Ioana Chitoran Colloquium
Ioana Chitoran
Dartmouth College
Does perceptual recoverability play a role in the phonological grammar? A possible answer from Georgian
Friday, March 30, 4:00 pm, Machmer E-37
Please note the later start time
Search
Categories
- acquisition lab
- alums
- awards
- candy
- colloquia
- computation
- department news
- dissertation defenses
- events
- faculty news
- glsa
- grad-student news
- grants
- graphs
- jobs
- miscellany
- phonetics lab
- phonology group
- photo albums
- prosody group
- publications/presentations
- semantics reading group
- syntax reading group
- undergrad news
- visiting scholars
- whisc
Other Ling Newsletters
05:08 (2007-03-29)
March 29, 2007
Tanya Reinhart Obituary
Tanya Reinhart died suddenly on March 17, 2007, while on Long Island. The Guardian published an extensive obituary that does a good job of conveying just how bold and passionate she was as a linguist and as a political thinker.
[Thanks Angelika!]
The Syntax Guru has Arrived
From Kyle:
I'm happy to announce that Roumyana Pancheva, this year's Syntax Guru, has arrived to South College where she will be in residence until the end of April. You can find her in Barbara's office.
Professor Pancheva has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California since the completion of her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. She is an expert on an interesting array of subjects in syntax, semantics and neuro-linguistics.
Her dissertation not only studied the free relative in all its glory but discovered much of its glory. It argues that the constrained form of the free relative nonetheless allows it to function in a dizzying array of constructions, including comparatives, concessives and correlatives. She has authored a large body of work on comparatives, conditionals, concessives and correlatives that builds on her dissertation work. In an important paper with Rajesh Bhatt, she has even found the free relative form in conditional sentences (e.g, "If this is a free relative, then it's heavily disguised").
She has also worked on the perfect participle, and its relation to tense, modality and aspect. In a series of interesting papers, one with Arnim von Stechow, she has provided a solution to the so-called present perfect puzzle, which is the name given to the observation that temporal adverbials of a certain sort cannot modify perfects when they are in the present tense (*She has danced yesterday) but can otherwise (She must have danced yesterday). In many closely related languages --- German and Italian for instance --- the present perfect is not constrained in this way. She argues that what makes English different is not the meaning of the perfect, but rather how the meanings of present and past tense are carved out in English as opposed to German or Italian. She has explored how the perfect varies in its form and meaning across a wide range of languages and shown how in some languages, Turkish for example, it can (surprisingly!) have a meaning like that of an evidential.
She has also done extensive work on clitics, especially in the Balkan sprachbund. Some of this work has been diachronic in nature: a good example is her 2005 Natural Language and Linguistic Theory paper in which she chronicles the rise of a second-position clitic in Bulgarian from postverbal clitics. In this work she also argues for a model of clitic placement that divorces it from strictly prosodic, or other phonological, controls, bucking a popular trend in this arena. She is presently working on an NSF project The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic.
And finally, in collaboration with colleagues at USC, she has worked on certain aphasias and on fMRI studies that distinguish semantic anomalies from syntactic ill-formedness. She is presently involved in a study funded by USC's Zumberge Research and Innovation grant that is investigating the fMRI patterns associated with distinguishing weak and strong nominals in the positions that they are licensed.
You can learn more about her research, download some of her papers, and find out what she looks like at her website.
Don't hesitate to get the guru's help on your work --- she's only here for one month!
Roumi Pancheva Talk
Roumi Pancheva, our Syntax Guru, will give a talk on Monday, April 2, at 4:00 pm, in Machmer W-21. The title is 'Partitive comparatives'. Here's an abstract.
Smith Workshop on Language and Mind
Jill De Villiers is hosting a workshop on language and mind at Smith, Monday, April 2, starting at 9:00 am. Here is a preliminary schedule.
Linguist List Grad School Challenge
The Linguist List Grad School Challenge is on! Peggy Speas has agreed to be in charge of collecting our department's donations. Get a check to her by April 13.
Last year, we were edged out of first place in the Challenge by Stanford. Peggy wrote, "I know we can triumph this year because we've been keeping in practice, donating for a new coffee system. This workout regime plus the already existing caffeine sources make us fit and ready to donate like champions!"
And she continued, "Please take a moment to consider just how you'd do research, find a job or know where conferences were without The LINGUIST List. It's hard to put a figure on the amount of time the list saves you, but any amount is welcome."
[Thanks Peggy!]
Tom Roeper's New Book Published
Semantics Reading Group
A special meeting of SRG this week: Craige Roberts is in town all week, and she has agreed to give a special SRG presentation on her paper Only: Presupposition and implicature. The meeting is today (March 29) at Jan and Aynat's, starting at 8:00 pm.
[Thanks Florian!]
Talks by Tom Roeper and Co-Authors
Two weeks ago, Tom Roeper gave an invited talk at the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics called 'Building the aquisition interface' and another at the Conference on Brain, Mind, and Language called 'Recursion, false belief, and implicatures'.
This week , at SRCD (the Society for Research in Child Development), Jill DeVilliers, Peggy Speas, Jay Garfield, and Tom Roeper
will participate in a seminar on evidentials, presenting the latest results from Tibetan experiments.
Tom Roeper will also present a poster with Kathy-hirsch Pasek, Tilbe Goksun, and Meredith Jones of Temple University called 'Nominal ellipsis in early acquisition using dual television techniques'.
Chris Potts at Penn and Swarthmore
Chris Potts is giving two talks at Penn today, the first in their SPLUNCH series (joint work with Rajesh Bhatt, Joe Pater, and Michael Becker), and the second in their colloquium series.
Tomorrow (March 30), Chris pops over to Swarthmore for a talk titled 'An introduction to expressive content'.
Harvard Workshop on Movement
There will be a workshop on movement at Harvard, May 7. Abstracts are due on April 1.
From the organizers, Cedric Boeckx and Clemens Mayr:
The workshop is designed to bring people together, whose work has bearing on the nature of syntactic movement and its relation to the interfaces between the computational and other cognitive systems. Obvious fields of interest are topics such as linearisation and movement for the PF interface, or quantifier-scope for the LF interface. But there are numerous other topics that would fall into this domain. For instance, an important question to be addressed would be, whether all syntactic movement is the same, or whether the interfaces impose specific restrictions that only need to be met by a subset of "movements". That said, it is clear that there is a broad range of possible topics. We are planning to invite about 8 abstracts for that day. Slots will be 35-40 minutes with focus on discussion afterwards.
[Thanks Kyle!]