Joe Pater Colloquium
Joe Pater
UMass Amherst
Harmonic Grammar with Harmonic Serialism
Friday, November 9, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26
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- Joe Pater Colloquium
- Eric Potsdam in Syntax Reading Group
- William Snyder in the Learning Seminar
- OT-Help Launch
- Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
- Candy: Past the 40lb Mark
- Acquisition Lab Meeting
- The Partee-Borschev Grant Group: What's Not Happening
- Elena Benedicto in the Evidentials Grant Group
- New GLSA Titles: Flack and Menendez-Benito
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Other Ling Newsletters
05:30 (2007-11-08)
November 8, 2007
Eric Potsdam in Syntax Reading Group
Eric Potsdam
University of Florida (and current UMass Amherst visitor)
Backward control in Malagasy and selective copy pronunciation
Thursday, November 8, 8:00 pm, Amy Rose's place
William Snyder in the Learning Seminar
William Snyder will guest lecture today (November 8) in Rajesh Bhatt and Tom Roeper's seminar on learnability, which meets in Herter 106, 2:30-5:15 pm. William will talk about 'Linguistic Conservatism', an idea that he develops in his new book Child Language: The Parametric Approach (OUP). The central observation is that the errors that children make in spontaneous speech are overwhelmingly error of omission, not errors of commission.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
OT-Help Launch
Michael Becker, Joe Pater, and Chris Potts launched OT-Help on November 1. OT-Help is a suite of software that facilitates solving large, complex phonological systems using OT and Harmonic Grammar. It's an easy-to-use, fully-documented downloadable. A link to Michael's announcement on phonoloblog.
Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
The first meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle will be held in the Department of Linguistics' Donald and Margaret Freeman lounge, Saturday, November 10, starting at noon. There is a growing interest in computational methods in phonological theory, and the northeast has a particularly dense population of people working in this area. This meeting aims to bring these people together in an informal setting to share results, ideas, and maybe even software. All are welcome, but please contact Joe Pater if you are coming so he can buy enough bagels for lunch (which can be eaten during the first presentation!)
[Thanks Joe!]
Candy: Past the 40lb Mark
From the Candy Monsters:
Candy lovers,
Your pocket change has realized its potential. Target representative Jason (out of picture, right) volunteered that this is the largest post-Halloween candy purchase he has ever witnessed. With your help, we broke the 40 pound mark, and didn't even have to settle for tootsie rolls and candy corn (sorry Rajesh, the constituency has spoken).
Thank you donors!
Acquisition Lab Meeting
The Acquisition Lab met on Monday, Novemeber 5. Chloe Gu presented 'Acquisition of English double object and prepositional phrase dative'.
[Thanks Tom!]
The Partee-Borschev Grant Group: What's Not Happening
In an insightful piece of performance art, the Partee-Borschev Grant Group, which is focussed on negation, has offered the first-ever non-announcement in WHISC: the group will not meet on November 13 (at 12:45 in the Partee Room). You're invited to instead spend the time reflecting on the nature of this event that never happened.
Elena Benedicto in the Evidentials Grant Group
Elena Benedicto, illustrious UMass Amherst alum (1998 Linguistics PhD), who is currently on sabbatical from Purdue University, will speak to the Evidentials grant group on Tuesday, November 13, at 12:15 pm, about evidentials in indigenous languages of Nicaragua. The meeting will be held in the Partee Room, and all are welcome.
[Thanks Peggy!]
New GLSA Titles: Flack and Menendez-Benito
The GLSA has two new titles on offer:
Paula Menendez-Benito. 2007. The Grammar of Choice.
Kathryn Flack. 2007. The Sources of Phonological Markedness.
Barbara and Volodja's Trip to China
Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev are back from two exciting weeks in China --- 9 lectures (Barbara 6, Volodja 3) (Zhejiang Univ., Yanshan Univ., Beijing Language and Culture Univ., Capital Normal Univ.), two bird-watching weekends (Chongming Island and Beidaihe), and neat touristy things (including West Lake, Peking Opera, Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Great Wall).
Barbara received an Honorary Visiting Professorship at Beijing Lang. and Cult. University, one of several universities that have formal semantics -- our audiences were all lively, and all understood English quite ok (with handouts).
Barbara writes:
Two discoveries: (1) it’s possible to get a chopstick blister --- I already knew how to use chopsticks but had never used them three meals a day seven days a week before; (2) stone lions come in two sexes: as you face them, the male is on the right, with his right front paw on a globe (power), and the female is on the left, with her left front paw on a baby lion (fertility). One confirmation of what we’d already heard: the universities are many and growing, and students are becoming more and more interested in and up-to-date on --- and contributing to --- international theoretical linguistics.
Check out Barbara's extensive picture archive of the trip. Volodja is in the process of typing up his diary.
And continue reading this entry for a selection of shots.
Chris Potts and Jesse Harris to AAAI
Chris Potts and Jesse Harris are in Arlington, VA, for the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposia. They're presenting 'Questions: Interpretation and resolution' at the AAAI workshop Cognitive Approaches to NLP.
Computational Phonology UMOP
More computational phonology news from UMass this week:
The volume we've all be waiting for, Papers in Theoretical and Computational Phonology, AKA UMOP 36, is here and available for browsing in the Node. It should be available for purchase from Amazon as early as next week.
This UMOP features papers from Michael Becker and Joe Pater, Kathryn Flack, Gaja Jarosz, Karen Jesney and Anne-Michelle Tessier, Shigeto Kawahara and Kazuko Shinohara, and Matt Wolf. We also got a guest contribution from the CLML team, headed by Jason Riggle.
[Thanks Michael!]
Lots of CSLI Books Freely Downloadable
Via Brian Weatherson's blog, a link to a lot of links for freely downloadable CSLI books.