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04:11 (2006-04-13)

April 13, 2006

Paula Menendez-Benito to MIT

Paula Menendez-Benito has accepted a visiting assistant professor position in Linguistics at MIT. Congatulations, Paula! This looks like a wonderful gig!

Conti Fellowship to Peggy Speas

Peggy Speas has been awarded a Conti Fellowship for next year. The Conti Fellowships are awarded by the dean to outstanding faculty. Congratulations, Peggy, on this well-deserved honor!

5 College Philosophy Conference

Hosted by the 5 College Philosophy Society

Saturday, April 15, 10:00-2:30 pm

Hampshire College, Franklin Patterson Hall

The 5 College Philosophy Society puts out an annual journal of original student work. To accompany the journal, the society puts on a conference. During the conference each author presents his or her paper to peers and teachers.

Eva Goodwin, Ben Lockwood, Andrew Gehring, Jennifer McAdoo, and Byron Patrick Simmons will present this year. Topics include meta-ethics, philosophy of time, and a paradox.

Also, don't miss the keynote lecture: UMass Amherst Professor Hilary Kornblith, esteemed epistemologist, will give a talk entitled 'Philosophy, Intuitions and Conceptual Analysis' this Friday, 5:00 pm, Hampshire, Franklin Patterson Hall, East.

[Thanks Erica!]

Undergrad Linguistics Group

The Undergrad DARLings meet today (April 13) at 6:30 pm in SC 301. Abril Navarro will be presenting her work on any and none in child language acquisition. She will be examining the speech of two children who use any to mean none. Abril will also be discussing the theoretical implications and why she suspects that this confusion occurs.

[Thanks Paula!]

Constraint Weighting and Linear Programming

A truly inter-subdisciplinary group of UMass Amherst linguists met yesterday (April 12), and will meet again at 10:00 am on April 19, to use algorithms and techniques from linear programming to find a general method for determining whether a given pattern of violations marks has a consistent constraint weighting. A preliminary Perl/CGI implementation is described and linked to here. The group has been working slowly but steadily towards a linguistically customized version of the famous simplex algorithm for solving linear systems.

Chris Potts Guest Lecture in Computer Science

Chris Potts is guest lecturing in Andrew McCallum's Computational Linguistics class today, 2:30-3:45, in CS 140. He will be talking about his dabbling in computation for pragmatics.

Another Candy Crisis!

From the Candy Monsters:

Linguists!

We are again in the throes of a grave candy shortage! Furthermore, we are on the threshold of a post-holiday candy-buying bonanza this coming Monday!

Thus: Now is the time, friends, for all good linguists to succor their piggy banks!! Donate now for our post-Easter shopping spree! Bunnies & pastel eggs for all! M&Ms in unnatural colors! Merriment! But not without your gracious donation!

---Your Candy monsters!

The Kratzer Cantation

Cartoon by Rowan McMullin at the the Daily Cardinal, in the Language Barrier series.

[Cick the picture to see the full cartoon]

Is it possible to work the Kratzer Cantation in Arabic, do you know?