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05:11 (2007-04-19)

April 19, 2007

Tom Roeper at Amherst Books

Tom Roeper at Amherst Books, April 25, 8:00-9:00 pm.

Flyer for the talk

Rickford Lectures

Angela and John Rickford, April 27 --- reception at 4:00 pm, talk at 4:30 pm, School of Management Room 137.

John and Angela Rickford, April 27, 4 pm, School of Mgmt 137

[Thanks Barbara Z.P.!]

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

Lilly Fellowship to Chris Potts

Chris Potts has received a 2007-2008 Lilly Teaching Fellowship. He plans to develop a course on computation for theoretical linguistics, which he will eventually co-teach with Rajesh Bhatt.

Bart Hollebrandse on Recursion

Bart Hollebrandse (2000 UMass Amherst PhD; curently visiting UMass Amherst and Smith) will soon head to Brazil to work with Dan Everett (newly genuinely famous thanks to a lengthy New Yorker story), under a grant run by Manfred Krifka, Uli Sauerland, and Everett. The work relates to tests Bart is developing for verbal and non-verbal recursion.

Bart and Tom Roeper will present a paper at a conference on recursion organized by Everett in Bloomington, April 27-29.

Syntax Reading Group

Cherlon Ussery will present in Syntax Reading Group today (April 19), 8:00 pm, at Rajesh's place. She will be giving a practice talk for WCCFL 26, Berkeley, April 27-29.

Evidentials Group Meeting

The Evidentials Grant Group met on Tuesday, April 17. Leah Bateman presented her work on Tibetan evidentials and their interaction with tense and aspect.

Second Place in the Grad School Challenge

UMass Amherst Linguistics finished in second place in this year's Linguist List Grad School Challenge. Thanks to everyone who contributed, a special thanks to Barbara Partee for her matching gifts, and another special thanks to Peggy Speas for leading the drive for us. We had among the longest (perhaps the longest) list of donors of any school.

The silver medal brings with it two prizes for the department:

  • A subscription to the online version of Labov's The Atlas of North American English, by Mouton de Gruyter
  • An Introduction to Language and Linguistics by Christopher J. Hall (Continuum)

More on the Publication of Syntactic Structures

Kai von Fintel recently documented some new and recent historical scholarship on the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Our own (yes, we are claiming him as our own) Bob Rothstein was, in a sense, present for the historical moment:

Dear WHISC,

February 1957 seems about right for the publication of Syntactic Structures. In the spring semester 1957, as a freshman math major at MIT, I wandered into a course called L78: Syntactic Structures. On the first day of class the instructor, a certain Noam Chomsky, told us that we didn't need to take notes since the class notes for the previous year's course were due to appear in print any day. And indeed, we were soon able to purchase a thin blue Mouton volume at the Tech Coop, and my notes for the course are very minimal, although they do include a two-page dittoed midterm (three questions to be answered in class and one to be done at home) and the several pages of my answers, corrected and graded by Noam.

Best regards,
Bob