Chris Potts heads to his first LSA Executive Committee meeting this weekend. The meeting runs all day Saturday and most of the day on Sunday (May 9-10). Please drop him a note if there are any questions, concerns, or complaints that you'd like to have him try to raise with the rest of the EC.
On May 4, the Supreme Court reached a decision in the case of the adverbial modifier. Here's a Language Log post by Jason Merchant that provides background on the case. And here's Jason's follow-up; "all nine justices agree with the linguists!"
Linguists Tom Ernst, Georgia Green, Jeffrey Kaplan, and Sally McConnell-Ginet filed an amici curiae brief, on the side of truth, of course.
From Seth:
Hi Everyone,
We're happy to announce the latest addition to our fine line of Cable brand products.
The 2009 Thomas Russel (spelled correctly; long story).
Specs:
- Production Date: April 25, 2009 (8:02AM)
- Weight: 7lbs 11oz
- Length: 20.5 inches
- Brain Pan: 33cm in circumference
Published Reviews:
- "Oh... he came out?" – Hazel Quarterly
- "His feet are gross!" – American Hazel
- "I think he wants ice cream!" – Field and Hazel
- "Can we go home?" – Harper's
Arriving soon at your local book shops and tackle stores!
Congratulations, Cables!
A letter to the editor by Tom Roeper appeared in the April 23, 2009, issue of the New York Times. Here's the text of the letter, which concerns the editorial In the spirit of openness:
To the Editor:
When I was 12 in the 1950s, my mother made me promise -- if I were drafted into the Army -- not to do something stupid or wrong even if an officer told me to. She is a Holocaust refugee. That was the meaning of the Nuremberg laws, I was told.
If I could understand that at 12, shouldn't C.I.A. agents bear the same responsibility to judge the orders from their superiors?
I was astonished to hear that the Nuremberg rationale was invoked -- "I was only following orders" -- as an acceptable excuse in the current debate.
Where is that better America that President Obama calls upon us to heed?
Can we really live with ourselves if we fail to prosecute all involved under the real Nuremberg laws?
Tom Roeper
Amherst, Mass., April 22, 2009
At the time of this writing, a recent extended comment by John Kingston in the New York Times has received 1,056 reader recommendations. The letter is a critical response to the Times editorial End the University as We Know It.
Linguist List is running its annual fund drive right now. It is likely to be a tough year, what with the world economy in a tailspin, so please donate if you have the means.
Barbara Partee sponsored a special challenge:
If 15 people who never gave to LINGUIST List before give at least $25 within 8 hours (8am - 4pm Eastern Time), she'll give an extra $100.
Unfortunately, WHISC is arriving in your inbox after the close of this special challenge, but you should still stop by the site and make a donation!
[Thanks Barbara!]
Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs
[Thanks Tom!]
Alum Suzanne Urbanczyk (PhD 1996) is interviewed in a recently released documentary called A Future Past Voice:
"Ideas, thoughts, memories and realities of the Coast Salish community are presented in an attempt to better understand the issues of language, language loss, and the importance of traditional culture. Community leaders, educators and concerned activists share their personal experiences in this powerful and heat touching film."
Thanks to the producer, Brian Rice, we have two copies of the DVD in the department. Seth Cable and Joe Pater are hoping to be able to organize a formal showing sometime in the future, but if you would like to watch it in the meantime, e-mail either of them to borrow a copy.
[Thanks Joe!]
The Linguists, the documentary about the fieldwork of K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, premiers on PBS on Thursday, February 26. Click through the image below for a trailer.
[Thanks Peggy!]
Peggy writes, "Change has come to linguists' public status", coins the somewhat unfortunate obamaguistics (Google: "Did you mean: obamagistics"; obamagistics has no matches), and provides three links to famous linguists in mainstream press:
[Thanks Peggy!]
A new year's treat from Tom and Laura!
My first experience with Microsoft Speech
David Foster Wallace's Time in the Pioneer Valley
Organizing your PDF Library [Thanks Barbara!]
Word for Linguists: Macros and Tips from Susanna Cumming [Thanks Barbara!]
Anisa Schardl put together the team Linguists and Friends to run and walk in the Mayor Higgins' Hot Chocolate Run to benefit Safe Passage, which took place on Saturday, December 6, in downtown Northampton. The team raised over $250 of the $55,000 that the event's 3,000 participants raised for Safe Passage.
This year's team was Anisa, Diana Apoussidou, Maria Biezma, Seth, Summer, and Hazel Cable, Noah Constant, Emily Elfner, Kathryn Flack, Meg Grant, Chloe Gu, Barak Krakauer, Jia Li, Emerson Loustau, Magda Oiry, Barbara Pearson, Chris Potts, Kathryn Pruitt, Martin Walkow, Alicia Wolf, and Tiantian Zhang.
Perhaps next year's Linguists and Friends team can be even bigger!
[Thanks Anisa!]
Perceptual insight in the auditory domain: An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (Matt Davis) [via kottke.org]
A Google utility that helps prevent you from sending messages you really ought not to be sending.
[Thanks Ji-yung!]
Bayliss Fiddiman, one of the department's new work study students, is heading up two teams that are walking to raise money for breast cancer research. The walk is on October 26. Both teams are UMass Amherst organizations:
Thanks for doing this, Bayliss!
The Commons Group invites you to the Amherst Bike Fair, Saturday, September 20, Amherst Town Commons, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. Find out about the Commons Group's ongoing efforts to educate the public about bike safety, learn about their speed-limit petition, and check out area bike maps. In addition, there will be unicycle and hybrid bike demonstrations.
[Thanks Tom!]
Elizabeth Hinkelman writes:
I just ran across a lovely piece of scriptwriting from the British sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, in which I can't believe it's not butter is used compositionally in variations embedding the product name. The lines are delivered convincingly by the actress Emma Chambers at the beginning of the episode 'Animals':
[Thanks Elizabeth!]
John McCarthy is quoted about the Boston dialect in the May 25 Sunday Boston Globe: Wicked good Bostonisms come and go.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
Shigeto Kawahara writes,
In GA, we often see this sign:
We always wonder, "what if you have 3 (or more) people in the car?"
From the New York Times, May 12, 2008:
Appearing on MSNBC this morning, John Edwards said he was "very likely" to endorse the candidate he voted for in the North Carolina primary on Tuesday. But, the anchors asked, which candidate was it?
In his demurral, Mr. Edwards may have slipped: "I just voted -- I just voted for him on Tuesday," he said. But given Mr. Edwards's Southern accent, that pesky pronoun may have been plural, albeit in a shortened form: "I just voted for 'em on Tuesday."
John McCarthy writes, "Here's the clip. What do you think?"
[Thanks John!]
Powerset has launched a new search engine over Wikipedia. Powerset is doing Natural Language Search — the search algorithms and the index depend on parsed data, built with tools that originated in the natural language research groups at PARC and make use of innovative theoretical ideas from LFG.
The search engine they just launched seems to take fairly seriously the form of one's queries and to attempt a certain amount of reference tracking across the documents it returns.
Chris Potts is quoted in the Times of Trenton article Dow is down! Watch your verbs! (April 26, 2008). According to the article, he is "The Spiderman of Linguistics".
Jonah Katz (2003 UMass Amherst BA; now in the Linguistics graduate program at MIT) had a letter published in the Boston Globe on the advantages of choosing UMass Amherst. Thanks for this, Jonah!
[Thanks Lisa S!]
From a sign Tom Roeper saw:
"The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it succeeds."
[Thanks Tom!]
Laura Holland recently had a letter published in the New York Times.
[Thanks Barbara!]
From Seth Cable:
I wanted to briefly draw your attention to the fact that a truly historic result has just been publicly announced on Linguist List. It has now been more-or-less officially accepted that the Na-Dene languages (e.g., Tlingit, Eyak, Athabaskan) are genetically related to the Yeniseic languages of Siberia (e.g., Ket).
The result has been endorsed by a "who's who" of specialists (Krauss, Leer, Kari, Nichols, Comrie, etc.), following a special "crisis" workshop at UAF a couple weeks ago. They made an 'official announcement' on Linguist List.
This result is not only of importance to linguists working on these languages. Most exciting of all is the fact that this is the very first fully accepted American-Asian super-family, and was established using the fully rigorous methods of internal reconstruction (rather than the looser methods of 'mass-comparison').
Very Exciting Stuff!
[Thanks Seth!]
[Thanks Kathryn!]
[Thanks John!]
For more on this important computational linguistics project.
Tom Roeper features in this New York Times piece on child language:
Baby-Talk Show (New York Times, Feb 24, 2008)
[Thanks Angelika!]
Helen Stickney submitted this little piece of probably-(non)accidental typographic convergence from the world of Neopets. Anne-Michelle Tessier writes, "Team Spelling Nerds 1, Team Pronounceable Name 0."
[Thanks Helen!]
Update from John Kingston: I can't believe that "ghoti" is an accident. It seems statistically improbable that this collection of letters would be obtained randomly as the name for a fish.
The cover story of the current issue of National Geographic is about animal cognition. Animals are learning our language, and we're learning theirs. (Oops. Wrong link. Here it is.)
From Jan Anderssen:
Do you sometimes print an article 2up (i.e. two pages per sheet) and end up regretting it because you have all that white space around a text block that is barely legible? PDF-2up can probably help.
Nice coverage of this story by Kai von Fintel at the Semantics & Pragmatics Editors' weblog.
[Thanks Kai and Barbara!]
Seth Cable passed along the sad news that Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last speaker of the Eyak language of Alaska, died on January 24. The Anchorage Daily News story is worth reading for its information about Smith Jones, Eyak, and the current state of Alaskan native languages.
MIT Linguistics now has an online newsletter, WHAMIT! (What's Happening at MIT!). Check it out in your browser, subscribe to the RSS feed, or get it by email. Kai von Fintel, Adam Albright, and Jonah Katz (2003 UMass Amherst BA) are at the helm.
[Thanks Kai!]
A podcast about the launch of Semantics & Pragmatics, featuring co-editor Kai on Fintel.
And check out the Semantics & Pragmatics website. Business looks good!
The Real Meanings of Letters of Recommendation (via semantics etc.)
"... Randal Doane is apparently one of our strongest students in social psychology ..."
The Linguists: A very foreign language film, a documentary that documents some of K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson's work documenting endangered languages, will have its world premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. According to the press release, it is "the first documentary supported by the National Science Foundation to ever make it to Sundance." A link to the trailer. If you'll be in Utah at the end of January, then you might try for some tickets.
Semantics & Pragmatics, the open-access journal that David Beaver and Kai von Fintel founded (in conjunction with the LSA's eLanguage initiative) is now ready for submissions. They even have a pilot issue up.
[Thanks David and Kai!]
"Many of the keyboards, though, have buttons for the kids' friends, family, and pets...."
Coincidences in Linguistics (beware the statistical accidents)
Update: Seth Cable writes, "Nice to see Tlingit represented, though the entry is a bit off: daughter is actually /si:/, which when combined with the diminutive /-k'/ gives you /si:k'/. So, the word they have in mind is /si:k'/, not /sik/, and it means little/beloved daughter, not just daughter...)"
From the article:
These skills can include the ability to be very analytical, provide clear and innovative thinking, and question assumptions
(via Brian Leiter)
Christine Bartels sent in this link to Nature's guide for mentors, with the observation that it might be "Worth contemplating by anyone about to start in a faculty position and wondering what it takes besides intellectual prowess."
[Thanks Christine and Angelika!]
Via Brian Weatherson's blog, a link to a lot of links for freely downloadable CSLI books.
Which is scarier to you: the deer or the Q Train? (Which is more annoying: the crickets or the garbage trucks?)
From Home, Sweet ... Yikes! (New York Times, October 26, 2007):
"New York thinking applied to nature equals paranoia," said Augusten Burroughs, the author of the memoir "Running with Scissors," from his country house on the outskirts of Amherst, Mass., which he and his partner, Dennis Pilsits, built three years ago. Since then, Mr. Burroughs, 42, has poured several book advances into what he calls his "prison in the trees" in an effort to defend his rustic outpost "from nature in all its malicious glory." This includes installing an $8,000 lightning protection system and spending $2,000 on various military-grade "tactical illumination devices" --- flashlights --- and even a pair of night-vision goggles, thanks to some terrifying encounters with nocturnal neighbors.
Late one recent night, Mr. Burroughs had gone out to check the mailbox when he saw two green, glittering eyes, triangular ears "and the general impression of height" in the shadows. When the creature began to walk toward him, Mr. Burroughs ran into the garage, fearing for his life. "Our skinny, gym-polished urban bodies are no match for anything that scratches its back on a tree," he said. "Whatever it was, it was both curious and unafraid --- two traits one does not admire in wildlife when one is alone in the dark."
And it’s not just what lurks outside that sends imaginations running wild. Even the houses themselves can send chills up one’s spine. "You climb into bed, and suddenly you hear groans, creaks and low, deep thumping sounds, as though there are rabbits trapped inside the walls, or fingers gently teasing the exterior window frames," Mr. Burroughs said. "Not a night goes by that I am not absolutely convinced somebody has entered the house and they do not have a conscience."
[Thanks Christine Bartels and Angelika!]
YouTube clip: The Office denizens on case-marking in English
Compelling, often amusing three-minute Deaf (Def) Poetry Jam
Law professors dress scruffily, and we need to do something about that...
[Thanks John!]
K. David Harrison and Gregory D.S. Anderson have been in the news a lot over the last few weeks, for things related to their Enduring Voices project for National Geographic. Here are some links:
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology is a new open-access journal in computational linguistics. The journal is now accepting submissions. Its editors are Annie Zaenen, Bonnie Weber, and Martha Palmer, with an all-star editorial board as well.
[Thanks Barbara!]
This recent Crooked Timber post links to lots of other good weblog posts about surviving grad school.
Mark Corner (Computer Science) is currently teaching a new course on usability (MW, 3:35-4:50, CmpSci 140). The focus will be on computer interfaces, but interfaces of many kinds will make their way onto the syllabus. Linguists are great at this stuff! Programming experience is not required.
CMPSCI 291U: Seminar - Usability
Professor: Mark Corner
MW 3:35-4:50 pm, CmpSci 140
In this course we examine the important problems in Usability, Human Computer Interaction, User Interfaces, and Human Centered Computing. We will examine elements of HCI history, understanding human capabilities, HCI design, several methods for prototyping user interfaces, and new applications and paradigms in human computer interaction. This is not a course in how to make dialog boxes, but rather a much more general approach to interacting with human beings and evaluating designs. Some elementary programming in Flash (or another user interface prototyping tool) may be required, but people without prior programming experience should feel right at home in this class. This is offered simultaneously at a 200-level and a 400-level. The 200-level course is available to any undergraduate student, not just computer scientists. IT-minor s tudents are especially encouraged to participate. The 400-level version, available only to junior and senior computer science majors, will require extra work and will be graded on a separate scale. Several group projects and exams will be required. No prerequisites. 3 credits.
Andrew McCallum is teaching his Computational Linguistics course this fall, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:45, in CMPSCI 140.
Here's Andrew's blurb about the course:
This Fall I will be teaching undergraduate Natural Language Processing again. This course is designed to introduce both Computer Science and Linguistics students to the exciting and intertwined topics of (1) using computational and statistical methods to give insight into observed human language phenomena, and (2) making computers perform various useful tasks with human languages, web pages, email, etc.
It typically attracts a fun, interdisciplinary group of engaged undergraduates.
The prerequisites are light: students should merely have some facility with programming, and familiarity with basic math (exponents, logs, elementary probability).
Even if you aren't sure you'd like to take the course, you are welcome to simply show up at the first lecture, September 4, Tuesday, 2:30pm in UMass Computer Science Building Room 140.
A comprehensive overview of the attacks on open-access journals by the big-time academic publishers
Salon commentary: Science publishers get even stupider
(links via semantics etc.)
Chris Potts's grant work on expressives was covered recently in The Boston Globe, and UMass Amherst Linguistics alum Kai von Fintel (MIT) makes an appearance as well:
J. M. Berger. Coming soon, a linguist's guide to obscenities. The Boston Globe Health and Science section, July 9, 2007.
And see Berger's additional material, as well as Chris's related Language Log post.
Lambda: The Semantics Tool is available for download (all platforms). Lambda is joint work by Lucas Champollion, Josh Tauberer and Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD; now Associate Professor at Penn). This is a first-rate tool for teaching lambdas in the Heim and Kratzer style. Thanks to the developers for making it available! |
 |
Carlota Smith passed away on May 24, at the age of 73. David Beaver posted to Language Log with some heartfelt comments and the full text of an obituary by Richard Meier, chair of the UT Linguistics Department.
CHFA Sampler 2007: Selections by Alumni, Faculty and Students at UMass Amherst
Features Bob Rothstein ('The Trumpeter of Krakow') and John McCarthy ('Dialects')
These get increasingly less scholarly from top to bottom:
At SALT 17 this past weekend, David Beaver and Kai von Fintel announced a new open-access journal called Semantics and Pragmatics. The editors' blog is an ongoing discussion of how the journal will work.
[Thanks David and Kai!]
From Seth:
I am writing now with some items that I thought may be of interest to many of you, particularly those of you with interests in language endangerment and revitalization.
The following are links to two news pieces that have aired recently on local Alaskan TV stations. They both concern programs aimed at preserving and revitalizing the Tlingit language.
The first segment concerns the Tlingit Immersion camps that have been run by Sealaska Heritage Institute. The second concerns the Tlingit translation of MacBeth that has been written and performed by the Perseverance Theater, and which was recently presented at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of the American Indian. There's lots of great footage in both the pieces, with some nice appearances by various prominent Tlingit community leaders. (However, there's not really any analysis of the impact of either of these programs.)
Kai von Fintel recently documented some new and recent historical scholarship on the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Our own (yes, we are claiming him as our own) Bob Rothstein was, in a sense, present for the historical moment:
Dear WHISC,
February 1957 seems about right for the publication of Syntactic Structures. In the spring semester 1957, as a freshman math major at MIT, I wandered into a course called L78: Syntactic Structures. On the first day of class the instructor, a certain Noam Chomsky, told us that we didn't need to take notes since the class notes for the previous year's course were due to appear in print any day. And indeed, we were soon able to purchase a thin blue Mouton volume at the Tech Coop, and my notes for the course are very minimal, although they do include a two-page dittoed midterm (three questions to be answered in class and one to be done at home) and the several pages of my answers, corrected and graded by Noam.
Best regards,
Bob
From Barbara Partee:
Russians are big on anniversaries.
In February I relayed a request from Olga Mitrenina in St Petersburg to find out what month Syntactic Structures was published 50 years ago. Kai von Fintel tracked down the history and found it was February, and that went into an article Olga published in February in the popular press called (I'm translating) Colorless Green Ideas Live and Conquer.
Independently of that, a group of Moscow syntax students organized the first Moscow generative syntax conference, and called it "Syntactic Structures" ("Sintaksicheskie Struktury") in commemoration of that anniversary as well. It was a really nice two-day conference held in Moscow, April 5-6, with some students from St. Petersburg also participating. Here's the program. There were 13 presentations by students and young researchers, and 5 invited talks by senior linguists (including me), and a banquet at the end.
Yakov Testelets closed the conference with a tribute to the enterprise of the students who organized the conference and to the revolution in linguistics marked by the publication of Syntactic Structures. The toasts at the banquet included an optimistic toast to the effect that there is now no longer "Russian linguistics" and "Western linguistics" but just "linguistics" -- maybe still a bit of an exaggeration, but increasingly true now for the younger generations of linguists in Moscow and St Petersburg. I've personally witnessed a huge change in 10 years.
There was also a nice toast to the 40th anniversary of Haj Ross's dissertation! Who would have noticed and marked the date besides a Russian! It was a great conference, very lively and stimulating, with a wonderful atmosphere! There are some photos of it on my Flickr site.
Tanya Reinhart died suddenly on March 17, 2007, while on Long Island. The Guardian published an extensive obituary that does a good job of conveying just how bold and passionate she was as a linguist and as a political thinker.
[Thanks Angelika!]
The Linguist List Grad School Challenge begins on March 19!
Last year, UMass Amherst Linguistics came in second (total raised: $2,855), edged out of first place by Stanford ($3,426), which is, by the way, a much larger department.
Make 2007 our year!
Barbara Partee and the Linguist List have teamed up to improve the coverage of Linguistics on Wikipedia. Watch for a special initiative during the Linguist List's Fund Drive. WHISC will keep you posted.
Barbara reports that linguists in Moscow are "getting organized about filling in gaps in linguistics coverage in the Russian-language Wikipedia, and working together to standardize entries on languages and language families". The effort is headed by Yuri Koryakov.
The current WikipediaProject for Linguistics is languishing. It is worth our while as linguists to improve it. Chris Potts submitted the following story, which later appeared on Language Log:
In my large intro course yesterday, there was an unfamiliar hand in the air a lot of the time, and the student's questions and insights were the best I've had all semester. It was puzzling, because I didn't recognize him, and he seemed to know much more about syntax than one would expect. (It was our first official day on the topic.)
After class, he came to the front and introduced himself as a prospective student, just out of high school. He said linguistics was his passion in high school. I said, "What? How?" And he replied, "Wikipedia".
[Thanks Barbara!]
[Thanks John J!]
Direct from "Springfield" to the land of bisimulations: Beginning July 1, Northwest Airlines will have daily nonstop service from Hartford-Springfield (Bradley Airport) to Amsterdam.
[Thanks John!]
Chris Potts was recently in Paris. He bought a packet of Metro tickets, but he mostly walked while there. He doesn't have plans to go back any time soon, because he prefers the coffee at Rao's. So he is selling his Metro tickets to the lowest non-negative bidder.
WHASC is What's Happening at Santa Cruz. It is WHISC's direct inspiration. (In fact, we, ahh, sort of stole the name.) It is put together by Connie Creel.
We're delighted to see that it has been revamped as ful-fledged Web publication. Check it out!
The paparazzi converge on Roumi Pancheva, hot young USC Associate Professor of Linguistics.
[Thanks Rajesh!]
After seeing the poster below, Brian Whalley went to EMS expecting to get 15% off his purchases. He was surprised to find that they would only give him 15% of a single item. We think this is not a possible reading of the sign. The fine print at the bottom of the poster protects EMS again complaints about the offer, so we suggest instead buying 20 water bottles from them and then insisting that each be rung up separately.
Google software engineer on working on Google and working in grad school. Sounds like the major difference is that Google supplements recognition and praise with mind-blowingly large perks ...
Foreign Language Syndrome? [Thanks Jan and Ilaria!]
John McCarthy is quoted in this article about the effects of the September 11 attacks on our language. Remarkably, John's comments were not warped into a statement of support for the current administration, a linguistically noteworthy event in itself.
US Patent Application: Method and system for selecting and conjugating a verb
[Thanks John!]
[Thanks Rajesh!]
An interesting variant on "my dog ate it" (from Barbara, who writes "This is from a serious undergraduate, so I know she must be telling the truth!"):
sorry, could you please send me the article again? My cat just deleted it (how smart). My article is 'aspectual selection and negation in mandarin chinese' by Jo Wang Lin.
Joseph Aoun, Professor of Linguistics and Dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC, has been named President of Northeastern University.
[Thanks John!]
Language Log received a nice write up in the New York Times Science section on June 20. Here's a PDF of the article.
Here I am standing next to just some of the flowers I received this week. Thank you to all the faculty and grad students who remembered me on my birthday, Valentine's Day, Christmas and other holidays this past year. Working with such kind, thoughtful and warm-hearted people is a real pleasure. I hope you know how much I appreciate your generosity throughout the year.
Sarah
Kathy found some wonderful old photos of South College, inside and out, at the DuBois Library's website:
There's a new and novel festschrift for Manfred Krifka on the Net:
Between 40 and 60 Puzzles for Krifka
[Thanks semantics etc.!]
The Experimental Sign-up Database is getting close to its 1000th sign-up. The database was established in February 2004 (according to WHISC). Youri Zabbal wrote the code, based on John Kingston's vision.
Computer generated gibberish deemed interesting (perhaps by another computer)
Report in the journal Nature: starlings can handle center embeddings and will peck at your eyes if you try to garden-path them.
Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds,
Timothy Q. Gentner, Kimberly M. Fenn, Daniel Margoliash and Howard C. Nusbaum
Nature 440.27. 1204-1207 (27 April 2006)
[Thanks John!]
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.
Cartoon by Rowan McMullin at the the Daily Cardinal, in the Language Barrier series.
[Cick the picture to see the full cartoon]
UMail will be down today (April 6) from 7:00-10:00 pm EDT, for regular maintenance. After the service: if you work on a Mac, you will have to click "Go Online" in the Mail program. If you use a Windows machine, you will have to restart your computer(!?).
And for Mac users who wish they had more chances to restart their computers: Boot Camp Public Beta.
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
[Thanks Jan!]
Linguistics in the Washington Post:
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.
