Main
05:07 (2007-03-15)
WHISC Has Moved!
WHISC has moved to the Department's webserver, which is a totally amazing MacPro that is made entirely of science (thanks for the machine, Joe!). Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds:
We've improved the design in some subtle ways, and we've improved the backend significantly: proper database support and newer blogging software.
We'll work on proper redirection from the old WHISC home, to avoid link breakage and the like. If you notice anything amiss, please drop us a note.
Linguist List Grad School Challenge
The Linguist List Grad School Challenge begins on March 19!
Last year, UMass Amherst Linguistics came in second (total raised: $2,855), edged out of first place by Stanford ($3,426), which is, by the way, a much larger department.
Make 2007 our year!
Support Linguistics on Wikipedia
Barbara Partee and the Linguist List have teamed up to improve the coverage of Linguistics on Wikipedia. Watch for a special initiative during the Linguist List's Fund Drive. WHISC will keep you posted.
Barbara reports that linguists in Moscow are "getting organized about filling in gaps in linguistics coverage in the Russian-language Wikipedia, and working together to standardize entries on languages and language families". The effort is headed by Yuri Koryakov.
The current WikipediaProject for Linguistics is languishing. It is worth our while as linguists to improve it. Chris Potts submitted the following story, which later appeared on Language Log:
In my large intro course yesterday, there was an unfamiliar hand in the air a lot of the time, and the student's questions and insights were the best I've had all semester. It was puzzling, because I didn't recognize him, and he seemed to know much more about syntax than one would expect. (It was our first official day on the topic.)
After class, he came to the front and introduced himself as a prospective student, just out of high school. He said linguistics was his passion in high school. I said, "What? How?" And he replied, "Wikipedia".
[Thanks Barbara!]
Espresso Fund Drive
We will soon have espresso in the department! Florian Schwarz led the wildly successful fund drive, which was over almost as soon as it had started. We now have the money we need to purchase this fine espresso maker:
[Thanks Florian!]
Syntax Reading Group
The Syntax Reading Group meets today (March 15) at Rajesh's house, 8:00 pm. Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi will present their current work on comparatives. Meg Grant will bring a treat imported from her home town.
Cedric Boeckx will present at the Group's April 19 meeting, which will be coordinated with the SRG.
[Thanks Cherlon!]
Craige Roberts Visit
Craige Roberts will be visiting in the week of March 26, right after spring break. She will speak in Angelika Kratzer's seminar on situations, and she will be around to talk with people.
[Thanks Angelika!]
SRG -- Special Edition with Craige Roberts
SRG is delighted to announce a special edition: Craige Roberts from OSU will be our guest on March 29, and will present work on Only: Presupposition and Implicature. We will meet, as usual, at Jan and Aynat's place at 8:00 pm.
Roumi Pancheva, Syntax Guru
Roumyana Pancheva is this year's Syntax Guru. She will be in residence from March 26 until April 30, with a brief sojourn to GLOW in Norway in the middle there.
[Thanks Kyle!]
Josef Perner Lecture at Smith
Josef Perner
University of Salzburg
Referential ambiguity in thought: Children's problems with alternative naming, false beliefs, and identity
Wednesday, March 28, 5:30 pm, Bass Hall 210, Smith College
[Thanks Jill!]
HUMDRUM Call for Papers
The Rutgers University Department of Linguistics will be hosting this year's HUMDRUM workshop for grad students working on topics related to OT. All students are welcome to attend and/or speak.
The conference is scheduled for April 21-22. If you would like to present, send a message to Michael O'Keefe, with your title or at least a general idea of what you'll talk about.
Planning UMMM/MUMM
Planning is underway for the Spring 2007 UMMM/MUMM meeting. UMMM is the UMass MIT Meeting in Phonology (so-named when it is here), and MUMM The MIT-UMass Meeting in Phonology (so-named when it is there). Write to John Kingston with your thoughts on where, when, and other practical details.
[Thanks John!]
Team Kingston at Haskins Lab
Team Kingston (John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Dan Mash, and Eve Brenner-Alsop) is going to present a talk titled 'Contextual effects on the perception of duration in speech and non-speech' at the upcoming workshop New England Sequencing and Timing (NEST) at Haskins Lab, May 17.
Lisa Sanders (UMass Amherst Psychology) is also giving a talk: 'Temporally selective attention modulates early auditory processing: Event-related potential evidence'.
Rajesh Bhatt in India and Northampton
Rajesh Bhatt recently returned from an extended working visit to
India, with stopovers in Dubai. He has hit the ground running, so
to speak, with a talk already scheduled for this week (today)! The
following summarizes his activities, starting in the future and moving
into the tail end of last year.
From Rajesh:
March 15 Talk in the Syntax Reading Group with
Shoichi Takahashi, presenting our work on Phrasal
Comparatives.
Feb. 21-25 at Vidya Bhawan, an educational foundation
in the city of Udaipur where taught a mini-course on Hindi syntax to an audience consisting
of school teachers and people involved in the preparation of educational
materials and educational policy more generally. In a first for me, I taught
in Hindi. I covered issues of word order, binding, agreement, and
long distance dependencies. Many of the participants were speakers of
Indo-Aryan languages other than Hindi and it was exciting to get them
to construct rules for their languages, in particular the language
Mewari. I have been invited by
Vidya Bhawan, together with Prof. Ramakant Agnihotri, Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya
to start work on an eventual linguistic mapping of the region of Mewar,
with a focus on Mewari. The hope is that this will function as a
pilot for the upcoming New Linguistic Survey of India.
Jan. 22-31 at the University of Delhi, where I gave a colloquium
called 'Unaccusativity and Case', and led the second part of a
workshop on the Semantics of Tense and Aspect in Indian Languages,
together with Professor Teesta Bagchi, Tanmoy Bhattacharya and
Hany Babu. We spent quite some time on the mysterious absence of
the universal perfect in any Indian language.
Jan. 4-7 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore,
where I participated in a workshop
on the question of Non-Native Englishes. This conference was structured
in the form of responses to a paper by Prof. Rajendra Singh in which he
argued that the classification of Englishes into Native Englishes and
non-Native Englishes was not based on any theoretically interesting
distinctions.
Dec. 19-21 at the South Asian Language Analysis conference at the
CIIL, Mysore where I presented a paper called 'Little or Nothing'. This
paper examines the properties of a negation in Hindi, homophonous with
the word 'little', that can only be used to negate utterances that have been
asserted in the recent context and not for new negative utterances. I also
led together with Prof. Jayaseelan, Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Prof.
Ayesha Kidwai, the initial half of a seminar on the semantics of tense and
aspect in Indian Languages.
New in the Node
A lot of new stuff!
- Direct Compositionality, Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson, eds.
- Anaphora: A Reference Guide, by Andrew Barss.
- Aspect and Reference Time, by Olga Borik.
- Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, Gerlof Bouma, Irene Kramer, Joost Zwarts, eds.
- Linguistic Universals, byRicardo Mairal and Juana Gil.
- A History of the English Language, by Richard Hogg and David Denison, eds.
- Plural Predication, by Thomas J. McKay.
- Events and Semantic Architecture, by Paul M. Pietroski.
- English Intonation: An Introduction, by J.C. Wells.
- Linguistics in Potsdam 25: Optimality Theory and Minimalism: A Possible Convergence? Hans Broekhuis and Rolf Vogel, eds.
- The Grammar of Words, by Geert Booij.
- Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction, by Paul R. Kroeger.
[Thanks Meg!]
