PhG will meet on Wednesday, February 18, starting at 8:00 pm (location TBA). The group is already well-prepared for Elliott Moreton's upcoming colloq, so the plan is instead to read Hale and Reiss's 2000 squib 'Substance abuse and dysfunctionalism", which is related to Elliott's work, but offers a different perspective.
[Thanks Wendell!]
Semantics Reading Group has its first meeting of the semester today (Thursday, February 12), 8:00 pm , at Maria and Masashi's place. The plan is to discuss Karttunen 1974:
Lauri Karttunen. 1974. Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics 1: 181-194. Also in Pragmatics: A Reader, Steven Davis (ed.), pp. 406-415, Oxford University Press, 1991.
[Thanks Aynat!]
The Acquisition/Evidentials group met on Monday, February 9. Kate Hobbs and Jill de Villiers presented their work and led a discussion with Joe Pater on OT acquisition connections between syntax and phonology.
[Thanks Tom!]
Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner are giving a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series, February 18, 12:15 pm, in the ASH building lobby. The title is 'What can Ned Flanders tell us about linguistic knowledge? Diddly-infixation and the poverty of the stimulus'. Abstract below.
On February 11, John Kingston gave a talk in Psychology on recent work in the phonetics lab. Here's a link to the abstract for the talk.
Tom Roeper was recently in Israel. He filed the following report on the journey:
I gave one of the primary talks in a long-planned and broadly advertised conference in Israel at the Hebrew University on Bilingualism and SLI and gave a talk on "Multiple Grammars Perspective and How Bilingualism can benefit children with SLI". Former UMass visiting scholars Petra Schulz and Jürgen Meisel were there too.
As an alternative to the academic boycott of Israel, promoted in England, recently advanced in the US, and supported by the late Tanya Reinhart, I chose to participate in a protest against the recent war and occupation of Gaza at the Wall in an isolated Arab town, Beilin. A weekly protest has taken place over the last two years. Two students were hit with bullets and another killed in the last few weeks. Aviya Hacohen, a visitor here briefly last year, came as well. The protest group of a couple of hundred was organized and led by the villagers with perhaps 30 Israelis and foreigners participating. No one was hurt but a good deal of teargas was shot, with little provocation that anyone could see. It was a sobering experience, but I was very glad to have participated and registered my opposition.
