Deanna Moore Talk for Job-Seeking Undergrads
A reminder from UG advisor Rajesh Bhatt:
On March 28, Deanna Moore (2005 UMass Amherst Linguistics MA) will talk about her work at National Evaluation Systems and how she uses linguistics in her job. The talk starts at 3:30 pm on South College 304.
Deanna, whose official job title is Content Developer, works with The National Evaluation Systems Group of Pearson. She develops teacher certification exams for foreign language teachers, including languages like Hmong. Deanna wrote to us saying: "I can't believe they pay me to do what I do. It's a job where I can incorporate all of my background in linguistics."
The talk will be followed by an informal discussion and will be accompanied by refreshments.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
MUMM 2 Workshop This Saturday
MUMM 2 takes place this Saturday, March 29, at MIT. (The location is encoded in the acronym: MIT-UMass Meeting in Phonology; when at UMass Amherst, it's UMMM.)
| 11-11:45 |
Hye-Sun Cho |
Effects of speech rate on segmental anchoring: A model of F0 timing as a function of slope and alignment targets |
| 11:45-12:30 |
Wendell Kimper |
Local optionality and harmonic serialism |
| 12:30-2:00 |
Lunch |
| 2:00-2:45 |
Patrick Jones |
Contour tone licensing in Kinande |
| 2:45-3:30 |
John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, and Michael Key |
Context and language effects on place perception by Japanese and English listeners |
| 3:30-4:15 |
Jonah Katz |
Compensatory shortening in English and phonetic representations |
| 4:15-4:30 |
Break |
| 4:30-5:15 |
Michael Becker |
Learning hidden structure in morphological bases |
| 5:15-6:00 |
Franz Cozier |
Encoding perceived contrast between CC-clusters and their simplified counterparts |
[Thanks John K!]
Prosody Matters
Three announcements from Lisa Selkirk:
- The intonation lunch will resume this Friday at 12:15 with an examination
of the prosody of Right Node Raising constructions using pitch tracks from an
earlier expt. study. Lunch will be provided, in the form of bagels and cheese,
as usual (the many leftover bagels from SALT will NOT be used...).
- The program for the upcoming prosody conference at Cornell, Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (April 11-13) is now posted.
- Our thanks to Mara Breen for reporting on some of her research this past Wednesday! Mara is a postdoc in UMass Amherst Psychology who did her recent dissertation work on intonation and information structure with Ted Gibson at MIT.
[Thanks Lisa!]
Semantics Reading Group Today
SRG meets today (March 27), 8:00 pm, Amy Rose's place. The goal is to finish the discussion of chapter 4 of Angelika Kratzer's The Event Argument and the Semantics of Verbs. The discussion will pick up on page 65.
[Thanks Aynat!]
Evidentials Grant Meeting
The Evidentials Grant group meets next on Monday, March 31, 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room. Leah Bateman will report on her talk on Tibetan at the GLOW Workshop on Evidentials.
[Thanks Tom!]
Larry Solan to Deliver the Freeman Lecture
Larry Solan will deliver the next Freeman Lecture, on Thursday, October 2, 2008, at 4:00 pm. The title is 'Law, language, and the modular mind'. Larry Solan is a 1978 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD. He is now Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.
Alum Update: Uri Strauss
Uri Strauss sent in this update:
I'll soon be wrapping up year two of my law school program in Cleveland, OH, and I don't want to keep WHISC readers in suspense about what I'm up to. I'll be spending the summer in Miami, FL, working for the Service Employees International Union. I'll probably drop by the department on my way there (being bad with directions). I miss South College.
I've recently started a blog called A linguist goes to law school, which may be of occasional interest to WHISC readers. Comments and feedback are welcome. To fulfill my law school's writing requirement, I am planning to address a controversial provision in a United Nations resolution (Security Council Resolution 242), which has been the subject of a wide-ranging dispute over whether it is to be interpreted as existential or universal. My plan is to (1) clarify the nature of the ambiguity using linguistic concepts, and (2) use diagnostics to argue that the universal reading exists. Details cheerfully provided upon request, and will probably be posted sooner or later on the aforementioned blog.
[Thanks Uri!]
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Conference on Epistemic Modals
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is holding a conference on epistemic modals, the second in their Chambers Philosophy Conference Series. The list of invited speakers includes Angelika Kratzer and Kai von Fintel (1994 UMass Amherst PhD; now Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT).
Update: We've been informed that this workshop is not until 2010! (This is right on the webpage; somehow, we missed it.) Apologies for getting your hopes up!
