Danny Fox Colloquium
MIT
Free choice disjunction and innocent exclusion
Friday, April 21, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-21
Search
Current issue
- Danny Fox Colloquium
- Distinguished Teaching Award to Monica Sieh
- Psycholinguistics Talk
- Ora Matushansky, 2006 Syntax Guru
- Orin Percus Visit
- UUSLAW: Acquisition Workshop at UConn
- Reminder: Computation for Linguistics Grant
- Undergrad Linguistics Group
- Semantics Reading Group
- UMass Amherst Linguist: #2 in Linguist List Donations
Categories
- acquisition lab
- alums
- awards
- candy
- colloquia
- computation
- department news
- dissertation defenses
- events
- faculty news
- glsa
- grad-student news
- grants
- jobs
- miscellany
- phonology group
- photo albums
- prosody group
- publications/presentations
- semantics reading group
- syntax reading group
- undergrad news
- visiting scholars
- whisc
Other Ling Newsletters
04:12 (2006-04-20)
April 20, 2006
Distinguished Teaching Award to Monica Sieh
From Lisa Selkirk:
Monica Sieh is the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award. This is truly an honor, a very tough award to get, and a reflection of extraordinary excellence in teaching. Only two or three TAs and two or three faculty members from all of UMass Amherst receive this in any one year. This is the first such award to someone in our department.
Congratulations, Monica! Wow!
Psycholinguistics Talk
Ina Bornkessel and
Matthias Schlesewsky
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, and University of Marburg
Minimality, transitivity and the subject preference: A neurotypological perspective
Monday, April 24, 4:00-5:30 pm, Tobin 307
Ora Matushansky, 2006 Syntax Guru
From Kyle Johnson:
This year's syntax guru is Ora Matushansky. She arrived on April 18, and she will be in residence until Thursday, April 27. She is housed in Barbara Partee's office in South College.
Ora presently has a position as a researcher at CNRS/Universite Paris VIII. She taught previously at L'Ecole Normal Superieure. She finished her PhD at MIT in 2002 with a dissertation on a famous problem in the syntax of DPs -- degree phrase movement (illustrated by, for example: so tedious an email). She squeezed out of that phenomenon an interesting set of conclusions about how the syntax and semantics function together in putting adjectives, numerals and determiners together. She has done interesting work on the syntax of comparatives and superlatives --- constructions related to those studied in her dissertation, on "phases," and what defines them, on the syntax of head movement, on the morphology/syntax interface in Russian inflectional paradigms, on partitives and pseudo- partitives, on the scope of adjectives and on names, and name-like predicates. (This is an incomplete list.) You can learn more about her work, her present research projects, and see what she looks like by visiting her website.
She will give a talk on Wednesday, April 26, at 2:30 pm, on comparatives/superlatives. The title, an abstract, and the location will be posted next week.
[Thanks, Kyle, for bringing in these wonderful visitors!]
Orin Percus Visit
Orin Percus will be semanticist in residence here until tomorrow (April 21). This past Tuesday, Orin lectured in Angelika Kratzer's seminar on pronouns. The topic was his joint work with Uli Sauerland on dream reports (Pronoun movement in dream reports).
Angelika writes:
Orin will be sharing Barbara's office with Ora Matushansky. Orin taught here some years ago, and it was he who got Paula Menendez- Benito, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Meredith Landman, and Marcin Morzycki hooked on semantics. They were all in his LING 610 class. When he was teaching here, Orin went out of his way to help students with their generals papers, dissertations, and job talks --- with greatest success --- so don't miss the opportunity to talk to him about your work, whatever it may be!
Orin received his PhD from MIT in 1997 with a thesis that has the simple title Aspects of 'A'. It's not about the first letter of the alphabet, but about the indefinite article. He is probably best known for his 2000 landmark article 'Constraints on some other variables in syntax' (Natural Language Semantics 8(3)), which many have read in one of my recent classes.
UUSLAW: Acquisition Workshop at UConn
The UConn/UMass/Smith Language Acquisition Workshop (UUSLAW) will be held at UConn on April 29.
Anyone who would like to present a paper should let Tom Roeper know, so that he can put you in contact with the coordinators. Anyone who would like to attend should let Tom know as well, for carpool-arranging purposes.
[Thanks Tom!]
Reminder: Computation for Linguistics Grant
Proposals for Chris Potts's department-internal grant (Computation for linguistics) are due next Friday, April 28. The details are here.
Undergrad Linguistics Group
The Undergrad DARLings meet today (April 20) at 6:30 pm in the Partee Room. Janet Danylieko will lead a group discussion of Larry Horn's paper The border wars, as preparation for Danny Fox's colloq.
Semantics Reading Group
Semantics Reading Group meets today (April 20), at 8:00 pm, at Florian's house.
Jan Anderssen will give a practice talk for WCCFL 25: 'Generalized domain widening --- uberhaupt'.
And Shai Cohen will talk briefly about too and also as well as as well, as well (perhaps).
UMass Amherst Linguist: #2 in Linguist List Donations
At the end of the Lingust List Donation Drive, UMass Amherst occupied the number #2 position, a nearish second to Stanford, where silicon chips grow on trees and can be traded for cappuccio at the farmer's market. A huge thanks to everyone who donated, and a special thanks to John McCarthy, Ellen Woolford, and Barbara Partee for their incentives for grads and alums.
2006 New York Institute
The website for the 2006 New York--St Petersburg Institute for Cognitive and Cultural Studies is now up. Chris Potts, Barbara Partee, and Volodja Borschev each taught there twice. It is a wonderful way to see Russia and take diverse, interesting classes from passionate teachers.
Candy Crisis Continues
The Candy Monsters Report:
We regret to inform you that although the Easter candy is in, the money for it is not. Our fundraising efforts have fallen rather short of our goals and projections. At this point we have $10 in the piggy. We have $35 in cold, hard candy. If you ever want to see your candy jar again, leave stacks of unmarked bills in the piggy bank pronto! (Dark glasses, brown bags, and suitcases not required.)
Free the pastel Milky Ways!
Free the Cadbury's Caramel Eggs!
Free the absurdly colored Jelly Bellies, the Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs, the Milk Chocolate Ovals with Mysterious Crunch!All this, friends, for merely $25....
--Candy monsters reduced to crime