The department is sponsoring a screening of the documentary The Linguists this Friday (March 27), 3:30 pm, in the School of Management 133. All are welcome. Instructors, please advertise the showing in your classes!
[Thanks Seth and Peggy!]
From Kyle Johnson:
This year's syntax guru arrived on Monday, March 23 and will be in residence until April 9. She is Gillian Ramchand, from the linguistics faculty at Tromsø University.
Gillian received degrees in mathematics and philosophy from MIT in 1988, and her linguistics PhD from Stanford in 1993 with a dissertation on Aspect and Argument Structure in Scots Gaelic. She has written extensively on Scottish Gaelic, and on South Asian languages, often focusing on Aspect, Aktionsart, argument structure and complex predicates of various sorts. She also has interesting work on relative clauses, wh-movement and resumptive pronouns (drawing from Scottish Gaelic), resultatives (in Scots Gaelic, with a comparison to Italian), negation (in Bengali), particle constructions (drawing on Germanic- wide data, but with an intriguing bridge to Hindi/Urdu particles), Russian aspect/tense prefixes, predication, and verbal nouns (Scots Gaelic, again).
She has been engaged in a large-scale project disentangling the relationships between lexical semantics, aspect/aktionsart, argument structure and its syntactic representations that have resulted in two books: Aspect and Predication: The Semantics of Argument Structure, published by Oxford University Press in 1997, and First Phase Syntax, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Gillian's stay with us is short, so come entertain her with your linguistic puzzles and unsolvable problems soon! She will be occupying my office in the Node during her stay.
Welcome, Gillian!
[Thanks Kyle!]
Lisa Selkirk's retirement party is now schedule for May 22, at John McCarthy and Ellen Woolford's house. Mark your calendars! We'll have many more details later in the semester.
[Thanks Kyle!]
Amy Rose Deal's paper Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
UMass Amherst Linguistics BA Kyle Rawlins has accepted a tenure-track job in the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins, where he is currently a visiting professor. Kyle earned his BA from UMass Amherst in 2003 (along with an BS in computer science), then headed to UC Santa Cruz for his doctoral work, graduating in 2008. Congratulations, Kyle!
[Thanks WHASC!]
Lauren Terzenbach got her undergrad degree in linguistics and Russian in 2003. When we last had news of her, in a May, 2007 WHISC, she was an Army captain in Iraq. Lauren has now completed her service and is a first-year graduate at UT Austin, planning to specialize in phonology.
[Thanks John!]
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Presupposition, propositions and inversion' at a conference on multi-lingualism in honor of Jürgen Meisel in Hamburg. Jürgen Meisel was twice a visitor at UMass Amherst, in 1973 and 1989, working first on semantics and then acquisition.
This year's Penn Linguistics Colloquium begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday (March 27-29). Lisa Selkirk is the invited speaker this year. Noah Constant and Chloe Gu are also on the program.
The Festival of Languages will take place in Bremen, Germany, September 17 to October 7, 2009. It looks like there will be a lot of different events happening throughout the city during that period, all with the goal of celebrating language in diverse ways.
[Thanks Angelika!]
The Syntax and Semantics Groups held a joint meeting on Monday, March 23, at Rajesh's place in Northampton. The meeting featured two practice talks:
[Thanks Annahita!]
The Acquisition/Evidentials Group met on Monday, March 23. Magda Oiry presented her recent analysis of long distance movement in acquisition, 'A case of true optionality: Wh-in-situ patterns like Long Movement in French'.
[Thanks Tom!]
Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs
[Thanks Tom!]
The new Baggett Fellowships and Scholarships program at the University of Maryland is now accepting applications for summer and fall of this year. Baggett Fellowships are open to US citizens or permanent residents who have a BA or BS by the start of the appointment. Check out this page for more details.
[Thanks Angelika!]
