have traditionally been focused on new and in-development acquisition research being done by UMass community members. This provides us all a lot of opportunity to workshop our ideas and fine tune experimental designs. But, there is a wide world of acquisition work out there, some of which makes assumptions that we often don't think too much about here, or uses methodologies which might not be widely used here. So, reading recent journal articles on acquisition work will be a way to learn about the variety that exists, and make sense of the sort of talks we are likely to see at places like BUCLD and other acquisition conferences where people of various theoretical backgrounds (and, in particular, psychologists working on acquisition) tend to be.

To that end, we will be reading and discussing next week articles from a recent issue of Language Acquisition (Vol 22 Issue 3; 2015 -- available online through the library). There are four articles; feel free to come having read any number of them. The titles are below.
The effect of input on children's cross-categorical use of polysemous noun-verb pairs (Lippeveld and Oshima-Takane)Object clitic omission in Child Spanish: evaluating representational and processing accounts (Mateu)Bootstrapping the syntactic bootstrapper: probabilistic labeling of prosodic phrases (Gutman, Dautriche, Crabbe, and Cristophe)Isomorphism for all (but not both): floating as a means to investigate scope (Tieu)

The hope is to have a largely student-run discussion, but anyone who is interested in acquisition in general or any of these particular topics should feel free to come, listen, and share thoughts.

LARC meets Wednesdays at 12:15 in ILC N458.

DGfS in Konstanz February 24-26

The 38th annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sprachwissenschaft will be held at Konstanz University this weekend. UMass is out in force:

Alumnus Kenneth Drozd is giving an invited talk “Cumulative universal quantification."

Tom Roeper, with Rebecca Woods, will be presenting the paper “Separating Tense and Assertion: Evidence from Embedded V2 and Child Language” and, with Jill de Villiers will be presenting the paper “How representations determine stages of acquisition.” and with Jennifer Rau, will present the paper “Children fail to repair presuppositions.

Magda Oiry will present the paper “How children deal with a contextually canceled presupposition."

Alumna Elena Benedicto will also be presenting the paper “Classifiers as agreement…or not?" 

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Cory Bill, Jeremy Zehr, Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli, will present the paper “On the acquisition of presupposition projection."

You can learn more here.

Staubs goes to MITRE

Robert Staubs has recently started a position at MITRE as a senior data scientist. MITRE is a not-for-profit organization that exclusively does work in the public interest for government clients. Congratulations Robert!

Woodbury at Sound Workshop

John Kingston writes:

Tony Woodbury will present his joint work with Stephanie Villard on tone in Zacatepec Chatino in Sound Workshop on Friday 26 February 1-2 in ILC N451.

UMass at AAAS

Tom Roeper writes:

Last weekend Barbara Pearson and I (and Megan Armstrong was there too) participated in the Family Science section of AAAS in Washington where all kinds of booths on science, geo-science, lego-robots, astronauts were present--and a booth with about 30 language folks, from profs to grad students to undergrads, interacted with children (usually using ipads, as we did) on language issues from phonetics to recursion (our domain). It was supported by NSF and the Language outreach program of the University of Maryland. We had a great time---particularly with the many autistic children who came--illustrating, playing with, and explaining recursion in terms of possessives.PP's, compounds, and relative clauses. Next year it will be in Boston and it might be nice to have a larger UMass contingent.

Call for papers: Sinn und Bedeutung

Sinn und Bedeutung 21 will take place in Edinburgh, from Sun 4th-Tues 6th September 2016.

We invite abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters, devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistic investigations related to meaning. Oral presentations will be scheduled for 40 minute slots (30 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion).

Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author (or two co-authored abstracts).

Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 31, 2016. When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether you would like it to be considered for a talk, a poster or both.

Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub21

For further information, please contact Rob Truswell (rob.truswell@ed.ac.uk).

UQAM Cognitive Science Summer School

Host Institution: Université du Québec à MontréalCoordinating Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal

Website: http://www.summer16.isc.uqam.ca/page/renseignement.php?lang_id=2

Dates: 20-Jun-2016 - 01-Jul-2016

Location: Montréal, Québec, Canada

Focus: Reasoning is an important component of human cognitive ability, and, as such, it is investigated by an extremely broad range of disciplines and interdisciplinary endeavors, including many branches of linguistics. The University of Quebec at Montreal thus welcomes linguists and language scholars interested in reasoning to attend its two-week summer school that focuses on this theme.Minimum Education Level: BA

Description:Registration is now open for UQAM's Cognitive Science Summer School, taking place from June 20 to July 1 2016 on our campus in downtown Montreal, just steps from Jazz Fest and other cultural activites. This year's theme is 'Reasoning' and the two-week program covers topics related to a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines including language acquisition, pragmatics, modality, computational linguistics, and Bayesian psycholinguistics in addition to other areas of cognitive science. An ensemble of more than 50 internationally-renowned researchers will team teach these topics via lectures and discussions, held entirely in English. We welcome the participation of graduate students as well as post-graduate scholars, faculty and other professionals. Continuing education or course credit may be possible.

For further details, including the full program and list of instructors, see the summer school website. 

Linguistic Field(s):

Cognitive Science

Computational Linguistics

Language Acquisition

Linguistic Theories

Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics

Psycholinguistics

Semantics

Tuition: 150 CAD

Registration: 01-Feb-2016 to 17-Jun-2016

Contact Person: Elizabeth Allyn Smith

Email: eallynsmithaddress-marker.gifgmail.com

Seth Cable talks in Semantics Workshop

Seth will be presenting his paper “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages,” in Semantics Workshop this week. Semantics Workshop meets on Wednesday in ILC N458 from 12:20-1:10.

 

 

Lingle on Tuesday

This term’s Lingle (the Linguistics Majors Mingle) will meet on Tuesday, February 16, at 5PM in ILC N400. The Lingle will be devoted to the ways in which majors can prepare for non-academic jobs.

Ethan Poole speaks in Syntax Workshop

In compliance with the UMass calendar, Syntax Workshop will meet this week on Tuesday, Feb. 16,  (instead of Monday) at 4PM in ILC N451. Ethan Poole will be giving his forthcoming GLOW talk “the locality of dependent Case."

PRG meets on Thursday

Brandon Prickett writes:

We're going to begin discussing journal articles in PRG at our next meeting (which will be on Thursday, 2/18). If you're interested in doing this with us and were not at the last meeting (on 2/4), then email me so I can include you in the email chain in which we discuss what will be presented (if you email me, I'll also explain what we're doing in more detail than I did here).

Masters in Computational Linguistics at Rochester University

The Computational Linguistics MS program at Rochester trains students to be conversant both in the analysis of language and in computational techniques applied to natural language. The curriculum consists of courses in Linguistics and Computer Science for a total of 32 credit hours.

Graduates from the Computational Linguistics MS program will be prepared for both further training at the PhD level in Computer Science and Linguistics and Computational Linguistics positions in industry. A growing number companies such as Google, Amazon.com, Nuance, LexisNexis, Oracle and many others are searching for employees with advanced degrees in Computational Linguistics for positions ranging from speech recognition technology to improving translation systems to developing bettermodels of language understanding. 

For fullest consideration, applicants should submit completed applications by March 1, though applications will continue to be considered as space permits. All documents and application materials should be uploaded in the online application (https://apply.grad.rochester.edu/apply/). Fees for applications received by February 15 waived (more information: https://apply.grad.rochester.edu/register/ASEwaiver). 

Direct questions to jeffrey.runner@rochester.edu

For more information about the program, go here.