Annual Mini-Conference today
Today is the Mini-Conference, at which the second years present their research. Start time: 9:00 am. Location: the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower. Check out last week's entry for more details.
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- Annual Mini-Conference today
- UUSLAW This Saturday
- Phillips Fund Grant to Amy Rose Deal
- Annual Mini-Conference
- Semantics Reading Group
- Michael Becker Accepts Position at Reed College
- Anisa Schardl in Voces Feminae Concert
- Amy Rose Deal Paper to Appear in Syntax
- Team Kingston at NEST
- UMass Amherst Linguists at CUNY 2008
- Andrew McKenzie at CLS 44
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grad-student news
May 15, 2008
UUSLAW This Saturday
UUSLAW (the UMass Amherst-UConn-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) takes place this Saturday, May 17, at UConn, in (or very near) the Linguistics Department there. Below is a list of the presenters, along with their titles, though possibly not in the order of presentation. The start time is 10:00 am.
| Jeff Bernath (UConn) | Separating theories of ASL Phonology: Looking in acquisition |
| Jean Crawford (UConn) | The acquisition of Sesotho passives: Evidence for maturation |
| Helen Koulidobrova (UConn) | DP or not DP: Testing the parameter through acquisition |
| Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst) | Acquisition of long-distance questions in French: Varying experimental contexts |
| Bill Philip (UMass Amherst) | Dutch children's sensitivity to weak cross-over effects |
| Aynat Rubinstein (UMass Amherst) | Assessing semantic conservatism |
| Masahiko Takahashi (UConn) | The acquisition of passives and optional subject movement in Japanese |
| Jill de Villiers, Harper Gernet-Girard, Jay Garfield (Smith) | Figuring out the properties of Tibetan evidentials for child speakers |
[Thanks Tanja!]
Phillips Fund Grant to Amy Rose Deal
Amy Rose Deal has been awarded a grant from the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society to support her research on Nez Perce this summer. She'll be spending the month of June in Idaho and working to learn more about futures, modals, tense and verbal space inflection.
Congratulations, Amy Rose!
May 8, 2008
Annual Mini-Conference
The Annual Department Mini-Conference will take place on Thursday, May 15, starting at 9:00 am, in the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower.
Downloadable version of the schedule
| Jesse Aron Harris | Events and extraction in pseudo-coordination | 9:00-9:35 |
| Wendell Kimper | Syntactic reduplication and the spellout of movement chains | 9:35-10:10 |
| Meg Grant | The (non-)interaction of ellipsis and binding: Evidence from re-binding | 10:10-10:45 |
| Misato Hiraga | Japanese Many quantifiers and their interaction with demonstratives | 10:45-11:20 |
| Break | Lunch provided | 11:20-12:00 |
| Emily Elfner | The interaction of linearization and prosody: Evidence from pronoun postposing | 12:00-12:35 |
| Pasha Siraj | How to win the discourse game using particles | 12:35-1:10 |
| Martin Walkow | When can you ask a inner negation polar question? | 1:10-1:45 |
[Thanks Kyle!]
Semantics Reading Group
Semantics reading group meets today (May 8), at 8:00 pm, for the last time in Spring 2008, with a very special program featuring two WCCFL 27 practice talks!
- Alumni and professors Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito: 'Minimal domain widening'
- Jesse Harris: 'Interpreting raising and matching analyses of relative clauses: Two roads to Heim's ambiguity'
[Thanks Aynat!]
May 1, 2008
Michael Becker Accepts Position at Reed College
Michael Becker has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Reed College. Congratulations, Michael!
Anisa Schardl in Voces Feminae Concert
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing a collection of Jewish and Old Testament-inspired music on Saturday, May 3, at 4:00 pm. The concert will be in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall in Smith College. It will be free and last under an hour. All are welcome!
April 24, 2008
Amy Rose Deal Paper to Appear in Syntax
Amy Rose Deal's paper The origin and content of expletives: evidence from "selection" has been accepted for publication in the journal Syntax. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
April 3, 2008
Tanja Heizmann is presenting at the interdisciplinary conference ISES 5 in Mainz, Germany, April 3-5. Her talk is called 'Die Entwicklung von Exhaustivität in Spaltkonstruktionen, Fragen und Quantifikatoren in Deutschen und Englischen Kindern'.
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
February 28, 2008
Andrew McKenzie at CLS 44
Andrew McKenzie's paper 'Kiowa switch-reference and variable-based contextual restriction' was accepted for presentation at CLS 44, University of Chicago, April 24-26, 2008.
February 21, 2008
Maria Biezma at the Penn Colloquium
Maria Biezma is presenting a paper called 'On deontic modality in Spanish' at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium, February 22-24.
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'.
December 13, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists at the LSA
A number of South College linguists will be presenting work at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, January 3-6, 2008.
December 6, 2007
Adrian Staub Talk in Psychology
Candidate for Cognitive Psychology faculty position
Adrian Staub
UMass Amherst
The Timing of Syntactic Decisions
Thursday, December 6, 10:45-noon, Tobin 521b (open to everyone)
Anisa Schardl in Voces Feminae Concert
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing an Anonymous Feast Saturday, December 8, at 7:00 pm. The concert will be in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall in Smith College. It will be free and last under an hour. All are welcome!
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'.
Maria Biezma Going Romance
Maria Biezma's paper 'An expressives analysis of exclamatives in Spanish' was accepted to Going Romance, the 21st Symposium on Romance Linguistics, Amsterdam, December 6-8, 2007.
November 22, 2007
Amy Rose at MIT
On October 31, Amy Rose gave a talk titled 'Case and caselessness in Nez Perce' in the Ergativity Research Seminar at MIT.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
November 8, 2007
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!]
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)
September 27, 2007
UMMM
UMMM (UMass Amherst MIT Meeting in Phonology) will take place here at UMass Amherst this Saturday, September 29, in the Linguistics Department Lounge. Here is the program in PDF.
[Thanks John K!]
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 |
Amy Rose Deal in Manhattan and Boston
Amy Rose Deal will given an invited talk on Sept 25 at the CUNY syntax supper entitled 'Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce'. She will also present related work at the MIT ergativity research seminar on Oct 31.
September 6, 2007
Anna Verbuk to McGill
Anna Verbuk has filed her dissertation, Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures, and begun a McGill post-doc with Thomas Shultz, of the McGill Department of Psychology. She will be part of the Center for Research on Language, Mind and Brain at McGill. Her project is on the acquisition of relevance implicatures.
Congratulations, Anna!
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!]
Shigeto Kawahara filed his dissertation and moved to Georgia, where he is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Georgia.
In addition, a joint paper by Shigeto and Takahito Shinya has been accepted for publication in Phonetica. The paper is called 'The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: Evidence for Intonational Phrase'.
June 28, 2007
Kathryn Flack: Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire
Kathryn Flack will be Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire for the 2007-8 academic year. She'll be teaching in the school of cognitive science.
Journal of Semantics Paper by Florian Schwarz
Florian Schwarz's paper 'Processing presupposed content' has been accepted by the Journal of Semantics.
May 31, 2007
Reminder: Kathryn Flack Dissertation Defense Today
The Sources of Phonological Markedness
Thursday, May 31, 2:00 pm, Machmer W-26
Reminder: Shigeto Kawhara Dissertation Defense Tomorrow
The Emergence of Phonetic Naturalness
Friday, June 1, 2:30 pm, Bartlett 301
Michael Becker Report from Israel
Michael Becker is teaching and doing research in Israel this semester. He's been busy running experiments in Ram Frost's lab. He writes, "Ram has very generously let me join his team of grad students who run dozens of psycholinguistic experiments every semester. "
In June, he will be talking in Amsterdam about joint work with Peter Jurgec at the workshop on segments and tone. From Amsterdam, he will continue to CASTL to give an informal talk about allomorph selection in Hebrew. Back in Israel, he will give the same talk more formally at IATL, "but it will almost certainly be too warm for a tie".
This Tuesday (May 29), Michael returned to teaching his course at Ben-Gurion University, for the first time since March, after the 41-day student strike ended with no real achievements for the students, sadly.
Michael closed by saying, "Looking forward to being back on the right side of the Atlantic again".
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 17, 2007
Shai Cohen to UC Santa Cruz
Shai Cohen has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz.
Shigeto Kawahara to the University of Georgia
Shigeto Kawahara has accepted a tenure-track offer in Linguistics at the University of Georgia.
Youri Zabbal to Boston University
Youri Zabbal has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in Linguistics at Boston University.
University Fellowship to Matt Wolf
Matt Wolf has received a University Fellowship for the 2007-8 academic year. Congratulations, Matt!
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!]
April 26, 2007
Graduate Mini-Conference
Wednesday, May 16, Math Lounge, Lederle Tower
| 9:00 | Maria Biezma |
| 9:30 | Chris Davis |
| 10:00 | Amy Rose Deal |
| 10:30 | Karen Jesney |
| 11:00 | Masashi Hashimoto |
| 11:30 | lunch |
| 1:00 | Kathryn Pruitt |
| 1:30 | Annahita Farudi |
| 2:00 | Aynat Rubinstein |
[Thanks Kathy and Kyle!]
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
April 5, 2007
Matt Wolf Talk
Matt Wolf will have a poster at the 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting, May 24-26, 2007, titled 'Phonology and morphology are in a single OT grammar'.
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'.
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: