[Thanks Emily and Brian!]
John Kingston and Navin Viswanathan (UConn Psychology) are each giving talks in PhG this Friday (April 10), from 4:00-5:45. The talks present opposite sides on a fundamental dispute in the theory of speech perception. John writes:
Navin and I don't plan this to be a point-counterpoint presentation, but instead a chance to lay out some recent relevant empirical results that point in opposite theoretical directions. Navin will give a more technical version of his talk in my lab meeting 2:30-3:45 in Bartlett 6 the same day. After it's all over we'll take him out for a well-deserved supper. Anyone is welcome to join us.
Here is a link to the talks' abstracts, bundled into a single document.
HUMDRUM will take place here at UMass Amherst on April 18-19. This workshop invites work on Optimality Theory from any perspective, and encourages work-in-progress as well as more polished projects. If you would like to present, please contact Emily Elfner or Brian Smith.
[Thanks Emily!]
PhG meets on Tuesday, March 10. Emily Elfner will give a practice talk for her upcoming gig in Arizona.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG met last night (Feb 18) at Karen Jesney's house in Northampton. Thanks for hosting, Karen!
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG will meet on Wednesday, February 18, starting at 8:00 pm (location TBA). The group is already well-prepared for Elliott Moreton's upcoming colloq, so the plan is instead to read Hale and Reiss's 2000 squib 'Substance abuse and dysfunctionalism", which is related to Elliott's work, but offers a different perspective.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG met on December 9 to read chapter 3 of Matt Wolf's dissertation. Diana Apoussidou led the discussion.
[Thanks Wendell!]
Here are some reading group events that we missed as a result of our strict adherence to Thursday publishing and our Thanksgiving Holiday:
PhG met on Tuesday, November 11. The group prepared for Brett Hyde's upcoming visit by reading his latest ROA upload, Alignment continued: Distance-sensitivity, order-sensitivity, and the midpoint pathology.
[Thanks Wendell and Emily!]
Bretty Hyde will visit the department on November 14 to meet with people and give an informal lecture titled 'How alignment creates stress windows.' The talk will begin at 3:30 pm in the Partee Room.
[Thanks Joe!]
PhG met on Wednesday, October 22, at Peter and Diana's house in Northampton. In preparation for Keren Rice's colloq, the group read Rice's chapter 'Markedness in phonology' in the Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (Paul de Lacy, ed.). Emily Elfner led the discussion.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG met on Wednesday, October 8. John Kingston facilitated the discussion.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG meets next on Thursday, October 9, starting at 6:30 pm, at Kathryn Pruitt's house. The plan is to order pizza and discuss Elliott Moreton's new paper Analytic bias and phonological typology.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG meets next Wednesday, September 24, at Karen Jesney's house. In anticipation of Adam Albright's colloq that Friday, Karen Jesney will lead a discussion of Albright et al.'s Modeling doubly marked lags with a split additive model, which Adam has described as short and light. Adam also suggests looking at Joe Pater's Optimization and linguistic typology.
[Thanks Wendell!]
PhG met on August 27 to discuss an ongoing collaborative project by John Kingston, Aditi Lahiri, and Randy Diehl.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG met on June 11. Michael Becker led a discussion of Ernestus and Baayen's 2003 Language article 'Predicting the unpredictable: Interpreting neutralized segments in Dutch.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG met yesterday (May 7). Nabila Louriz, currently a visitor at MIT, gave a talk entitled 'Adaptation of nasal vowels in Moroccan Arabic.'
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG met yesterday (April 30) to hear Emily Elfner and Wendell Kimper deliver a practice talk for WCCFL 27. Their talk is entitled Reduplication without RED: evidence from diddly-infixation.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
HUMDRUM (the UMass Amherst–Johns Hopkins–Rutgers OT workshop) takes place at Rutgers, April 26. The workshop has a website, but most of the crucial information is being kept under wraps. See Wendell Kimper if you'd like details (or if you just want to know what HUMDRUM stands for).
[Thanks Wendell!]
Gillian Gallagher (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA; now a PhD candidate at MIT) presented in PhG yesterday (April 23). Her talk was called 'The role of contrast in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions'.
[Thanks Michael!]
PhG meets next on Wednesday, April 16. Gillian Gallagher (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA; now a PhD candidate at MIT) will return to present.
From Rutgers organizer Michael O'Keefe:
Rutgers Linguistics will be hosting this year's HUMDRUM on the weekend of April 26-27. Grad students working on any topic relating to Optimality Theory are invited to present their research. It is worth emphasizing that this is intended to be a useful workshop for grad students, so you are welcome to present work in any stage of development. If you would like to present, I ask that you please email me by Saturday, March 15. I don't need any information right now unless you have it. (If you do have a title or general topic area you can give me, great, but there's no need right now.)
Past experience indicates that no date suits everyone. If you absolutely can't present on the weekend of April 26-27, but you would like to otherwise, please let me know what your commitments are and we'll see if we can arrange anything.
PhG met yesterday (March 5). Joe Pater gave a talk called 'Inherent biases of a positive constraint learner'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG holds its first meeting of the semester tomorrow (Feb 15), 2:00 pm, in the Partee Room. Michael Becker will give a talk about his recent experimental work.
This is unlikely to be the regular PhG meeting time. We'll have more details about the schedule soon.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
Lisa Selkirk is organizing a weekly lunch-hour session for training in the analysis of English intonation. If you're interested, head to the Partee Room tomorrow (Feb 1) at 12:15 pm.
The tentative plan is to meet from 12:15-1:15 on Fridays (though tomorrow's meeting will be shorter). Bagels and accompaniments to power you through. Here's a brief description from Lisa:
The plan is to analyze a few natural speech utterances each week, which will be sent out to you in advance so that participants can try their hands at an analysis on their own before the meeting. (This preparation part would not be obligatory.) The object of this informal session will be to gain familiarity with looking at pitch tracks of English and thinking about their analysis. This skill could be of use for those on the "S-side" of things, as well as those on the "P-side".
[Thanks Lisa!]
It's agreed: MUMM 2 will be held at MIT on March 29. More details to come. If you'd like to present, contact John Kingston.
[Thanks John K!]
PhG held an evening meeting on Tuesday, December 5, at Michael Becker's house, to discuss Andy Wedel's paper Feedback and Regularity in the Lexicon. John Kingston led the discussion. Kathryn Flack provided cookies, and Tulip provided hot cocoa.
[Thanks Michael and Kathryn P!]
PhG meets next on November 27, at Karen Jesney's place in Northampton, starting at 7:00 pm. The plan is to get ready for Donca Steriade's colloquium (November 30) by studying her Lexical conservatism and the notion base of affixation.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG will meet on Tuesday, November 6, 7:30 pm, at Kathryn Pruitt's apartment, to discuss Chapters 1 and 3.0-3.3 of Lev Blumenfeld's dissertation, which Emily Elfner and Wendell Kimper will present. Wendell might also bring cupcakes. There may be other snacky things. There will probably be something to drink. There will be cats.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG will have its first meeting of the semester on Friday, October 5, at 3:30 pm. Distinguished Professor John McCarthy has a draft of a paper on metrically conditioned syncope that he would like feedback on.
UMMM (UMass Amherst MIT Meeting in Phonology) will take place here at UMass Amherst this Saturday, September 29, in the Linguistics Department Lounge. Here is the program in PDF.
[Thanks John K!]
As usual, PhG is going (fairly) strong all summer long. On July 11, John McCarthy gave a talk entitled 'Metrically-conditioned syncope in OT-CC'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG has been meeting throughout the month.
June 6: Tim Vance (University of Arizona) gave a talk on Lyman and Lyman's Law.
June 13: The phonetics lab presented a paper entitled "Hearing precedes knowledge: The autonomy of auditory and lexical effects of context". The authors are John Kingston, Dan Mash, Della Chambless, Shigeto Kawahara, and Jonah Katz.
June 27: Shigeto Kawahara presented ongoing joint research with Yurie Hara called 'Patterns of hiatus resolution in Hiroshima Japanese'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
Joe Pater presented in PhG on Tuesday, May 29. He reported on his ongoing investigations into constraint weighting as a mode of optimization in theoretical phonology.
PhG meets next on June 7. Timothy Vance (University of Arizona) will give a talk entitled 'Benjamin Smith Lyman and His Law'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG will rage on through the summer months, with a few things already tentatively planned. We'll have more details next week.
PhG meets on Tuesday, May 8, at 4:00 pm, in the Partee Room. Emily Elfner will give a practice talk for the 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG met on Tuesday, April 24. Gaja Jarosz gave a practice talk for CLS 43.
On May 1, John McCarthy will talk about stress/syncope interactions.
On May 8, Emily Elfner willl give a practice talk for the 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting.
All these meetings take place in South College 301, starting at 4:00 pm.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG meets next on April 24. Gaja Jarosz will give a practice talk for CLS 43, May 3-5. The talk is on the learning of restrictive lexicon-grammar combinations that cannot be identified using ranking biases.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG met on Tuesday, March 6. Matt Wolf presented 'Mutation and learnability in OT'.
PhG meets once more before spring break. The group will discuss last year's Language article 'Against formal phonology'. Emily Alling, UMass Amherst librarian and erstwhile phonologist, provides this link to the article, which will work on campus with no fuss and off-campus via the proxy server.
[Thanks Kathryn P and Emily!]
PhG will meet next on Tuesday, March 6. Matt Wolf will discuss 'Mutability and learnability in OT'.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG meets next on February 27, at 4:00 pm, in the Partee Room. The group will discuss John McCarthy's new book manuscript.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG met on February 13. Kathryn Flack presented her ongoing computation modeling work.
PhG meets next on February 20. Shigeto Kawahara will give a practice talk.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG will meet on Tuesdays at 4:00 pm in the Partee Room this semester. Here's a look at the next few meetings:
| Feb 13 | Kathryn Flack | her recent computational modeling work |
| Feb 20 | Shigeto Kawahara | practice talk |
| Feb 27 | John McCarthy | discussion of, and feedback on, his new OT Guide manuscript |
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
The various reading groups are in their planning stages for the semester. Here's a mapping from groups to their current organizers, whom you should contact if you're new to South College and would like to receive news about meetings and the like:
| Acquisition Lab | → | Youri Zabbal |
| PhG | → | Kathryn Pruitt |
| SRG | → | Florian Schwarz |
| Syntax | → | Cherlon Ussery |
PhG met on Tuesday, November 14. Visiting Scholar Nathan Sanders talked about opacity and strong lexicon optimization.
On Tuesday, November 21, Michael Becker will talk about Turkish.
[Thanks Kathryn P.]
PhG will meet on Tuesday, November 14, 3:30 pm, in South College 301. Visitor Nathan Sanders will talk about his work on opacity and strong lexicon optimization.
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG met this past Tuesday to discuss papers by de Lacy and Blevins --- prep for the colloq this Friday. Here's a quick look at what's coming up:
[Thanks Kathryn P.]
PhG meets next on Halloween, at 3:30 pm, in the Partee Room. The group will discuss the following work:
Contact Kathryn P if you would like copies of these.
Kathryn P writes, "There is currently nothing spooky actually planned, but I'm happy to hear suggestions for increasing the spookiness, if this is exciting for people."
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG will meet on Tuesday, October 24, 3:30-5:00, in the Partee Room. Shigeto Kawahara will be practicing for an invited talk he'll be giving in Toronto soon. Here's the abstract.
Here is a look at what's coming up in PhG:
| Halloween | Spooky group discussion of some papers by Paul De Lacy, in preparation for his November 3 colloq. |
| November 7 | John Kingston will lead a discussion of the work he reported on recently in Toronto. |
| November 21 | Michael Becker will present some of his recent work on Turkish. |
[Thanks Kathryn P!]
PhG met on Tuesday, October 10. Matt Wolf presented some of his work on prenasals.
[Thanks Kathryn P.!]
PhG met on Tuesday, October 3. Lisa Shiozaki gave a practice talk for her upcoming NELS 37 presentation.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
PhG meets on Tuesday, October 3, at 3:30 pm. Lisa Shiozaki will give a practice talk fo her upcoming NELS 37 presentation. The work is currently called 'Category and position as correlates in determining patterns of default accentuation in Japanese: Evidence from nonce words'.
The Tuesday, 3:30 pm, time-slot is the regular meeting time of PhG this semester.
[Thanks Kathryn!]
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 Phonology Group has continued to meet throughout these dog days of summer:
On June 15, they discussed Alan Prince's Entailed ranking arguments. John McCarthy acted as facilitator.
On June 22, John Kingston presented his paper 'Contrast and assimilation in the perception of successive segments', in preparation for LABPHON 10.
Here's how things look for the remainder of the summer:
| July 6 | Kathryn Flack |
| July 13 | Shigeto Kawahara and Matt Wolf |
| July 20 | [open] |
| July 27 | Sound change in OT |
| August 3 | Matt Wolf |
The rest of August is open at present.
PhG met yesterday to discuss some work by Gaja Jarosz, who will be our 2006-7 Visiting Professor in Phonology.
The first meeting of MUMM (The MIT-UMass Meeting in Phonology) is taking place this Saturday, May 6, in the Stata Center (Building 32, D461), from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm.
| 11:00-11:45 | Michael Becker (UMass Amherst) | Tone licensing and categorical alignment in Serbo-Croatian |
| 12:00-12:45 | Gillian Gallagher (MIT) | Coalescence and marked faithfulness in West Greenlandic |
| 1:00-2:00 | lunch (some bagels and beverage will be provided) | |
| 2:00-2:45 | Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Amherst) | Half rhymes in Japanese rap songs |
| 3:00-3:45 | David Hill (MIT) | Variable obstruent-liquid syllabification inLatin |
| 4:00-4:45 | Matt Wolf (UMass Amherst) | Morphologically-governed labialization in Chaha: A challenge to anti- faithfulness |
| 5:00-5:45 | Sunny Kim (MIT) | On initial devoicing in Korean |
| 6-??? | interested participants go out to dinner to one or more local dives |
|
[Thanks John!]
Many UMass Amherst phonologists will make their way down to Johns Hopkins this weekend for HUMDRUM 2006, a two-day workshop involving UMass Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers. The program includes six UMass Amherst phonologists --- seven if we include Gaja, and eight if we count Michael Becker twice (once as the scribe of CCamelOT, once as a tone licenser). Check it out.
MUMM 1, the second joint meeting of the UMass Amherst and MIT phonology groups, takes place on Saturday, May 6. This one's at MIT; UMMM 1 was at UMass Amherst earlier in the semester.
[Thanks John!]
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.
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.
HUMDRUM is now scheduled to talk place at Johns Hopkins University, April 29-30. (HUMDRUM is the Hopkins, University of MarylanD, Rutgers University of Massachusetts workshop on Optimality Theory. It took place here at UMass Amherst last year.)
MUMM 1 is now scheduled for May 6. MUMM is the joint meeting of the phonology groups at UMass Amherst and MIT. The first one happened on February 11, 2006, but it was then called UMMM 1, because it took place here.
On March 8, at 3:30 pm, in South College 301, the PhG will discuss Lev Blumenfeld's paper 'Tone domains in Tonga'.
This week's meeting has been postponed until March 8. The plan for March 8 is to discuss Lev Blumenfeld's recent ROA posting, 'Tone domains in Tonga'. The next meeting is on March 1 --- Matt Wolf will disuss his work on antifaithfulness.
The full schedule is as follows:
| March 1 | Matt Wolf on antifaithfulness |
| March 8 | Lev Blumenfeld's paper 'Tone domains in Tonga' |
| March 29 | Mike Key's GLOW practice talk |
| April 12 | Anne-Michelle Tessier's WCCFL 25 practice talk |
The next meeting of the PhG is Wednesday, February 22, 3:30 pm, in South College 301. The plan is to discuss Lev Blumenfeld's recent ROA posting, 'Tone domains in Tonga'. John Kingston writes, "I have a very soft spot in my heart (and a little heart break) about this language, as I wrote about it in my special field exam when I was a student."
John K. will lead the discussion, perhaps assisted by Mike Key.
From Kathryn Flack:
UMMM, the joint UMass and MIT phonology group, met for the first time on Saturday, February 11, and it was a great success! About 25 people gathered in our new lounge for seven talks and much lively conversation on a wide range of topics in phonetics and phonology. The MIT contingent successfully avoided driving in blizzard conditions, everyone gracefully adapted to a short-notice time change, and we're looking forward to another meeting (at MIT, so of "MUMM") in April.
