Note Well, Prospies!
This issue of WHISC has it all: new faculty, reading groups, parties, more workshops than you can shake a stick at, and robots. South College is an exciting place!
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- Note Well, Prospies!
- Valentine Hacquard: 2006-7 Partee Visiting Professor in Semantics
- Linguist List Grad School Challenge
- Department-Internal Call for Proposals: Computation for Linguistics
- Undergrad Linguistics Club
- Acquisition Lab Meeting
- Syntax Reading Group
- Phonology Reading Group
- HUMDRUM Speakers Sought
- Syntax-Phonology Interface Workshop II
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- computation
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- phonology group
- photo albums
- prosody group
- publications/presentations
- semantics reading group
- syntax reading group
- undergrad news
- visiting scholars
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Other Ling Newsletters
04:09 (2006-03-30)
March 30, 2006
Valentine Hacquard: 2006-7 Partee Visiting Professor in Semantics
We are delighted to report that Valentine Hacquard will be the 2006-7 Barbara Partee Visiting Professor in Semantics. Valentine is the second linguist to occupy this position. The first was Greg Carlson (Fall 2005).
Valentine is currently finishing up her dissertation at MIT. Next fall, she will teach a grad seminar. Her research is on topics in semantics/pragmatics as well as psycholinguistics.
Linguist List Grad School Challenge
The Linguist List is currently running its annual graduate school fundraising challenge, to see which department will donate the most money between March 17 and April 14.
John McCarthy and Ellen Woolford have made a generous donation, and they have teamed up to offer to match donations made by any current UMass Amherst graduate student. In addition, Barbara Partee will contriute $10 for every donation made by a current UMass Amherst grad student or alum. Donations must be made by April 14, 2006, to be eligible for both offers
Department-Internal Call for Proposals: Computation for Linguistics
Chris Potts has announced a small department-internal grant to support linguistic research that makes use of computational tools and techniques. Chris writes:
The grant is open to computer neophytes and gurus alike, so read on even if you are currently inexperienced with computers but would like to learn.
The grant will take the form of a summer RA-ship: 40 hours in all, at the usual department rate, with the fringe benefits paid for as well.
The idea is to support attempts to use computational techniques to do better linguistics. Like most funding agencies, I do not really know what I am after. It's up to you to tell me what I am after. However, some general ideas are listed below.
I'm requesting one-page proposals. You can go over or under one-page if you like. The proposals can concern any area of linguistics. The deadline for proposals is noon on April 28. Please submit them to me via email, in PDF format.
This opportunity is open to all current UMass Amherst Linguistics graduate students --- young and old, P-sides and S-sides.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you have questions about how to go about writing the proposal.
Example topics:
- Learn enough Python to write a morphological parser for your favorite agglutinative language.
- Learn enough Prolog to write an interesting semantic fragment.
- Figure out some ways to incorporate computation into 201.
- Figure out a way to make Praat more flexible and efficient for some specific task.
- Create a small library of algorithms that are linguistically useful, and write a CGI interface for them so that others can make use of them.
- Talking Roomba!
Undergrad Linguistics Club
The Undergrad DARLings meet today (March 30), at 6:30 pm, in SC 301. Rob Chase will present a parsing algorithm and explain Chomsky Normal Form. This particular parsing algorithm --- the CYK algorithm (named for its creators) --- is the dream of many students in 201. Given a sentence and set of transformation rules in Chomsky Normal Form, the CYK algorithm can produce the set of all possible parse trees for the sentence, given enough memory and time. There will be powerpoint slides and a "do it by hand" exercise.
[Thanks Paula!]
Acquisition Lab Meeting
The Acquisition Lab meets this Monday, April 3, at 12:30 pm, in South College 301. The line-up of speakers is not yet determined, but the topics wil probably range from evidentiality to telicity.
All are welcome. Stay tuned for updates.
[Thanks Tom!]
Syntax Reading Group
The Syntax Reading Group meets today (March 30) at 4:30 pm. Rajesh Bhatt and Amy Rose Deal will give practice talks for CLS 42. Abstracts and links to the conference program are below the fold.
After the meeting, there will be a dinner at Rajesh's house, starting at 7:30 pm. All are invited.
Phonology Reading Group
The PhG (pronounced fig!) is taking the week off. The next meeting is next week (April 5). Ed Bruckert will visit from Fonix, where he works on speech synthesis.
HUMDRUM Speakers Sought
As we noted earlier, HUMDRUM is scheduled to take place at Johns Hopkins, April 29-30. Contact Kathryn Flack if you would like to present.
HUMDRUM is an awesome acronym. But this workshop used to be called RUM J. ClaM, which is, I think we can all agree, significantly awesomer.
Syntax-Phonology Interface Workshop II
On Saturday, May 20, UMass Amherst Linguistics we will host another Syntax-Phonology Interface Workshop. This time the invited speakers are Shin Ishihara (Potsdam), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Syracuse), and Marjorie Pak (Penn). More details to follow.
[Thanks Lisa!]
Workshop on Phonological Acquisition
On April 8, a workshop on phonological acquisition will take place at the UMass Amherst Department of Linguistics. The presenters are students at UMass and Brown, along with Claartje Levelt, who is visiting Brown this year. All are welcome to attend. The schedule is below; talks will last 25 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions.
The workshop will take place in the lounge of the new wing of the department, on the 3rd floor of South College.
| 1:00-1:35 | Claartje Levelt, Leiden | The development of schwa in Dutch child language |
| 1:35-2:10 | Elizabeth McCullogh, Brown | The acquisition of word-final clusters in French |
| 2:10-2:20 | short break | |
| 2:20-2:55 | Della Chambless, UMass Amherst | Prosodic effects in medial cluster reduction |
| 2:55-3:30 | Jae Yung Song, Brown | Early representation of English prosodic structure: Evidence from compensatory vowel lengthening for omitted word-final codas |
| 3:30-4:05 | Karen Jesney, UMass Amherst | Child chain shifts as faithfulness to input prominence |
| 4:05-4:25 | longer break | |
| 4:25-5:00 | Katherine White, Brown | Statistical learning of phonological alternations |
| 5:00-5:35 | Sharon Goldwater, Brown | Bayesian modeling for word and morpheme segmentation |
[Thanks Joe!]
Tom Ernst: Visiting Professor at Dartmouth
Tom Ernst has accepted a one-year position at Dartmouth College. He will teach four courses, in sociolinguistics, syntax, and lexicology. However, he will continue to live in Northampton after the winter break, so he'll remain a presence here in South College.
UMass Amherst Linguists at the ASA Meeting
There are five (5!) UMass Amherst phoneticians presenting at upcoming meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. The talks are listed below; Shigeto Kawahara wrote to say that "Basically, everybody is an author of every project, but since there is a rule that a person can be first author of one abstract and a co-author of at most one more, we divided things up this way".
This high volume of high quality work is no doubt a direct result of John Kingston's big NIH grant, now in its second year.
Daniel Mash is a recent BA from our linguistics program, and Eve Brenner-Alsop is a current major --- and they're already off to a national meeting!
- Eve Brenner-Alsop: Parsing time and rate normalization vs durational contrast.
- John Kingston, Della Chambless, and Daniel Mash: Sequential contrast and assimilation in the perception of neighboring vowels and consonants.
- Della Chambless and John Kingston: Sequential contrast or compensation for coarticulation.
- Daniel Mash and Shigeto Kawahara: Sequential contrast vs compensation for coarticulation in Japanese vs English.
- Shigeto Kawahara: Contextual effects on the perception of duration.
Report from SALT 16
We have some pictures from SALT 16 in Japan, which featured many UMass Amherst linguists.
Florian put together some photo albums.
Report from Tromsø
Shigeto Kawahara spent a few weeks at the University of Tromsø, doing experiments on Norwegian, getting data from other languages such as Swedish and Saami, and presenting his current work to the phonology community there. He wrote: "It is amazingly beautiful here, especially the northern lights. They are really something to see. If people are having a chance to visit here (GLOW next year is going to be held here!), I strongly encourage them to take advantage of it!"
Report from New Zealand
Barbara Partee is currently in New Zealand, at the University of Canterbury on an Erskine Fellowship. (She'll be back in South College in the fall.) She recently wrote:
A picture of no squirrels
It took me a minute to realize how strange it looked to see acorns lying all around. And even to hear them plopping down in great numbers with every breeze -- I don't think our squirrels even let many of them get to the ground. The immigrants brought lots of oaks, but no squirrels. Just one more complication to the mixed native/exotic ecology here. (Flightless birds evolved here because there were no predators. The Maoris brought rats and the Europeans brought possums and ferrets (to try to keep down the rabbits they had brought ...) and now the flightless birds are mostly extinct except on some islands and some isolated protected places.
[Thanks Barbara!]
Acquisition Lab Clean-Up
Helen Stickney reminds us:
Mark your calendars. The official date for cleaning and organizing the Language Acquisition Lab is Saturday, April 1, 12:00-2:00pm. Please feel free to drop in and help at any point during that two hour period.
[Thanks Helen!]
Sinking about V1/\Gr@
[Thanks Jan!]