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05:25 (2007-10-04)
October 4, 2007
Undergrad Meeting with Geoff Nunberg
Following today's Freeman Lecture, Geoff Nunberg's What Words Can Teach, there will be a smaller informal gathering immediately after the talk for undergraduate linguistics students (majors, minors, interested others). It's chance to meet a famous linguist and radio personality, and there will be cider and donuts as well. This event will take place immediately after the talk in Bartlett 35. It will finish by 6:00 pm.
You're encouraged to arrive with questions for Geoff. The talk will undoubtedly stimulate ideas, but he's worked on a wide range of issues, so you might want to ask about things not covered in the talk. For example, he was an expert witness in the case to cancel the Washington Redskins trademark on their name, he has written about how analysis of the usage of the words "War" and "Terror" can shed light on current political discourse, and much more.
All are welcome!
[Thanks Joe!]
John McCarthy Appointed Distinguished Professor
Our own John J. McCarthy has been appointed Distinguished Professor. John has produced so many books and articles that the department office was cluttered with crates --- really, crates --- of them recently (they had just returned from a tour of the offices of the UMass administration). No one has done more than John to highlight the power of Optimality Theory as a tool for empirical investigation, and he also helped establish swearing as a respectable topic of scientific inquiry.
Laura Holland Photography Show
An exhibit at the Amherst Chamber of Commerce (in the Amherst Cinema Complex) with the opening from 5:00-8:00 pm today (October 4). It will be a part of the Amherst Artwalk, where about five galleries are open, so it is a good time to take in Amherst art.
The Genitive of Negation grant group will meet on Tuesday, October 9, at 1:15 pm (notice change of time!) in the Partee Room.
Aynat Rubinstein will be presenting on "Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs".
Abstract:
One recurring question in studies of reciprocalization (the process that creates reciprocal verbs) concerns the difference between verbal reciprocals and their well-studied pronominal counterparts (Faller, to appear, Siloni 2001, to appear). In this paper I offer a novel answer to this question. I propose that reciprocal verbs involve collective predication that is absent from other expressions of reciprocity. In particular, I explore Artstein’s (1997) hypothesis that the domain of events is similar to the domain of individuals in containing elements which are groups. I propose that reciprocal verbs are predicates of group events and derive their essential properties from this assumption.
Phonology Group
PhG will have its first meeting of the semester on Friday, October 5, at 3:30 pm. Distinguished Professor John McCarthy has a draft of a paper on metrically conditioned syncope that he would like feedback on.
Semantics Reading Group
SRG will meet this Thursday, October 4, 8:00 pm, at Jan and Aynat's place. The reading is Kennedy and McNally's 2002/2005 paper "Scale structure and the semantic typology of gradable predicates". Write to Aynat or Chris for a copy of the article
Come energized after the Freeman lecture to enjoy an evening on adjectives!
[Thanks Aynat!]
UMMM Success; on to MUMM
This past weekend's UMMM was a success --- so much so that the crew is already planning for a spring MUMM (the MIT-hosted version of UMMM).
[Thanks John K!]
Cambridge Workshop: Where Does Syntax Come From? Have We All Been Wrong?
Special one-day MIT Workshop:
Where Does Syntax Come From? Have We All Been Wrong?
Cambridge, MA, October 19, 2007
Friday, October 19th, 2007, 9 am - 5:30 pm (refreshments 9-9:30; lunch 12:30-1:30; afternoon refreshments)
MIT, Room 34-401 (Grier Room), Cambridge, MA
No advance registration required, no fee - open to all.
Open roundtable discussion at the end of the day.
The speakers:
- Noam Chomsky, MIT: Remarks and Reflections
- Sandiway Fong, University of Arizona: Statistical Natural Language Parsing: Reliable Models of Language?
- Lila Gleitman, University of Pennsylvania, Human Simulations of Language Learning
- Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland, Structure Dependence, the Rational Learner, and Putnam's 'Sane Person'
- Chris Manning, Stanford University, Title TBA
- Parta Niyogi, University of Chicago, The Computational Nature of Language Learning
- William Gregory Sakas & Janet Dean Fodor, CUNY, 'Ideal' Language Learning and The Psychological Resource Problem
- Josh Tennenbaum, Amy Perfors, MIT, & Terry Regier, University of Chicago, Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech