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faculty news
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'.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Tom Roeper in Lyon
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Implicatures and Maximizing Falsifiability' at the Institute for Cognitive Science, in Lyon, March 18.
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.
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.
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!]
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.
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'.
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!
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
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.
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'.
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.
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.
Continue reading "Barbara and Volodja's Trip to China" »
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!]
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).
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.
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."
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:
Alums:
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.
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 |
