This is the final weekly WHISC of the 2006-7 academic year. We'll publish on the final Thursday of the month for June through August, so keep the items coming.
Last week, we called for news, and we got it. This is a fat issue, and it reports on many major accomplishments and important events. A wonderful way to close the year! Thank you!
The Sources of Phonological Markedness
Thursday, May 31, 2:00 pm, Machmer W-26
The Emergence of Phonetic Naturalness
Friday, June 1, 2:30 pm, Bartlett 301
The First Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP) will take place at UMass Amherst from June 4 to June 16. Organized and directed by Lisa Green (with help from Barbara Pearson), the SDRP will provide research experiences for undergraduates with an interest in language-related disciplines.
The focus of the 2007 SDRP is the description of patterns in African American English (AAE), including "hands-on" methods for analyzing data from different sources.
The program will bring to campus twelve undergraduate students who are interested in African American English. The students are coming from colleges and universities in Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, DC, New York, California, and Massachusetts. Their background is in linguistics, English literature, other languages, and communication disorders.
Students will participate in classes taught by Lisa Green, Lisa Selkirk, Tom Roeper, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Frances Burns (UMass Ph.D in Com.Dis), Peggy Speas, Shelley Velleman, Peter Elbow, and J Michael Terry.
[Thanks Barbara, Lisa, and Peggy!]
Carlota Smith passed away on May 24, at the age of 73. David Beaver posted to Language Log with some heartfelt comments and the full text of an obituary by Richard Meier, chair of the UT Linguistics Department.
Lauren Terzenbach, who got a BA in Linguistics and Russian in 2003, was on an ROTC scholarship and entered the Army as a 2nd lieutenant immediately after graduation. She is now a captain and adjutant of the 163d Military Intelligence Battalion. She's in Iraq now, and her unit just got extended for another three months, but she's looking ahead to completing her service commitment and going to grad school in 2008.
[Thanks John McCarthy!]
Rajesh Bhatt and Miriam Butt have not only founded an innovative new journal, but they've done it in an innovative way: online. The Journal of South Asian Linguistics is published by CSLI. Visit the website for information about how to submit work. The first issue is due out in January. Wow, thank you Rajesh and Miriam!
John McCarthy's new book is out: Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory. It's the first book in the new book series, Advances in Optimality Theory (Equinox Publishing). The series editors are Armin Mester (1986 UMass Amherst PhD; now Professor at UCSC) and Ellen Woolford.
Michael Becker is teaching and doing research in Israel this semester. He's been busy running experiments in Ram Frost's lab. He writes, "Ram has very generously let me join his team of grad students who run dozens of psycholinguistic experiments every semester. "
In June, he will be talking in Amsterdam about joint work with Peter Jurgec at the workshop on segments and tone. From Amsterdam, he will continue to CASTL to give an informal talk about allomorph selection in Hebrew. Back in Israel, he will give the same talk more formally at IATL, "but it will almost certainly be too warm for a tie".
This Tuesday (May 29), Michael returned to teaching his course at Ben-Gurion University, for the first time since March, after the 41-day student strike ended with no real achievements for the students, sadly.
Michael closed by saying, "Looking forward to being back on the right side of the Atlantic again".
Lisa Green and Lisa Selkirk have been awarded a joint Faculty Research Grant. Wonderful! Congratulations, Lisas!
[Thanks Ellen!]
Lisa Green and Tom Roeper presented a paper at the conference on Formal Approaches to Variation in York, May 10-12, on the topic of Negative Inversion in AAE and Stable Nodes. On hand with insighful comments were Bernadatte Plunkett (1993 UMass Amherst PhD) and Helen Goodluck (1978 UMass Amherst PhD), both now professors in the Department of Language and Linguistics Science at the University of York.
Kyle Johnson — Ulster and Tübingen, early June!
Determiners
On Linguistic Inferfaces
Ulster, Northern Ireland, June 1
LCA +Alignment = RNR
Workshop on Coordination, Subordination and Ellipsis
Tübingen University, June 6
Chris Potts is an invited speaker at the Fifth Barcelona Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Reference, Barcelona, June 5-8.
John McCarthy gave a talk at University College London on May 23: 'Getting to Optimality'.
Ellen Woolford gave a talk at University College London on May 23: 'Ergativity, Transitivity, and Case Locality'.
The 2007 LSA Summer Institute takes place at Stanford in July. Three UMass Amherst Linguistics graduate students received fellowships to attend the Institute: Chris Davis, Meg Grant, Karen Jesney, and Martin Walkow.
A number of UMass Amherst faculty are teaching courses as well:
David Beaver, Christopher Potts, and Robert van Rooij are organizing a July 11 LSA Institute Workshop called Conversational Games and Strategic Inference. Chris is also giving a talk in the workshop — extensions of joint work with Chris Davis and Peggy Speas.
Karen Jesney and Joe Pater are presenting at the LSA Institute Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology. Karen's talk is called 'The locus of variation in weighted constraint grammars', and Joe's talk is called 'Phonological Variation in Harmonic Grammar'.
The workshop Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory was held at the University of Michigan, May 18-20. It was organized by UMass Amherst alum Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst PhD; now Assistant Professor at University of Michigan) and had a large UMass Amherst contingent amongst the participants. Presenters included Joe Pater and alums Ellen Broselow (1976 PhD; Professor at Stonybrook University), Andries Coetzee, and Elliott Moreton (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC). Maria Gouskova (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at NYU) and Jen Smith (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC) were also in attendance. All involved judged the conference a huge success, and it looks like it will be held again elsewhere in the near future.
Joe Pater presented in PhG on Tuesday, May 29. He reported on his ongoing investigations into constraint weighting as a mode of optimization in theoretical phonology.
PhG meets next on June 7. Timothy Vance (University of Arizona) will give a talk entitled 'Benjamin Smith Lyman and His Law'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
From Michael Becker:
You will recall that we are planning to have a phonology/phonetics UMOP this summer. The theme is computational and theoretical work. More specifically, contributions of the following kinds of encouraged:
Not sure if your paper fits in? Ask me. Everybody in, at, or of South College is invited to contribute, including visitors and passers-by. If there is interest, the UMOP will be accompanied by a website that links to/hosts relevant stuff.
The deadline for submission is July 10, 2007. We really want to have this volume out the door before the end of the summer, so please work with us here.
If you are interested in contributing to this UMOP, please send me an email soon, and tell me in a few sentences what you think your paper will be about.
Go, UMOP!
m.
Rajesh has posted some photos from his recent adventures in South Asia and Northampton, the Arctic, Cambridge, and Storrs.
