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04:07 (2006-03-09)

March 9, 2006

Colin Phillips Colloquium

Colin Phillips
University of Maryland

How is Grammar so Fast?

Friday, March 10, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26

Continue reading "Colin Phillips Colloquium" »

Semantics Reading Group

The SRG meets today, at Amy Rose's house, to hear practice talks from Ilaria Frana and Florian Schwarz, both of whom are off soon to SALT 16, in Tokyo. The event begins at 8:00 pm.

UMass Amherst Linguists at WCCFL 25

There will be an impressive UMass Amherst Linguistics presence at WCCFL 25, University of Washington, April 28-30, 2006. The program is now posted. It includes:

Jan Anderssen Generalized domain widening
Ilaria Frana Deriving concealed questions from the semantics of the predicate
Anne-Michelle Tessier Stages of OT phonological acquisition of error-selective learning
Dalina Kallulli (Winter 2006 visitor) Triggering factivity: Prosodic evidence for syntactic structure

And a number of our PhDs will be presenting:

Ana Arregui (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at U Ottawa) On the consequences of event quantification in counterfactual conditionals
Jill Beckman (1998 PhD; now Associate Professor, Iowa) Phonetic variation in German fricative voicing: Implications for phonological theory
Ania Lubowicz (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor, USC) Opaque Allomorphy in OT

Update (2006-03-12):

Ana Arregui wrote to note that we forgot to mention two UMass Amherst alums who are on the WCCFL program: Marcin Morzycki and Bernhard Schwarz. She also noted that recent undergrad graduate Kyle Rawlins (presently in the Linguistics PhD program at UCSC) is an alternate.

[Thanks Ana!]

UMass Amherst Linguists at CLS 42

Rajesh Bhatt and Amy Rose Deal had papers accepted to CLS 42, April 6-8, 2006. The program is available here.

Update

There are also a number of UMass PhDs on the program. In the main session, Eva Juarros-Daussà (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo), and Mike Terry (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC). In the Case and Voice session with Amy Rose, Peter Sells (1984 PhD; now Professor at Stanford).

[Thanks for the update, Barbara!]

Tom Roeper in Toronto

Tom Roeper is recently back from a trip to the University of Toronto, where he gave a talk at the Syntax Group ('Covert movement and nominalizations'), as well as a colloquium: 'Stable dialects and tree structure'.

Online Lectures by Famous Linguists

The Ecole Normale Supérieure has made available a number of downloadable recordings of lectures by eminent linguists, including our own Angelika Kratzer, as well as two of our PhDs: Gennaro Chierchia and Irene Heim.

Partee: News from New Zealand

Barbara wrote in with a few observations about the strangeness of life in the Southern Hemisphere. In addition to some comments about how everything is upside-down down there, but she has some noteworthy astronomical observations:

Orion down under, or "Knowing vs. realizing"

New Zealand keeps making me feel interestingly dumb -- I keep being surprised by things about which immediately after the surprise reaction I have to say "oh, of course". It's a constant lesson in the difference between "having the information that" and "realizing that".

Latest: I just saw the constellation Orion! But that's a northern constellation! Oh, of course: we only have it in the fall, and the rest of the time it must be somewhere else, mustn't it? Where else but in the southern hemisphere? ("Duh.", in some dialects.) So of course I "knew" it -- but not until after I had recovered from the initial shock and thought a second.

So it turns out that since we'll have two fall seasons this year, I'll have Orion most of the year. That's nice, I like Orion. (I remember when George Horn -- UMass PhD 1973 or so -- went to teach in Australia and sent back to the department a postcard with a diagram showing why the man in the moon is upside down from down here. That one was harder.)

Greetings to all,
Barbara

Correction

John Kingston writes:

Chris and Barbara,
A correction may be called for. Orion has been visible in the early evening all through both January and February. I always look for it when I get home in the evening after dark at this time of year and then do the walk around the sky to see other familiar friends. It's fully up, too, so much that Sirius is easily visible. Of course, both are in the southern sky.
John

And Barbara follows up:

Aha! Thanks! Indeed Orion is in the northern sky here. We're going to go out some clear night soon to look for the Southern Cross, now that we've figured out that it's pretty much straight opposite Orion.

Thanks again -- as I said in my note to WHISC, this is fun -- it's an interesting kind of dumb.