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!
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!
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!
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).
The Evidentials Grant group meets next on Monday, March 31, 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room. Leah Bateman will report on her talk on Tibetan at the GLOW Workshop on Evidentials.
[Thanks Tom!]
The Evidentials Grant group will meet on Monday, February 25, at 12:15pm in the Partee Room. Edward Garrett is visiting and will present work with Leah Bateman.
[Thanks Emily S!]
The Evidentials Grant group will meet Monday, February 11, at 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room. Chris Davis will be presenting on 'Tense, situations, and evidentials'.
[Thanks Emily!]
The Partee-Borschev Grant Group meets on Tuesday, November 20, at 12:45 pm, in the Partee Room. Amy Rose Deal and Annahita Farudi are presenting:
Alternatives for Persian Indefinites
Persian has three types of indefinite objects: bare nouns, and nouns marked with either or a combination of two "indefinite articles", ye and -i. Using a Hamblin semantics, we argue that -i introduces alternatives of type
drawn from the common noun denotation, while ye forms an existential generalized quantifier whose restrictor can be drawn from a set of alternatives introduced by -i. We explore the interaction of these alternatives with various operators (negation, universal quantification, questions).
[Thanks Aynat!]
In an insightful piece of performance art, the Partee-Borschev Grant Group, which is focussed on negation, has offered the first-ever non-announcement in WHISC: the group will not meet on November 13 (at 12:45 in the Partee Room). You're invited to instead spend the time reflecting on the nature of this event that never happened.
Elena Benedicto, illustrious UMass Amherst alum (1998 Linguistics PhD), who is currently on sabbatical from Purdue University, will speak to the Evidentials grant group on Tuesday, November 13, at 12:15 pm, about evidentials in indigenous languages of Nicaragua. The meeting will be held in the Partee Room, and all are welcome.
[Thanks Peggy!]
November meetings of the Partee-Borschev grant group begin next week with a presentation by Misato Hiraga. Join us on Tuesday, November 6, at 12:45 pm, in the Partee Room for Misato's talk on 'Domain restriction by demonstratives in Japanese'.
[Thanks Aynat!]
The Genitive of Negation Grant group will be meeting almost every Tuesday in November. Meetings will feature presentations by Misato Hiraga (November 6), Annahita Farudi (November 13), and Amy Rose Deal (November 20). Stay tuned for more information as the talks come up!
[Thanks Aynat!]
Edward Garrett visited the Evidentials Grant group on Monday, October 22, to talk about acquisition experiments on pronouns and deixis in Navajo, Tibetan and English.
[Thanks Peggy!]
The Genitive of Negation grant group will meet on Tuesday, October 9, at 1:15 pm (notice change of time!) in the Partee Room.
Aynat Rubinstein will be presenting on "Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs".
Abstract:
One recurring question in studies of reciprocalization (the process that creates reciprocal verbs) concerns the difference between verbal reciprocals and their well-studied pronominal counterparts (Faller, to appear, Siloni 2001, to appear). In this paper I offer a novel answer to this question. I propose that reciprocal verbs involve collective predication that is absent from other expressions of reciprocity. In particular, I explore Artstein’s (1997) hypothesis that the domain of events is similar to the domain of individuals in containing elements which are groups. I propose that reciprocal verbs are predicates of group events and derive their essential properties from this assumption.
The Genitive of Negation grant group will meet on Tuesday, October 2, at 12:45 pm in the Partee Room. Keir Moulton will be presenting on 'Clausal Complementation and Subject Raising'.
Abstract [handout]
I will present an account for a long-standing puzzle about restrictions on raising to object constructions (the Derived Object Constraint (DOC), Postal 1974). I show that verbs subject to the DOC do not by themselves select for complement clauses, and I argue that their complement is instead selected by a higher (functional) head. This has the effect of allowing only a subset of movement options out of the clause. General implications, and predictions, for the nature of clausal complementation will be discussed.
[Thanks Aynat!]
Edward Garrett, from Eastern Michigan University, will be visiting to work with the Evidentials project, September 21-25.
On Saturday, September 22, there will be an informal get-together + barbecue at Peggy's house (253 Shutesbury Rd., Leverett) beginning at 4:00 pm.
On Monday, September 24, Edward will present some of his work on Tibetan Evidentials to the grant group, at 12:15, in the Partee room.
Then, on Tuesday, September 25, Edward and Leah Bateman will be talking at Smith College about the field work that they did this summer. The meeting at Smith will be in Bass Hall 401 (or larger place to be posted on the door of 401).
All are welcome to any of these events. If you would like to make an appointment to meet with Edward during his visit, contact Peggy.
[Thanks Peggy!]
The semester's first Genitive of Negation grant meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 18, at 12:45 pm in the Partee Room.
From Barbara:
As in previous years, we will have a number of open meetings this semester for project participants and anyone else who is interested to discuss project research and topics that are related to the project. The project is The Russian Genitive of Negation: Integration of Lexical and Compositional Semantics, and there are many relevant issues, which need not concern Russian; see the description of the project on the website.
On the agenda of the first meeting:
[Thanks Aynat and Barbara!]
The semester's first meeting of the Evidentials Grant Group will be on Tuesday, September 11, at 12:00 pm, in the Partee Room. We'll hear stories of summer adventures and plan the fall schedule of meetings. All are welcome!
[Thanks Peggy!]
Chris Potts's grant work on expressives was covered recently in The Boston Globe, and UMass Amherst Linguistics alum Kai von Fintel (MIT) makes an appearance as well:
J. M. Berger. Coming soon, a linguist's guide to obscenities. The Boston Globe Health and Science section, July 9, 2007.
And see Berger's additional material, as well as Chris's related Language Log post.
Lisa Green and Lisa Selkirk have been awarded a joint Faculty Research Grant. Wonderful! Congratulations, Lisas!
[Thanks Ellen!]
Shigeto Kawahara and Yurie Hara will present their work on intonation and evidentiality in Japanese at the evidentials grant group meeting on Monday, May 7, at 12:30 pm in the Partee Room. Here's the abstract.
[Thanks Peggy!]
Continue reading "Hara and Kawahara in the Evidentials Group" »
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Tuesday, April 17. Leah Bateman presented her work on Tibetan evidentials and their interaction with tense and aspect.
The Evidentials Group/Acqusition Lab met on March 5. Anna Verbuk and Catherine Léger presented.
The next meeting is on March 12, 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room. Tanja Heizmann will present some of her experimental items for her work on exhaustivity, and Valentine Hacquard will present joint work done with Emily Sowalsky on epistemics and embeddings.
[Thanks Youri!]
The Evidentials Group/Acquisition Lab met on February 5. Jay Garfield, Namgyal Norbu, and Jill de Villiers presented 'Beginning explorations in the acquisition of Tibetan evidentials'.
The Partee--Borschev Grant Group met on December 6. There were two presentations:
[Thanks Florian!]
The Partee-Borschev Grant Group will have an open meeting on November 29th, 5:30 pm, in South College 301 (Pizza will be provided). There will be two presentations:
For more information and future meetings, check out the events section on the grant website.
Florian
Christopher Potts has been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant: Expressive content and the semantics of contexts. Angelika Kratzer and Peggy Speas are consultants on the grant.
Barbara and Volodja gave an invited colloquium at UConn on Friday November 3, on Sentential and Constituent Negation in Russian BE-sentences Revisited, based on work done jointly with their Russian consultants that they plan to work on some more. Barbara writes, "The UConn linguistics program turns out to have quite a number of Russian PhD students, and we got lots of great discussion (not only from them)."
In addition, Barbara and Voldja are about to hit the road, for an eight-talk, mulitcontinental tour. The schedule is here, and watch their NSF grant's website for handouts and additional details.
The third open NSF-grant meeting of the semester will be held Wednesday November 8th, 5:30-7:30 pm, with pizza provided, in the Partee room. Everyone is welcome!
There will be two presentations:
More details, as well as abstracts and handouts from past meetings, can be found in the events section of the grant website.
[Thanks Florian!]
The Partee-Borschev Grant Group will have an open meeting on October 25, 5:30 pm, in South College 301. Here's a brief version of the agenda:
Check out a fuller version of the agenda, with abstracts.
Here's a brief rundown on future meetings:
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Tuesday, October 3. Leah Bateman presented some of the work she did over the summer: 'Tibetan evidentials and their interaction with TAM markers'.
[Thanks Youri!]
The Partee-Borschev Grant Group met yesterday (October 4). Anna Verbuk gave a talk titled 'The acquisition of the Russian or', and Barbara Partee presented 'Negation, intensionality, and aspect: Interaction with NP semantics'.
[Thanks Florian!]
The Partee-Borschev NSF Grant Group will have a number of open meetings this semester for project participants and anyone else who is interested to discuss project research and topics that are related to the project.
The first meeting will be held Wednesday October 4, 5:30-7:30 pm (with some sort of food included, TBA, suggestions welcome), in the Partee room. Everyone is welcome!
Agenda
Anna Verbuk will give a practice talk of her upcoming 20-minute paper for WECOL, 'The acquisition of the Russian or'.
Brief abstract: In languages such as English and German, the disjunction operator is interpreted inclusively under the scope of negation. In languages such as Russian and Hungarian, the disjunction operator is interpreted exclusively under the scope of negation because it is a PPI (Szabolcsi 2002). I discuss an experiment that I did on the acquisition of the Russian "or." Russian-speaking children start out by going through the "English" stage where they interpret the Russian "or" inclusively when clausemate negation is present. I argue that the default setting of the PPI parameter is {-PPI}, and propose a trigger for changing the initial setting of the parameter to the Russian {+PPI} setting.
Barbara Partee will present a paper currently under final revision for a volume resulting from an Aspect conference organized by Susan Rothstein in Tel Avis in June 2005; the title is "Negation, Intensionality, and Aspect: Interaction with NP Semantics", and a draft is available here.
Brief abstract: This paper is about the interaction of the meanings of Noun Phrases (NPs) and various operator-like elements that a sentence may contain: negation, intensional verbs (want, expect,hope for, seek), tenses, modal verbs, aspectual operators, and other elements. I focus mainly on negation and intensionality, with discussion of aspect-related problems at the end. The patterns of interaction of NPs and various operator-like elements sometimes show negation and intensional operators patterning alike, sometimes differently. Negation is not an intensional operator; so the question arises why it sometimes, but not always, patterns with the intensional operators.
The Russian "genitive of negation" construction seems to lump negation and some intensional verbs together. We review hypotheses about interactions among scope, NP interpretation, and the semantic properties of negation and intensional operators. Then we add aspect to the picture, drawing on recent works by Paul Kiparsky and by Dmitry Levinson. After challenging some appealing but questionable claims by Kiparsky (Kiparsky 1998) about parallels between partitive case in Finnish and imperfective aspect in Russian, I adapt some arguments from Dmitry Levinson's work (this and this) on a slightly different kind of parallel between imperfectivity and genitive case under negation, to further support the idea of similarity between NPI contexts and intensional contexts. In the concluding section I opt for a view of "family resemblance" properties that many but not all instances of negation and intensionality share, so as to allow for equally important differences that show up among the family members.
Discussion of plans for future meetings. We will have presentations in the future at least by Florian, Keir, Amy Rose, and Aynat, some additional presentations by Barbara and/or Volodja, and we would be glad to have volunteers for additional presentations. This can be an additional venue for practice talks, for instance. Let Barbara know if you'd like to present something.
[Thanks Florian!]
On October 3, Leah Bateman will present some preliminary findings from her fieldwork on Tibetan at the Evidentials Grant Group meeting. Leah spent much of the summer working with a Tibetan consultant in Nepal, investigating "new" evidentials and beginning to explore the interaction of evidentials and TAM markers.
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Tuesday, September 19. Chris Davis presented 'Post-propositional meaning in Japanese', which is based on his summer research on Japanese.
[Thanks Youri!]
The Evidentials Grant Group and the Acquisition Lab have joined forces. They will now have combined meetings on Tuesdays, 12:30 pm, in the Partee Room. This new combination is the result of the extensive interactions between the groups facilitated by the NSF Grant on Evidentials.
At the most recent meeting, Bart Hollebrandse and Helen Stickney each presented work.
For more about the grant and associated projects, visit these websites:
[Thanks Youri!]
Peggy Speas is attending an NSF Principal Investigators' meeting in Washington, DC, September 13-15. She is presenting a poster about the Evidentials project. Look for a copy of the poster in the department next week!
Peggy Speas recently returned from three weeks of teaching at the Navajo Language Academy in Flagstaff. She and a group of about twenty students develped an analysis of Navajo spatial deictic terms. Peggy reports that it is a significant improvement over the existing description, which simply says there are six terms that mean "here", six that mean "there", and four that mean "over there".
Above: Peggy engaging in a lesson prepared by Cecilia Silentman Carr (in green) on how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Peggy writes: "Neither here nor there, but we got to eat the sandwiches in the end".
The Evidentials Grant Group met throughout August.
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Monday, July 3.
The comp4ling project is flourishing with a bunch of new utilities for doing linguistics (and writing up your results). The latest additions:
Chris Potts presented a paper at the Language for Intelligent Machines Workshop at West Point, July 19-21. He was recruited to provide the "linguist perspective". His talk was called 'A system of pragmatic pressures'. The workshop was organized by Chris Arney, manager of the cooperative systems program at the Army Research Office (ARO).
ARO supports pure research at universities through a variety of initiatives. We should all be aware of it as a source of funding for the full range of research projects undertaken here at UMass Amherst.
Chris learned a lot about robots and how to escape them when they rise up against us.
The Evidentials Grant Group met on June 6.
Joe Pater has beeen awarded a quite substantial UMass Amherst Faculty Research Grant. The title of his grant is 'Phonology with weighted constraints: A computational study of its typological implications'. Congratulations, Joe!
Chris Potts, Tim Beechey, and Aynat Rubinstein have begun the comp4ling project (view the announcement here). The first algorithm is up: it is a CGI/Perl implementation of Paul Dekker's Predicate Logic with Anaphora.
Watch this space for additional algorithms and other goodies as the summer progresses.
Suggestions for algorithms to include in the collection are very welcome. Send such suggestions to Chris.
The Evidentials Grant held a meeting on Monday, April 24, at 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room. Jay Garfield talked about his preliminary work at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies.
On May 1, Edward Garrett will visit. He will speak at 12:15 pm in the Partee Room. Ed's recent UCLA dissertation is about evidentials in Tibetan, and he has been working recently on an online data base of Tibetan.
Proposals for Chris Potts's department-internal grant (Computation for linguistics) are due next Friday, April 28. The details are here.
