Anna Szabolcsi Colloquium
Anna Szabolcsi
New York University
Friday, February 27, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-23
Refreshments to follow in the department lounge.
Party after that at Kathryn and Chris's.
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Other Ling Newsletters
07:06 (2009-02-26)
February 26, 2009
Semantics Reading Group Today
Today's (Feb 26's) SRG will be devoted to the following paper by Anna Szabolcsi, which she recommends as background reading for her colloquium on tomorrow:
Overt Nominative Subjects in Infinitival Complements in Hungarian
The paper's got syntax, and semantics — if you're on or near the S-sides, stop by! 8:00 pm, Amy Rose's place in Northampton.
[Thanks Aynat!]
Collaboration Graph: Thesis Committees
We continue the series of collaboration graphs this week with an unusual one: a graph that links two faculty members iff they have been on a thesis committee together at some point between 1995 and the present.
CSAAL: 2009 Summer Dialect Research Project
The UMass Amherst Center for the Study of African American Language is gearing up for the next Summer Dialect Research Project, which will take place in June. Here's a snippet from the website:
The goal of the SDRP is to provide research experiences in linguistics for undergraduates with interest in language-related disciplines and to increase the number of students, particularly those from underrepresented minority groups, who conduct graduate research in these areas.
Here's a fuller description and enrollment information.
Five College Undergrads at McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates
Michelle Barron (Amherst College '10) and Mallory Schleif (Hampshire College '11) will present their paper 'The phonotactics of word-initial consonant clusters in Nepali' at McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates, March 6-8. Both Michelle and Mallory are often found in UMass linguistics classes; this semester Mallory is also assisting John Kingston and Wendell Kimper with experimental work. This paper began as a project in Kathryn Flack's field methods class at Hampshire last semester.
Suzanne Urbanczyk in A Future Past Voice
Alum Suzanne Urbanczyk (PhD 1996) is interviewed in a recently released documentary called A Future Past Voice:
"Ideas, thoughts, memories and realities of the Coast Salish community are presented in an attempt to better understand the issues of language, language loss, and the importance of traditional culture. Community leaders, educators and concerned activists share their personal experiences in this powerful and heat touching film."
Thanks to the producer, Brian Rice, we have two copies of the DVD in the department. Seth Cable and Joe Pater are hoping to be able to organize a formal showing sometime in the future, but if you would like to watch it in the meantime, e-mail either of them to borrow a copy.
[Thanks Joe!]
Angelika Kratzer at the DGfS
Angelika Kratzer is a plenary speaker at the 31st meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, held this year at the University of Osnabrück, March 4-6.
Barbara Partee in Russia and Alaska
Barbara Partee is teaching in Moscow this spring, as usual. She'll also be in Alaska (as is somewhat less usual). Here's a rundown on what she is up to these days:
- On Saturday, Feb 28, she will give an invited talk "Symmetry and Symmetrical Predicates" in the Moscow State University seminar "Applications of mathematical methods in linguistics" led by V.A. Uspensky and M.R. Pentus.
- This semester, she is teaching a course "Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics" at Moscow State University, meeting on Friday afternoons 4:20-7:30 (! - the students' choice!) from February 20 until June 5. (It's an elective course, and that was apparently the only 'good' block of two slots that the students had free.) This year Barbara grappled with Dreamweaver to make her course website - she hopes it's an improvement over previous ones.
We'll soon have details on the talk she will give at the University of Alaska in March; they're still choosing among possible topics and settling the day. Barbara writes, "It mustn't conflict with my daughter-in-law's dog races!" (Check out Sled Dog Studios.)
Evidentials/Acquistion Lab Meeting
The Aquisition/Evidentials Grant Group met on Monday, February 23. Aynat Rubinstein presented 'An experiment on the acquisition of low modal meanings'.
[Thanks Tom!]
UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora
Earlier this year, Noah Constant, Chris Davis, Chris Potts, and Florian Schwarz released the UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora:
The UMass Amherst Linguistics Sentiment Corpora consist of n-gram counts extracted from over 700,000 online product reviews in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese. The files are UTF-8 encoded text. They are formatted to be read in as R data frames, but they can easily be manipulated with other tools.
This data collection effort and research that makes use of it were supported by an NSF grant and by a UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Visioning Grant.