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November 18, 2009
November 11, 2009
Barbara Partee's Oslo lecture on video
The whole lecture Barbara gave in September in Oslo is on line and free of access: http://folk.uio.no/atleg/russian_in_contrast/Tom Roeper talk in Paris
Leah S. Bauke (University of Wuppertal) gave a presentation of joint work with Tom Roeper in a talk entitled "A closer look: incorporated and non-incorporated singular and plural nominal gerunds" at the Workshop on Nominal and Verbal Plurality held at CNRS/Paris 8, November 6-7, 2009.October 7, 2009
More UMass people going to NELS 40
Rajesh Bhatt and Radek Simik are presenting together at MIT in the Semantics Workshop on Pronouns at NELS 40. The title of their talk is "Variable Binding meets the Person Case Constraint".Former South College visitor Radek Simik has also a paper "Quantificational properties of ne-Wh items in Russian" in the main session with Natasha Kondrashova.
Former student Cherlon Ussery (2009 UMass Amherst PhD now at Carleton College) is presenting a paper entitled "Variability in Icelandic agreement: An interaction of DP licensing and Multiple Agree".
Former student Michael Becker (2008 UMass Amherst PhD now at Harvard) is presenting "Initial syllable faithfulness as the best model of word-size effects in alternations" in collaboration with Andrew Nevins.
Rajesh Bhatt and Radek Simik's world tour
Rajesh Bhatt is an invited speaker at MOSS is Moscow. He is speaking there on Oct. 10, presenting joint work with Radek Simik on the interaction of variable binding and the person case constraint.Radek will also be presenting their work on this topic at IATL 25 in Israel on October 13.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
October 1, 2009
Lyn Frazier: "Inaudible Syntax" in San Francisco
Lyn Frazier gave a joint talk with Jason Merchant on "Inaudible syntax" at the Leverhulme meeting on context and communication, San Francisco, September 19.September 23, 2009
UMass talks at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona
Noah Constant reports several UMass presentations at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona last week.* Invited speakers Elisabeth Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer presented on "Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information".
* Noah Constant presented a poster "Variations on Contrastive Topic Marking -- Evidence from Mandarin Chinese".
* Mara Breen (UMass Psychology) was a coauthor on a poster "Factoring out Speaker Variation in Experimental Studies of Prosody: The Case of Association with Focus".
Seth Cable in Norway
Seth is in Tromso, Norway this week, presenting an invited talk at the CASTL conference on Arctic languages.September 16, 2009
Barbara Partee in Norway
Barbara Partee is in Norway for a series of talks over two weeks. Click here for a great poster: BP.pdfSept 16 in Kjell Johan Sæbø's Contrastive Semantics seminar at the University of Oslo: "Perspectives on Semantics: How philosophy and syntax have shaped the development of formal semantics, and vice versa"
Sept 17-19, at the conference Russian in Contrast, University of Oslo, organized by Atle Grønn. "Specificational Copular Sentences in Russian and English"
Sept 20-23, University of Tromsø (the northernmost university in the world), hosted by Laura Janda. "Russian Genitives, Non-Referentiality, and the Property-Type Hypothesis" (based on work joint with Borschev, Paducheva, Rakhilina, Testelets, and Yanovich).
Sept 24-27, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, hosted by Lars Hellan, "Compositionality and Coercion: The Dynamics of Adjective Meanings".
Then she'll have to reset what's the farthest north she's been, no longer Fairbanks, Alaska...
Tom Roeper - summer activities
Tom Roeper had a busy summer. In June he presented at a conference on Recursion at ZAS in Berlin (along with Bart Hollebrandse, and Angeliek van Hout). He also presented at a conference on Sentence Types in Frankfurt, on "Vacate Phase" (also presentatons by other former department members Peter Sells, Edwin Williams and Luigi Rizzi). Tom went to South Africa to advise scholars working on the DELV on the test and gave lectures in Stellenborsh, Capetown, and at the University of Lesotho (and managed to do some pony-trekking with Tim Roeper on the side). The DELV, developed in part for AAE, has been translated into Afrikaans, CAAPS, and South African Black English.May 21, 2009
Party for Lisa Selkirk
Lisa Selkirk's retirement party gets underway tomorrow (May 22), 7:00 pm, at Ellen and John's place!
Barbara Partee at Dialog 2009
Barbara Partee will present a paper "The dynamics of adjective meaning" at the conference Dialog 2009 (the series is so-named because it aims to foster dialogue between theoretical and computational linguists), May 27-31 at the Bekasovo Spa ("Common-Snipe-ovo Spa") in Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow. Barbara writes, "Part of what I love about these end-of-semester Dialog conferences is that often the whole family comes along (lots of linguists seem to be children of linguists and/or married to linguists) and there are lots of kids - here's my favorite photo from last year's conference at the same location.May 14, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at SULA
Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas 5 (SULA 5) takes place at MIT this weekend (May 15-17). Lots of UMass Amherst folks on the program:
- Seth Cable (Invited address!): Intervention effects, superiority and pied-piping: Evidence from Tlingit
- Amy Rose Deal (Invited address!): The expression of futurity in Nez Perce
- Ana Quadros Gomes (former visitor): The structure of gradable adjectives
- Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Matthewson: Anatomy of a discourse particle
- Suzi Lima: Numeral quantification in Juruna: Exactly and approximately readings
- Cathy O'Connor and Amy Rose Deal: Evidentiality and the Interpretation of Fluid-S Case Marking
UMass Amherst Dominates the Current Issue of Linguistic Inquiry
The current issue of Linguistic Inquiry (40:2, Spring 2009) contains three papers by UMass Amherst linguists (out of eight papers in all):
- Angelika Kratzer: Making a pronoun: Fake indexicals as windows into the properties of pronouns
- Kyle Johnson: Gapping is not (VP-)Ellipsis
- Christopher Potts, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Ash Asudeh, Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Christopher Davis, Yurie Hara, Angelika Kratzer, Eric McCready, Tom Roeper, and Martin Walkow: Expressives and identity conditions
For the third, we note also that Luis is a UMass Amherst PhD and Yurie was a long-time visitor.
May 7, 2009
Lisa Selkirk's Retirement Party May 22
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!]
Lisa Selkirk to be Honored at CHFA Event
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!]
Chris Potts at the LSA Executive Committee Meeting
Chris Potts heads to his first LSA Executive Committee meeting this weekend. The meeting runs all day Saturday and most of the day on Sunday (May 9-10). Please drop him a note if there are any questions, concerns, or complaints that you'd like to have him try to raise with the rest of the EC.
April 30, 2009
Thomas Russel Cable Arrives!
From Seth:
Hi Everyone,
We're happy to announce the latest addition to our fine line of Cable brand products.
The 2009 Thomas Russel (spelled correctly; long story).
Specs:
- Production Date: April 25, 2009 (8:02AM)
- Weight: 7lbs 11oz
- Length: 20.5 inches
- Brain Pan: 33cm in circumference
Published Reviews:
- "Oh... he came out?" – Hazel Quarterly
- "His feet are gross!" – American Hazel
- "I think he wants ice cream!" – Field and Hazel
- "Can we go home?" – Harper's
Arriving soon at your local book shops and tackle stores!
Congratulations, Cables!
Tom Roeper in the NY Times
A letter to the editor by Tom Roeper appeared in the April 23, 2009, issue of the New York Times. Here's the text of the letter, which concerns the editorial In the spirit of openness:
To the Editor:
When I was 12 in the 1950s, my mother made me promise -- if I were drafted into the Army -- not to do something stupid or wrong even if an officer told me to. She is a Holocaust refugee. That was the meaning of the Nuremberg laws, I was told.
If I could understand that at 12, shouldn't C.I.A. agents bear the same responsibility to judge the orders from their superiors?
I was astonished to hear that the Nuremberg rationale was invoked -- "I was only following orders" -- as an acceptable excuse in the current debate.
Where is that better America that President Obama calls upon us to heed?
Can we really live with ourselves if we fail to prosecute all involved under the real Nuremberg laws?
Tom Roeper
Amherst, Mass., April 22, 2009
John Kingston in the NY Times
At the time of this writing, a recent extended comment by John Kingston in the New York Times has received 1,056 reader recommendations. The letter is a critical response to the Times editorial End the University as We Know It.
April 23, 2009
Frazier in York
Lyn Frazier is speaking this week at the Explaining Syntax Workshop in York. The title of her talk is 'Explaining syntax: The role of acceptable ungrammaticality'.
Hollebrandse and Roeper at GLOW
Bart Hollebrandse and Tom Roeper presented a paper at GLOW 32. The title was 'Indirect recursion as a restriction on the syntax-semantics interface'.
Partee in Moscow
Barbara Partee was an invited speaker at the 4th Annual Moscow Students' Linguistics Conference. The title of her talk was 'Quantifying over contexts: Semantics or pragmatics or both?'. Barbara plans soon to post an updated handout reflecting ongoing conversation with Paul Elbourne. When she does, we'll link to it from here.
Davis and Potts at Brown
Chrises Davis and Potts visited Brown yesterday, to lecture in Polly Jacobson's undergraduate seminar on questions and answers. They presented a corpus they've collected, and then the group engaged in some exploratory data analysis, seeking to identify pragmatic strategies for responding to questions and the implicatures those strategies give rise to.
April 16, 2009
Distinguished Teaching Award to John McCarthy
Distinguished University Professor John McCarthy is now at least doubly Distinguished: he has been selected to receive the Distinguished Teaching Award for 2008-2009. John will receive the award at the Celebration of Teaching Dinner this Thursday, April 16. Congratulations, John!
UMass Amherst Linguists at CLS 45
UMass Amherst Linguistics is well-represented at CLS 45, which begins today (April 16) and runs through Saturday:
- Kyle Johnson is giving a plenary address
- Christopher Potts is giving a plenary address, presenting joint work with Jesse Harris.
- Jesse Harris: Locality, Event-construal and Extraction: Evidence from Language Processing.
- Karen Jesney: Licensing in Multiple Contexts: An Argument for Harmonic Grammar.
- Alum Marcin Morzycki (Michigan State): Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives
April 9, 2009
Kingston and Viswanathan in Phonology Group
John Kingston and Navin Viswanathan (UConn Psychology) are each giving talks in PhG this Friday (April 10), from 4:00-5:45. The talks present opposite sides on a fundamental dispute in the theory of speech perception. John writes:
Navin and I don't plan this to be a point-counterpoint presentation, but instead a chance to lay out some recent relevant empirical results that point in opposite theoretical directions. Navin will give a more technical version of his talk in my lab meeting 2:30-3:45 in Bartlett 6 the same day. After it's all over we'll take him out for a well-deserved supper. Anyone is welcome to join us.
Here is a link to the talks' abstracts, bundled into a single document.
Kratzer and Selkirk in Michigan
Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk are giving a joint colloquium in the Linguistics department at the University of Michigan tomorrow. Their talk is called 'Distinguishing contrastive, new, and given information'.
April 2, 2009
Harris and Potts at OSU
Jesse Harris and Chris Potts are presenting their paper Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings, just before SALT 19 (April 2-3), at OSU. The workshop is co-organized by Craige Roberts (1987 UMass Amherst PhD).
Peggy Speas at Purdue
Peggy Speas is giving a keynote address at the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas at Purdue University , April 3-5. The conference is organized by alum Elena Benedicto (1998 UMass Amherst PhD).
March 26, 2009
Retirement Party for Lisa Selkirk on May 22
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!]
Tom Roeper in Hamburg
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Presupposition, propositions and inversion' at a conference on multi-lingualism in honor of Jürgen Meisel in Hamburg. Jürgen Meisel was twice a visitor at UMass Amherst, in 1973 and 1989, working first on semantics and then acquisition.
UMass Amherst Linguists at the Penn Colloquium
This year's Penn Linguistics Colloquium begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday (March 27-29). Lisa Selkirk is the invited speaker this year. Noah Constant and Chloe Gu are also on the program.
March 12, 2009
Kratzer in Osnabrück
Tanja Heizmann-Dold sent in this picture from Angelika's recent plenary address at the DGfS:
And here's a link to the slidehow prominently displayed in this shot.
[Thanks Tanja!]
Bhatt in Texas
Rajesh Bhatt visited the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, late last month. He gave a talk titled 'Ergativity in Two Indo-Aryan Languages'. While there, he worked on a paper on the interaction of negation and verb movement in Kashmiri with Sadaf Munshi, who is an assistant professor at UNT.
Treebanking in Hyderabad
Rajesh Bhatt was in Hyderabad earlier this year for a Hindi-Urdu treebanking workshop at IIIT. You can check out the project wiki for news, technical documents, and some data.
Here's an action shot:
From left to right: Rajesh, Owen Rambow (Columbia), Dipti Misra Sharma (IIIT), Martha Palmer (Colorado), Rajiv Sangal (IIIT), Fei Xia (Washington), Rafiya Begum (IIIT), Miriam Butt (Konstanz), Samar Hussain (IIIT), Aravind Joshi (Penn)
March 5, 2009
Watsky and Kingston at NEST
Sarah Watsky (UMass Amherst Linguistics undergrad) and John Kingston are giving a talk at the NEST (New English Sequence and Timing) meeting at Haskins Labs, March 7. The talk is called 'Counting sounds: Do musicians estimate relative numerosity better than non-musicians?'
February 26, 2009
Collaboration Graph: Thesis Committees
We continue the series of collaboration graphs this week with an unusual one: a graph that links two faculty members iff they have been on a thesis committee together at some point between 1995 and the present.
Angelika Kratzer at the DGfS
Angelika Kratzer is a plenary speaker at the 31st meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, held this year at the University of Osnabrück, March 4-6.
Barbara Partee in Russia and Alaska
Barbara Partee is teaching in Moscow this spring, as usual. She'll also be in Alaska (as is somewhat less usual). Here's a rundown on what she is up to these days:
- On Saturday, Feb 28, she will give an invited talk "Symmetry and Symmetrical Predicates" in the Moscow State University seminar "Applications of mathematical methods in linguistics" led by V.A. Uspensky and M.R. Pentus.
- This semester, she is teaching a course "Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics" at Moscow State University, meeting on Friday afternoons 4:20-7:30 (! - the students' choice!) from February 20 until June 5. (It's an elective course, and that was apparently the only 'good' block of two slots that the students had free.) This year Barbara grappled with Dreamweaver to make her course website - she hopes it's an improvement over previous ones.
We'll soon have details on the talk she will give at the University of Alaska in March; they're still choosing among possible topics and settling the day. Barbara writes, "It mustn't conflict with my daughter-in-law's dog races!" (Check out Sled Dog Studios.)
UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora
Earlier this year, Noah Constant, Chris Davis, Chris Potts, and Florian Schwarz released the UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora:
The UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora consist of n-gram counts extracted from over 700,000 online product reviews in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese. The files are UTF-8 encoded text. They are formatted to be read in as R data frames, but they can easily be manipulated with other tools.
This data collection effort and research that makes use of it were supported by an NSF grant and by a UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Visioning Grant.
February 19, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at the CUNY Conference
The CUNY Conference, held non-compositionally at UC Davis this year, will feature work by a number of UMass Amherst linguists:
- Maria Biezma: Processing evidence for multiple focus-assignment strategies
- Veena Dwivedi (PhD 1994): Underspecification of scope ambiguity and anaphora: Evidence from self-paced reading
- Meg Grant, Lyn Frazier, and Chuck Clifton: The role of Non-Actuality Implicatures in processing elided constituents
- Jesse Harris: On the Event-Extraction Correlation: Evidence from Coordinate Structures
Congratulations!
February 12, 2009
Kingston and Co. Talk in Psychology
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.
February 5, 2009
McCarthy, Kimper, and Pruitt on Large Lecture Classes
On Tuesday, February 3, John McCarthy, Wendell Kimper, and Kathryn Pruitt gave a two-hour presentation in the Center for Teaching's series called Teaching Large Classes. They described their work on the TA handbook for Ling 101. Matt Ouellett, the CFT's director, invited Wendell and Kathryn to do an encore in the Fall at the CFT's University-wide TA orientation.
Apoussidou, Jesney, and Pater at Brown
Diana Apoussidou, Karen Jesney, and Joe Pater are presenting their joint talk 'Learning underlying representations with Positive M-Phon constraints' at Brown this Friday (Feb 6). Here's the abstract and locational information.
UMass Amherst Linguists at Harvard
The Harvard colloq schedule is packed with UMass Amherst linguists this semester:
- Lisa Selkirk on the syntax–prosody interface, January 30
- John McCarthy on harmonic serialism, February 6
- Angelika Kratzer on February 20.
[Thanks Joe!]
January 29, 2009
Prism of Grammar
Tom Roeper's Prism of Grammar has sold out of its hardcover print run, but it will appear in paperback on February 6, at the low, low price of only $12.95. The book has been used as a textbook, for courses in acquisition and general linguistics. Please do drop Tom a note if you've used the book in the classroom; he's keen to hear about novel applications.
Seminar on Phi-Features
Rajesh Bhatt is teaching a seminar on Phi features this semester. The course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:45, in Hasbrouck Lab Add 106. The Tuesday meetings are open to everyone; the Thursday meetings are only for those who are [+enrolled] or at least [+did the reading]. Here's the syllabus, and a course abstract too:
Phi-features (Person, Number, Gender) play an important role in linguistic theory. For example, the uninterpretable/interpretable distinction on phi-features is taken to be the driving force behind most syntactic operations in versions of the Minimalist Program. In this course, we will explore how the syntactic system manipulates phi-features giving rise to the phenomena of Agreement. We will also examine how there are significant distinctions between different kinds of phi-features. These differences become visible in a number of domains: in morphosyntax via agreement restrictions and the person-case constraint, and in semantics via constraints on interpretation. Our goal will be to develop an integrated understanding of the fundamental properties of phi-features. This will involve a proper appreciation of the asymmetries between the different kinds of phi-features and how these asymmetries might follow from the design of the basic syntactic primitives.
Seminar on Meaning and Intonation
Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk are co-teaching a seminar on meaning and intonation this semester. The course meets in the heart of the Ag school: Bowditch 209. The first half of each class is open to everyone; the second half of each class is a hands-on practicum. Check out the website for topics, readings, and class notes.
Seminar on Models of Phonological Learning
Joe Pater is teaching a phonology seminar this semester: Models of Phonological Learning. The course mets in Hasbrouck Lab Add 106. Check out the syllabus; here's Joe's description:
We'll be considering phonological acquisition mostly from the perspective of OT and related theories, but we'll also be considering other models of phonological learning, and will thus be reading fairly widely in the literature. The course will consist of discussions related to each week's readings. All are welcome, but the discussion may not make much sense if you don't do the reading beforehand. Along with phonologists, others interested more generally in acquisition and/or computational approaches to learning may find relevant things in the syllabus. I'll keep the syllabus updated at this web address, and will make sure that the all the readings have URLs soon. You only need to let me know that you are coming if you want to make sure to have your own copy of the handout!
January 22, 2009
Tom Roeper Above the Arctic Circle
Tom Roeper gave three lectures in Norway this past December: 'Recursion in Acquisition', 'Nodes, Features, and Labels' (Trondheim), and 'The impact of recursion and Phases on interpretation' (Tromsø). He also found time for some skiing and dog-sledding above the Arctic Circle:
December 18, 2008
Report on the Angelika Fest
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
UMass Amherst Linguists at the LSA
There are lots of UMass Amherst linguists at the upcoming LSA Annual Meeting (San Francisco, January 8-11, 2009).
Angelika Kratzer is giving one of the three plenary addresses. Her title is 'Straddling the border between linguistics and philosophy'. The talk is on Saturday, January 10, 12:45-1:45 pm.
In addition, we culled the following lists from the preliminary program (please let us know if we missed any current or former South College faculty, visitors, alums, etc.!):
Current South College Inhabitants
Seth Cable: Use of subordinate clauses as matrix utterances in the Pacific Northwest
Amy Rose Deal: Future and past in Nez Perce modals
Lisa Green: Resultative aspect and past tense in child African American English
Andrew McKenzie: Kiowa switch-reference and subject positions
Christopher Potts and Florian Schwarz: Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora
Aynat Rubinstein: Between modals and verbs: The dual role of must/need
Nathan Sanders (Williams) and Jaye Padgett: Exploring the role of production in predicting vowel inventories
Cherlon Ussery: Case at syntax, agreement at PF: Evidence from Icelandic
South College Alums
Michael Becker (Reed) and Lena Fainleib (Tel Aviv): Surface-based generalizations over lexical exceptions
Andries Coetzee (U Michigan) and Rigardt Pretorius (North-West University, South Africa): Tswana voiced plosives: Observing change-in-progress
Lisa Matthewson (UBC): Tense and modality in the Pacific Northwest
Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins): A semantics for extreme ignorance questions
Helen Stickney: Inter-speaker variation in the syntax of the partitive
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers), Roger Schwarzschild (Rutgers): The representation and processing of measure phrases in four-year-olds
Matthew Wolf (Georgetown): Local ordering in phonology/morphology interleaving: Evidence for OT-CC
December 11, 2008
Seth Cable in the S-Group Today
As we announced last week, Seth Cable is speaking in the joint semantics and syntax reading group meeting today (December 11), 4:30 pm, in the department lounge. The title of the talk is 'Sequence of Tense as Abstraction over Topic Time'; here's the abstract.
[Thanks Annahita!]
December 4, 2008
Birthday FestShop for Angelika Kratzer
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!]
Roeper and Pearson at the American Speech and Hearing Convention
Tom Roeper, Barbara Pearson, and Ondene van Dulm (University of Stellenbosch) presented a seminar on "Building on the DELV" about efforts to translate the DELV into foreign languages and dialects at the American Speech and Hearing Convention in Chicago, November 8.
Chris Potts Elected to the LSA Executive Committee
Chris Potts has been elected to the LSA Executive Committee. His term starts at the close of the LSA Annual Meeting and runs for three years.
November 20, 2008
Roger Higgins Colloquium
F. Roger Higgins
UMass Amherst (retired)
Philology's Revenge: Working on John Eliot's Bible, an Introduction
Friday, November 21, 2008, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26
Party after at Barbara Partee's house
Chris Potts at Univerity of Michigan Philosophy
Chris Potts will be at the University of Michigan Linguistics and Philosophy Workshop on Implicatures this weekend. His task is to comment on a paper by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. He has written a short paper, Indirect answers and cooperation, to serve as the basis for the commentary.
November 13, 2008
More Distinguished Teaching Award Nominations
Last week, we reported on Martin Walkow's Distinguished Teaching Award nomination. We have a few more nominations to report. Here's the full list of nominees:
- John McCarthy
- Tom Roeper
- Cherlon Ussery
- Martin Wakow
First Issue of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics
The inaugural issue of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics has appeared. The journal is coedited by Rajesh Bhatt and Miriam Butt. Here's the table of contents for the issue:
- Eystein Dahl . Performative Sentences and the Morphosyntax-Semantics Interface in Vedic
- Alice Davison. A Case Restriction on Control: Implications for Movement
- Umesh Patil, Gerrit Kentner, Anja Gollrad, Frank Kügler, Caroline Fery, Shravan Vasisth. Focus, Word Order and Intonation in Hindi
Volodja Borschev in the Russian Science News
Volodja Borschev in action at a recent conference in Moscow!
Barbara Partee reports:
The conference was in honor of Yulij Shreider, a mathematician and theoretical scientist who was the head of Volodja's department at VINITI (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences) for many years, and his sometimes co-author, who died quite a few years ago – various mathematicians and philosophers discussed Shreider's ideas and what influence they had on later work.
As the article notes, Volodja discussed both Shreider's ideas about scientific infrastructure and their relevance to the internet age, and Shreider's innovative topological approach to formal grammar description. Shreider's "neighborhood models" of language are directly relevant to model-theoretic syntax, as Volodja and I discussed with Geoff Pullum and Chris Potts at Santa Cruz in May 2002, which was the first time we met Chris!
[Thanks Barbara!]
Budapest Summer School on Conditionals
The CEU Summer University announces the course Conditionals: Philosophical and Linguistic Issues.
November 6, 2008
NECPhon on November 15
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 |
Forthcoming Papers from Joe Pater
Joe Pater has had an extremely productive year. In addition to starting his joint NSF project with John McCarthy, he has published a number of papers.
Joe's 'Harmonic Grammar and linguistic typology" has been accepted for publication in Cognitive Science, a premier interdisciplinary journal (here is an earlier version).
Joe has also recently been involved in a number of collaborative projects on Harmonic Grammar. A paper with Andries Coetzee, 'Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic', has just been published in NLLT (pre-publication draft), and papers with Chris Potts, Rajesh Bhatt and Michael Becker (Harmonic Grammar and linear programming: From linear systems to linguistic typology) and Paul Boersma (Convergence Properties of a Gradual Learning Algorithm for Harmonic Grammar) are in submission.
October 30, 2008
Seth Cable's Book to be Published by OUP
Seth Cable's book The Grammar of Q is soon to be published by Oxford University Press. Congratulations, Seth! (And congratulations, OUP!)
Ellen Woolford in Brazil
Ellen Woolford has just returned from Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she gave a week long course in connection with a workshop on Ergativity and Case Theory at UFMG, Oct 20-24. She had the opportunity to consult with graduate students working on five different indigenous languages of Brazil, and to participate in elicitation sessions with a native speaker of Terena (an Arawakan language). There are plans for an ongoing collaboration with Fábio Bonfim Duarte, faculty at UFMG, coordinator of a project on the indigenous languages of Brazil.
October 23, 2008
Speas Lecture at Purdue, From South College
Last week, Peggy Speas gave a guest lecture at Purdue University without having to leave South College. The talk, which Elena Benedicto arranged via Skype, was on Navajo Pronouns in Embedded Contexts. Peggy reports that it was fun and the students asked good questions, but the post-colloq party at her desk was pretty dull.
UMass Amherst Linguists at BUCLD
The Boston University Child Language Development (October 31-November 2) will be bustling with UMass Amherst linguists. Anna Verbuk, Helen Stickney, Joe Pater, Jill deVilliers, Barbara Pearson, Ana Perez and D'jaris Coles White will all present papers or posters. In addition, Tom Roeper is giving a plenary lecture on Saturday evening, title 'From Input to Mind: How acquisition work captures the heart of linguistic theory and the soul of practical application'.
October 16, 2008
New Work by Seth Cable
Seth Cable has made a lot of new work available:
- Towards the Elimination of Pied-Piping: Evidence from Tlingit
- A New Argument for Lexical Decomposition: Transparent Readings of Verbs
- Wh-Fronting (in Hungarian) is not Focus-Fronting
- The Grammar of Q
In addition, Seth is giving colloquia at Cornell (October 30) and Maryland (November 21), and he is giving a talk at the LSA meeting in January, as part of an LSA/SSILA panel Inflectional Contrasts in the Languages of the Northwest Coast.
Barbara Partee in New York and Berlin
Barbara Partee was at Cornell two weeks ago, presenting a colloquium talk on September 25 that had four other (absent) co-authors – Vladimir Borschev, Elena Paducheva, Yakov Testelets, and Igor Yanovich: "Russian Genitives, Non-Referentiality, and the Property-Type Hypothesis". This was a version of their FASL 16 paper, which they plan to revise into a journal article.
Barbara spent time with Mats Rooth and Dorit Abusch (one of only two couples of whom both were her Ph.D. students – see the Partee PhD Genealogy), Sally McConnell-Ginet, Wayles Browne, saw Molly Diesing, and met with students; took a walk at the Cornell Ornithology center (there were indeed lots of birds there, but they cheat – they have lots of bird feeders); and it's a beautiful drive between Amherst and Ithaca at this time of year.
Barbara is now Berlin, as an invited discussant at the second International Conference on Quotation and Meaning (ICQM2) at ZAS, October 16-18, organized by Manfred Krifka and his colleagues.
Upcoming Talks by Tom Roeper
Tom Roeper is a Distinguished Guest Speaker in the California State University, Northridge, Linguistics/TESL Program. His talk is today (October 16). It is titled 'From input to mind: How acquisition work captures the heart of linguistic theory and the soul of practical application'. Tom is also giving a talk at UCLA next week: 'Nodes, labels, and features and the role of recursion in acquisition'.
October 9, 2008
Barbara Pearson at the University Club October 15
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.
October 2, 2008
John Kingston on Journal Editing
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.
September 18, 2008
GALANA 3 Report
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.
Tom Roeper in Leiden
Tom Roeper has recently returned from Leiden, where he and Bart Hollebrandse gave a paper called 'Indirect recursion'.
September 11, 2008
Potts and Schwarz in UCSC Alumni Conference
UC Santa Cruz Linguistics is holding a graduate reunion conference, September 12-13. Chris Potts is giving a joint paper with Florian Schwarz called 'Expressives in the wild: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora' (associated paper). Chris is also a (part-of) Bargunnedytts, for whom the description theory of names is true.
The alumni conference got some press.
September 4, 2008
NIH Grant to Clifton and Frazier
Lyn Frazier and Chuck Clifton have just been awarded a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health. The project is called Language Comprehension: Mechanisms of Co-Variation. Congratulations, Lyn and Chuck!
NSF Science and Learning Grant to Speas and Roepe
Peggy Speas and Tom Roeper have received a grant from the NSF's Science and Learning Center program to hold a large international workshop on recursion in the spring. The grant runs for a full year and provides for student support. Congratulations, Tom and Peggy!
Chris Potts on the LSA Executive Committee Ballot
Chris Potts is on the ballot for the LSA Executive Committee. Check out his ballot statement, and then vote online at the LSA website.
UMass Amherst Linguists at the IASCL
UMass Amherst Linguistics was well-represented at the International Association for the Study of Child Language, held in Edinburgh this year, July 28 to August 1. There was a session on presuppositions organized by UMass Amherst grad Ana Perez and UMass Amherst visitor Petra Schulz. Both also gave talks, as did Tanja Heizmann and Tom Roeper. In addition, Jill de Villiers spoke in a session on Bantu, Peter de Villiers in a session on theory of mind, and Barbara Pearson in a session on bilingualism.
Talks and Research by Rajesh Bhatt in Hyderabad
Rajesh Bhatt gave a talk called 'Complex predicates and agreement' at EFLU, Hyderabad, on August 18. He was also at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), in Hyderabad, working to develop tree-banking guidelines for Hindi-Urdu, August 12-19. This work is connected with Rajesh's new NSF grant.
Upcoming Talks by Lyn Frazier
Lyn Frazier will hardly be resting during her sabbatical this semester. On September 12, she gives a colloquium on ellipsis at Rutgers. Shortly after, on September 19, she'll be in Kent, England, to speak at the Workshop on Context and Communication. Then she moves on to Padua for a talk called 'Good Enough parsing' on October 3 and a related talk in Rovereto on October 4. She will spend the rest of October as a visiting scholar in Germany, mostly in Potsdam, where she will give a short course on puzzles at the interfaces.
Tom Roeper in Germany
Tom Roeper was in Germany this summer to give a number of talks. He spoke about frequency in Wuppertal, about implicit arguments in Cologne, and about recursion in Cologne and Frankfurt.
August 28, 2008
NSF Grant to McCarthy and Pater
John McCarthy and Joe Pater have been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant. The title of the project is Investigations in Optimality Theory: Typology, Learning, and Modeling. Congratulations, John and Joe!
UMass Amherst Linguistics now has four active NSF grants, in quite different areas: Rajesh Bhatt to develop a Hindi Treebank, Peggy Speas and Tom Roeper to work on evidentiality, Chris Potts to work on expressive content, and now the McCarthy–Pater project.
New Mexico Adopts Parsons Yazzie and Speas Textbook
Evangeline Parsons Yazzie and Peggy Speas' Navajo textbook, Diné Bizaad Bínáhoo'aah: Rediscovering The Navajo Language Description, has been adopted by the state of New Mexico as its official textbook. New Mexico is the first state to have its own official textbook! The AP story ran in lots of newspapers. Here's a link to the USA Today version.
July 31, 2008
Peggy Speas at the Navajo Language Academy
Peggy Speas has been teaching and working at the Navajo Language Acadamy this month. She points us to a YouTube video about the academy, Navajo language academy summer workshop 2007.
Peggy also writes, "There's also a very funny video that someone made of Arnold Schwarznegger supposedly speaking Navajo".
[Thanks Peggy!]
June 26, 2008
Leadership in Action Award to Kingston, McCarthy, Pater, and Selkirk
From John Kingston:
John McCarthy, Joe Pater, Lisa Selkirk, and I obtained a Research Leadership in Action grant from the Office of Research Affairs in the amount of $17,500 to partially fund the 12th Laboratory Phonology Conference, which we hope to hold here in the summer of 2010 (more on this soon). We will enter our bid at the meeting in New Zealand at the end of this month. Now, all we have to do is raise at least $10,000 in matching money.
John McCarthy in the Boston Globe
John McCarthy is quoted about the Boston dialect in the May 25 Sunday Boston Globe: Wicked good Bostonisms come and go.
Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee at DIALOG 2008
From Barbara:
Volodja and I [[+distributive] presented] papers at DIALOG 2008, June 4-8, at a pleasant 'pansionat' outside Moscow, the Bekasovo Spa (which translates roughly as Woodcockville Spa; 'bekas' is woodcock (a little plumper than a snipe)). There were goldfinches, fieldfares, magpies, greenfinches, wagtails, and probably more, not counting chaffinches and hooded crows, which are everywhere (I'm composing this on the 5th). It's been a very cold May in and around Moscow, and there were still lily-of-the-valley in bloom here in early June, though the light late nights meant it must be summer.
Volodja's paper was ' "Ja ne byl ..., menja ne bylo..." or how many different "byt' " in Russian.' (' "I.NOM NEG was.MASC.SG, ... I.GEN NEG was.NEUT.SG..." or how many different "BE"s in Russian'). My paper was 'Symmetry and symmetrical predicates'.
The annual DIALOG conference brings together theoretical, descriptive, and computational linguists, and it's always stimulating and fun. There are many Russian linguist "families", and there were several 3-generation-families at the conference in its lovely family-friendly setting -- for instance our colleague Elena Paducheva and her wonderful linguist husband Andrej Zalizniak's daughter Anna Zalizniak is a linguist and is married to another linguist Mixail Mixeev, and their daughter Melania is 9 now -- they were all here except Zalizniak senior. Apresjan and his wife are both linguists, their daughter Valentina is a very fine linguist, her husband is not a linguist, but they're all here together with Valentina's 4-year-old son Iosef -- I love watching the grandparents and parents all taking turns with Iosef on his little rented bike while the others go to talks.
I am having trouble, as you see, writing a past tense report while living in the present tense. It's an interesting exercise. At this point I stopped and got back to work on my Power Point presentation for the talk I gave on June 7.
[Thanks Barbara!]
Chris Potts Running for the LSA Executive Committee
Chris Potts is on the ballot for the LSA Executive Committee. Check out his position statement, and be sure to vote in the upcoming elections! (Voting begins September 1; follow this link (requires member login) for more information.)
May 15, 2008
Grants to John McCarthy
John McCarthy has received grants from the Center for Teaching and the General Education Council to effect various improvements in Linguistics 101. Congratulations, John!
UMass Amherst Linguists at NAPhC 5
John Kingston gave an invited talk, 'Is auditory processing autonomous from linguistic knowledge', at the Fifth North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC 5) in Montreal. Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD, now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan) gave another of the invited talks, 'Integrating grammatical and extra-grammatical factors in phonological variation'.
Chris Potts at Stanford
Chris Potts is giving a colloquium at Stanford on May 23. He is also speaking in the Pragmatics Reading Group on the same day.
May 8, 2008
Barbara Partee Elected to the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences
Barbara Partee has been selected as one of the first Academy Fellow Awardees of the newly created Massachusetts Academy of Sciences. Congratulations, Barbara!
The MAS's mission is to stimulate interest in science, promote scientific research, help improve science education, and so forth. The President is a UMass Amherst alumna and UMass Amherst professor, Margaret Riley (Biology). Anyone can join the MAS, and joining in 2008 makes one a Charter Member.
Diversity Grant to Joe Pater
Joe Pater has been awarded a UMass Amherst Diversity Grant from the General Education Council for "Course Material Development: The Sounds of Englishes". It's for the development of a course he is offering this coming fall with Lisa Selkirk: The Sounds of Englishes. Congratulations, Joe!
Kyle Johnson in Maryland
Kyle Johnson is giving a talk called 'Fitting islands to the semantics of movement' at the Maryland Linguistics MayFest this coming weekend (May 10-11).
Joe Pater in Chicago
Joe Pater is giving a colloquium today (May 8) at the Unversity of Chicago. The title is Serial Harmonic Grammar. Check out the abstract or the related slideshow.
Chris Potts in Tucson
Chris Potts is giving an invited address at the Arizona Linguistics and Anthropology Symposium this weekend (May 9-11). The title of his talk is 'The coin of the expressive realm'.
May 1, 2008
Peggy Speas Tours the Southwest
Peggy Speas is presenting a keynote address entitled 'Someone Else's Language: Linguists and Language Revitalization' at the 15th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Language Conference in Flagstaff, AZ, on May 2.
On May 5, she is giving a colloquium on at the University of New Mexico on reported speech in Navajo.
April 24, 2008
NSF Grant to Rajesh Bhatt and Co.
Rajesh Bhatt is a Co-PI on a recently-awarded National Science Foundation grant to build a Hindi Treebank. The title of the project is A Multi-Representational and Multi-Layered Treebank for Hindi/Urdu. The team is headed by Martha Palmer and also includes Nianwen Xue and Fei Xia. Congratulations!
CHFA Outstanding Teaching Award to John Kingston
Congratulations to John Kingston, winner of a CHFA Outstanding Teacher Award this year!
Visioning Grant to Green, Velleman, Roeper, and Selkirk
Lisa Green, Shelley Velleman, Tom Roeper, and Lisa Selkirk were awarded a CHFA Visioning Grant. It will fund Tracy Connor to do a project involving AAE and children in
linguistics and communication disorders. Congratulations!
So that makes two Visioning Grants to Linguistics!
Talks by Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi
Rajesh Bhatt is newly back from a sort of world tour. He and Shoichi Takahashi gave a joint talk at GLOW 31 on March 31, and he gave a UCLA colloquium based on joint work with Shoichi on April 18. Both talks reported on their ongoing joint work on the variation found in phrasal comparatives focusing on English, Hindi-Urdu, and Japanese.
Chris Potts at Cornell
Chris Potts is giving a talk on expressive content at the Cornell Workshop on Philosophy of Language for Meta-Ethicists, April 26. Sally McConnell-Ginet is the commentator on his paper.
April 17, 2008
Barbara Pearson's Book is Out; Party April 27
Barbara Zurer Pearson's new book Raising a Bilingual Child has been published by Random House. It's a step-by-step guide, aimed at parents, and it has a wealth of information about language learning in general. The people who did the blurbs for the book said they thought it would be of interest to "parents, educators, and policymakers" — as well as monolinguals. Check out the book's website for more information.
- Book Launch Party at the Jones Library, Sunday, April 27, from 2:00-4:00 pm.
- Reading at the Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley, Tuesday, April 29, at 7:00 pm.
Congratulations, Barbara!
Kyle Johnson at USC
Kyle Johnson gave a colloquium at USC this past Monday titled 'Fitting a multidominant model of movement to reconstruction'.
Visioning Grant to Kingston, Potts, Bhatt, et al.
The Linguistics-led Visioning Proposal Data-Rich Humanities Research has been funded. The project will work to help CHFA students and faculty become more adept at using large corpora to answer humanities-style research questions. John Kingston leads the team. The other members are Chris Potts, Rajesh Bhatt, Stephen Harris (English), Julie Hayes (Languages, Literature and Cultures), Michael Papio (Languages, Literature and Cultures), and Rex Wallace (Classics).
April 10, 2008
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.
April 3, 2008
Tom Roeper in Lyon
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Implicatures and Maximizing Falsifiability' at the Institute for Cognitive Science, in Lyon, March 18.
March 13, 2008
Team Kingston at NEST
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.
March 6, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists at CUNY 2008
CUNY 2008 takes place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 13-15. A number of UMass Amherst linguists will be presenting:
- Lyn Frazier, Helen Majewski, Paula Menendez-Benito and Keith Rayner: The Puzzle of Processing Any in Subtrigging Contexts
- Tanja Heizmann: (Un)Frozen Scope in English and German Double Object Constructions
- Kathryn Pruitt: Mapping Prosody to Interpretation in Alternative Questions
Kyle Johnson Teaching in Switzerland
Kyle Johnson is teaching two classes on multidominance at the Conférence Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale, in Leysin, Switzerland, March 10 and 11.
Peggy Speas in Albuquerque
Peggy Speas is going to a workshop this Saturday (March 8) in Albuquerque in honor of Ken Hale. She's presenting, along with Ted Fernald (Swarthmore) and Ellavina Tsosie Perkins (Navajo Language Academy), a talk on categories of quantifiers in Navajo.
February 28, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists Converge on University of Michigan Philosophy
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.
Tom Roeper in the New York Times
Tom Roeper features in this New York Times piece on child language:
Baby-Talk Show (New York Times, Feb 24, 2008)
[Thanks Angelika!]
February 21, 2008
John McCarthy on Radio Boston
On Friday, February 15, John McCarthy appeared live on WBUR's Radio Boston in a show about the Boston dialect. John was one of the two on-air guests in this one-hour show Got an accent?, which also featured the accents of other Medfordites, some famous (Michael Bloomberg, Paul Theroux) and some not so famous.
Chris Potts at NYU
Chris Potts is a guest lecturer in Chris Barker's NYU seminar on dynamic semantics this Monday, February 25. The class will be called 'The dynamics of appositives', and the dynamic part is more or less fully implemented. The pragmatics part is, of course, a bit harder to squeeze into bits.
Ellen Woolford in Leiden
Ellen Woolford is a keynote speaker at DEAL II: Interface theories: the filtering of the output of the generator, which takes place in Leiden, February 22-23. Her paper is called Aspect splits.
Tom Roeper in Wellesley and on TV
Tom Roeper discussed his book The Prism of Grammar at the Wellesley Women's Forum in Boston, February 12. The next day, he was interviewed on Conversations, on Amherst Community TV.
February 14, 2008
Key and Kingston to LabPhon 11
Mike Key and John Kingston have had papers accepted to LabPhon 11, which will be held at Victoria University of Wellingston, NZ, June 30-July 2. Mike's is called 'Interactive and autonomous modes of speech perception: Consonant place discrimination', and John's is called 'The independence of auditory and categorical effects on speech perception'.
February 7, 2008
Topics in Ellipsis Hits the Shelves
He did.
Tom Roeper Op-Ed on Human Nature and Foreign Policy
Tom Roeper contributed an op-ed piece to the MIT PressLog: Human Nature and Foreign Policy. Feel free to add comments!
January 24, 2008
Parsons Yazzie and Speas Textbook in Stores Now
In bookstores now, Diné Bizaad Bínáhoo'aah: Rediscovering The Navajo Language Description, by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie and Peggy Speas.
Emmon Bach Letter from London
Professor Emeritus Emmon Bach writes:
A bit about what's going on with us. Wynn and I are hoping to be in Amherst for SALT. I am teaching (for the second time), a second level semanttics course at Oxford this term -- called Hilary in the Oxford dialect. Then just after SALT I will be at OSU for three weeks, doing a course on Morphosemantics and a couple of public lectures.
Cheers, hope to see everyone in March.
Best, Emmon
November 29, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists in Berlin
Two UMass Amherst linguists are giving papers at the the workshop Reciprocals cross-linguistically, Berlin, November 30 - December 2. Aynat Rubinstein's paper is called 'Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs', and Tom Roeper has a joint paper with Insa Guelzow called 'Reciprocals and reflexives in German and English child language'.
Chris Potts in NYC
Christopher Potts (1999 NYU BA) is the first alumnus plenary speaker at the SUNY-CUNY-NYU Mini-Conference, December 1, 2007.
November 22, 2007
Rajesh Bhatt at MIT
Rajesh Bhatt gave a talk in the Ergativity Research Seminar at MIT on November 14. The title was 'Ergativity in Indo-Aryan Languages'.
November 15, 2007
Popular Review of the Prism of Grammar
Tom Roeper's book The Prism of Grammar was reviewed by William O'Grady in the Columbia Teacher's College Record, one of the premier education journals. Check it out.
November 8, 2007
Joe Pater Colloquium
Joe Pater
UMass Amherst
Harmonic Grammar with Harmonic Serialism
Friday, November 9, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26
Barbara and Volodja's Trip to China
Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev are back from two exciting weeks in China --- 9 lectures (Barbara 6, Volodja 3) (Zhejiang Univ., Yanshan Univ., Beijing Language and Culture Univ., Capital Normal Univ.), two bird-watching weekends (Chongming Island and Beidaihe), and neat touristy things (including West Lake, Peking Opera, Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Great Wall).
Barbara received an Honorary Visiting Professorship at Beijing Lang. and Cult. University, one of several universities that have formal semantics -- our audiences were all lively, and all understood English quite ok (with handouts).
Barbara writes:
Two discoveries: (1) it’s possible to get a chopstick blister --- I already knew how to use chopsticks but had never used them three meals a day seven days a week before; (2) stone lions come in two sexes: as you face them, the male is on the right, with his right front paw on a globe (power), and the female is on the left, with her left front paw on a baby lion (fertility). One confirmation of what we’d already heard: the universities are many and growing, and students are becoming more and more interested in and up-to-date on --- and contributing to --- international theoretical linguistics.
Check out Barbara's extensive picture archive of the trip. Volodja is in the process of typing up his diary.
And continue reading this entry for a selection of shots.
Chris Potts and Jesse Harris to AAAI
Chris Potts and Jesse Harris are in Arlington, VA, for the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposia. They're presenting 'Questions: Interpretation and resolution' at the AAAI workshop Cognitive Approaches to NLP.
Computational Phonology UMOP
More computational phonology news from UMass this week:
The volume we've all be waiting for, Papers in Theoretical and Computational Phonology, AKA UMOP 36, is here and available for browsing in the Node. It should be available for purchase from Amazon as early as next week.
This UMOP features papers from Michael Becker and Joe Pater, Kathryn Flack, Gaja Jarosz, Karen Jesney and Anne-Michelle Tessier, Shigeto Kawahara and Kazuko Shinohara, and Matt Wolf. We also got a guest contribution from the CLML team, headed by Jason Riggle.
[Thanks Michael!]
November 1, 2007
Tom Roeper in Cyprus
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.
Obituary: Juan Zamora
Professor Juan C. Zamora, of the Spanish department, died on October 8. In the Loop's obituary discusses his life-long commitment to Spanish and Portuguese linguistics.
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).
October 25, 2007
Speas and Parsons Yazzie Navajo Textbook
Peggy Speas and Evangeline Parsons Yazzie have published a textbook on Navajo, and it is currently available for pre-order.
October 18, 2007
Talks by Lisa Green
Lisa Green is giving a colloquium at the University of Rochester today (October 18). It's called 'Negative and inversion and negative focus'.
In addition, Lisa will give a lecture in the Rochester Distinguished Lecture Series tomorrow (October 19). That talk is called 'Communicative competence and child African American English'. That lecture is part of Rochester's Meliora Weekend.
John Kingston at HOWL 4
John Kingston gave a well-received tutorial 'Interaction vs. autonomy' and talk 'New arguments for autonomy' at HOWL 4 this past weekend.
John reports, "It was a very stimulating meeting, with a day spent on phonetics and phonology (Sunday) and another on what humans (both adults and infants) and non-humans know about number. The highlights for me were the debate with Jay McClelland about whether speech perception is interactive, but also the rational analysis perspective into which Colin Wilson cast the phonetics and phonology talks."
October 11, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists at NELS 38
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:
- Michael Becker
- Maria Biezma
- Karen Jesney
- Keir Moulton
- Joe Pater
- Aynat Rubinstein
- Shoichi Takahashi
- Matt Wolf
Alums:
- Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan)
- Gillian Gallagher (MIT)
- Shigeto Kawahara (University of Georgia)
- Marcin Morzycki (Michigan State)
- Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of Alberta)
October 4, 2007
John McCarthy Appointed Distinguished Professor
Our own John J. McCarthy has been appointed Distinguished Professor. John has produced so many books and articles that the department office was cluttered with crates --- really, crates --- of them recently (they had just returned from a tour of the offices of the UMass administration). No one has done more than John to highlight the power of Optimality Theory as a tool for empirical investigation, and he also helped establish swearing as a respectable topic of scientific inquiry.
September 13, 2007
Sinn und Bedeuting 12 Presenters
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 |
Kyle Johnson in Paris
Kyle Johnson is teaching a course on the copy theory of movement and multidominant trees at Ecole d'Automne de Linguistique in Paris, September 24-27.
August 30, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists at GALA
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!]
The Prism of Grammar in the Vocabula Review
A chapter from Tom Roeper's new book The Prism of Grammar was featured in The Vocabula Review this month.
June 28, 2007
Reports on the Illinois Recursion Workshop
The recent Illinois workshop on recursion, which included a presentation by Tom Roeper and Bart Hollebrandse, was covered by the Chicago Tribune. It's best to look at the article only after first reading the responses to it by Tom, by Dan Everett, and by Mark Liberman (an onlooker):
Tom Roeper in Japan
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.)
May 31, 2007
Bhatt and Butt Found Online Journal of South Asian Linguistics
Rajesh Bhatt and Miriam Butt have not only founded an innovative new journal, but they've done it in an innovative way: online. The Journal of South Asian Linguistics is published by CSLI. Visit the website for information about how to submit work. The first issue is due out in January. Wow, thank you Rajesh and Miriam!
New Book by John McCarthy
John McCarthy's new book is out: Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory. It's the first book in the new book series, Advances in Optimality Theory (Equinox Publishing). The series editors are Armin Mester (1986 UMass Amherst PhD; now Professor at UCSC) and Ellen Woolford.
Faculty Research Grant to Lisas Green and Selkirk
Lisa Green and Lisa Selkirk have been awarded a joint Faculty Research Grant. Wonderful! Congratulations, Lisas!
[Thanks Ellen!]
Lisa Green and Tom Roeper at York
Lisa Green and Tom Roeper presented a paper at the conference on Formal Approaches to Variation in York, May 10-12, on the topic of Negative Inversion in AAE and Stable Nodes. On hand with insighful comments were Bernadatte Plunkett (1993 UMass Amherst PhD) and Helen Goodluck (1978 UMass Amherst PhD), both now professors in the Department of Language and Linguistics Science at the University of York.
Kyle Johnson European Tour
Kyle Johnson — Ulster and Tübingen, early June!
Determiners
On Linguistic Inferfaces
Ulster, Northern Ireland, June 1
LCA +Alignment = RNR
Workshop on Coordination, Subordination and Ellipsis
Tübingen University, June 6
Chris Potts in Barcelona
Chris Potts is an invited speaker at the Fifth Barcelona Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Reference, Barcelona, June 5-8.
John McCarthy at University College London
John McCarthy gave a talk at University College London on May 23: 'Getting to Optimality'.
Ellen Woolford at University College London
Ellen Woolford gave a talk at University College London on May 23: 'Ergativity, Transitivity, and Case Locality'.
LSA Institute at Stanford
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:
- Chuck Clifton: Experimental Design for Linguists
- Christopher Potts
- Dimensions of Meaning
- Conversational Inference (with David Beaver and Robert van Rooij)
- Logic for Linguists (presession course)
- Joe Pater: Introduction to Phonological Theory
Institute Workshop: Convesational Games and Strategic Inference
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.
Institute Workshop: Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology
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'.
Workshop Report: Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory
The workshop Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory was held at the University of Michigan, May 18-20. It was organized by UMass Amherst alum Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst PhD; now Assistant Professor at University of Michigan) and had a large UMass Amherst contingent amongst the participants. Presenters included Joe Pater and alums Ellen Broselow (1976 PhD; Professor at Stonybrook University), Andries Coetzee, and Elliott Moreton (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC). Maria Gouskova (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at NYU) and Jen Smith (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC) were also in attendance. All involved judged the conference a huge success, and it looks like it will be held again elsewhere in the near future.
May 24, 2007
John Kingston at the University of Oregon
John Kingston will speak at the University of Oregon tomorrow (May 25). His talk is called 'Phonological persistence/Phonetic variability'. It deals with a puzzle arising in the genesis and subsequent development of tone in the Athabaskan languages and what that means for our understanding to interaction between phonetics and phonology in sound change.
May 17, 2007
Rajesh Bhatt at McGill
Rajesh Bhatt gave four (4!) talks at McGill last week (May 7-10). Two of the talks were on the syntax of unaccusativity and passives in Hindi-Urdu and Differential Subject/Object Marking. The other two reported joint work with Shoichi Takahashi on phrasal comparatives.
MIT Greek Syntax-Semantics Workshop
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.
SULA 4
SULA 4 takes place in São Paulo, May 24-26. The program includes papers by Amy Rose Deal, Andrew McKenzie, and Keir Moulton, as well as a commentary by Angelika Kratzer.
SALT 17 Report
There was a very strong UMass Amherst presence at SALT 17 this past weekend. Many students turned out to hear the talks and ask insightful questions. And the program included a joint paper by Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi, a joint paper by Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Peggy Speas, as well as an invited lecture by UMass Amherst Linguistics alum Gennaro Chierchia (1984 PhD; now Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics at Harvard) and a paper by former visitor Uli Sauerland (ZAS).
Titan Arum (the Corpse Flower)
[Thanks for the photo Barbara!]
May 10, 2007
CHFA Award to Tom Roeper
Tom Roeper has been awarded the CHFA Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity for 2006-2007. Tom will receive the award at the CHFA reception on May 15, 3:45 pm, in the Fine Arts Center.
Congratulations, Tom!
May 3, 2007
Paula Menendez-Benito, 2007-8 Visiting Professor in Semantics
We're delighted to report that Paula Menéndez-Benito has accepted our offer to teach here next year. Paula received her PhD from UMass Amherst Linguistics (that's us!) in 2005. She has since taught at UC Santa Cruz and MIT. She will probably teach our semantics proseminar in the Fall and Ling 620 (Formal Semantics) in the spring, along with some graduate training instruction. Welcome back, Paula!
April 26, 2007
Rajesh Bhatt's Book Published
Rajesh Bhatt's new book Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts has just been published by Mouton de Gruyter, in their Interface Explorations series.
Congratulations, Rajesh!
Recent Talks by Rajesh Bhatt
Rajesh Bhatt was at OSU earlier this month (April 5-6) to give two talks:
- Unaccusativity and Case
- Systematic Ambiguity [joint work with Shoichi Takahashi]
More recently, Rajesh was at GLOW, in Tromso, Norway, also reporting on joint work with Shoichi. Rajesh writes, "This is the only conference I've been to where the conference party involved dog-sledding."
April 19, 2007
John Kingston Talk at Harvard
John Kingston will give a colloquium this Friday at Harvard on behalf of the Phonetics Lab group:
Hearing precedes knowledge
John Kingston, Daniel Mash, Della Chambless and Shigeto Kawahara
Lilly Fellowship to Chris Potts
Chris Potts has received a 2007-2008 Lilly Teaching Fellowship. He plans to develop a course on computation for theoretical linguistics, which he will eventually co-teach with Rajesh Bhatt.
Bart Hollebrandse on Recursion
Bart Hollebrandse (2000 UMass Amherst PhD; curently visiting UMass Amherst and Smith) will soon head to Brazil to work with Dan Everett (newly genuinely famous thanks to a lengthy New Yorker story), under a grant run by Manfred Krifka, Uli Sauerland, and Everett. The work relates to tests Bart is developing for verbal and non-verbal recursion.
Bart and Tom Roeper will present a paper at a conference on recursion organized by Everett in Bloomington, April 27-29.
April 12, 2007
Roeper Book Tour Begins
Tom Roeper will read from his new book
The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanity
Selections on acquisition, African-American English, and ethics in science
Amherst Books, 8 Main St (downtown Amherst), Wednesday, April 25, 8:00-9:00 pm
and at
the Harvard Coop, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Monday, May 21, 7:00 pm
John McCarthy in Brazil
John McCarthy is in Porto Alegre, Brazil, presenting a lecture and giving a short course at the III Seminário Internacional de Fonologia. The sponsoring institution is the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. PUCRS is the home of Bira Alves, who is visiting the department this semester under Joe Pater's sponsorship.
Anniversary of Syntactic Structures Celebrated in Moscow
From Barbara Partee:
Russians are big on anniversaries.
In February I relayed a request from Olga Mitrenina in St Petersburg to find out what month Syntactic Structures was published 50 years ago. Kai von Fintel tracked down the history and found it was February, and that went into an article Olga published in February in the popular press called (I'm translating) Colorless Green Ideas Live and Conquer.
Independently of that, a group of Moscow syntax students organized the first Moscow generative syntax conference, and called it "Syntactic Structures" ("Sintaksicheskie Struktury") in commemoration of that anniversary as well. It was a really nice two-day conference held in Moscow, April 5-6, with some students from St. Petersburg also participating. Here's the program. There were 13 presentations by students and young researchers, and 5 invited talks by senior linguists (including me), and a banquet at the end.
Yakov Testelets closed the conference with a tribute to the enterprise of the students who organized the conference and to the revolution in linguistics marked by the publication of Syntactic Structures. The toasts at the banquet included an optimistic toast to the effect that there is now no longer "Russian linguistics" and "Western linguistics" but just "linguistics" -- maybe still a bit of an exaggeration, but increasingly true now for the younger generations of linguists in Moscow and St Petersburg. I've personally witnessed a huge change in 10 years.
There was also a nice toast to the 40th anniversary of Haj Ross's dissertation! Who would have noticed and marked the date besides a Russian! It was a great conference, very lively and stimulating, with a wonderful atmosphere! There are some photos of it on my Flickr site.
April 5, 2007
Report from Joe Pater
Joe Pater is in Europe this year, based in France, but travelling often to give special lectures and meet with fellows researchers. He filed this report from the road:
I'm spending the semester as a visitor at the Université de Nantes, where I get to talk with Jean-Pierre Angoujard, a specialist in Arabic phonology, and Olivier Crouzet, who works on phonetics and phonotactics. And conveniently enough, I've just developed an interest in French schwa. I'm also continuing to make visits further North. I'm writing from Tromsø, where I just gave a talk entitled The power of constraint weighting, and I was recently in Nijmegen where I talked about Gradual learning and gradient phonotactics.
Report from Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev
On March 23, Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev gave a talk in Russian at a research seminar at IPI RAN, a computational linguistics institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, 'Existential and locative sentences – What distinguishes them? Theme-rheme structure or diathesis?'.
On March 31, Barbara was invited to talk for the 100th seminar in V.A. Uspensky’s seminar series (now in its 51st year!) Applications of mathematical methods in linguistics; her talk was 'Type theory and natural language: Do we need two basic types?', based on her squib in Krifka’s 50th birthday fest.
On April 6, Barbara is an invited speaker in a Moscow student syntax conference, where she’ll give 'A brief history of the syntax-semantics interface in western formal linguistics'.
On April 13, Barbara and Volodja will give a version in Russian of their FASL 14 paper for the Cognitive Linguistics program at the University of Kazan.
And on May 6, their Gang of Five will give a new paper at FASL 16 at Stony Brook: Borschev, Paducheva, Partee, Testelets, and Yanovich, 'Russian genitives, non-referentiality, and the property-type hypothesis' (abstract PDF here).
Chris Potts Talks at Chicago
Chris Potts is giving three talks at the University of Chicago. One is a departmental colloquium. The other is a special lecture in Jason Riggle's Chicago Language Modeling Lab, a report on joint work with Joe Pater, Rajesh Bhatt, and Michael Becker. The third is a talk on expressives in the Workshop on Semantics and Philosophy of Language, organized by Chris Kennedy.
March 29, 2007
Tom Roeper's New Book Published
Talks by Tom Roeper and Co-Authors
Two weeks ago, Tom Roeper gave an invited talk at the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics called 'Building the aquisition interface' and another at the Conference on Brain, Mind, and Language called 'Recursion, false belief, and implicatures'.
This week , at SRCD (the Society for Research in Child Development), Jill DeVilliers, Peggy Speas, Jay Garfield, and Tom Roeper
will participate in a seminar on evidentials, presenting the latest results from Tibetan experiments.
Tom Roeper will also present a poster with Kathy-hirsch Pasek, Tilbe Goksun, and Meredith Jones of Temple University called 'Nominal ellipsis in early acquisition using dual television techniques'.
Chris Potts at Penn and Swarthmore
Chris Potts is giving two talks at Penn today, the first in their SPLUNCH series (joint work with Rajesh Bhatt, Joe Pater, and Michael Becker), and the second in their colloquium series.
Tomorrow (March 30), Chris pops over to Swarthmore for a talk titled 'An introduction to expressive content'.
March 15, 2007
Team Kingston at Haskins Lab
Team Kingston (John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Dan Mash, and Eve Brenner-Alsop) is going to present a talk titled 'Contextual effects on the perception of duration in speech and non-speech' at the upcoming workshop New England Sequencing and Timing (NEST) at Haskins Lab, May 17.
Lisa Sanders (UMass Amherst Psychology) is also giving a talk: 'Temporally selective attention modulates early auditory processing: Event-related potential evidence'.
Rajesh Bhatt in India and Northampton
Rajesh Bhatt recently returned from an extended working visit to India, with stopovers in Dubai. He has hit the ground running, so to speak, with a talk already scheduled for this week (today)! The following summarizes his activities, starting in the future and moving into the tail end of last year.
From Rajesh:
March 15 Talk in the Syntax Reading Group with Shoichi Takahashi, presenting our work on Phrasal Comparatives.
Feb. 21-25 at Vidya Bhawan, an educational foundation in the city of Udaipur where taught a mini-course on Hindi syntax to an audience consisting of school teachers and people involved in the preparation of educational materials and educational policy more generally. In a first for me, I taught in Hindi. I covered issues of word order, binding, agreement, and long distance dependencies. Many of the participants were speakers of Indo-Aryan languages other than Hindi and it was exciting to get them to construct rules for their languages, in particular the language Mewari. I have been invited by Vidya Bhawan, together with Prof. Ramakant Agnihotri, Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya to start work on an eventual linguistic mapping of the region of Mewar, with a focus on Mewari. The hope is that this will function as a pilot for the upcoming New Linguistic Survey of India.
Jan. 22-31 at the University of Delhi, where I gave a colloquium called 'Unaccusativity and Case', and led the second part of a workshop on the Semantics of Tense and Aspect in Indian Languages, together with Professor Teesta Bagchi, Tanmoy Bhattacharya and Hany Babu. We spent quite some time on the mysterious absence of the universal perfect in any Indian language.
Jan. 4-7 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, where I participated in a workshop on the question of Non-Native Englishes. This conference was structured in the form of responses to a paper by Prof. Rajendra Singh in which he argued that the classification of Englishes into Native Englishes and non-Native Englishes was not based on any theoretically interesting distinctions.
Dec. 19-21 at the South Asian Language Analysis conference at the CIIL, Mysore where I presented a paper called 'Little or Nothing'. This paper examines the properties of a negation in Hindi, homophonous with the word 'little', that can only be used to negate utterances that have been asserted in the recent context and not for new negative utterances. I also led together with Prof. Jayaseelan, Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Prof. Ayesha Kidwai, the initial half of a seminar on the semantics of tense and aspect in Indian Languages.
March 8, 2007
SULA Acceptances
SULA 4 (Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas) will take place May 24-26, 2007, in São Paulo. Three UMass Amherst linguists are presenting:
In addition, Angelika Kratzer is a member of the SULA scientific committee.
SALT 17 Acceptances
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists will be presenting at SALT 17, UConn, May 11-13:
- Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Peggy Speas: Evidential marking, interrogtives, and the maxim of quality
- Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi: Direct comparisons: Resurrecting the direct analysis of phrasal comparatives
February 22, 2007
Cherlon, Rajesh, and Lyn at WCCFL
Cherlon Ussery's paper 'What It Means to AGREE: the Behavior of Case and Phi Features in Icelandic Control' was accepted to WCCFL 26, UC Berkeley, April 27-29.
Also on the program: Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi (UMass Amherst/Tokyo University). Their talk is called 'Direct comparisons: Resurrecting the direct analysis of phrasal comparatives'.
And Lyn Frazier is an invited speaker!
February 8, 2007
Tom Roeper's New Book
We're a bit late on this, but we won't let that get in the way of our celebration: Tom Roeper's new book The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism has been published by MIT Press. The title says it all: this is serious linguistics that aims to provide important general lessons and insights about the human experience.
Update: It turns out that we're not late on this, we're early. Amazon says January 1, but they apparently haven't told MIT Press about this. We can, it seems, expect the book in early March, at which point we should all write reviews at Amazon.
LSA Summer Institute Fellowships by Feb 12
LSA Summer Institute tuition fellowship applications are due on Monday, November 12 --- this coming Monday!
The Institute is at Stanford this year. It's a chance to escape the heat of the Happy Valley for a spell, and the Institute itself is a chance to broaden your intellectual horizons.
Here's a rundown of the UMass Amherst professors teaching there:
- Chuck Clifton: Experimental Design for Linguists
- Christopher Potts
- Dimensions of Meaning
- Conversational Inference (with David Beaver and Robert van Rooij)
- Logic for Linguists (presession course)
- Joe Pater: Introduction to Phonological Theory
Ellen Woolford in Nijmegen
Ellen Woolford was hard at work in Nijmegen this January. Here's a rundown of her activities:
- Deriving transitivity effects on Case, invited talk at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University (January 18)
- A course on Case and Agreement at the 2007 LOT Winter School, January 8-19, Radboud University
December 7, 2006
Roeper and Verbuk at ZAS
Tom Roeper and Anna Verbuk gave an invited joint talk 'Implicatures and Discourse in Pronoun Resolution' at the Conference on Intersentential Pronominal Reference in Child and Adult Language that took place at the Centre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals Research (ZAS) in Berlin, December 1-2.
November 30, 2006
Chris Potts at U Chicago
Argh! Chris's flight was cancelled due to bad weather in Chicago (natch)! He's going to reschedule his trip for the spring.
Chris Potts is giving two talks at the University of Chicago today (November 30). The morning talk is a report on his collaborative work with Joe Pater, Rajesh Bhatt, and Michael Becker , and the afternoon colloquium is about pragmatic dimensions of meaning. Chris will also be touring Jason Riggle's Chicago Language Modeling Lab.
November 9, 2006
Talks by Barbara and Volodja
Barbara and Volodja gave an invited colloquium at UConn on Friday November 3, on Sentential and Constituent Negation in Russian BE-sentences Revisited, based on work done jointly with their Russian consultants that they plan to work on some more. Barbara writes, "The UConn linguistics program turns out to have quite a number of Russian PhD students, and we got lots of great discussion (not only from them)."
In addition, Barbara and Voldja are about to hit the road, for an eight-talk, mulitcontinental tour. The schedule is here, and watch their NSF grant's website for handouts and additional details.
Report from BUCLD
Liane Jeschull writes
UMass Amherst was well represented at BUCDL 31. Altogether, there were nine presentations by former and current UMass Amherst students, visitors and allied faculty:
- Jill and Peter de Villiers
- Tanja Heizmann
- Bart Hollebrandse
- Liane Jeschull
- Catherine Léger
- Magda Oiry
- Anne-Michelle Tessier
- Angeliek van Hout
- Anna Verbuk
Magda, Tanja and Catherine provided for an entire session solely representing research by the UMass Amherst Acquisition Group.
I personally was very pleased to receive a Paula Menyuk Travel Award.
Outshining the success of the conference, however, latest news from Tom and Laura and their new grandchild quickly spread and engaged BUCLD conferees...
[Thanks Liane!]
October 19, 2006
LSA Summer Institute Website
Stanford is hosting the 2007 LSA Summer Institute. The Institute's website is now up. UMass Amherst linguists Joe Pater and Christopher Potts are teaching courses.
October 12, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at The OSU
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 Reports from Utrecht
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.
October 5, 2006
Tom Roeper in Montreal
Tom Roeper was recently in Montreal, where he gave a talk at UQAM on Friday, September 28, on configurational iterativity. He writes, "The work brought together collaborations with Uri Strauss, Markus Bader, Barbara Schmiedtova and arguments from syntax, parsing, semantics, and acquisition. It was great to see a number of former UMass Amherst folk, including Rose-Marie Déchaine, Meredith Landman, Rejan Carnac-Marquis, Juan Uriagereka, and Andreas Gualmini there."
September 28, 2006
John Kingston in Europe
John Kingston leaves soon for a Phonetics-a-thon across Europe. He'll be in Italy for work relating to his NIH grant, he'll be in Konstanz to speak at a workshop, and we think he'll be working hard in various other countries between and around those subtrips. More power to him.