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Other Ling Newsletters
grad-student news
November 11, 2009
October 1, 2009
Grad students going to LSA
A number of our graduate students are heading to this year's meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Baltimore, MD January 7-10, including three (!) first-years:Leah Bateman: "Syntax of nominalizations in Tibetan"
Maria Biezma:"Inverted antecedents and covert modality in Spanish"
Emily Elfner: "Stress-epenthesis interactions in Harmonic Serialism"
Minta Elsman: "The morphosyntax of the American English perfect." (with Stanley Dubinsky, South Carolina)
Annahita Farudi: "Dividing deontics in Farsi: morphosyntactic evidence for the split"
Karen Jesney and Robert Staubs: "Learning Hidden Structure with a Log-Linear Model of Grammar" (with Ramgopal Mettu, UMass Electrical Engineering, Joe Pater and David Smith, UMass Computer Science)
Claire Moore-Cantwell: "Gerard Manley Hopkins's Sprung Rhythm: Corpus study and stochastic grammar" (with Bruce Hayes, UCLA)
Aynat Rubinstein: "Gradations of force: rethinking modal quantificational components"
Martin Walkow: "A Unified Analysis of the Person Case Constraint and 3-3-Effects in Barceloni Catalan"
Congrats all!
Grad students on their way to NELS 40
A group of Grad students had abstracts accepted to NELS 40 in Boston, November 13-15:Maria Biezma: "Inverted Antecedents in Hidden Conditionals".
Chloe Gu: "Maximalization and the definite reading in Mandarin wh-conditionals"
Emily Elfner: "Recursivity and Binarity in Prosodic Phrasing: Evidence from Connemara Irish"
Martin Walkow: "A Unified Analysis of the Person Case Constraint and 3-3-Effects in Barceloni Catalan"
Bravo all!
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".
Suzi Lima - summer grants
Suzi Lima received two very prestigious grants this summer.The first was from the Lewis and Clark Fund of The American Philosophical Society. This fellowship supported her fieldwork in Brazil, which focused on quantificational processes in Yudja.
The second was from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and FUNAI (Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Bureau).
UNESCO has hired her as a researcher on a 2 year contract to coordinate the documentation of the Kawaiwete language along with indigenous teachers of the Kawaiwete community. The goals of the project are documenting the language, providing materials for the Kawaiwete communities and teaching the language documentation methodology to the Kawaiwete teachers in these communities. She also started this work during the summer.
Congrats, Suzi!
September 16, 2009
Keir Moulton: Post-doc
Keir Moulton has taken up a post-doctoral fellowship at McGill University. Congratulations Keir!May 21, 2009
Michael Becker to Harvard
Michael Becker, who has just finished a year teaching at Reed College, is now headed to Harvard, where he will be a College Fellow. Congratulations, Michael!
Amy Rose Deal to Harvard
Amy Rose Deal has accepted a tenure-track offer in Linguistics at Harvard, starting this fall. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
Ilaria Frana Dissertation Defense
Concealed Questions: In Search of Answers
Thursday, May 28, 3:30 pm, Herter 201
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
Annual Department Mini-Conference May 14
The annual Second-Year Mini-Conference takes place on Thursday, May 14, in Dickinson 110, from 9:30-12:00.
| 9:30 | Coffee | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Emerson Loustau | Aspect, agentive agreement, and i-level predicates in Mohawk |
| 10:30 | Anisa Schardl | Variable unaccusativity |
| 11:00 | Chloe Gu | Maximization in Mandarin wh-conditionals |
| 11:30 | Noah Constant | Variations in contrastive topic marking – evidence from Mandarin Chinese |
April 30, 2009
Scholarship to Misato Hiraga
Misato Hiraga has received a scholarship to attend the 3L International Summer School in Language Documentation at SOAS in London. Congratuations, Misato!
April 23, 2009
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 program of English and Italian music next weekend. The performance will be on Saturday, May 2, at 4:00 pm, in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall at Smith. It's free! Anisa, you rock!
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
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
UMass Amherst Linguists at ECO5
ECO5 2009 (The Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics) took place on Saturday, April 4, at the University of Maryland. Emerson Loustau and Martin Walkow each presented papers.
April 2, 2009
Meg Grant: Psych Brown Bag Talk
Meg Grant is giving a Cognitive Brownbag talk over in Psychology on Wednesday, April 9, at 12:00 pm, in 521B Tobin.
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).
March 26, 2009
Paper by Amy Rose Deal to Appear in NLLT
Amy Rose Deal's paper Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
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
Heizmann-Dold in Osnabrück
Tanja Heizmann-Dold participated in the special interest group Production-comprehension asymmetries in child language at the recent DGfS meeting. She presented the core findings from her dissertation in a talk titled 'Exhaustivity in questions and clefts and the quantifier connection'.
March 5, 2009
Job News: Florian Schwarz to Penn
Florian Schwarz has accepted a tenure-track position in Linguistics at Penn and will join the department this fall. Congratulations, Florian!
Job News: Cherlon Ussery to Carleton College
Cherlon Ussery has accepted a one-year position at Carleton College as a Consortium for Faculty Diversity in Liberal Arts Colleges Fellow. Her time will be equally split between teaching and research. Congratulations, Cherlon!
Emily Elfner at Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics
Emily Elfner will present a paper at the conference Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics, March 27-29 at the University of Arizona. Emily has also been awarded a scholarship to attend the four-day mini-course on Celtic linguistics that precedes the conference.
February 26, 2009
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
Jesney and Tessier, To Appear in NLLT
An article by Karen Jesney and alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier (PhD 2007; Assistant Prof at Alberta) has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. This article, 'Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning', argues that Harmonic Grammar can explain many of the stipulated ranking biases that have been posited in the literature on language learning in OT.
[Thanks John!]
Elfner and Kimper at Hampshire
As we reported, Emily Elfner and Wendell Kimper gave a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series last week (Feb 18). Here's a photo from the event:
[Thanks Kathryn!]
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!
UMass Amherst Linguists at SALT 19
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists are on the program at SALT 19 (and one of the organizers is Craige Roberts, 1986 UMass Amherst PhD):
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle (PhD 2006): EVEN and biased questions: the case of Spanish siquiera
- Maria Biezma: Alternative vs. polar questions: the cornering effect
- Gennaro Chierchia (PhD 1984): Relevance of polarity for the on line interpretation of numerals and determiners (with Daniele Panizza, Yi-Ting Huang, and Jesse Snedeker)
- Jeff Runner (PhD 1995): Discourse structure and parallelism in VP ellipsis (with Christina Kim)
Congratulations to all!
February 12, 2009
Kimper and Elfner Talk at Hampshire
Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner are giving a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series, February 18, 12:15 pm, in the ASH building lobby. The title is 'What can Ned Flanders tell us about linguistic knowledge? Diddly-infixation and the poverty of the stimulus'. Abstract below.
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 22, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at the 4th Meeting on Prosody and Informational Structure
There were many UMass Amherst linguists at the 4th Meeting on Prosody and Informational Structure, hosted by Haruo Kubozono in Shiga. Masako Hirotani, Taka Shinya, and Satoshi Tomioka all presented their work. Shin Ishihara (currently at Potsdam) presented his joint project with Yoshi Kitagawa. Shigeto Kawahara was an invited discussant. And Yurie Hara also attended the meeting.
December 18, 2008
Deal and McKenzie: NSF Dissertation Grant Projects
NSF dissertation grant proposals by Amy Rose Deal and Andrew McKenzie have been recommended for funding. Amy Rose's project is for work on Nez Perce, and Andrew's project is for work on Kiowa. Angelika Kratzer and Seth Cable are the respective advisors.
Congratulations, Amy Rose and Andrew!
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
Voces Feminae Performances December 12 and 13
Anisa Schardl is in Voces Feminae, the Five College Early Music women's vocal ensemble. They are performing a program of Spanish music this weekend. There will be two performances:
- Friday, December 12, 8:00 pm, in St. Brigid's church in Amherst
- Saturday, December 13, 4:00 pm, in Sweeney Concert Hall, in Sage Hall at Smith
Both performances will be free and last under an hour.
November 20, 2008
Pruitt and Kimper at The Sixth Old World Conference in Phonology
Kathryn Pruitt and Wendell Kimper are presenting papers at the The Sixth Old World Conference in Phonology, January 21-24, 2009. Kathryn's paper is titled 'Parallelism vs. serialism in stress assignment', and Wendell's is titled 'Deriving local optionality: harmonic serialism and phonological variation'.
November 13, 2008
Adam Werle Dissertation Defense
Word, Phrase, and Clitic Prosody in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian
Monday, November 17, 2008, 4:00 pm. Machmer W-26
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
November 6, 2008
Martin Walkow Nominated for Distinguished Teaching Award
Martin Walkow has been nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award. Congratulations, Martin!
October 30, 2008
Shai Cohen Dissertation Defense
Shai Cohen
On the semantics of too and only
Halloween (October 31), 12:00 pm, Machmer E-37
October 23, 2008
Syntax Reading Group
Syntax Reading Group meets today (October 23), 8:00 pm, at Rajesh's house in Northampton. The meeting features Meg Grant giving a practice talk for her NELS 39 talk 'A psycholinguistic investigation of MaxElide in variable-binding contexts'.
[Thanks Annahita!]
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'.
September 25, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists at NELS 39
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists are off to NELS 39 to present their work. The full program.
- Meg Grant, A psycholinguistic investigation of MaxElide in variable-binding contexts
- Karen Jesney, Positional faithfulness, non-locality, and the Harmonic Serialism solution
- Michael Key, The relation between phonetic and phonological encoding in perception: Interactive or autonomous?
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menéndez-Benito, and Florian Schwarz, Maximize presupposition and two types of definite competitors
And watch for our alums:
- Anne-Michelle Tessier (2007 PhD, now Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta)
- Junko Shimoyama (2001 PhD, now Assistant Professor at McGill)
- Gillian Gallagher (2005 BA, now in the grad program at MIT)
- Kyle Rawlins (2003 BA, now Visiting Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins)
In addition, Roger Schwarzschild (1994 PhD, now Professor at Rutgers) is an invited speaker.
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.
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
Ilaria Frana to Göttingen
Ilaria Frana has accepted, and begun, a post-doc at Georg-August University in Göttingen, working with Magdalena Schwager. Congratulations, Ilaria!
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.
August 28, 2008
Keir Moulton to the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keir Moulton has accepted a Visiting Professor position in the Linguistics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Congratulations, Keir!
July 31, 2008
Helen Stickney Dissertation Defense
Helen Stickney will defend her dissertation, The Emergence of DP in the Partitive Structure, on Monday, August 11, 2:00 pm, in Herter 205.
Jan Anderssen to Michigan State University
Jan Anderssen has accepted a Visiting Professor position in the Linguistics Department at Michigan State University. Congratulations, Jan!
Helen Stickney to the University of Pittsburgh
Helen Stickney has accepted a Visiting Professor position in the Linguistics Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Congratulations, Helen!
June 26, 2008
Michael Becker: Successful Dissertation Defense
Michael Becker successfully defended his dissertation on June 23. The title of the thesis is Phonological Trends in the Lexicon: The Role of Constraints. Congratulations, Michael!
Matthew Wolf: Successful Dissertation Defense
Matthew Wolf successfully defended his dissertation on June 23. The title of the thesis is Optimal Interleaving: Serial Phonology-Morphology Interaction in a Constraint-based Model. Congratulations, Matt!
Picture from the Day of Defenses
Proud Chair John McCarthy with his two doctors-to-be, from the party following the day of defenses:
[Thanks Karen!]
Anisa Schardl Teaching High School Linguistics
Anisa Schardl will be teaching an introduction to to linguistics class for high school students this July, in Cambridge. The program is called Junction and is part of ESP,
MIT's student teaching club.
May 15, 2008
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.
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.
Update: We now have the full schedule here:
| 10:00-10:30 | Breakfast | |
| 10:30-11:00 | Jeff Bernath (UConn) | Separating theories of ASL Phonology: Looking in acquisition |
| 11:00-11:30 | Helen Koulidobrova (UConn) | DP or not DP: Testing the parameter through acquisition |
| 11:30-11:45 | Coffee | |
| 11:45-12:15 | Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst) | Acquisition of long-distance questions in French: Varying experimental contexts |
| 12:15-12:45 | Bill Philip (UMass Amherst) | Dutch children's sensitivity to weak cross-over effects |
| 12:45-1:45 | Lunch | |
| 1:45-2:15 | Masahiko Takahashi (UConn) | The acquisition of passives and optional subject movement in Japanese |
| 2:15-2:45 | Jean Crawford (UConn) | The acquisition of Sesotho passives: Evidence for maturation |
| 2:45-3:00 | Coffee | |
| 3:00-3:30 | Jill de Villiers, Harper Gernet-Girard, Jay Garfield (Smith) | Figuring out the properties of Tibetan evidentials for child speakers |
| 3:30-4:00 | Aynat Rubinstein (UMass Amherst) | Assessing semantic conservatism |
| 4:00-4:30 | Eva Bar-Shalom (UConn) and Elena Zaretsky (UMass Amherst) | Initial phases of attrition in Russian-English bilingual children and the role of L1 in L1 attrition |
[Thanks Tanja and Tom!]
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:
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 15, 2007
Chris Davis and Luis Alonso-Ovalle Presenting at GURT
Chris Davis and Luis Alonso-Ovalle (2005 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD, now Assistant Professor at UMass Boston) are presenting at GURT 2007, March 8-11, at Georgetown University. The schedule.
February 8, 2007
Amy Rose Deal at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium
Amy Rose Deal will present 'The origin and content of expletives: evidence from "selection"' at the 31st Penn Linguistics Colloquium, February 23-25, 2007.
December 21, 2006
Good Luck at the LSA!
Many from South College are giving talks and interviews at the 2007 LSA Annual Meeting, January 4-7, in Anaheim, California.
A special note for those of you who are giving interviews: We assume you are busy estimating the number of bicycles in the United States and imagining how you'd design Bill Gates' bathroom. Good. But we recently learned, via experts in the department, that you need to be prepared for an even tougher question: Your interviewer might have the nerve to say, out of fatigue or malice, "So, tell us a bit about yourself." How can you turn that into a friendly, modest, relatively short, but quietly self-serving reply?
Current UMass Amherst Grad Students Presenting
(let us know if we missed anyone)
Kathryn Flack: Phonotactic restrictions across prosodic domains
Matthew Wolf: Vice-versa as contrastive focus
Helen Stickney: Children's acquisition of the partitive: A deficient DP
Shai Cohen: Too in the complement of the verb believe
Shigeto Kawahara (with Matthew Wolf): A root-initial-accenting suffix in Japanese
Cherlon Ussery: AGREE to control: Case optionality in Icelandic
Michael Becker (with Nihan Ketrez an Andrew Nevins): When and why to ignore lexical patterns in Turkish obstruent alternations
Adam Werle: Three approaches to Serbo-Croation second-position clitic reordering
Anna Verbuk: Why children do not compute irrelevant scalar implicatures
There are also boatloads of South College alums presenting their work --- check out the full schedule for more details.
Update: The Annual Meeting of SSILA happens at the same time, in the same impersonal conference center, as the LSA. Elena Benedicto (1998 UMass Amherst PhD) is giving a talk, as is Emmon Bach, in a joint presentation with UBC-ers Fiona Campbell and Pat Shaw.
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 23, 2006
ICEAL Report
The International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (ICEAL) was held at the University of Toronto November 10012. Jen Smith was an invited speaker, and presented her work on loanword phonology. Shigeto Kawahara was a student invited speaker, and gave a talk on the phonetic naturalness and unnaturalness in phonology. Min-Joo Kim presented her work on internally-headed relative clause constructions in Korean. Lan Kim (Simon Frazier University) presented her collaboration work with John Alderete on [h] and aspirated consonants in Korean. Also in the audience were some UMass Amherst alums: Toni Borowsky(temporarily teaching at York University) and Satoshi Tomioka.
November 9, 2006
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!]
November 2, 2006
Michael Becker Talk at Yale
Michael Becker is giving a talk at the Turkish Linguistics Workshop, Yale, November 11. He is presenting joint work with Nihan Ketrez and Andrew Nevins.
October 26, 2006
Helen Stickney Talk at Springfield College
Nicaraguan Sign Language: Watching Language Emerge
Thursday, November 2, Springfield College
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.
Shigeto Kawahara at Harvard
Shigeto Kawahara has been invited to give a guest lecture at Harvard on October 18. He'll be speaking in Andrew Nevins' class. The talk is tentatively titled 'Similarity in Japanese rap songs: Consonant correspondence and extrametrical vowels'.
Talks by Adam Werle
Adam Werle is having a busy semester. On September 29, he spoke at the University of Victoria: The syntax-phonology interface and clisis in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian and Ditidaht.
He is in addition presenting a paper at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the LSA: Serbo-Croatian second-position clisis by PF movement versus copy selection.
And he'll have another paper at SSILA 2007: Second-position clitics and second-position suffixes in Southern Wakashan.
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.
More LSA Acceptances
Michael Becker, Shai Cohen, Kathryn Flack, Shigeto Kawahara, Helen Stickney, Cherlon Ussery, Matt Wolf, Adam Werle, ... the list of UMass Amherst linguists giving papers at the 2007 LSA Meeting keeps growing...
October 5, 2006
SNEWS Report
Nine UMass Amherst linguists made their way to Yale on Saturday for SNEWS, the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics. Shai Cohen, Chris Davis, and Amy Rose Deal gave stellar talks, and together they illustrated the diversity of the semantics and pragmatics being done around here.
SNEWS will probably be hosted by MIT next year.
UMass Amherst Linguists at NELS 37
p>NELS 37 is at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 13-15. There are lots of South College people involved.Lisa Selkirk is an invited speaker.
Two current grads are giving talks: Keir Moulton and Youri Zabbal.
One current BA student (!) is giving a talk: Lisa Shiozaki.
And a number of alums are on the program as well: Elliott Moreton (2002 PhD, now Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel-Hill), Bernhard Schwarz (2000 PhD, now Assistant Professor at McGill), and Paul Portner (1992 PhD, now Associate Professor at Georgetown).
UMass Amherst LSA Acceptances
The LSA has made it decisions for the 2007 Annual Meeting, which is being held in Anaheim, California, January 4-7. We're starting to get word of acceptances. So far: Michael Becker, Shai Cohen, Kathryn Flack, Shigeto Kawahara, and Matt Wolf. There are probably more. We'll have a fuller report in December.
September 14, 2006
Monsters
The GLSA had its annual meeting last week. Many monsterships were reassigned, and some new ones were created. An asterisk marks a new position; an @ sign marks a new South College dweller. We linked to all the websites we could locate.
| GLSA manager | Amy Rose Deal |
| Student rep | Karen Jesney |
| Curriculum committee rep | Maria Biezma-Garrido |
| Department colloq rep | Michael Becker |
| GEO reps | Helen Majewski, @Pasha Siraj |
| Publication exchange | @Jesse Harris |
| Conference sales | Annahita Farudi |
| Dissertation contact | Jan Anderssen |
| *Credit-card monster | Kathryn Pruitt |
| Dinner monsters | Tanja Heizmann, Ilaria Frana |
| Colloq monsters | Keir Moulton, Andrew Mckenzie |
| NELS editors | some combination of @Pasha Siraj, @Martin Walkow, @Emily Elfner, and @Jesse Harris |
| Manager's assistant | @Martin Walkow |
| *Web/LaTeX monster assistants | Maria Biezma-Garrido, @Wendell Kimper |
| Beer monsters | Matt Wolf, Ilaria Frana |
| Cookie monsters | @Meg Grant, @Wendell Kimper, @Misato Hiraga |
| Coffee monster | Florian Schwarz |
| Candy monster | Andrew McKenzie |
| *Monsters of sport | Mike Key, Chris Davis |
[Thanks Amy Rose!]
SNEWS
SNEWS is scheduled to take place on September 30, at Yale. From UMass Amherst, Amy Rose Deal and Shai Cohen will be presenting. Contact Chris about getting a ride (or providing one).
UMass Amherst Linguists at Sinn und Bedeutung 11
UMass Amherst Linguistics will be well represented at Sinn und Bedeutung 11, September 24-25, in the Departament de Traducció i Filologia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
- Valentine Hacquard: Speaker- vs. Subject-Oriented Modals: a Split in Implicative Behavior
- Yurie Hara: On Quantification over Questions: a Case Study of Exhaustification in Japanese
- Gennaro Chierchia (1984 UMass Amherst PhD)
- Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD)
September 7, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at the BU Child Language Conference
The UMass Amherst Acquisition Group will be well represented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 31), November 2-5. Indeed, one of the (unfortunately few) theoretical sessions will consist entirely of South College denizens (Tanja, Magda, Catherine):
Students and former students
- Tanja Heizmann
- Anna Verbuk
- Liane Jeschull
- Bart Hollebrandse
- Anne Michelle-Tessier
Current and recent visitors
- Catherine Legere
- Magda Oiry
- Angeliek van Hout
In addition, Jill de Villiers (Smith Psychology and one of our allied faculty members) is presenting.
[Thanks Tom!]
August 31, 2006
Report from GALANA 2
GALANA 2 (McGill University, August 17-19, 2006) was dominated by UMass Amherst linguists.
Helen Stickney and Liane Jeschull compiled a photo album.
[Thanks Liane and Helen!]
Report from Osaka
The 4th Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics Conference was held in Osaka, August 17-19. Many UMass Amherst linguists presented their work:
- Lisa Shiozaki (UMass Amherst Linguistics undergraduate)
- Shigeto Kawahara and Ben Gelbart (UMass Amherst graduate student, alumnus)
- Junko Ito and Armin Mester (UMass alumni)
- Mana Kobuchi-Philip (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA)
- Yurie Hara (UMass Amherst Linguistics visiting scholar, JSPS Research Fellow at Kyoto University)
Thanks Shigeto
July 27, 2006
Team Kingston in Paris
Team Kingston at LabPhon in Paris this year, plus Jaye Padgett (1991 UMass Amherst PhD):
From left: Eve Brenner-Alsop, Dan Mash, Shigeto Kawahara, John Kingston, and Jaye Padgett
[Thanks Shigeto!]
Shigeto Kawahara on Half Rhymes in Rap
Shigeto Kawahara's paper 'Half rhymes in Japanese rap lyrics and knowledge of similarity' has been accepted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
June 29, 2006
Uri Strauss is off to Law School
From Uri:
i'm leaving umass (masters degree in hand) and headed to the law school. i was offered a generous scholarship to go to case western reserve university in cleveland, ohio, which made my decision to go there pretty easy. i will miss all my friends, professors and colleagues in the linguistics department and in the happy valley. and i will miss being able to interact with linguists: case has no department, no program, and apparently just one undergraduate course with "linguistics" in the title. i will keep in touch with the department through WHISC, and will try to visit when possible.
Amy Rose Deal has a new Snippet
Amy Rose Deal's squib 'Does English have a genitive case?' has just been published in Snippets. She writes that the highlights include "-analysis of your all's" and "citations from the H section". We'll add that she has occasion to cite Scott McClellan. Here's the direct link so that you can find out what that means.
May 18, 2006
GALANA 2 Acceptances
Della Chambless, Liane Jeschull, Karen Jesney, Helen Stickney, Anna Verbuk, and Jill de Villiers, had papers accepted to GALANA 2, which will take place at McGill University, August 17-19, 2006. Joe Pater is an invited speaker.
May 11, 2006
Second-Year Miniconference
This year's Second-Year Miniconference will take place on Friday, May 18, from 9:00-12:00. It will probably be on Floor 9 of the Campus Center. Check WHISC next week for the precise and unhedged details.
| 9:00-9:30 | Mike Key | Metrical attraction and Bantu imbrication |
| 9:30-10:00 | Andrew McKenzie | On the attraction of universal quantifiers |
| 10:00-10:30 | Leah Bateman | Sandhi domains in Shanghai Chinese |
| 10:30-11:00 | break | |
| 11:00-11:30 | Cherlon Ussery | Case transmission in Icelandic control |
| 11:30-12:00 | Elena Innes | Learning interacting phonological alternations |
[Thanks Joe!]
May 4, 2006
WCCFL Photo
Much of the UMass Amherst crowd at WCCFL 25 this past weekend: Jan, Ilaria, Marcin, Anne-Michelle, Ania, Alexandra Teodorescu (UT Austin), and Kylito.
[Thanks Ilaria!]
April 27, 2006
Second-Year Miniconference
The Second-Year Miniconference will take place in the morning on May 19, before the End-of-Semester Luncheon.
UMass Amherst Linguists at LABPHON 10
Our phoneticians, current and graduated, are everywhere these days. Shigeto Kawahara kindly pulled together the following summary of UMass Amherst people on LABPHON 10 program. LABPHON takes place in Paris, June 29-July 1.
Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole, Kevin Roon, Chakir Zeroual. Variation in timing and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic clusters. (Adamantios Gafos was a visiting professor here.)
Scott Myers, Benjamin Hansen (University of Texas, Austin). The origin of vowel length neutralization patterns. (Scott Myers, 1986 UMass Amherst PhD)
John Kingston, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, Jonah Katz, Eve Brenner, Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Amherst). Sequential contrast and the perception of co-articulated segments'. (Daniel and Jonah are recent UMass Amherst Linguistics BAs; Eve is a current major; Della and Shigeto are current grad students.)
Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Amherst). 'Sonorant Geminate: Aperceptually-grounded phonological constraint'.
Jaye Padgett, Marzena Zygis (UCSC; ZAS). 'A perceptual study of Polish fricatives, and its relation to historical sound change'. (Jaye Padgett, 1991 UMass Amherst PhD).
April 20, 2006
Distinguished Teaching Award to Monica Sieh
From Lisa Selkirk:
Monica Sieh is the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award. This is truly an honor, a very tough award to get, and a reflection of extraordinary excellence in teaching. Only two or three TAs and two or three faculty members from all of UMass Amherst receive this in any one year. This is the first such award to someone in our department.
Congratulations, Monica! Wow!
April 13, 2006
Paula Menendez-Benito to MIT
Paula Menendez-Benito has accepted a visiting assistant professor position in Linguistics at MIT. Congatulations, Paula! This looks like a wonderful gig!
April 6, 2006
NSF Fellowships to Andrew McKenzie and Jonah Katz
Andrew McKenzie, currently a Year 2 grad student here, has received an NSF Graduate Fellowship.
Jonah Katz, a 2005 UMass Amherst Linguistics BA now in the Linguistics grad program at MIT, has also received an NSF Graduate Fellowship.
UMass Amherst Linguists in Aalborg
Helen Stickney's paper has been accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Language Acquisition at the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics 2006 in Aalborg, Denmark, at the end of June.
Fall 2005 visitor Erik-Jan Smits will also be presenting a paper that he coauthored with Bart Hollebrandse (2000 UMass Amherst PhD) and Tom Roeper co-authored.
UMass Amherst Linguists at GLOW 29
Lisa Selkirk is an invited speaker in the Workshop on Prosodic Phrasing at GLOW 29, April 6-8 in Barcelona. Her talk is called Minimalist spellout of prosodic major phrases.
John McCarthy is also an invited speaker. His talk is called 'Derivations: Optimal and otherwise'.
And 1998 UMass Amherst PhD Ania Lubowicz (Assistant Professor at USC) is a speaker at the workshop on phonological opacity. Her talk is called Opaque allomorphy in Polish.
March 30, 2006
Syntax Reading Group
The Syntax Reading Group meets today (March 30) at 4:30 pm. Rajesh Bhatt and Amy Rose Deal will give practice talks for CLS 42. Abstracts and links to the conference program are below the fold.
After the meeting, there will be a dinner at Rajesh's house, starting at 7:30 pm. All are invited.
UMass Amherst Linguists at the ASA Meeting
There are five (5!) UMass Amherst phoneticians presenting at upcoming meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. The talks are listed below; Shigeto Kawahara wrote to say that "Basically, everybody is an author of every project, but since there is a rule that a person can be first author of one abstract and a co-author of at most one more, we divided things up this way".
This high volume of high quality work is no doubt a direct result of John Kingston's big NIH grant, now in its second year.
Daniel Mash is a recent BA from our linguistics program, and Eve Brenner-Alsop is a current major --- and they're already off to a national meeting!
- Eve Brenner-Alsop: Parsing time and rate normalization vs durational contrast.
- John Kingston, Della Chambless, and Daniel Mash: Sequential contrast and assimilation in the perception of neighboring vowels and consonants.
- Della Chambless and John Kingston: Sequential contrast or compensation for coarticulation.
- Daniel Mash and Shigeto Kawahara: Sequential contrast vs compensation for coarticulation in Japanese vs English.
- Shigeto Kawahara: Contextual effects on the perception of duration.
Report from SALT 16
We have some pictures from SALT 16 in Japan, which featured many UMass Amherst linguists.
Florian put together some photo albums.
Report from Tromsø
Shigeto Kawahara spent a few weeks at the University of Tromsø, doing experiments on Norwegian, getting data from other languages such as Swedish and Saami, and presenting his current work to the phonology community there. He wrote: "It is amazingly beautiful here, especially the northern lights. They are really something to see. If people are having a chance to visit here (GLOW next year is going to be held here!), I strongly encourage them to take advantage of it!"
March 16, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at SALT
SALT 16 takes place at the University of Tokyo, March 22-24. The program is full of South College-goers:
Angelika Kratzer is an invited speaker. Her talk is called Building a pronoun.
Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called On concealed questions.
Ilaria Frana is giving a talk called Wondering about concealed questions.
Florian Schwarz is giving a talk called On NEEDING propositions and LOOKING FOR properties.
Irene Heim (1982 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called 'Little'.
March 9, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at WCCFL 25
There will be an impressive UMass Amherst Linguistics presence at WCCFL 25, University of Washington, April 28-30, 2006. The program is now posted. It includes:
And a number of our PhDs will be presenting:
| Ana Arregui (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at U Ottawa) | On the consequences of event quantification in counterfactual conditionals |
| Jill Beckman (1998 PhD; now Associate Professor, Iowa) | Phonetic variation in German fricative voicing: Implications for phonological theory |
| Ania Lubowicz (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor, USC) | Opaque Allomorphy in OT |
Update (2006-03-12):
Ana Arregui wrote to note that we forgot to mention two UMass Amherst alums who are on the WCCFL program: Marcin Morzycki and Bernhard Schwarz. She also noted that recent undergrad graduate Kyle Rawlins (presently in the Linguistics PhD program at UCSC) is an alternate.
[Thanks Ana!]
UMass Amherst Linguists at CLS 42
Rajesh Bhatt and Amy Rose Deal had papers accepted to CLS 42, April 6-8, 2006. The program is available here.
Update
There are also a number of UMass PhDs on the program. In the main session, Eva Juarros-Daussà (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo), and Mike Terry (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC). In the Case and Voice session with Amy Rose, Peter Sells (1984 PhD; now Professor at Stanford).
[Thanks for the update, Barbara!]
March 2, 2006
The ECO 5 Syntax Workshop
The ECO 5 Syntax Workshop will take place at MIT, in the Stata Center, this weekend (March 4-5). The program features talks by four UMass Amherst students:
- Michael Becker,Verum focus and T-to-Neg movement in English
- Chris Davis, Evidence for movement in Japanese relative clauses
- Amy Rose Deal, On selection in expletive constructions
- Makoto Kadowaki, Sluicing in Japanese
Taka Shinya at Speech Prosody 2006
Taka Shinya's paper 'Lexical Accent Status Affects Perceived Prominence of Intonational Peaks in Japanese' has been accepted by Speech Prosody 2006, to be held on May 2-5, 2006 in Dresden, Germany.