WHISC Monthly Through the Summer
This is the final WHISC of the academic year. Keep the news items coming, though. We'll publish on the final Thursday of June, July, and August, resuming our weekly schedule at the start of September.
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06:17 (2008-05-15)
May 15, 2008
Annual Mini-Conference today
Today is the Mini-Conference, at which the second years present their research. Start time: 9:00 am. Location: the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower. Check out last week's entry for more details.
UUSLAW This Saturday
UUSLAW (the UMass Amherst-UConn-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) takes place this Saturday, May 17, at UConn, in (or very near) the Linguistics Department there. Below is a list of the presenters, along with their titles, though possibly not in the order of presentation. The start time is 10:00 am.
Update: We now have the full schedule here:
| 10:00-10:30 | Breakfast | |
| 10:30-11:00 | Jeff Bernath (UConn) | Separating theories of ASL Phonology: Looking in acquisition |
| 11:00-11:30 | Helen Koulidobrova (UConn) | DP or not DP: Testing the parameter through acquisition |
| 11:30-11:45 | Coffee | |
| 11:45-12:15 | Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst) | Acquisition of long-distance questions in French: Varying experimental contexts |
| 12:15-12:45 | Bill Philip (UMass Amherst) | Dutch children's sensitivity to weak cross-over effects |
| 12:45-1:45 | Lunch | |
| 1:45-2:15 | Masahiko Takahashi (UConn) | The acquisition of passives and optional subject movement in Japanese |
| 2:15-2:45 | Jean Crawford (UConn) | The acquisition of Sesotho passives: Evidence for maturation |
| 2:45-3:00 | Coffee | |
| 3:00-3:30 | Jill de Villiers, Harper Gernet-Girard, Jay Garfield (Smith) | Figuring out the properties of Tibetan evidentials for child speakers |
| 3:30-4:00 | Aynat Rubinstein (UMass Amherst) | Assessing semantic conservatism |
| 4:00-4:30 | Eva Bar-Shalom (UConn) and Elena Zaretsky (UMass Amherst) | Initial phases of attrition in Russian-English bilingual children and the role of L1 in L1 attrition |
[Thanks Tanja and Tom!]
Phillips Fund Grant to Amy Rose Deal
Amy Rose Deal has been awarded a grant from the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society to support her research on Nez Perce this summer. She'll be spending the month of June in Idaho and working to learn more about futures, modals, tense and verbal space inflection.
Congratulations, Amy Rose!
Grants to John McCarthy
John McCarthy has received grants from the Center for Teaching and the General Education Council to effect various improvements in Linguistics 101. Congratulations, John!
Acquisition Lab
The Acquisition Lab met on Monday, May 12. Tanja Heizmann, Amy Patno and Tom Roeper presented an informal, interactive talk titled 'Exhaustivity vs maximality: Preliminiary data brainstorming session'.
Intonation Lab
The Intonation Lab met on May 9. Lisa Selkirk delivered a talk titled 'The nature of contrastive focus Spell-Out in English and Japanese.'
UMass Amherst Linguists at NAPhC 5
John Kingston gave an invited talk, 'Is auditory processing autonomous from linguistic knowledge', at the Fifth North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC 5) in Montreal. Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD, now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan) gave another of the invited talks, 'Integrating grammatical and extra-grammatical factors in phonological variation'.
Chris Potts at Stanford
Chris Potts is giving a colloquium at Stanford on May 23. He is also speaking in the Pragmatics Reading Group on the same day.
Two-Person Car Pools Only
Shigeto Kawahara writes,
In GA, we often see this sign:
We always wonder, "what if you have 3 (or more) people in the car?"
Phonology in the News
From the New York Times, May 12, 2008:
Appearing on MSNBC this morning, John Edwards said he was "very likely" to endorse the candidate he voted for in the North Carolina primary on Tuesday. But, the anchors asked, which candidate was it?
In his demurral, Mr. Edwards may have slipped: "I just voted -- I just voted for him on Tuesday," he said. But given Mr. Edwards's Southern accent, that pesky pronoun may have been plural, albeit in a shortened form: "I just voted for 'em on Tuesday."
John McCarthy writes, "Here's the clip. What do you think?"
[Thanks John!]
Powerset Launches
Powerset has launched a new search engine over Wikipedia. Powerset is doing Natural Language Search — the search algorithms and the index depend on parsed data, built with tools that originated in the natural language research groups at PARC and make use of innovative theoretical ideas from LFG.
The search engine they just launched seems to take fairly seriously the form of one's queries and to attempt a certain amount of reference tracking across the documents it returns.