[Thanks Barbara!]
Lisa Selkirk's retirement party gets underway tomorrow (May 22), 7:00 pm, at Ellen and John's place!
The NSF-sponsored workshop Recursion: Structural Complexity in Language and Cognition takes place here at UMass Amherst, May 26-28. The workshop is organized by Peggy Speas and Tom Roeper, and it features a line-up of top scholars.
UMass Amherst is holding a farewell celebration for Esther Terry on Friday, May 29, from 4:00-6:00 pm, in the Student Union Ballroom. Esther is retiring from UMass, but apparently she won't be all that retiring — she will become Provost at Bennett College for Women in North Carolina. Esther is being honored with an endowment fund to support PhD research in Afro-American Studies here at UMass Amherst. The fund, as well as some of Esther's major achievements, are described here. An achievement that isn't listed: our own J. Michael Terry, 2004 UMass Amherst PhD, now Assistant Professor in Linguistics at UNC Chapel Hill!
The department held a special public showing of the film The Linguists today. In case you missed it, check it out online: it is screening on Babelgum for a limited time. (Thanks to Jennifer Carlson for the pointer.)
MUMM (the MIT-located version of UMMM) takes place this Saturday, May 9. Here's the schedule:
| 11:00 | Emily Elfner | Harmonic Serialism and stress-epenthesis interactions in Levantine Arabic |
|---|---|---|
| 11:45 | Bronwyn Bjorkman (MIT) | Uniform exponence and reduplication: evidence from Kinande |
| 12:30 | Patrick Jones (MIT) | The evidence for the phonological stem in Kinande |
| 1:15-2:30 | lunch | |
| 2:30 | Anne Pycha (Penn/UMass) | The role of acoustic shape in phonological grammar: evidence from eye tracking |
| 3:15 | Hyesun Cho (MIT) | The problem of generalization in a statistical learning model of phonotactics |
| 4:00 | break | |
| 4:30 | Brian Smith (UMass) | The null parse in Harmonic Grammar |
| 5:15 | Karen Jesney (UMass) | Licensing in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar |
Talks are 30 mins, followed by 10 mins discussion, 5 mins walking about.
[Thanks John!]
The annual Second-Year Mini-Conference takes place on Thursday, May 14, in Dickinson 110, from 9:30-12:00.
| 9:30 | Coffee | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Emerson Loustau | Aspect, agentive agreement, and i-level predicates in Mohawk |
| 10:30 | Anisa Schardl | Variable unaccusativity |
| 11:00 | Chloe Gu | Maximization in Mandarin wh-conditionals |
| 11:30 | Noah Constant | Variations in contrastive topic marking – evidence from Mandarin Chinese |
This year, the Linguistics department has a record fifteen majors graduating! The department is hosting a dinner in their honor starting at 5:30 pm on May 12, in the department lounge (third floor of South College). All are welcome; RSVPs to Rajesh would be much appreciated.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
On May 22, starting at 7:00 pm, we'll celebrate Lisa Selkirk's retirement with a dinner party at John McCarthy and Ellen Woolford's place (37 Shattuck Rd, Hadley). Please let Kyle know if you can't make it. (We'll assume you're coming unless we hear from you.)
(There is parking along Shattuck Road, and at the curb on Gooseberry Lane, which is the cul-de-sac on the left, just past their house.)
[Thanks Kyle!]
At the HFA end-of-semester event on Tuesday, May 12, 3:00 pm, in the Studio Arts Building, there will be recognition of retiring faculty members, including our own Lisa Selkirk. (The others are Roger Rideout of Music, Julian Olf of Theater, and Michael Thelwell of Afro-Am.)
[Thanks John!]
The 15th Annual Massachusetts Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference took place on Friday, May 1, here at UMass Amherst. It seems that there was just one linguistics presentation: Jennifer Kelleher (a Spanish major) presented 'Exploring conceptualization through interpreters'.
Amherst Books is hosting a party on May 6, 5:00 pm, to celebrate the publication of Bob Rothstein's new book Two Words to the Wise: Reflections on Language, Literature, and Folklore. All are welcome!
Luiz Amaral (UMass Amherst Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) guest-lectured in Ling 409 today. Luiz talked about the theoretical and engineering aspects of his work on intelligent tutoring systems. Here's a link to his (fascinating) slideshow. Many thanks for this, Luiz! This is interdisciplinary work at its best!
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing a program of English and Italian music next weekend. The performance will be on Saturday, May 2, at 4:00 pm, in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall at Smith. It's free! Anisa, you rock!
SNEWS (The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) takes place this Saturday, April 25, here at UMass Amherst, starting at 10:00 am.
Fun fact: the name "SNEWS" was coined here at UMass Amherst six years ago by Polly Jacobson, during a coffee break at what we now call SNEWS.
The website is spiffy. A direct link to the program. The organizing crew will ensure that coffee flows all day, and a light lunch will be provided.
[Thanks Jesse!]
The next meeting of UMAFLAB (the UMass Funny Languages Breakfast) will be next Tuesday (4/28) at 9:30 in the Partee Room. The following folks will be leading the meeting:
[Thanks Seth!]
The 7th Annual NY-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 6-24. Barbara Partee and Chris Potts have both taught at the Institute in past years. They are happy to answer questions about it.
The NYI is a wonderful way to see St. Petersburg and to take first-rate courses in cognitive science. It's also one of the most affordable summer schools in our field.
[Thanks Emily and Brian!]
The Linguistics Department's screening of the documentary film The Linguists has been rescheduled for May 14, 2:00 pm, in Thompson 102.
Eulàlia Bonet (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) spoke in Rajesh Bhatt's Phi-Features Seminar (Ling 810) on April 14. The title of her talk was 'The relevance of repair strategies in understanding the Person-Case constraint'.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
UMass Amherst is hosting SNEWS (Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) on Saturday, April 25. All are welcome!
If you plan to attend, please let the orgaizers know what your dietary needs and wants are by taking this Doodle poll (also linked via the workshop website). Contact Jesse Harris if you have further dietary specifications or other questions about the workshop.
[Thanks Jesse, Anisa, and Martin!]
ECO5 2009 (The Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics) took place on Saturday, April 4, at the University of Maryland. Emerson Loustau and Martin Walkow each presented papers.
The next UUSLAW meeting (the UMass Amherst-UConn-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) is scheduled to take place on May 2 at the University of Connecticut, in the Psychology Department. Please email Saime Tek if you would like to present. Pilot studies and experiments, completed studies, and theoretical studies are all welcome.
Meg Grant is giving a Cognitive Brownbag talk over in Psychology on Wednesday, April 9, at 12:00 pm, in 521B Tobin.
Daniele Panizza
Mai in the wrong place: An ERP study of violations associated with NPIs in Italian
Tuesday, April 7, 4:30 pm, South College 301 (The Partee Room)
From Seth:
The UMass (Funny) Languages (Breakfast) Group will have its first full meeting on Tuesday, April 14, at 9:30-10:30 am, in the Partee room.
At this meeting, we will have presentations by:
- Peggy Speas: On quantifiers in Navajo
- Anisa Schardl: On voicing contrasts in Burmese
[Thanks Seth!]
The annual department picnic is now scheduled, at least tentatively, for September 12. As usual, it will be at Barbara and Volodja's. Mark your calendars!
[Thanks Barbara!]
The Brown University Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences has announced its first annual series of Brown Minicourses in Language and Linguistics, May 18-22, 2009. There are two courses, each meeting for two hours per day for each of the five days:
Attendance is free and open to the public.
[Thanks Polly Jacobson!]
The 21st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information will be held in Bordeaux, France (pretty swish!), July 20-31. ESSLI is a fanastic summer school — relatively affordable, with top-notch classes in linguistics and also lots of opportunities to explore the neighboring fields of logic and theoretical computer science.
[Thanks Angelika!]
The department is sponsoring a screening of the documentary The Linguists this Friday (March 27), 3:30 pm, in the School of Management 133. All are welcome. Instructors, please advertise the showing in your classes!
[Thanks Seth and Peggy!]
Lisa Selkirk's retirement party is now schedule for May 22, at John McCarthy and Ellen Woolford's house. Mark your calendars! We'll have many more details later in the semester.
[Thanks Kyle!]
The Festival of Languages will take place in Bremen, Germany, September 17 to October 7, 2009. It looks like there will be a lot of different events happening throughout the city during that period, all with the goal of celebrating language in diverse ways.
[Thanks Angelika!]
The University of Maryland is hosting the EC05 Workshop on Saturday, April 4. EC05 is a student workshop in syntax. More to come on the UMass Amherst presenters.
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
Magdalena Schwager and our own Ilaria Frana (now on a post-doc in Göttingen) are organizing a workshop titled FACQs: Frequently Asked Concealed Questions. The invited speakers are Maria Aloni, Irene Heim, Caroline Heycock, Lance Nathan, Orin Percus, Maribel Romero, and Ede Zimmermann. The deadline for abstract submission is April 5.
[Thanks Ilaria!]
UMass Amherst Linguistics will host a conference May 26-28, 2009, on Recursion in Language and Cognition featuring, among others, Noam Chomsky, our own alums Eva Juarros-Dausa and Bart Hollebrandse, plus Tecumseh Fitch, Aravind Joshi, Hilda Koopman, Marc Hauser, Andrea Moro and many others. The conference will include a poster session. Check out the website for more details.
...
[Thanks Peggy!]
Noah Smith
Language Technologies Institute and Machine Learning Department
Carnegie Mellon
Hidden Grammar: Advances in Data-Driven Models of Language
Monday, March 9, 1:30 pm Computer Science Building, Room 151
Timothy Williamson gave this year's Amherst Lecture in Philosophy today (March 5). His talk was called 'Probability and danger'.
[Thanks Aynat!]
HUMDRUM will take place here at UMass Amherst on April 18-19. This workshop invites work on Optimality Theory from any perspective, and encourages work-in-progress as well as more polished projects. If you would like to present, please contact Emily Elfner or Brian Smith.
[Thanks Emily!]
The UMass Amherst Center for the Study of African American Language is gearing up for the next Summer Dialect Research Project, which will take place in June. Here's a snippet from the website:
The goal of the SDRP is to provide research experiences in linguistics for undergraduates with interest in language-related disciplines and to increase the number of students, particularly those from underrepresented minority groups, who conduct graduate research in these areas.
Here's a fuller description and enrollment information.
Elliott Moreton (this week's colloq speaker) will be in the department today and tomorrow (Feb 19 and 20). Today, he is speaking in Joe's Seminar on Models of Phonological Learning (Thursday, Feb 19, 1:00-2:15 pm, Hasbrouck Lab 106). He will also be available for meetings and lunches. Contact Emily for more details.
[Thanks Emily!]
The Linguists, the documentary about the fieldwork of K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, premiers on PBS on Thursday, February 26. Click through the image below for a trailer.
[Thanks Peggy!]
Chuck Clifton gave a talk titled Making scalar implicatures yesterday (Feb 18), as part of the Psychology Cognitive Brown Bag series. (John Kingston spoke in the series last week.)
Continue reading "Psychology Talk: Clifton on Processing Scalar Implicatures" »
Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner are giving a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series, February 18, 12:15 pm, in the ASH building lobby. The title is 'What can Ned Flanders tell us about linguistic knowledge? Diddly-infixation and the poverty of the stimulus'. Abstract below.
On February 11, John Kingston gave a talk in Psychology on recent work in the phonetics lab. Here's a link to the abstract for the talk.
Eiling Yee
Brown PhD; now on a post-doc at Penn
Word recognition, from sound to meeting
Thursday, January 22, 10:30-12:00, Tobin 521B
Continue reading "Psychology Talk: Eiling Yee on Word Recognition" »
Nathan Klinedinst and Daniel Rothschild are organizing a workshop on presuppositions at the 2009 ESSLLI: New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition. Two-page abstracts are due February 15, 2009. See the website for more details.
Lisa Selkirk sent in this report on the birthday festivities that Angelika's students organized for her on December 6.
Angelika's birthday celebration, organized by Roger Schwarzschild and Kai von Fintel, with a dinner at a fine Italian restaurant in Cambridge on Friday, December 5, and a workshop held at MIT on December 6, was a wonderful event.
The dinner was attended by almost all of Angelika's former and current students, as well as a few significant others. Some of the former students travelled long distances to be there — Jo-Wang Lin flew in from Taiwan, Kiyomi Kusumoto from Japan, Maribel Romero from Konstanz, Ilaria Frana and Paula Menendez-Benito from Göttingen.
There was a Canadian contingent: Ana Arregui from Ottawa, Junko Shimoyama and Bernhard Schwarz (with toddler Makoto) from McGill. Two came in from Michigan — Marcin Morzycki, Jan Anderssen. Roger was there from Rutgers and Satoshi Tomioka from Delaware.
The Amherst contingent included Shai Cohen, Florian Schwarz, Amy Rose Deal, Aynat Rubinstein and Andrew McKenzie.
In the Eastern Mass. contingent there was Kai, and Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Youri Zabbal from the other side of the river.
It was amazing to see everyone together for this celebration, odd to realize that they didn't all know each other before this. The photos which I took at the dinner are here. The festive atmosphere — darkened room with low lights, lights from the skyline across the river outside the windows — presented a technical challenge for me and the camera, but I hope that the human dimension — including moments when endearing words were spoken — shines through.
On Saturday, the papers at the workshop held at MIT were given by Angelika's current and former students. Other "locals" attended, and the pictures link has photos of some familiar faces there, including Gennaro Chierchia, now at Harvard, and Irene Heim (MIT).
—Lisa Selkirk
The Linguistics Department will host a lunch tomorrow (December 12) to celebrate our graduating seniors and to mark the end of the semester. The lunch will be from 12:00 to 2:00 pm in the Freeman Lounge (3rd floor of South College). Please come, congratulate graduating majors, and have lunch and cake with us.
[Thanks Sarah!]
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing a program of Spanish music this weekend. There will be two performances:
Both performances will be free and last under an hour.
Anisa Schardl put together the team Linguists and Friends to run and walk in the Mayor Higgins' Hot Chocolate Run to benefit Safe Passage, which took place on Saturday, December 6, in downtown Northampton. The team raised over $250 of the $55,000 that the event's 3,000 participants raised for Safe Passage.
This year's team was Anisa, Diana Apoussidou, Maria Biezma, Seth, Summer, and Hazel Cable, Noah Constant, Emily Elfner, Kathryn Flack, Meg Grant, Chloe Gu, Barak Krakauer, Jia Li, Emerson Loustau, Magda Oiry, Barbara Pearson, Chris Potts, Kathryn Pruitt, Martin Walkow, Alicia Wolf, and Tiantian Zhang.
Perhaps next year's Linguists and Friends team can be even bigger!
[Thanks Anisa!]
This Saturday (December 6), Angelika Kratzer's PhD students (past and present) are holding a workshop in her honor, in MIT's Stata Center, 8:00-4:00. All are welcome for both the talks and the refreshments!
[Thanks Kai!]
UUSLAW (UConn-UMass Amherst-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) takes place this Saturday (December 6), at Smith College, in Campus Center 204.
[Thanks Tom!]
Scott Myers (1987 UMass Amherst PhD, now Professor of Linguistics at UT Austin) will be returning to South College for a visit next week. On December 8, he will give a brief talk on his current research, 4:00 pm, in the Partee Room:
Final devoicing: An experimental investigation
Word-final devoicing is a recurring phonological pattern in the world's languages. In this talk I present the results of an on- going study investigating the relation between this phonological pattern and the breakdown of vocal fold vibration frequently found in utterance-final position. Experimental evidence is provided in support of the claim that listeners have a bias toward identifying utterance-final obstruents as voiceless.
Scott will also be available for meetings on Monday and Tuesday (Dec 8-9). He'll be camped out in Kyle Johnson's office. Drop Lisa Selkirk a note if you'd like to chat with him.
[Thanks Lisa!]
UMMM (UMass Amherst MIT Meeting in Phonology) will be held this Saturday, November 22, in the lounge on the third floor of South College. The post-workshop party will be at John Kingston's.
| 9:30-10:10 | Jonah Katz (MIT) | Phonetic similarity in an English hip-hop corpus |
| 10:15-10:55 | Diana Apoussidou (UMass Amherst) | Modeling allomorphy with lexical constraints |
| 10:55-11:10 | Break | |
| 11:10-11:50 | Hrayr Khanjian (MIT) | Western Armenian once-stressed vowels |
| 11:55-12:35 | Peter Jurgec (UMass Amherst) | Autosegmental spreading is a binary relation |
| 12:35-2:45 | Lunch | |
| 2:45-3:25 | Michael Key (UMass Amherst) | Dialect-specific perception: "ar"-epenthesis and "a<r>" deletion in Boston English |
| 3:30-4:10 | Gillian Gallagher (MIT) | Perception and contrast in laryngeal (dis)harmony |
| 4:10-4:25 | Break | |
| 4:25-5:05 | Wendell Kimper (UMass Amherst) | Markedness-on-markedness variation: Some implications for serialism and convergence |
| 5:10-5:50 | Tara McAllister (MIT) | Fricative neutralization in strong position in child phonology |
[Thanks John K!]
UUSLAW (the UMass Amherst-UConn-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) is scheduled to take place on December 6 at Smith College. Write to Tom Roeper and Jill de Villiers if you'd like to present. Tom writes, "It is a good time to expose pilot work or a planned experiment for some feedback as well as more extensive results. Theoretical work is also welcome."
[Thanks Tom!]
The CEU Summer University announces the course Conditionals: Philosophical and Linguistic Issues.
Maya Eddon
UMass Amherst
Three arguments from temporary intrinsics
Friday, November 7, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 206
The UMass Psycholinguistics Experiment Co-operative (UMPEC!) will have its first organizational meeting on Wednesday, November 12 (that's a UMass Tuesday), at 5:15 pm in South College 105. Everyone is welcome.
[Thanks Meg!]
Bretty Hyde will visit the department on November 14 to meet with people and give an informal lecture titled 'How alignment creates stress windows.' The talk will begin at 3:30 pm in the Partee Room.
[Thanks Joe!]
The second North East Computational Phonology Workshop takes place on Saturday, November 15, at Yale. Here's a tentative schedule; the precise timing of everything is still being sorted out:
Update [Thanks Joe]: The website is now up.
| Joe Pater (UMass Amherst) | Emergent simplicity bias in a Gradual Maximum Entropy Learner |
| Bruce Tesar (Rugers) | Learning phonological grammars for output-driven maps |
| Sarah Eisenstat (Brown) | Learning underlying forms together with constraint weights |
| Mark Johnson (Brown) | Improving word segmentation by also learning syllable structure |
| Jennifer Michaels (MIT) | Summing up constraint interactions: Chain shifts in a split additive model |
| Giorgio Magri (MIT) | A convergent version of the GLA for standard OT |
| Gaja Jarosz & J. Alex Johnson (Yale) | Comparing phonotactic cues to word boundaries in three languages |
Meg Grant has announced a new Psycholinguistics Experiment Cooperative:
This will be a group of experimenters who get together to run experiments in South College. Pooling our efforts will allow us to share the work of running the experiments and will also help us to have a diverse set of materials in each experiment. Our first goal is to run a questionnaire later this fall, but I'm hoping this will be an ongoing thing where we can run different kinds of experiments (e.g., self-paced reading or RSVP tasks).
Contact Meg if you'd like more details.
[Thanks Meg!]
Hideki Kishimoto
Kobe University
Possessive Nominals and Possessor-Raising Constructions in Japanese
Thursday, November 6, 4:00 pm, Machmer W-27
[Thanks Tom!]
Keren Rice (University of Toronto) will speak about her work on Athapaskan this Friday, October 24, at 10 am in the Partee room. The title and abstract are below. All are welcome!
[Thanks Emily!]
Undergrads! Find the Linguistics outpost at the Majors Fair, Wednesday, October 29, 5:30-7:30 pm, Campus Center Auditorium and First Floor Concourse. Professors Bhatt and Potts will be on hand to answer questions.
On November 5, Judy Kegl will give a talk at UMass Boston. The title is 'Four Instincts that lead us to language'. The event is sponsored by the Hispanic Studies Department, the Undergraduate Program in Linguistics, and the Friends of Healey Library of the University of Massachusetts Boston. It takes place from 3:30 to 5:00 at the Center for Library Instruction, Healey Library, 4th floor, UMass Boston.
[Thanks Luis!]
Chris Barker will be visiting the SRG today (October 16), starting at 8:00 pm, at Aynat's house. The official reading is Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan's new paper in Semantics & Pragmatics: Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. The discussion might be quite free-form, though, moving from towers to donkeys to bishops to continuations. This will be good prep for tomorrow's colloq. All are welcome!
[Thanks Aynat!]
Aviya Hacohen
Tel Aviv
On compositional telicity in Adult and Child Hebrew
Monday, October 20, 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room
[Thanks Tom!]
On Tuesday, October 21, at 10:00 am, in the Partee Room, Jason Narad will be speaking with the computational learning group about his work developing Bayesian models of morphology induction that make use of phonological rules. Jason received an M.S. from Edinburgh before joining the UMass Amherst Computer Science PhD program. Jason is also a member of the UMass Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and the UMass Amherst Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory.
[Thanks Joe!]
The topic of the Third-Year Seminar next week is Being on the Job Market. The meetings are Tuesday and Thursday (Oct 21 and 23), 4:00-5:15 pm, in the Partee Room.
John McCarthy will visit on Thursday, October 23. The title of his presentation is 'The Secret To A Successful Career'.
The 2009 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will be held on February 4, 2009 (open round) and March 11, 2009 (closed round).
Check out the website for lots more information about how to get involved.
[Thanks Barbara!]
Barbara Pearson is reading from her new book Raising a Bilingual Child at the University Club, October 15, 7:00-9:00 pm. She'll also be signing books! Here's a poster.
The date for this year's UMMM has been tentatively set for November 22. Contact John Kingston if you'd like more details. We'll have a fuller report closer to the workshop.
[Thanks John!]
An NSF Symposium on Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use will take place at NYU, November 14-15. Registration is free. The program is chock-a-block with leading lights in NLP research, from academia and industry.
[Thanks Aynat!]
Larry Solan's 'Law, language, and the modular mind', October 2 (today!), 4:00 pm, Herter 227.
The Linguistics Department is hosting an informal lunch tomorrow (October 3), 12:00-1:30 pm, in the department lounge (third floor of South College). Undergrad majors are specially invited to come have lunch with the faculty and grad students in the department, and to hang out with fellow majors. Larry Solan will be on the scene and would be happy to talk about connections betwen language and the law.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
John Kingston will visit the Third-Year Seminar on Thursday, October 9 (4:00-5:15 pm), to discuss life as a journal editor, with an eye towards helping students move through the process of submitting their work, dealing with referee feedback, and ultimately bringing their papers to print. All are welcome. The seminar meets in the Partee Room.
Conor Quinn, who was a postdoc at MIT until recently and has done a lot of work on Penobscot, will be speaking in Peggy and Ellen's seminar on October 1 (Wednesday, 2:30-5:15 pm, Hasbrouck 106). You can check out his 2006 Harvard dissertation Referential Access Dependancy in Penobscot, along with a bunch of other work, at his website.
[Thanks Peggy and Ellen!]
GALANA 3 (Generative Approaches to Langauge Acquisition North America 3) was held at UConn, September 4-6. Miren Hodgson and Anna Perez, who are from UMass Amherst Spanish and did lingusitics dissertations, gave papers. In addition, faculty, former visitors, and students gave a series of posters: Angeliek van Hout and Jill deVilliers; Emily Sowalsky, Valentine Hacquard and Tom Roeper; Anna Verbuk; and Liane Jeschull and Tom Roeper.
The Commons Group invites you to the Amherst Bike Fair, Saturday, September 20, Amherst Town Commons, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. Find out about the Commons Group's ongoing efforts to educate the public about bike safety, learn about their speed-limit petition, and check out area bike maps. In addition, there will be unicycle and hybrid bike demonstrations.
[Thanks Tom!]
The Cognitive Science Brownbag program will be active throughout the semester, with lots of talks that are of interest to linguists. For example, up first is Julie Van Dyke from Haskins Labs (September 17, 12:00-1:30 pm, Tobin 512b). The website has lots of information about this and future talks.
[Thanks Meg!]
Word from Gaja Jarosz (former UMass Amherst Visiting Professor, now Assistant Professor at Yale): the second annual meeting of the North East Computational Phonology Workshop wil take place on Saturday, November 15, at Yale.
[Thanks Joe and Gaja!]
The Annual Linguistics Department Picnic takes place on Sunday, September 7, starting at 3:30 pm, at Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev's house: 50 Hobart Lane, Amherst.
Barbara writes:
We'll have a barbecue grill, and some beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages. Bring things to eat in any category. International foods most welcome! (If you aren't up for cooking, you can bring additional beer or wine, or cheese, or fruit, or ....) We'll likely start eating around 4:30 or 5:00.
And she warns of parking issues:
Parking problem: There is no parking permitted on most of Hobart Lane. Parking is possible in our driveway, and it seems that parking is possible in the daylight hours on the opposite side of the street between our house and where Hobart Lane turns into a dirt road, but for safety, put a note under your windshield wiper that tells the police your name and that you are now at 50 Hobart Lane and asking them please to let us know if there is a problem. (The parking restrictions help us combat the problems of large beer parties in the neighboring apartment complexes on Hobart Lane, so we want to stay friends with the police on this matter! We'll let them know about the party, but they won't be able to grant a parking waiver for a September Saturday. But they are often willing to come and let us know that cars needed to be moved off of Hobart Lane, before calling the tow truck.)
But she emphasizes:
But don't be daunted by any of that -- somebody can always help you figure out where to park. Do come, rain or shine! And please help get the word to new faculty, students, visitors or relevant others!
In the Loop has nice coverage of July's Summer Dialect Teacher Project, hosted by the Center for the Study of African American Language.
Today is the Mini-Conference, at which the second years present their research. Start time: 9:00 am. Location: the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower. Check out last week's entry for more details.
UUSLAW (the UMass Amherst-UConn-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) takes place this Saturday, May 17, at UConn, in (or very near) the Linguistics Department there. Below is a list of the presenters, along with their titles, though possibly not in the order of presentation. The start time is 10:00 am.
Update: We now have the full schedule here:
| 10:00-10:30 | Breakfast | |
| 10:30-11:00 | Jeff Bernath (UConn) | Separating theories of ASL Phonology: Looking in acquisition |
| 11:00-11:30 | Helen Koulidobrova (UConn) | DP or not DP: Testing the parameter through acquisition |
| 11:30-11:45 | Coffee | |
| 11:45-12:15 | Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst) | Acquisition of long-distance questions in French: Varying experimental contexts |
| 12:15-12:45 | Bill Philip (UMass Amherst) | Dutch children's sensitivity to weak cross-over effects |
| 12:45-1:45 | Lunch | |
| 1:45-2:15 | Masahiko Takahashi (UConn) | The acquisition of passives and optional subject movement in Japanese |
| 2:15-2:45 | Jean Crawford (UConn) | The acquisition of Sesotho passives: Evidence for maturation |
| 2:45-3:00 | Coffee | |
| 3:00-3:30 | Jill de Villiers, Harper Gernet-Girard, Jay Garfield (Smith) | Figuring out the properties of Tibetan evidentials for child speakers |
| 3:30-4:00 | Aynat Rubinstein (UMass Amherst) | Assessing semantic conservatism |
| 4:00-4:30 | Eva Bar-Shalom (UConn) and Elena Zaretsky (UMass Amherst) | Initial phases of attrition in Russian-English bilingual children and the role of L1 in L1 attrition |
[Thanks Tanja and Tom!]
The Annual Department Mini-Conference will take place on Thursday, May 15, starting at 9:00 am, in the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower.
Downloadable version of the schedule
| Jesse Aron Harris | Events and extraction in pseudo-coordination | 9:00-9:35 |
| Wendell Kimper | Syntactic reduplication and the spellout of movement chains | 9:35-10:10 |
| Meg Grant | The (non-)interaction of ellipsis and binding: Evidence from re-binding | 10:10-10:45 |
| Misato Hiraga | Japanese Many quantifiers and their interaction with demonstratives | 10:45-11:20 |
| Break | Lunch provided | 11:20-12:00 |
| Emily Elfner | The interaction of linearization and prosody: Evidence from pronoun postposing | 12:00-12:35 |
| Pasha Siraj | How to win the discourse game using particles | 12:35-1:10 |
| Martin Walkow | When can you ask a inner negation polar question? | 1:10-1:45 |
[Thanks Kyle!]
The department held is End-of-Semester Lunch yesterday. It featured sandwiches from Andiamo and a cake from the Henion Bakery. The cake was decorated with the names of our graduating majors:
Thanks to everyone who helped arrange the lunch! And congratulations to our new Linguistics BAs!
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing a collection of Jewish and Old Testament-inspired music on Saturday, May 3, at 4:00 pm. The concert will be in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall in Smith College. It will be free and last under an hour. All are welcome!
Today (April 24) is the first day of the Workshop on Locating Variability, a three-day workshop sponsored by the Center for the Study of African American Language, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the Linguistics Department. The schedule is posted at the CSAAL website. Here's the description:
Recent trends in linguistic theory have led to increased interest in the role of features and formal grammar in language variation, its expression as dialectal difference, and speakers' choices of forms within dialects. While it is true that research on dialects of English has focused mainly on the impact that social factors have on the use of linguistic constructions, variation in dialects of languages such as Italian, German, Dutch, and Flemish have been productively analyzed using variation models developed within theoretical syntax. This workshop will bring together researchers from the US and abroad for a discussion of the treatment of variation within current formal linguistic theory. Participating researchers will address the following themes:
- The status of linguistic features in grammar and their relation to the way languages and dialects vary
- Intra-speaker variability due to selection of multiple grammars or parameters
- Patterns of variation in language acquisition
Participants:
From UG Advisor Rajesh Bhatt:
This evening (April 24), there will be a career related event organized by the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 3:00 pm-6:00 pm in the Fine Arts Center Lobby. Linguistics will be represented by two of our undergraduate alumni (see below). In addition to meeting these interesting people, you could also win an iPod Touch.
- Dan Bodah, 1999 B.A. magna cum laude, Linguistic Major
- Job Title and description: Law Clerk to Hon. Joan M. Azrack, Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York: draft judicial opinions, prepare legal research memos, assist judge with hearings and trials.
- Julia Hanley, May 2004, B.A., Linguistics Major
- Job Title/ Description: Peace Corps Volunteer Leader - Liaison between Peace Corps Kenya staff and volunteers. Provided support for staff and volunteers, including technical, administrative, and counseling support as well as budgeting, managing office staff and conducting volunteer site visits. Assisted in project selection, evaluation and preparation including recommending potential host country organizations.
HUMDRUM (the UMass Amherst–Johns Hopkins–Rutgers OT workshop) takes place at Rutgers, April 26. The workshop has a website, but most of the crucial information is being kept under wraps. See Wendell Kimper if you'd like details (or if you just want to know what HUMDRUM stands for).
[Thanks Wendell!]
The date for UUSLAW (the UMass Amherst–UConn–Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) is now set for May 17. Tanja Heizmann writes, "it is really informal, so it's a nice platform to discuss experimental ides or interim data!"
[Thanks Tanja!]
David Adger (University of London) gave a special lecture called 'Intrapersonal Variability and Agreement' in Lisa Green and Rajesh Bhatt's Syntactic Variation Seminar yesterday.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
Janet Fodor will deliver the Third Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture at Harvard University, Thursday, April 24, at 4:00 pm. The talk takes place in the Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall. The title is 'New (old-fashioned) parameter setting'.
We just had a busy week with two conferences for young researchers back-to-back (making it easier for people to come for both), one on formal syntax and the other on formal semantics and pragmatics. Both international, both organized by students and young researchers, both very successful! I did no work — I just continued as "honorary mentor for the program committee" of the semantics conference.
The syntax conference, April 3-4, was the second in its series, Syntactic Structures 2: it was started on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Syntactic Structures, whence its name. All but one of the talks were in English; about half were by linguists from Moscow or St Petersburg, with other participants from the US, Norway, Germany, and Spain. Invited speakers were David Pesetsky, Maria Polinsky, Peter Svenonius (Tromsø) Anton Zimmerling (Moscow), and Ekaterina Lyutikova (Moscow). There's a very nice website for the conference (and also about last year's), in English. I'm flattered that they used 5 of my photos from last year's conference on the frame page. Nice portrait photos from day 2 of the conference by Peter Arkadiev are here.
The semantics/pragmatics conference was Formal Semantics in Moscow 4 (FSIM 4), on April 5. The invited speaker was Manfred Krifka. There was one paper by a Moscow student, and others by young linguists from France, Germany, Utrecht/Beijing, and the US. The website is here . A few photos are in my Live Journal, and more on my Flickr site. More by Peter Arkadiev are on his Picasa site.
The week was made even more lively by invited talks at various venues by Peter Svenonius, David Pesetsky (on language and music), and Manfred Krifka. Manfred and I went to a concert by the military orchestra of the Russian Ministry of Defense after his talk, in the Moscow Conservatory – that was fun.
There will be a workshop on intensionality at Yale on April 12. The conference venue is located in Connecticut Hall, which houses the department of philosophy at Yale.
| 10:00 | Graeme Forbes (University of Colorado) | Psychological Attitude Verbs: A Unified Account |
| 11:45 | Frederike Moltmann (Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, Paris) | Intensional Verbs and the Nominalization Theory of Special Qauntifiers |
| 3:00 | George Bealer (Yale University) | Intensionality and Logical Form |
| 4:45 | Mark Richard (Tufts University) | Content and Semantics |
[Thanks Rajesh!]
Tufts University is hosting a workshop on semiproductivity in grammar, May 3-4.
[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" »
MUMM 2 takes place this Saturday, March 29, at MIT. (The location is encoded in the acronym: MIT-UMass Meeting in Phonology; when at UMass Amherst, it's UMMM.)
| 11-11:45 | Hye-Sun Cho | Effects of speech rate on segmental anchoring: A model of F0 timing as a function of slope and alignment targets |
| 11:45-12:30 | Wendell Kimper | Local optionality and harmonic serialism |
| 12:30-2:00 | Lunch | |
| 2:00-2:45 | Patrick Jones | Contour tone licensing in Kinande |
| 2:45-3:30 | John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, and Michael Key | Context and language effects on place perception by Japanese and English listeners |
| 3:30-4:15 | Jonah Katz | Compensatory shortening in English and phonetic representations |
| 4:15-4:30 | Break | |
| 4:30-5:15 | Michael Becker | Learning hidden structure in morphological bases |
| 5:15-6:00 | Franz Cozier | Encoding perceived contrast between CC-clusters and their simplified counterparts |
[Thanks John K!]
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.
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!
Cover design by Pasha Siraj
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!]
Cover design by Pasha Siraj
From Rutgers organizer Michael O'Keefe:
Rutgers Linguistics will be hosting this year's HUMDRUM on the weekend of April 26-27. Grad students working on any topic relating to Optimality Theory are invited to present their research. It is worth emphasizing that this is intended to be a useful workshop for grad students, so you are welcome to present work in any stage of development. If you would like to present, I ask that you please email me by Saturday, March 15. I don't need any information right now unless you have it. (If you do have a title or general topic area you can give me, great, but there's no need right now.)
Past experience indicates that no date suits everyone. If you absolutely can't present on the weekend of April 26-27, but you would like to otherwise, please let me know what your commitments are and we'll see if we can arrange anything.
From local organizer Michael O'Keefe:
Rutgers Linguistics will be hosting this year's HUMDRUM on the weekend of April 5-6. Grad students working on any topic relating to Optimality Theory are invited to present their research. We will have two sessions. One will be the standard 20 minutes talk / 10 minutes questions format, and the other will be a poster session. It is worth emphasizing that this is intended to be a useful workshop for grad students, so you are welcome to present work in any stage of development.
If you would like to present I ask that you please email me by Saturday, March 8. I don't need any information besides your name and whether you'll be giving a talk or a poster. (If you do have a title or general topic area you can give me, great, but there's no need right now.)
The ECO5 syntax workshop is coming up this weekend at UConn.
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
Laura Holland's photograpy show Vanishing Fast is at the Jones Library, March 2-30. The opening reception is tonight (March 6), 5:00-8:00 pm. All are welcome!
In addition to his colloquium, Joan Mascaró will also guest lecture in John McCarthy's Ling 606 on Friday, 11:15, Hasbrouck 106. He will talk about stress-dependent harmony systems. He will motivate an alternative to Walker's (2005) weak trigger theory in NLLT, examining her cases and other systems of metaphony (as this phenomenon is known).
[Thanks John M!]
We're holding a completely informal, pizza-fueled "Meet your Faculty Mentor" event on Wednesday, March 5, starting at 5:30 pm in the department lounge (South College, Third Floor). This is a chance for undergrads to meet their new faculty mentors as well as other linguistics majors.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
CSAAL, the Center for the Study of African-American Language, is hosting a workshop on formal approaches to variation, April 23-25. It will bring scholars who have worked on variation together with those who have made theoretical suggestions for representing it.
[Thanks Lisa G and Tom!]
Paul Pietroski
University of Maryland
Semantic monadicity with conceptual polyadicity
Friday, March 22, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 206
The program for SALT 18 (UMass Amherst, March 21-23) is now posted. There will be a total of 46 presentations (4 invited talks, 17 submitted talks, 25 poster talks) from linguists all over the world. Get ready!
Know of any interesting syntax work that should be presented at the ECO 5 student workshop in syntax coming up at UConn in March? Then send Amy Rose a note about it! The workshop takes place March 8. Talks will be 20 minutes each. MIT, Maryland, Harvard, UConn, and, of course, UMass Amherst.
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
The Workshop on Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of Agreement will take place at Harvard, February 29 - March 2. Registration is free. Check out the website for additional information, including the full program.
[Thanks Kathy!]
It's agreed: MUMM 2 will be held at MIT on March 29. More details to come. If you'd like to present, contact John Kingston.
[Thanks John K!]
Register now for SALT 18, UMass Amherst Linguistics, March 21-23, 2008.
The University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland, September 11-13, 2008.
Abstracts are due April 30, 2008 (500 word max)
Send abstracts to and
Continue reading "International Conference: Semantics without Borders" »
The annual Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz/Thomas Tymoczko Memorial Logic Lecture
Edwin Mares
Victoria University of Wellington
Partial Information and the Meaning of All
Smith College, December 6, 2007, 7:30 pm
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing an Anonymous Feast Saturday, December 8, at 7:00 pm. The concert will be in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall in Smith College. It will be free and last under an hour. All are welcome!
UUSLAW, Saturday, December 1, 2007, UMass Amherst (Herter 301). PDF version of the program.
[Thanks Tanja!]
The annual Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz/Thomas Tymoczko Memorial Logic Lecture
Edwin Mares
Victoria University of Wellington
Partial Information and the Meaning of All
Smith College, December 6, 2007, 7:30 pm
UUSLAW (the UMass-UConn-Smith Acquisition Workshop) will take place on December 1, here at UMass Amherst. If you'd like to present (20 minute talk, plus 10 minutes for questions), send Tanja Heizmann a note this week, with a title if possible.
[Thanks Tanja!]
Vagueness and Language Use
Paris, ENS & Institut Jean-Nicod
April 7-9, 2008
Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2008 [details]
[Thanks Nathan!]
William Snyder will guest lecture today (November 8) in Rajesh Bhatt and Tom Roeper's seminar on learnability, which meets in Herter 106, 2:30-5:15 pm. William will talk about 'Linguistic Conservatism', an idea that he develops in his new book Child Language: The Parametric Approach (OUP). The central observation is that the errors that children make in spontaneous speech are overwhelmingly error of omission, not errors of commission.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
The first meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle will be held in the Department of Linguistics' Donald and Margaret Freeman lounge, Saturday, November 10, starting at noon. There is a growing interest in computational methods in phonological theory, and the northeast has a particularly dense population of people working in this area. This meeting aims to bring these people together in an informal setting to share results, ideas, and maybe even software. All are welcome, but please contact Joe Pater if you are coming so he can buy enough bagels for lunch (which can be eaten during the first presentation!)
[Thanks Joe!]
That's right. We're hosting SALT, March 21-23!
Invited speakers
Abstracts are due December 15, 2007. Here's the call for papers. UMass Amherst linguists are welcome (encouraged!) to submit their work.
UBC Linguistics is hosting a workshop on Parts and Quantities, November 16. Seth Cable has volunteered to send handouts our way, so check out the program!
[Thanks Seth!]
TIE3 will take place September 15-17, 2008, at the University of Lisbon. Our own Lisa Selkirk is one of the invited speakers. Here's a copy of the call for papers (abstracts due April 1).
Jerry Fodor
State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers
Against Darwinism
Friday, October 26, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 61
SNEWS takes place this Saturday, October 20, at MIT. Jesse Harris and Andrew McKenzie are the UMass Amherst presenters, and a whole crew of South College linguists is attending.
Call for papers: Syntax of the World's Languages III
Berlin, September 25-29, 2008
[Thanks Barbara!]
Roberto Tuchman
Miami Children' s Hospital
Autism: What does it mean to be a spectrum disorder?
Thursday, October 18, FPH Main Lecture Hall, 5:30 pm
An exhibit at the Amherst Chamber of Commerce (in the Amherst Cinema Complex) with the opening from 5:00-8:00 pm today (October 4). It will be a part of the Amherst Artwalk, where about five galleries are open, so it is a good time to take in Amherst art.
This past weekend's UMMM was a success --- so much so that the crew is already planning for a spring MUMM (the MIT-hosted version of UMMM).
[Thanks John K!]
Special one-day MIT Workshop:
Where Does Syntax Come From? Have We All Been Wrong?
Cambridge, MA, October 19, 2007
Friday, October 19th, 2007, 9 am - 5:30 pm (refreshments 9-9:30; lunch 12:30-1:30; afternoon refreshments)
MIT, Room 34-401 (Grier Room), Cambridge, MA
No advance registration required, no fee - open to all.
Open roundtable discussion at the end of the day.
The speakers:
UMMM (UMass Amherst MIT Meeting in Phonology) will take place here at UMass Amherst this Saturday, September 29, in the Linguistics Department Lounge. Here is the program in PDF.
[Thanks John K!]
Michael Smith
Princeton
Norms, kinds, and functions
Friday, September 28, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 206
From Rajesh
Dear Malus Domestica afficionados,
This is a reminder that the apple tasting is coming up. It is scheduled to happen coming Saturday, September 29, at Rajesh's house. Here is what you can expect:
Contributions in the form of a nice bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir or something made from apples would be most welcome. Otherwise you could contribute $6 (students)/$12 (faculty) towards the cause.
RSVPs would be greatly appreciated.
- Rajesh
Geoff Nunberg will deliver the Freeman Lecture at 4:00 pm on October 4 in Bartlett 65.
What words can teach
Over the last century, "philology" has gone from the name of a central historical method in the humanities to an antiquated name for historical linguistics. Now, the advent of extensive online corpora promises to breathe new life into the philological enterprise. We can track the origin and development of words more accurately, rapidly, and in greater detail than was ever possible before and capture nuances of meaning that we could previously talk about only impressionistically.
The SNEWS 2007 website is up. The UMass Amherst presenters will be Jesse Harris and Andrew McKenzie.
A conference on Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody is to be held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York on April 11-13, 2008. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers working on prosody from different fields, including phonetics, phonology, semantics, language processing, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. The conference organizers are Duane Watson, Michael Wagner, and Ted Gibson. Select papers from the conference will appear in a special issue of Language and Cognitive Processes.
The deadline for submission of abstracts is January 18, 2008.
[Thanks Lisa!]
Welcome back! The Annual Departmental "Town Meeting" is this Friday, September 7, 3:30 pm, in the Freeman Lounge (third floor South College). Please come for:
[Thanks Sarah!]
The Department Picnic is this Saturday (September 8), starting at 3:30 pm, at Barbara's House, 50 Hobart Lane.
From Lisa Green and Barbara Pearson:
Twelve talented students from around the country participated in the Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (June 3-17). The SDRP was the first research workshop for undergraduates on current issues in the study of African American English (AAE) sponsored by the newly created Center for the Study of African American Language.
The SDRP students were selected on the basis of prior courses on AAE-related topics and interest in pursuing graduate research in some area of study of AAE. During the two-week program, the students participated in seminars and work sessions with faculty and other presenters: Lisa Green, Tom Roeper, Lisa Selkirk, Peggy Speas (all of UMass Amherst Linguistics), Theresa Austin (Education), Rob Cox (Library Special Collections), Peter Elbow (English), Denise Gaskin (Education), Barbara Pearson (Research Liason and Development), Steven Tracy (Afro-American Studies), Shelley Velleman (Communication Disorders) (all of UMass Amherst), Frances Burns (Communication Disorders at Texas State), Jill de Villiers (Psychology at Smith College), Peter de Villiers (Psychology at Smith College), and J. Michael Terry (Linguistics at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and UMass Amherst Linguistics alum).
The seminars and work sessions were on topics such as syntactic and semantic variation in AAE in different regions and communities, intonation and perceptions
of "sounding black," and developmental patterns in child AAE. Special presentations were on topics such as writing and features of AAE, language use in the blues, and dialects, literacy and reading.
The SDRP culminated with a student symposium dedicated to Professor Emeritus Harry Seymour. The students reported on their projects, which were related to research topics in seminars and work with large computerized corpora and other databases.
SDRP students participate in seminar
SDRP participants study pitch tracks in Lisa Selkirk's course on intonation and perceptions of "sounding black"
J. Michael Terry and SDRP participants discuss linguistic variation
From Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev (here's a downloadable version of this invitation):
Linguists and Friends!
Please come to a beginning-of-the-year potluck picnic/party to greet the new school year and welcome new faculty, new students, new visitors.
When: Saturday, September 8, starting at 3:30, continuing on into the evening
Where: 50 Hobart Lane, Amherst. (549-4501) --- Barbara and Volodja's.
Hobart Lane is a small street off North Pleasant just a short distance north of the university, opposite Puffton Village, near the Crestview /Presidential Apartments bus stop. 50 Hobart Lane is a big white house on the left, near the end.
The party will be outdoor/indoor; dress casual.
We'll set up the volleyball net; bring other outdoor stuff.
Food and drink: Potluck
We'll have a barbecue grill set up, and some beer and wine and non-alcoholic beverages. Bring things to eat in any category. International foods most welcome! (If you aren't up for cooking, you can bring additional beer or wine, or cheese, or fruit, or ....) We'll likely start eating around 5:00.
*Parking problem : There is no parking permitted on most of Hobart Lane. Parking is possible in our driveway, and it seems that parking is possible in the daylight hours on the opposite side of the street between our house and where Hobart Lane turns into a dirt road, but for safety, put a note under your windshield wiper that tells the police your name and that you are now at 50 Hobart Lane and please to let us know if there is a problem. (The parking restrictions help us combat the problems of large beer parties in the neighboring apartment complexes on Hobart Lane, so we want to stay friends with the police on this matter! We'll let them know about the party, but they won't be able to grant a parking waiver for a September Saturday. Often they are willing to come and let us know that cars needed to be moved off of Hobart Lane, before calling the tow truck.)
But don't be daunted by any of that -- somebody can always help you figure out where to park. Do come, rain or shine!
The free bus service has a bus stop very near Hobart Lane -- it's the "Crestview" stop, near Puffton Village and North Village and Crestview apartments.
SNEWS is scheduled to take place at MIT on October 20. Contact Chris Potts if you would like to present.
SNEWS is very informal (and you're likely to get great feedback), so think about presenting even if you don't currently have all the details of your idea worked out.
In addition, the local organizers, Jillian Mills and Giorgio Magri, hope to have a diorama contest, in which "interested
students (not necessarily students presenting otherwise) make a diorama representing some semantic concept, problem, etc." They aim to have a prize for the best one!
MIT has agreed to host SNEWS (Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) this coming fall. The local organizers are Jillian Mills and Giorgio Magri.
[Thanks Jillian and Giorgio!]
The 1st Summer Dialect Research Project finished up on June 17. It was two intense and productive weeks of seminars, group research projects, and talks. On June 16, the students presented their work in an extended afternoon seminar.
We hope to have pictures and a fuller report for the July issue. Stay tuned!
[Thanks Barbara!]
The First Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP) will take place at UMass Amherst from June 4 to June 16. Organized and directed by Lisa Green (with help from Barbara Pearson), the SDRP will provide research experiences for undergraduates with an interest in language-related disciplines.
The focus of the 2007 SDRP is the description of patterns in African American English (AAE), including "hands-on" methods for analyzing data from different sources.
The program will bring to campus twelve undergraduate students who are interested in African American English. The students are coming from colleges and universities in Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, DC, New York, California, and Massachusetts. Their background is in linguistics, English literature, other languages, and communication disorders.
Students will participate in classes taught by Lisa Green, Lisa Selkirk, Tom Roeper, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Frances Burns (UMass Ph.D in Com.Dis), Peggy Speas, Shelley Velleman, Peter Elbow, and J Michael Terry.
[Thanks Barbara, Lisa, and Peggy!]
The 2007 LSA Summer Institute takes place at Stanford in July. Three UMass Amherst Linguistics graduate students received fellowships to attend the Institute: Chris Davis, Meg Grant, Karen Jesney, and Martin Walkow.
A number of UMass Amherst faculty are teaching courses as well:
David Beaver, Christopher Potts, and Robert van Rooij are organizing a July 11 LSA Institute Workshop called Conversational Games and Strategic Inference. Chris is also giving a talk in the workshop — extensions of joint work with Chris Davis and Peggy Speas.
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'.
Speechy Prosody 2008 wil take place May 6-9, 2008, in Campinas, Brazil. The call for papers is up.
[Thanks Shigeto!]
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.
UUSLAW will meet at UConn this Saturday (May 5). We don't yet have the schedule, but there will be papers from Tanja Heizmann, Angeliek van Hout (reporting on ongoing work with Lisa Green, Bart Hollebrandse, and Tom Roeper), and Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper, along with a host of papers from UConn whose names we don't yet have.
Rides are available for anyone interested.
[Thanks Tom!]
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.
This year's Central European Summer School in Generative Grammar (the Egg School) will take place in Brno, Czech Republic, July 30 - August 10. Registration starts today and runs until May 16. This is a great opportunity for undergraduates and graduate students alike to study linguistics and see a bit of the world. Register today!
[Thanks Angelika!]
The Linguistics TA Training Seminar will take place on Monday, May 21, 10:30-2:30, with a break for lunch (which will be catered).
A note from John Kingston:
If you have not taught a section of 201 independently and you're scheduled to teach one next year, you must attend the seminar. Although I and a number of other faculty will attend and offer advice about how to teach this class, the most valuable contributions come from experienced TAs, who will also attend. Of course, anyone else is welcome to attend.
[Thanks John!]
Workshop on Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages
Berlin, Germany, July 6-7, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, Math Lounge, Lederle Tower
| 9:00 | Maria Biezma |
| 9:30 | Chris Davis |
| 10:00 | Amy Rose Deal |
| 10:30 | Karen Jesney |
| 11:00 | Masashi Hashimoto |
| 11:30 | lunch |
| 1:00 | Kathryn Pruitt |
| 1:30 | Annahita Farudi |
| 2:00 | Aynat Rubinstein |
[Thanks Kathy and Kyle!]
Alan Gilchrist
Rutgers University
Computation of surface lightness in simple and complex images
Monday, April 30, 3:30 pm, School of Management Room 133
Dietmar Roehm
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig
The perplexity of language-related ERP components: Some insights from time-frequency analysis
Wednesday, May 2, 12:00 pm, Tobin 521B
[Thanks Adrian!]
There will be a workshop on movement at Harvard, May 7. Here is the program.
[Thanks Kyle!]
There will be a workshop on Greek syntax and semantics at MIT, May 20-22. Here is the program.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
Angela and John Rickford, April 27 --- reception at 4:00 pm, talk at 4:30 pm, School of Management Room 137.
[Thanks Barbara Z.P.!]
Brian Weatherson
Cornell University
Causation and causatives
Friday, April 13, 3:30pm, Bartlett 206
Semantic interfaces: cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives
Friday April 20, 9:30-3:30pm, One Brattle Sq, Suite 6, Cambridge
Invited speakers
Each of the invited talks will be followed by commentary from two discussants from different disciplines, with interspersed general discussion and lunch.
Jill De Villiers is hosting a workshop on language and mind at Smith, Monday, April 2, starting at 9:00 am. Here is a preliminary schedule.
There will be a workshop on movement at Harvard, May 7. Abstracts are due on April 1.
From the organizers, Cedric Boeckx and Clemens Mayr:
The workshop is designed to bring people together, whose work has bearing on the nature of syntactic movement and its relation to the interfaces between the computational and other cognitive systems. Obvious fields of interest are topics such as linearisation and movement for the PF interface, or quantifier-scope for the LF interface. But there are numerous other topics that would fall into this domain. For instance, an important question to be addressed would be, whether all syntactic movement is the same, or whether the interfaces impose specific restrictions that only need to be met by a subset of "movements". That said, it is clear that there is a broad range of possible topics. We are planning to invite about 8 abstracts for that day. Slots will be 35-40 minutes with focus on discussion afterwards.
[Thanks Kyle!]
Josef Perner
University of Salzburg
Referential ambiguity in thought: Children's problems with alternative naming, false beliefs, and identity
Wednesday, March 28, 5:30 pm, Bass Hall 210, Smith College
[Thanks Jill!]
The Rutgers University Department of Linguistics will be hosting this year's HUMDRUM workshop for grad students working on topics related to OT. All students are welcome to attend and/or speak.
The conference is scheduled for April 21-22. If you would like to present, send a message to Michael O'Keefe, with your title or at least a general idea of what you'll talk about.
Planning is underway for the Spring 2007 UMMM/MUMM meeting. UMMM is the UMass MIT Meeting in Phonology (so-named when it is here), and MUMM The MIT-UMass Meeting in Phonology (so-named when it is there). Write to John Kingston with your thoughts on where, when, and other practical details.
[Thanks John!]
Subordination in language development
A workshop associated with GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition), September 6-8, 2007
Invited speaker: Josef Perner (Salzburg)
Call for papers deadline: March 15
Organized by Bart Hollebrandse and Uli Sauerland
Continue reading "GALA Workshop on Subordination in Language Acquisition" »
The New York-St. Petersburg Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies
5th Annual Summer Institute
June 29 - July 27, 2007
Deadline for applications: April 16, 2007
UMass Amherst linguists Vladimir Borschev, Barbara Partee, and Chris Potts have taught at the NYI in past years.
Check-out the website or this poster for more details.
Roland Pfau (University of Amsterdam) gave a special lecture on Wednesday, March 7. The title of the talk was 'Wh-Questions without wh-words: evidence from signed and spoken languages'. The abstract is below.
[Thanks Kyle!]
The ECO5 Workshop is this Saturday, March 3, in the Math Lounge (at the top of Lederle Tower). Here's the schedule. The UMass Amherst presenters are Andrew McKenzie and Keir Moulton.
[Thanks Amy Rose and Annahita!]
Today (February 22), at 4:00 pm, in Machmer E-10, Seth Cable will give a special seminar. It will be aimed at specialists, but all are of course welcome.
On Friday, February 16, at 1:00 pm, in the South College Lounge, Peter Alrenga will give a special seminar. It will be aimed at specialists, but all are of course welcome.
Today (Feb 8) at 4:00 pm, in Machmer E10, Jessica Rett will give a special seminar. It will be aimed at specialists, but all are of course welcome. The title is 'On exclamatives'.
Today (Feb 1) at 4:00 pm, in Machmer E10, Valentine Hacquard will give a special seminar. It will be aimed at specialists, but all are of course welcome.
In a little over a month, UMass Amherst Linguistics will host the ECO5 Syntax Workshop. This is an annual graduate student workshop involving our department, MIT, Maryland, Harvard and UConn. Amy Rose Deal and Annahita Farudi are organizing what will be the first ECO5 meeting here at UMass.
Students are invited to present work on any aspect of syntax. The organizers expect to set a limit of three presenters per school, in order to keep the program to a single day. Let Amy Rose and Annahita know if you think you'd like to present. They'll see if everyone fits. Even if you aren't interested in presenting (or if you are a faculty member), do plan on joining us in the South College lounge on March 3 to listen to some great new work in syntax!
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
The 1st Annual Cornell University Undergraduate Colloquium will take place March 10-11, 2007. UMass Amherst undergraduates are encouraged to submit their work. The due date for abstracts is February 1. Check out the call for papers for details.
[Thanks Lisa!]
Helen Stickney grabbed a bunch of good shots at UUSLAW. Here's a sample:
[Thanks Helen!]
Click the image for a pdf version
[Thanks Tanja!]
UUSLAW (The UMass-Amherst/UConn/Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) will take place here at UMass Amherst on December 9, in Herter 301. The start-time will be around 9:00 am. We'll have more details closer to the time.
[Thanks Tanja!]
David Christensen
University of Vermont
Does Murphy's Law apply in Epistemology? Self-doubt and rational ideals
Friday, November 10, 2006, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 206
[Thanks Barbara!]
