Dissertation Defense: Anne-Michelle Tessier
Biases and Stages in Phonological Acquisition
Friday, August 4, 3:00 pm, Dickinson 110
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Other Ling Newsletters
04:18 (2006-07-27)
July 27, 2006
Report from Heather from Pakistan
UMass Amherst Linguistics BA Heather Walts is now living and working in Pakistan. She's been sending reports to WHISC. Here is here latest; we're pround to be able to feature these items:
I've had a crazy three months of my passport being taken, leaving a job, overstaying my visa, waiting five weeks for an official type paper to be sent from one city to another to remedy the visa, spending time in the northern areas where the internet was so slow it was not worth using, and am finally back and settling in Lahore after collecting my things from the six various houses I had left them at! Whew, life in Pakistan. Now I'm running self-designed teacher training workshops including, "Strategies for Building Fluency," "Linguistics for Communicative Learning," "Introduction to English Phonology," and "Integrative Language and Culture in the Classroom." I'm also teaching "LIP," - the Language Improvement Program for in-service teachers. Our slogan is "not just lip service, we get results.".
Language learning here is almost entirely based on literature, as in any higher education in language. Punjab University has just started a Linguistics program, but a far as I know there are not many others in the country. The teachers are enjoying the workshops, and they LOVE drawing syntax trees and using IPA symbols. Hey, it's a start! These English teachers need to know why rote memorization is a thing of the past. Any graduates who don't know what to do next year? You're always welcome to come join me in Lahore. I'll make sure nobody takes your passport and you don't overstay your visa....besides now I know all the immigration officers and how things are supposed to work. Supposed to being the key words.
Here's a short article written in April with the intention of sending it to WHISC.
Team Kingston in Paris
Team Kingston at LabPhon in Paris this year, plus Jaye Padgett (1991 UMass Amherst PhD):
From left: Eve Brenner-Alsop, Dan Mash, Shigeto Kawahara, John Kingston, and Jaye Padgett
[Thanks Shigeto!]
Evidentials Grant Meeting
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Monday, July 3.
Phonology Group
On July 7, Kathryn Flack presented some of her ongoing research.
On July 13, Shigeto Kawahara and Matt Wolf gave a talk entitled simply 'zu-'.
Today (July 27), John McCarthy will give a talk called 'Slouching Towards Optimality: Cluster Simplification in OT-CC'
The Comp4Ling Project
The comp4ling project is flourishing with a bunch of new utilities for doing linguistics (and writing up your results). The latest additions:
- closure utilities for generating powersets, permutations, n-tuples, and partitions
- an OT tableau formatting tool for LaTeX
- a downloadable script for automatically numbering examples in plain-text documents (and keeping track of citations)
- flexible structured documentation tools
- a typefree lambda calculus implementation
- phonological constraint weighting as linear programming
Report from West Point
Chris Potts presented a paper at the Language for Intelligent Machines Workshop at West Point, July 19-21. He was recruited to provide the "linguist perspective". His talk was called 'A system of pragmatic pressures'. The workshop was organized by Chris Arney, manager of the cooperative systems program at the Army Research Office (ARO).
ARO supports pure research at universities through a variety of initiatives. We should all be aware of it as a source of funding for the full range of research projects undertaken here at UMass Amherst.
Chris learned a lot about robots and how to escape them when they rise up against us.
Shigeto Kawahara on Half Rhymes in Rap
Shigeto Kawahara's paper 'Half rhymes in Japanese rap lyrics and knowledge of similarity' has been accepted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
Workshop on Computational Semantics
The Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics will take place January 10-12, in Tilburg. The program committee includes two UMass Amherst PhDs: Robin Cooper and James Pstejovsky.
[Thanks Barbara!]