Main
events
Annual Mini-Conference
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!]
End-of-Semester Lunch
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:
- Amanda Bernhard
- Clara Donascimento
- Daniel Green
- Ekaterina Kravtchenko
- Elizabeth Oconnor
- Natan Pakman
- Yelena Paschenko
- Amy Patno
- Ho Ching Yuen
Thanks to everyone who helped arrange the lunch! And congratulations to our new Linguistics BAs!
Anisa Schardl in Voces Feminae Concert
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!
Workshop on Locating Variability
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:
- David Adger (University of London)
- Sjef Barbiers (The Meertens Institute, KNAW)
- Lisa Green (UMass Amherst)
- Randall Hendrick (UNC - Chapel Hill)
- Alison Henry (University of Ulster)
- Richard Kayne (New York University)
- William Labov (University of Pennsylvania)
- Karen Miller (Calvin College)
- Andrew Nevins (Harvard University)
- Jeffrey Parrott (LANCHART Center, University of Copenhagen)
- Joe Pater (UMass Amherst)
- Thomas Roeper (UMass Amherst)
- Cristina Schmitt (Michigan State University)
- William Snyder (University of Connecticut)
- Joseph Paul Stemberger (University of British Columbia)
- J. Michael Terry (UNC - Chapel Hill)
- Christina Tortora (CUNY (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center))
- James Walker (York University)
- Jessica White (University of Texas at Austin)
- Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania)
Schedule
Career Connections Reception
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 April 26
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!]
UUSLAW on May 17
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!]
Special Lecture by David Adger
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 Lecture at Harvard
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'.
Mini-report on Two Moscow Conferences, from Barbara
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.
Intensionality Workshop at Yale
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 Workshop on Semiproductivity
Tufts University is hosting a workshop on semiproductivity in grammar, May 3-4.
[Thanks Kathy!]
Deanna Moore Talk for Job-Seeking Undergrads
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!]
MUMM 2 Workshop This Saturday
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 to Deliver the Freeman Lecture
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.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Conference on Epistemic Modals
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!
SALT 18 is Upon Us!
Cover design by Pasha Siraj
Gennaro Chierchia UMass Amherst Graduate Alum Lecture
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!]
SALT 18 Nearly Upon Us
Cover design by Pasha Siraj
HUMDRUM at Rutgers
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.
HUMDRUM at Rutgers April 5-6
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.)
ECO5 at UConn This Weekend
The ECO5 syntax workshop is coming up this weekend at UConn.
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
Laura Holland Show at Jones Library
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!
Joan Mascaro Guest Lecture
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!]
Undergrad Mentees Meet Mentors Pizza Event
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 Workshop on Formal Approaches to Variation
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 Philosophy Colloquium
Paul Pietroski
University of Maryland
Semantic monadicity with conceptual polyadicity
Friday, March 22, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 206
SALT 18 Program Posted
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!
Seeking ECO5 Submissions
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!]
Harvard Workshop: MUMSA
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!]
MUMM 2 on March 29
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!]
SALT 18 Registration Open
Register now for SALT 18, UMass Amherst Linguistics, March 21-23, 2008.
International Conference: Semantics without Borders
The University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland, September 11-13, 2008.
Abstracts are due April 30, 2008 (500 word max)
Send abstracts to and
Additional information
Continue reading "International Conference: Semantics without Borders" »
Logic Lecture at Smith
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
Continue reading "Logic Lecture at Smith" »
Anisa Schardl in Voces Feminae Concert
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 Workshop
UUSLAW, Saturday, December 1, 2007, UMass Amherst (Herter 301). PDF version of the program.
[Thanks Tanja!]
Logic Lecture at Smith
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
Continue reading "Logic Lecture at Smith" »
UUSLAW on December 1
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!]
Call for Papers: Vagueness and Language Use
Vagueness and Language Use
Paris, ENS & Institut Jean-Nicod
April 7-9, 2008
Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2008 [details]
[Thanks Nathan!]
William Snyder in the Learning Seminar
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!]
Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
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!)
The schedule
[Thanks Joe!]
An Evening of African American English
SALT 18 at UMass Amherst
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.
Parts and Quantities Workshop at UBC
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: Conference on Tone and Intonation
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 Philosophy Colloquium
Jerry Fodor
State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers
Against Darwinism
Friday, October 26, 3:30 pm, Bartlett 61
SNEWS This Saturday
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.
