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07:20 (2009-09-23)
September 23, 2009
UMAFLAB schedule
Peggy Speas informs us that UMAFLAB (UMass Funny Languages Breakfast) will be meeting every other Wednesday morning, from 9-10 am, in the Partee room. Here's the schedule for the first few meetings:Sept 30: Misato Hiraga, Possessive classifiers and demonstratives in Carollinian.
Oct. 14: Suzi Lima, Summer theoretical and documentation field work in Brazil.
Oct. 28: Elizabeth Bogal-Albritten, positive and negative roots in Wakashan languages
All are welcome!
[Thanks, Peggy!]
Published translation of McCarthy's book
The Korean translation of John McCarthy's book "Doing Optimality Theory" has just been published by Hankook in Seoul. The translators are Seunghun Lee and Ponghyung Lee. A Japanese translation by Shin-ichi Tanaka will appear soon, as will a Korean translation by Hyang-Sook Sohn of "Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory"Congrats, John!
Wikipedia fame
The Wikipedia article about UMass Amherst describes South College as "the home of UMass' world renowned linguistics department" (Adamczyk 2009 p.c.). Will the perpetrator (sorry, Wikipedia editor) please 'fess up?Amalia Gnanadesikan on the Radio
Alumna Amalia Gnanadesikan (PhD 1997) appeared on the BBC Radio program "Questions, Questions" answering a listener's question about the direction of writing. You can hear her at around the 17 minute mark of http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729z7. Amalia is also listed as a source for a Slate magazine article about the movie "Brüno" and diacritics. Amalia's book "The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet" was published earlier this year. [Thanks, John!]
UMass talks at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona
Noah Constant reports several UMass presentations at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona last week.* Invited speakers Elisabeth Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer presented on "Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information".
* Noah Constant presented a poster "Variations on Contrastive Topic Marking -- Evidence from Mandarin Chinese".
* Mara Breen (UMass Psychology) was a coauthor on a poster "Factoring out Speaker Variation in Experimental Studies of Prosody: The Case of Association with Focus".
Seth Cable in Norway
Seth is in Tromso, Norway this week, presenting an invited talk at the CASTL conference on Arctic languages.Suzi Lima - summer grants
Suzi Lima received two very prestigious grants this summer.The first was from the Lewis and Clark Fund of The American Philosophical Society. This fellowship supported her fieldwork in Brazil, which focused on quantificational processes in Yudja.
The second was from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and FUNAI (Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Bureau).
UNESCO has hired her as a researcher on a 2 year contract to coordinate the documentation of the Kawaiwete language along with indigenous teachers of the Kawaiwete community. The goals of the project are documenting the language, providing materials for the Kawaiwete communities and teaching the language documentation methodology to the Kawaiwete teachers in these communities. She also started this work during the summer.
Congrats, Suzi!