Gillian Gallagher (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA; now a PhD candidate at MIT) presented in PhG yesterday (April 23). Her talk was called 'The role of contrast in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions'.
[Thanks Michael!]
Jonah Katz (2003 UMass Amherst BA; now in the Linguistics graduate program at MIT) had a letter published in the Boston Globe on the advantages of choosing UMass Amherst. Thanks for this, Jonah!
[Thanks Lisa S!]
From his recent Century of Scholarship lecture:
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
Kathryn Flack (2007 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD), currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire, will continue on at Hampshire next year. She will teach and advise in Cognitive Science half time, and she will work in Institutional Research half time. Congratulations, Kathryn!
Shigeto Kawahara (2007 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD, presently tenure-track at the University of Georgia) has accepted a tenure-track offer from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Congratulations, Shigeto!
PhG meets next on Wednesday, April 16. Gillian Gallagher (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA; now a PhD candidate at MIT) will return to present.
Amalia Gnanadesikan (1997 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD) has accepted a permanent faculty position at Holy Family University in northeast Philadelphia. She'll be teaching writing. Amalia has been a regular contributor to The Vocabula Review. Her popular book The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet is in press at Blackwell.
[Thanks John!]
Angela Carpenter's dissertation Learning Artificial Languages: The Role of Universal Grammar is now available on Amazon.
[Thanks Kathy!]
A reminder from UG advisor Rajesh Bhatt:
On March 28, Deanna Moore (2005 UMass Amherst Linguistics MA) will talk about her work at National Evaluation Systems and how she uses linguistics in her job. The talk starts at 3:30 pm on South College 304.
Deanna, whose official job title is Content Developer, works with The National Evaluation Systems Group of Pearson. She develops teacher certification exams for foreign language teachers, including languages like Hmong. Deanna wrote to us saying: "I can't believe they pay me to do what I do. It's a job where I can incorporate all of my background in linguistics."
The talk will be followed by an informal discussion and will be accompanied by refreshments.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
Gennaro Chierchia
Harvard University
Logic and grammar: How language and reasoning shape each other
Wednesday, April 9, 1:30-3:00 pm, Campus Center Room 904
Continue reading "Chierchia Public Lecture on Logic and Grammar" »
Larry Solan will deliver the next Freeman Lecture, on Thursday, October 2, 2008, at 4:00 pm. The title is 'Law, language, and the modular mind'. Larry Solan is a 1978 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD. He is now Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.
Uri Strauss sent in this update:
I'll soon be wrapping up year two of my law school program in Cleveland, OH, and I don't want to keep WHISC readers in suspense about what I'm up to. I'll be spending the summer in Miami, FL, working for the Service Employees International Union. I'll probably drop by the department on my way there (being bad with directions). I miss South College.
I've recently started a blog called A linguist goes to law school, which may be of occasional interest to WHISC readers. Comments and feedback are welcome. To fulfill my law school's writing requirement, I am planning to address a controversial provision in a United Nations resolution (Security Council Resolution 242), which has been the subject of a wide-ranging dispute over whether it is to be interpreted as existential or universal. My plan is to (1) clarify the nature of the ambiguity using linguistic concepts, and (2) use diagnostics to argue that the universal reading exists. Details cheerfully provided upon request, and will probably be posted sooner or later on the aforementioned blog.
[Thanks Uri!]
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is holding a conference on epistemic modals, the second in their Chambers Philosophy Conference Series. The list of invited speakers includes Angelika Kratzer and Kai von Fintel (1994 UMass Amherst PhD; now Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT).
Update: We've been informed that this workshop is not until 2010! (This is right on the webpage; somehow, we missed it.) Apologies for getting your hopes up!
The UMass Amherst Graduate School is celebrating A Century of Scholarship (1908-2008) on Wednesday, April 9. One of the invited speakers is our own Gennaro Chierchia. Gennaro received his PhD from UMass Amherst Linguistics in 1984 with a now-classic dissertation Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Infinitives and Gerunds. He is currently the Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics at Harvard.
Gennaro's talk is from 1:30-3:00 on Campus Center Room 904. The title is 'Logic and grammar: How language and reasoning shape each other'.
[Thanks Lisa S and Kathy!]
On March 8, John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, and Eve Brenner-Alsop presented a talk called "Contextual effects on the perception of duration in speech and non-speech" at NEST (New England Sequence and Timing). NEST was held at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. Michael Key and Sarah Watsky attended the meeting and helped quell the unruly hordes.
Shigeto Kawahara (2007 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD; now Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia) will give a talk on the universality of the prosodic hierarchy this Friday, March 7, at 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room (South College 301).
[Thanks Lisa!]
Thony Gillies is hosting a series of mini-workshops this semester, at the University of Michigan. Kai von Fintel (1994 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD) is the invited speaker this Wednesday, March 5, and the two commentators are Craige Roberts (1987 UMass Amherst PhD) and Chris Potts. Kai will be talking about the work he and Thony have been doing on epistemic modals and evidentiality.
An update from John McCarthy:
Julia Hanley, who got her linguistics BA in 2004, entered the Peace Corps in May 2005 and was assigned to Kenya. She worked with local people on public health education, including HIV prevention, maternal and child health, and contraception. She also raised funds to outfit an orphanage. As she began her third year of service, she was promoted to managing a regional office with responsibility for other volunteers and their programs. Her final duty was to oversee the evacuation of 38 volunteers from regions of civil unrest in Kenya. The deteriorating situation there cut short her last year of service, and she returned to the US in January.
MIT Linguistics now has an online newsletter, WHAMIT! (What's Happening at MIT!). Check it out in your browser, subscribe to the RSS feed, or get it by email. Kai von Fintel, Adam Albright, and Jonah Katz (2003 UMass Amherst BA) are at the helm.
[Thanks Kai!]
From Ola Horn, via Emmon Bach:
I am writing to tell you that George passed away suddenly (and totally unexpectedly) this past July at the age of 65, while getting ready to go out for his morning walk/jog that he had enjoyed for years. He moved us all to Baltimore in 2004, having retired from the University of Newcastle the year before. He certainly did not enjoy his retirement for a long time, but got to spend some time back home, where he always wanted to return.
George Horn received his PhD in Linguistics from UMass Amherst in 1975.
The GLSA has two new titles on offer:
Paula Menendez-Benito. 2007. The Grammar of Choice.
Kathryn Flack. 2007. The Sources of Phonological Markedness.
Tom Roeper just returned from giving the keynote lecture at the EU commission COST meeting in Cyprus, which was organized by Uli Sauerland and ZAS in Berlin.
Tom writes:
The program was inspired by our AAE dialect work connected to the DELV test, and it is aimed to bring eastern and Western European scholars together to develop assessment of children speaking dialects in countries where no assessments exist. Former UMass folks (Ken Drozd, Bart Hollebrandse, Angeliek van HOut, Kazulo Yatsushiro, Petra Schulz) played a major role in jointly designed experiments on Tense and aspect, quantification and implicatures, wh-, binding, and passive.
Crucial DELV sentences like "who bought what" and quantifier spreading will now be explored in 17 languages with work in, for instance, Bulgarian, Polish, Romani, Hebrew and Arabic underway and Estonian to follow.
With a little luck (well, maybe a lot of luck) real comparisons will be possible, but no matter what it is a major step in taking eastern European dialects and their human consequences seriously. The program is seeking as many dialects as possible, and I think our students who know relevant languages and dialects might get involved in the future if they would like to.
A huge number of UMass Amherst linguists are presenting at NELS 38, October 26-28, at the University of Ottawa. Many thanks to Joe for putting this list together:
Current department members:
Alums:
Mike Walsh Dickey (2000 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD) has accepted a tenure-track job in the Department of Communication Science & Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh. Congratulations, Mike!
A number of UMass Amherst linguists are presenting work at Sinn und Bedeutung 12, in Oslo, September 20-22:
| Amy Rose Deal | Property-type objects and modal embedding |
| Luis Alonso-Ovalle (UMass Boston; 2005 UMass Amherst PhD) | Innocent Exclusion in an Alternative Semantics |
| Ana Arregui (Ottawa; 2003 UMass Amherst PhD) | On past facts and the semantics of counterfactuals |
| Francesca Foppolo (Milano-Bicocca; former SC visitor) | Between 'cost' and 'default' of scalar implicature |
| Irene Heim (1982 UMass Amherst PhD) | Invited talk |
| Valentine Hacquard (Maryland; 2006-7 Partee Visiting Professor) | Restructuring and implicative properties of volere |
| Uli Sauerland (ZAS; former SC visitor) | Hardt’s surprising sloppy readings: A flat binding account |
| Lynsey Wolter (Rochester; former SC visitor) | That is Rosa: Identificational sentences as intensional predication |
Anna Verbuk has filed her dissertation, Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures, and begun a McGill post-doc with Thomas Shultz, of the McGill Department of Psychology. She will be part of the Center for Research on Language, Mind and Brain at McGill. Her project is on the acquisition of relevance implicatures.
Congratulations, Anna!
The most prominent three-day biannual European conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA, Sept 6-8, Barcelona) features no less than 13 UMass Amherst people presenting 10 papers and posters: faculty member Tom Roeper, students Helen Stickney and Keir Moulton, UMass Amherst-Smith collaborators Jill de Villiers, Kate Hobbs, Catherine Léger, alums Bart Hollebrandse, Anna Perez (UMass Amherst Spanish), and Miren Hodgson (UMass Amherst Spanish), former visitors Angeliek van Hout, Petra Schulz, Magda Oiry, Eric-Jan Smits, and Kazuko Yatsushiro. In addition, a special session on Theory of Mind was jointly organized by Bart Hollebrandse and former visitor Uli Sauerland.
No other institution in the world comes even close to having this level of representation.
[Thanks Tom!]
Shigeto Kawahara filed his dissertation and moved to Georgia, where he is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Georgia.
In addition, a joint paper by Shigeto and Takahito Shinya has been accepted for publication in Phonetica. The paper is called 'The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: Evidence for Intonational Phrase'.
Tom Roeper was in Japan this month. He gave the keynote lecture, 'Recursion and exclusivity', based on joint work with Bart Hollebrandse, at the Kansei Linguistics Society meeting. There were many UMass Amherst folks in attendance, including Armin Mester, Junko Ito, Mariko Sugahara, Mari Takahasi, and Masanobu Ueda.
Tom also spoke in Sendai, at Tohuku University, on acquisition and implicatures, based in part on Anna Verbuk's work, at a workshop in Kyoto on morphology on joint work with Angeliek van Hout and Masaaki Kamiya, and at an acquisition workshop at Nanzan University on the acquisition of quantification.
(Wow, that's a lot of talks.)
Lauren Terzenbach, who got a BA in Linguistics and Russian in 2003, was on an ROTC scholarship and entered the Army as a 2nd lieutenant immediately after graduation. She is now a captain and adjutant of the 163d Military Intelligence Battalion. She's in Iraq now, and her unit just got extended for another three months, but she's looking ahead to completing her service commitment and going to grad school in 2008.
[Thanks John McCarthy!]
Karen Jesney and Joe Pater are presenting at the LSA Institute Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology. Karen's talk is called 'The locus of variation in weighted constraint grammars', and Joe's talk is called 'Phonological Variation in Harmonic Grammar'.
The MIT Greek Syntax–Semantics Workshop takes place May 20-22. The UMass Amherst presenters are Rajesh Bhatt and Kyle Johnson, Paula Menéndez-Benito (2005 UMass Amherst Linguistics Phd; returning as a visiting professor next year) is also on the program, as are this year's Syntax Guru Roumi Pancheva and a host of prestigious UMass Amherst alums: Gennaro Chierchia, Kai von Fintel, Irene Heim, Winnie Lechner.
Jason Fossella, a recent UMass Amherst Linguistics BA, wrote to say that he is studying to become a civil engineer — and that his linguistics training is a big asset. He wrote, "the habits of thought I picked up studying linguistics have really helped me in my new field. Being able to analyze and describe complex systems is a valuable skill for an engineer, and syntax and semantics certainly taught me that."
Very cool! Thank you, Jason!
Mark Stein (1981 UMass Amherst PhD) recently sent in some updates. He's been working as a chaplain at Albany Medical Center, his daugher is finishing up school at MIT (Civil Engineering, as it happens &mdash Jason might advise that she take a few linguistics courses), and his wife Cheryl Geisler is Chair of the Department of Language, Literature and Communication at RPI.
Mark was wondering when we would again have a reunion-style picnic. Barbara?
From Angelika:
Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD; now Associate Professor at Penn) will talk in my seminar on May 8, 2:30-5:15, Machmer W-21. Everyone is welcome to attend. You don't have to be a regular participant. Maribel will talk about biased questions. The recommended readings are:
Maribel will be here from Tuesday (May 8) to Thursday (May 10). Let me know whether you want to schedule an appointment with her and what your time constraints are.
Veena Dwivedi (1994 UMass Amherst PhD) has accepted a position in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Brock University, Ontario. Veena continues to work on the syntax--semantics interface, but her research has taken a more psycholinguistic turn of late. She reports that she is now using "super cool EEG techniques" to investigate semantic processing. Along with Natalie Philips and Shari Baum, she's just received a three-year SSHRC grant to continue these projects.
Samuel Jay Keyser, former UMass Amherst Linguistics Head and Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, is leading a trip to Bhutan this May.
[Thanks Barbara!]
UMass Amherst Linguistics BA Heather Walts is living and working in Pakistan. She filed this report. Check out her weblog for more on her adventures.
My MA TESOL students at Lahore College for Women have embarked on their first ever Syntax and Semantics projects and I am eagerly awaiting their papers. Their task was to compare Pakistani English usage with standard varieties. For a sample, I gave them an idea for an experiment about the interpretation of "dress" in Pakistani English. It's my hypothesis that "dress" can be used to mean any matching set of clothes, whether for men or women, and that what American or British speakers think of as a dress will be referred to as "frock." I was quite taken aback one day when a male friend told me, 'I have to pick up my dresses at the dry cleaner." I was thinking, wow, maybe he has some hobby that I didn't know about, but it turned out that he meant his clothes for work (dress pants and button-down shirts).
If the students were to choose the topic of the word "dress," they would need to design an experiment to see what articles or sets of clothing can be considered as "dress" here in Pakistan, and by what background of speakers.
As the previously mentioned friend is about to head to Canada as a permanent resident, I've now drilled into his head that in North America "dress" can only refer to a specific type of women's clothes, not his clothes!
The other sample idea I gave them was to look into the pluralization of verbs in the case of respect. In Urdu, singular subjects can take plural pronouns, case markings and verbal morphology if respect is due to that person. When this transfers into English, you get sentences like: "My father are coming."
Some of the topics that the students are looking into include:
and my personal favorite:
Stay tuned, I'll be creating a web blog to post their projects online.
In other news I'm in the middle of coming up with a proposal for a Linguistics Library at the Ali Institute of Education. We'll be starting a post graduate diploma in English Language Teaching next year and I've been encouraging our department to include linguistics courses in the program. There is currently only one linguistics program in Lahore at the University of Punjab. It's a one year post graduate diploma. The Ali Institute has offered to hire me to design a one year program in Linguistics which would culminate with each student writing a thesis. For that to happen, we need resources! My director has given me the task to make up a list of books and articles that I can acquire during my time in the US and we will apply for funding for the resources as well as the shipping.
If you have any recommendations as "must haves" for the library, please contact me at . Thanks!
The International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (ICEAL) was held at the University of Toronto November 10012. Jen Smith was an invited speaker, and presented her work on loanword phonology. Shigeto Kawahara was a student invited speaker, and gave a talk on the phonetic naturalness and unnaturalness in phonology. Min-Joo Kim presented her work on internally-headed relative clause constructions in Korean. Lan Kim (Simon Frazier University) presented her collaboration work with John Alderete on [h] and aspirated consonants in Korean. Also in the audience were some UMass Amherst alums: Toni Borowsky(temporarily teaching at York University) and Satoshi Tomioka.
Heather Walts, UMass Amherst Linguistics BA, has been living and working in Pakistan for nearly a year now. The following continues her report on greetings.
"Ya Ali madad," say the children as they pass by me in the village streets. May Ali help you always. "Muala Ali madad." May Ali always help you too.
We are in Ismaili territory now, and the Sunni/Shia greeting of Salaam Alaikum (May the peace of Allah be upon you) along with it's response Wa alaikum asalaam (May the peace of Allah also be upon you) is no longer the standard.
Now I'm in real trouble with my greetings, because while I don't mind using the standard greeting Salaam Alaikum, I have a bit of trouble saying Ya Ali madad. Why is that? Well as a Christian myself I believe that God (Arabic = Allah, Urdu = Xuda) can bestow peace upon someone, but I personally don't believe that Ali is physically helping anyone. It would as if in America the greeting was not "Hello, how are you?" (or "Hey, what's up?") but it was something like "May Buddha be helping you", "May Jesus be helping you," or "May Krishna be helping you." It would certainly be odd to stick in the name of someone that you personally did not believe to have that power.
The Shia/Sunni split is based on a difference in opinion over how the leadership of the Muslim community should be decided. Basically, Shia believe that leadership should be hereditary and that Ali, Mohammad's son in law, should have been the first rightful Caliph (leader of the Muslim community). Prior to Ali, there were three other caliphs who the Shia regard as usurpers. Ali ended up being killed by some who didn't agree with his claim to leadership, as was his son Hussein. With the death of Hussein came the split of Sunni and Shia, Shia holding that the leadership should be chosen from Mohammad's family. Shia also consider their religious leader, the imam, to be infallible (unable to do wrong) and to have a direct connection with Allah, unlike other devout followers. Within Shi'ism there is a further breakdown of sects depending on how long they believe the true imamate lasted. Some Shia believe the 7 th imam was the last one and some Shia believe the 12th imam was the last one, these are referred to as the Seveners and the Twelvers respectively.
The Ismailis are those who believe the imamate has continued to the present day. Most Ismailis live in the Hunza region of Pakistan. Their current imam is Aga Khan, who I'm told is the third richest man living in France….or at least that's the rumor in Hunza. Third richest or tenth richest man in France, this man's picture is in every living room in Ismaili villages. His picture watches over you as you ride in a Suzuki down steep mountain roads. His smiling face is looking down on you as you enjoy a modest meal in the smallest hole-in-the-wall restaurant. No shop would be complete without Aga Khan's photo hanging above the merchandise.
Not only is his picture everywhere, but his investment is as well. The Aga Khan Development Foundation is the largest NGO active in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. Each village has an Aga Khan Diamond Jubilee School for primary education. Irrigation projects have been sponsored by Aga Khan. Clean drinking water, sanitation, transport roads, literacy programs, girls' hostels, girls' colleges, health centers, micro-loans, small business development, women's vocational training, you name it! It's all provided by Aga Khan's various organizations.
Technically, I would say that the Ismailis worship not only Ali, but also the Aga Khan. They have special worship songs written only for him. They celebrate his birthday, anniversary, and even his sons' marriages. One day when I was in the village everything was put on hold because the Aga Khan's son was getting married in India. People had to run off to worship at the jamaa khana.
So back to my problem of the greetings: What do I say when I greet Ismailis? Well the good thing is that most of the Ismailis I know are Burushaski speakers and they do not use the ya Ali madad greeting. They generally stick with the traditional "Behal bila"and the response "Thik bila." I haven't learned so much about Burushaski (language isolate, heavy borrowing from Urdu) but there's not any reference to Ali or the Aga Khan in there so I'm safe. Bila = form of "be", thik = ok/good, borrowed from Urdu.
My friends from the Hunza region tend to only use ya Ali madad as an exclamative and not as a greeting. When 75 year-old grandpa is trying to stand up, he says, "Ya Ali madad." When they find out someone in the village has become pregnant, "Ya Ali madad." It can be used in either a positive or negative exclamation.
It would be interesting to do a survey on the Ismaili villages in the Northern Areas and to see under what circumstances they use the expression ya Ali madad and how its use differs from place to place, but as for now my greeting crisis is temporarily solved. I'm back in Lahore where most people I meet are Sunni or Shia Muslims, so it's safe for me to use Salaam alaikum once more.
Craige Roberts is hosting an all-star workshop on presuppositions accommodation at The OSU, October 13-15, as part of The Pragmatics Initiative. Lyn Frazier is giving an invited lecture on novel definites, and Florian Schwarz has a poster on the morphosemantics of definites. There are in addition a number of distinguished UMass Amherst Linguistics alums involved: Kai von Fintel is giving an invited paper, and Dorit Abusch, Mats Rooth, Greg Carlson, and Nirit Kadmon are commentators.
Joe Pater is taking his sabbatical in Utrecht. He has a bunch of collaborations going there, and a bunch more with people on this continent. Here's his brief report from abroad:
I've got a couple of talks coming up. They are at my webpage. And I'm busy continuing work on collaborative projects with UMass Amherst people: all of you at HaLP, Karen Jesney, Anne-Michelle Tessier (now Assistant Professor at Alberta), and Andries Coetzee (now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan), and I'm starting new projects with Utrecht people (Rene Kager, Shakuntala Mahala). I'm happy now that my MacBook has been fixed, but sad that my bike was stolen after having it for only two weeks.
