Freeman Lecture Postponed
Today's Freeman lecture has been postponed until September.
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- Luis Alonso-Ovalle Special Lecture
- John McCarthy in Brazil
- Anniversary of Syntactic Structures Celebrated in Moscow
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Other Ling Newsletters
05:10 (2007-04-12)
April 12, 2007
Roeper Book Tour Begins
Tom Roeper will read from his new book
The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanity
Selections on acquisition, African-American English, and ethics in science
Amherst Books, 8 Main St (downtown Amherst), Wednesday, April 25, 8:00-9:00 pm
and at
the Harvard Coop, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Monday, May 21, 7:00 pm
Linguist List Grad School Challenge Update
The Linguist List Grad Shool Challenge ends tomorrow. We are in second place at present, with $1867. Unfortunately, this puts us quite a bit behind first-place Stanford University, with $3270. If you've not given yet, please do so today!
Brian Weatherson Philosophy Colloquium
Brian Weatherson
Cornell University
Causation and causatives
Friday, April 13, 3:30pm, Bartlett 206
Phonology Group
PhG meets next on April 24. Gaja Jarosz will give a practice talk for CLS 43, May 3-5. The talk is on the learning of restrictive lexicon-grammar combinations that cannot be identified using ranking biases.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
Semantics Reading Group
SRG meets today (April 12), at Jan and Aynat's house in Northampton. The plan is to read Jacqueline Lecarme's paper 'Tense in nominals'. Aynat will lead the discussion.
[Thanks Florian!]
Harvard Semantic Interfaces Workshop
Semantic interfaces: cross-disciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives
Friday April 20, 9:30-3:30pm, One Brattle Sq, Suite 6, Cambridge
Invited speakers
- Chris Kennedy, University of Chicago
- Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia
- Julie Sedivy, Brown University
- Ira Noveck, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon
Each of the invited talks will be followed by commentary from two discussants from different disciplines, with interspersed general discussion and lunch.
Luis Alonso-Ovalle Special Lecture
John McCarthy in Brazil
John McCarthy is in Porto Alegre, Brazil, presenting a lecture and giving a short course at the III Seminário Internacional de Fonologia. The sponsoring institution is the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. PUCRS is the home of Bira Alves, who is visiting the department this semester under Joe Pater's sponsorship.
Anniversary of Syntactic Structures Celebrated in Moscow
From Barbara Partee:
Russians are big on anniversaries.
In February I relayed a request from Olga Mitrenina in St Petersburg to find out what month Syntactic Structures was published 50 years ago. Kai von Fintel tracked down the history and found it was February, and that went into an article Olga published in February in the popular press called (I'm translating) Colorless Green Ideas Live and Conquer.
Independently of that, a group of Moscow syntax students organized the first Moscow generative syntax conference, and called it "Syntactic Structures" ("Sintaksicheskie Struktury") in commemoration of that anniversary as well. It was a really nice two-day conference held in Moscow, April 5-6, with some students from St. Petersburg also participating. Here's the program. There were 13 presentations by students and young researchers, and 5 invited talks by senior linguists (including me), and a banquet at the end.
Yakov Testelets closed the conference with a tribute to the enterprise of the students who organized the conference and to the revolution in linguistics marked by the publication of Syntactic Structures. The toasts at the banquet included an optimistic toast to the effect that there is now no longer "Russian linguistics" and "Western linguistics" but just "linguistics" -- maybe still a bit of an exaggeration, but increasingly true now for the younger generations of linguists in Moscow and St Petersburg. I've personally witnessed a huge change in 10 years.
There was also a nice toast to the 40th anniversary of Haj Ross's dissertation! Who would have noticed and marked the date besides a Russian! It was a great conference, very lively and stimulating, with a wonderful atmosphere! There are some photos of it on my Flickr site.
Espresso Machine!
The espresso machine has arrived! Many thanks to fund-driver leader Florian Schwarz.
