Pater, Potts, and Bhatt Colloquium
UMass Amherst Linguistics Department Colloquium
Joe Pater, Christopher Potts, and Rajesh Bhatt
UMass Amherst
Harmonic grammar with linear programming
Friday, September 22, 3:30 pm Machmer W-26
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Other Ling Newsletters
04:22 (2006-09-21)
September 21, 2006
Anthropology Department Colloquium on Navajo
Anthony Webster
Southern Illinois University
When we walk north: Poetics, ironies, and discomforts in Navajo poetry and talk about 'the Return'
Monday, September 25, 3:30-5:00 pm, Machmer W-15
The talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics!
[Thanks Peggy!]
Tasting on the 23rd
From Rajesh:
Were you aware? UMass Amherst owns an apple research facility in verdant Belchertown, showcasing, among other wonders, America's first pomological achievement: the Roxbury Russet. To celebrate this discovery and our many other aestival adventures and to mark the advent of autumn, let us convene this Saturday the 23rd day of September and properly enjoy the fruits (liquid and otherwise) of the season.
Wines await you from Italy, from Michigan, from Greece, from California, from Thailand, from Germany, and from Slovenia. There is also an unexpected guest all the way from Glacier National Park in Montana (no pet bears please!).
Come prepared for a delicious selection of apples du jour: the Akane! the Baldwin! the Cortland! the Shamrock! and let's not forget the Winter Banana! The friendship of Bacchus and the apple tree will be testified to by fine local hard ciders and apple brandies (Calvados if we are lucky).
If you haven't contacted us already concerning your summer inventory, you can resort to the usual $8 (students)/$15 (faculty) pricing scheme. An RSVP would be most excellent.
Location: Rajesh's place
Time: 8pm (please dine in advance)
Undergrad Linguistics Club
The Undergrad DARLings have established a permanent weekly meeting time: Tuesdays at 6:30 pm in The Partee Room (South College 301).
Last Tuesday, David Fiske got the ball rolling by presenting Quang Phuc Dong's classic paper 'English without overt grammatical subject.' Much interesting discussion followed.
Next tuesday (September 26), Linguistics/Anthropology major Caroline Kelly will present on bilingualism in America and the lack of translators in the medical community. She will talk about code switching as well as the special challenging of translating semantic and pragmatic subtleties.
DARLings is open to anyone and everyone interested --- no matter whether you have just enrolled in Ling101 or are applying to graduate schools this semester. So, come one, come all!
[Thanks David!]
Updated Faculty Collaboration Graph
Year ago, WHISC published a collaboration graph for the tenured and tenure-track Linguistics Department Faculty. We've updated that graph. Two professors are linked iff they have collaborated on a paper or grant proposal. By these criteria, the graph is connected:
Updates and corrects are extremely welcome. Send them to Chris.
Updated Faculty--Student Collaboration Graph
WHISC also published a faculty--student collaboration graph in late 2003. That too has been updated. You can view the graph here.
Updates and corrections are extremely welcome. Send them to Chris.
Evidentials Grant Group Meeting
The Evidentials Grant Group met on Tuesday, September 19. Chris Davis presented 'Post-propositional meaning in Japanese', which is based on his summer research on Japanese.
[Thanks Youri!]
Semantics Reading Group
SRG meets today (September 21) at Jan and Aynat's place in Northampton, starting at 8:00 pm.
[Thanks Florian!]
Education Abroad Fair
On Monday, September 25, from 4-6 pm in the Campus Center Auditorium, the International Programs Office will host an Education Abroad Fair.
Campus representatives ---- and education abroad reps from dozens of agencies and institutions outside of UMass Amherst --- will be on hand to provide information and guidance on education abroad programs around the globe.
[Thanks Angelika!]
Partee and Borschev Report from Indiana
Volodja and I were invited speakers at the inaugural meeting of the new Slavic Linguistics Society held in Bloomington Sept 8-10; our talk was The genitive of negation in Russian: multiple perspectives on a multi-faceted problem . Also on the program was a paper on language acquisition in Russian-English bilingual children by Eva Bar-Shalom of UConn and Elena Zaretsky of UMass (Com Dis) --- Elena and Barbara met for the first time at this conference! At the business meeting the organization 'established itself', and invitations were made and accepted for a 2007 meeting at ZAS in Berlin and a 2008 meeting at The Ohio State University (see recent Language Log posts for discussion of that The. Our colleague informed us that they get in trouble when they don't include it --- I forget what sanctions! So since he carefully included it I had better repeat it so as not to get him in trouble.)*
This new organization and its conference series brings formal and functional/cognitive linguists together and is thus self-consciously more inclusive than FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics); they also try to accept most abstracts, have multiple sessions, and probably won't do published paper proceedings. The first meeting was a big success, and I was blissfully unaware most of the time of who was a formalist and who was a functionalist or cognitivist – discussion was all very inclusive and constructive. (Some papers were clearly formal, but I didn't detect more than one that was "anti" anything.)
*Editor's note: We get in trouble when we say merely "UMass". "UMass Amherst" is our brand!
[Thanks Barbara!]
John Kingston Reports from Toronto
John Kingston presented a plenary paper plenary the Third Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology conference in Toronto on September 8. The talk was called, with admirable simplicity, 'Lenition'. John reports that it went well and adds, "I was able to resuscitate my passive knowledge of Spanish. Speaking remains roto y despacio."
Linguistics in the News, Oddly
Foreign Language Syndrome? [Thanks Jan and Ilaria!]