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publications/presentations
October 1, 2009
September 23, 2009
UMass talks at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona
Noah Constant reports several UMass presentations at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona last week.* Invited speakers Elisabeth Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer presented on "Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information".
* Noah Constant presented a poster "Variations on Contrastive Topic Marking -- Evidence from Mandarin Chinese".
* Mara Breen (UMass Psychology) was a coauthor on a poster "Factoring out Speaker Variation in Experimental Studies of Prosody: The Case of Association with Focus".
May 21, 2009
Barbara Partee at Dialog 2009
Barbara Partee will present a paper "The dynamics of adjective meaning" at the conference Dialog 2009 (the series is so-named because it aims to foster dialogue between theoretical and computational linguists), May 27-31 at the Bekasovo Spa ("Common-Snipe-ovo Spa") in Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow. Barbara writes, "Part of what I love about these end-of-semester Dialog conferences is that often the whole family comes along (lots of linguists seem to be children of linguists and/or married to linguists) and there are lots of kids - here's my favorite photo from last year's conference at the same location.May 14, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at SULA
Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas 5 (SULA 5) takes place at MIT this weekend (May 15-17). Lots of UMass Amherst folks on the program:
- Seth Cable (Invited address!): Intervention effects, superiority and pied-piping: Evidence from Tlingit
- Amy Rose Deal (Invited address!): The expression of futurity in Nez Perce
- Ana Quadros Gomes (former visitor): The structure of gradable adjectives
- Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Matthewson: Anatomy of a discourse particle
- Suzi Lima: Numeral quantification in Juruna: Exactly and approximately readings
- Cathy O'Connor and Amy Rose Deal: Evidentiality and the Interpretation of Fluid-S Case Marking
UMass Amherst Dominates the Current Issue of Linguistic Inquiry
The current issue of Linguistic Inquiry (40:2, Spring 2009) contains three papers by UMass Amherst linguists (out of eight papers in all):
- Angelika Kratzer: Making a pronoun: Fake indexicals as windows into the properties of pronouns
- Kyle Johnson: Gapping is not (VP-)Ellipsis
- Christopher Potts, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Ash Asudeh, Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Christopher Davis, Yurie Hara, Angelika Kratzer, Eric McCready, Tom Roeper, and Martin Walkow: Expressives and identity conditions
For the third, we note also that Luis is a UMass Amherst PhD and Yurie was a long-time visitor.
May 7, 2009
Annual Department Mini-Conference May 14
The annual Second-Year Mini-Conference takes place on Thursday, May 14, in Dickinson 110, from 9:30-12:00.
| 9:30 | Coffee | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Emerson Loustau | Aspect, agentive agreement, and i-level predicates in Mohawk |
| 10:30 | Anisa Schardl | Variable unaccusativity |
| 11:00 | Chloe Gu | Maximization in Mandarin wh-conditionals |
| 11:30 | Noah Constant | Variations in contrastive topic marking – evidence from Mandarin Chinese |
April 23, 2009
Frazier in York
Lyn Frazier is speaking this week at the Explaining Syntax Workshop in York. The title of her talk is 'Explaining syntax: The role of acceptable ungrammaticality'.
Hollebrandse and Roeper at GLOW
Bart Hollebrandse and Tom Roeper presented a paper at GLOW 32. The title was 'Indirect recursion as a restriction on the syntax-semantics interface'.
Partee in Moscow
Barbara Partee was an invited speaker at the 4th Annual Moscow Students' Linguistics Conference. The title of her talk was 'Quantifying over contexts: Semantics or pragmatics or both?'. Barbara plans soon to post an updated handout reflecting ongoing conversation with Paul Elbourne. When she does, we'll link to it from here.
Davis and Potts at Brown
Chrises Davis and Potts visited Brown yesterday, to lecture in Polly Jacobson's undergraduate seminar on questions and answers. They presented a corpus they've collected, and then the group engaged in some exploratory data analysis, seeking to identify pragmatic strategies for responding to questions and the implicatures those strategies give rise to.
April 16, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at CLS 45
UMass Amherst Linguistics is well-represented at CLS 45, which begins today (April 16) and runs through Saturday:
- Kyle Johnson is giving a plenary address
- Christopher Potts is giving a plenary address, presenting joint work with Jesse Harris.
- Jesse Harris: Locality, Event-construal and Extraction: Evidence from Language Processing.
- Karen Jesney: Licensing in Multiple Contexts: An Argument for Harmonic Grammar.
- Alum Marcin Morzycki (Michigan State): Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives
April 9, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at ECO5
ECO5 2009 (The Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics) took place on Saturday, April 4, at the University of Maryland. Emerson Loustau and Martin Walkow each presented papers.
Kratzer and Selkirk in Michigan
Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk are giving a joint colloquium in the Linguistics department at the University of Michigan tomorrow. Their talk is called 'Distinguishing contrastive, new, and given information'.
Oiry at ISTAL 19
Magda Oiry gave a talk titled 'A case of true optionality: Long Movement patterns like Wh-in situ in French' at the workshop On the optionality of Wh-Movement in Thessaloniki, Greece. The workshop was part of the International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (ISTAL 19). Former South College visitor Aritz Irurtzun also gave a talk, in the Mapping Asymmetries Workshop.
April 2, 2009
Meg Grant: Psych Brown Bag Talk
Meg Grant is giving a Cognitive Brownbag talk over in Psychology on Wednesday, April 9, at 12:00 pm, in 521B Tobin.
Harris and Potts at OSU
Jesse Harris and Chris Potts are presenting their paper Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings, just before SALT 19 (April 2-3), at OSU. The workshop is co-organized by Craige Roberts (1987 UMass Amherst PhD).
Peggy Speas at Purdue
Peggy Speas is giving a keynote address at the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas at Purdue University , April 3-5. The conference is organized by alum Elena Benedicto (1998 UMass Amherst PhD).
March 26, 2009
Paper by Amy Rose Deal to Appear in NLLT
Amy Rose Deal's paper Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
Tom Roeper in Hamburg
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Presupposition, propositions and inversion' at a conference on multi-lingualism in honor of Jürgen Meisel in Hamburg. Jürgen Meisel was twice a visitor at UMass Amherst, in 1973 and 1989, working first on semantics and then acquisition.
UMass Amherst Linguists at the Penn Colloquium
This year's Penn Linguistics Colloquium begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday (March 27-29). Lisa Selkirk is the invited speaker this year. Noah Constant and Chloe Gu are also on the program.
Joint Syntax/Semantics Meeting: Biezma, Constant, Gu
The Syntax and Semantics Groups held a joint meeting on Monday, March 23, at Rajesh's place in Northampton. The meeting featured two practice talks:
- Noah Constant and Chloe Gu: Mandarin even, all, and the Trigger of Focus Movement (for the Penn Linguistics Colloquium)
- María Biezma: Alternative vs polar questions: the cornering effect (for SALT 19)
[Thanks Annahita!]
March 12, 2009
Heizmann-Dold in Osnabrück
Tanja Heizmann-Dold participated in the special interest group Production-comprehension asymmetries in child language at the recent DGfS meeting. She presented the core findings from her dissertation in a talk titled 'Exhaustivity in questions and clefts and the quantifier connection'.
Bhatt in Texas
Rajesh Bhatt visited the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, late last month. He gave a talk titled 'Ergativity in Two Indo-Aryan Languages'. While there, he worked on a paper on the interaction of negation and verb movement in Kashmiri with Sadaf Munshi, who is an assistant professor at UNT.
March 5, 2009
Emily Elfner at Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics
Emily Elfner will present a paper at the conference Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics, March 27-29 at the University of Arizona. Emily has also been awarded a scholarship to attend the four-day mini-course on Celtic linguistics that precedes the conference.
February 26, 2009
Barbara Partee in Russia and Alaska
Barbara Partee is teaching in Moscow this spring, as usual. She'll also be in Alaska (as is somewhat less usual). Here's a rundown on what she is up to these days:
- On Saturday, Feb 28, she will give an invited talk "Symmetry and Symmetrical Predicates" in the Moscow State University seminar "Applications of mathematical methods in linguistics" led by V.A. Uspensky and M.R. Pentus.
- This semester, she is teaching a course "Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics" at Moscow State University, meeting on Friday afternoons 4:20-7:30 (! - the students' choice!) from February 20 until June 5. (It's an elective course, and that was apparently the only 'good' block of two slots that the students had free.) This year Barbara grappled with Dreamweaver to make her course website - she hopes it's an improvement over previous ones.
We'll soon have details on the talk she will give at the University of Alaska in March; they're still choosing among possible topics and settling the day. Barbara writes, "It mustn't conflict with my daughter-in-law's dog races!" (Check out Sled Dog Studios.)
February 19, 2009
UMass Amherst Faculty Collaboration Graph
WHISC has a long tradition of collaboration graphs:
- Faculty collaboration (Dec 2003; Sep 2006)
- Faculty student collaboration (Dec 2003)
- Faculty Erdos numbers (Dec 2003)
They've become quite out of date, though. With the help of statnet, we now have a nice system for generating and updating them, so we'll be rolling out 2009 versions over the coming weeks. Below is the first: a graph of faculty collaborations on papers and grant projects. The graph is connected; you can travel from any faculty member to any other faculty member.
Documentation below.
Continue reading "UMass Amherst Faculty Collaboration Graph" »
Jesney and Tessier, To Appear in NLLT
An article by Karen Jesney and alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier (PhD 2007; Assistant Prof at Alberta) has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. This article, 'Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning', argues that Harmonic Grammar can explain many of the stipulated ranking biases that have been posited in the literature on language learning in OT.
[Thanks John!]
Elfner and Kimper at Hampshire
As we reported, Emily Elfner and Wendell Kimper gave a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series last week (Feb 18). Here's a photo from the event:
[Thanks Kathryn!]
UMass Amherst Linguists at the CUNY Conference
The CUNY Conference, held non-compositionally at UC Davis this year, will feature work by a number of UMass Amherst linguists:
- Maria Biezma: Processing evidence for multiple focus-assignment strategies
- Veena Dwivedi (PhD 1994): Underspecification of scope ambiguity and anaphora: Evidence from self-paced reading
- Meg Grant, Lyn Frazier, and Chuck Clifton: The role of Non-Actuality Implicatures in processing elided constituents
- Jesse Harris: On the Event-Extraction Correlation: Evidence from Coordinate Structures
Congratulations!
UMass Amherst Linguists at SALT 19
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists are on the program at SALT 19 (and one of the organizers is Craige Roberts, 1986 UMass Amherst PhD):
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle (PhD 2006): EVEN and biased questions: the case of Spanish siquiera
- Maria Biezma: Alternative vs. polar questions: the cornering effect
- Gennaro Chierchia (PhD 1984): Relevance of polarity for the on line interpretation of numerals and determiners (with Daniele Panizza, Yi-Ting Huang, and Jesse Snedeker)
- Jeff Runner (PhD 1995): Discourse structure and parallelism in VP ellipsis (with Christina Kim)
Congratulations to all!
February 12, 2009
Kimper and Elfner Talk at Hampshire
Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner are giving a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series, February 18, 12:15 pm, in the ASH building lobby. The title is 'What can Ned Flanders tell us about linguistic knowledge? Diddly-infixation and the poverty of the stimulus'. Abstract below.
Tom Roeper: Report from Israel
Tom Roeper was recently in Israel. He filed the following report on the journey:
I gave one of the primary talks in a long-planned and broadly advertised conference in Israel at the Hebrew University on Bilingualism and SLI and gave a talk on "Multiple Grammars Perspective and How Bilingualism can benefit children with SLI". Former UMass visiting scholars Petra Schulz and Jürgen Meisel were there too.
As an alternative to the academic boycott of Israel, promoted in England, recently advanced in the US, and supported by the late Tanya Reinhart, I chose to participate in a protest against the recent war and occupation of Gaza at the Wall in an isolated Arab town, Beilin. A weekly protest has taken place over the last two years. Two students were hit with bullets and another killed in the last few weeks. Aviya Hacohen, a visitor here briefly last year, came as well. The protest group of a couple of hundred was organized and led by the villagers with perhaps 30 Israelis and foreigners participating. No one was hurt but a good deal of teargas was shot, with little provocation that anyone could see. It was a sobering experience, but I was very glad to have participated and registered my opposition.
February 5, 2009
McCarthy, Kimper, and Pruitt on Large Lecture Classes
On Tuesday, February 3, John McCarthy, Wendell Kimper, and Kathryn Pruitt gave a two-hour presentation in the Center for Teaching's series called Teaching Large Classes. They described their work on the TA handbook for Ling 101. Matt Ouellett, the CFT's director, invited Wendell and Kathryn to do an encore in the Fall at the CFT's University-wide TA orientation.
Apoussidou, Jesney, and Pater at Brown
Diana Apoussidou, Karen Jesney, and Joe Pater are presenting their joint talk 'Learning underlying representations with Positive M-Phon constraints' at Brown this Friday (Feb 6). Here's the abstract and locational information.
UMass Amherst Linguists at Harvard
The Harvard colloq schedule is packed with UMass Amherst linguists this semester:
- Lisa Selkirk on the syntax–prosody interface, January 30
- John McCarthy on harmonic serialism, February 6
- Angelika Kratzer on February 20.
[Thanks Joe!]
January 29, 2009
Prism of Grammar
Tom Roeper's Prism of Grammar has sold out of its hardcover print run, but it will appear in paperback on February 6, at the low, low price of only $12.95. The book has been used as a textbook, for courses in acquisition and general linguistics. Please do drop Tom a note if you've used the book in the classroom; he's keen to hear about novel applications.
January 22, 2009
UMass Amherst Linguists at the 4th Meeting on Prosody and Informational Structure
There were many UMass Amherst linguists at the 4th Meeting on Prosody and Informational Structure, hosted by Haruo Kubozono in Shiga. Masako Hirotani, Taka Shinya, and Satoshi Tomioka all presented their work. Shin Ishihara (currently at Potsdam) presented his joint project with Yoshi Kitagawa. Shigeto Kawahara was an invited discussant. And Yurie Hara also attended the meeting.
Tom Roeper Above the Arctic Circle
Tom Roeper gave three lectures in Norway this past December: 'Recursion in Acquisition', 'Nodes, Features, and Labels' (Trondheim), and 'The impact of recursion and Phases on interpretation' (Tromsø). He also found time for some skiing and dog-sledding above the Arctic Circle:
December 18, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists at the LSA
There are lots of UMass Amherst linguists at the upcoming LSA Annual Meeting (San Francisco, January 8-11, 2009).
Angelika Kratzer is giving one of the three plenary addresses. Her title is 'Straddling the border between linguistics and philosophy'. The talk is on Saturday, January 10, 12:45-1:45 pm.
In addition, we culled the following lists from the preliminary program (please let us know if we missed any current or former South College faculty, visitors, alums, etc.!):
Current South College Inhabitants
Seth Cable: Use of subordinate clauses as matrix utterances in the Pacific Northwest
Amy Rose Deal: Future and past in Nez Perce modals
Lisa Green: Resultative aspect and past tense in child African American English
Andrew McKenzie: Kiowa switch-reference and subject positions
Christopher Potts and Florian Schwarz: Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora
Aynat Rubinstein: Between modals and verbs: The dual role of must/need
Nathan Sanders (Williams) and Jaye Padgett: Exploring the role of production in predicting vowel inventories
Cherlon Ussery: Case at syntax, agreement at PF: Evidence from Icelandic
South College Alums
Michael Becker (Reed) and Lena Fainleib (Tel Aviv): Surface-based generalizations over lexical exceptions
Andries Coetzee (U Michigan) and Rigardt Pretorius (North-West University, South Africa): Tswana voiced plosives: Observing change-in-progress
Lisa Matthewson (UBC): Tense and modality in the Pacific Northwest
Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins): A semantics for extreme ignorance questions
Helen Stickney: Inter-speaker variation in the syntax of the partitive
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers), Roger Schwarzschild (Rutgers): The representation and processing of measure phrases in four-year-olds
Matthew Wolf (Georgetown): Local ordering in phonology/morphology interleaving: Evidence for OT-CC
December 4, 2008
UUSLAW This Saturday
UUSLAW (UConn-UMass Amherst-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop) takes place this Saturday (December 6), at Smith College, in Campus Center 204.
[Thanks Tom!]
Roeper and Pearson at the American Speech and Hearing Convention
Tom Roeper, Barbara Pearson, and Ondene van Dulm (University of Stellenbosch) presented a seminar on "Building on the DELV" about efforts to translate the DELV into foreign languages and dialects at the American Speech and Hearing Convention in Chicago, November 8.
November 20, 2008
UMMM This Saturday
UMMM (UMass Amherst MIT Meeting in Phonology) will be held this Saturday, November 22, in the lounge on the third floor of South College. The post-workshop party will be at John Kingston's.
| 9:30-10:10 | Jonah Katz (MIT) | Phonetic similarity in an English hip-hop corpus |
| 10:15-10:55 | Diana Apoussidou (UMass Amherst) | Modeling allomorphy with lexical constraints |
| 10:55-11:10 | Break | |
| 11:10-11:50 | Hrayr Khanjian (MIT) | Western Armenian once-stressed vowels |
| 11:55-12:35 | Peter Jurgec (UMass Amherst) | Autosegmental spreading is a binary relation |
| 12:35-2:45 | Lunch | |
| 2:45-3:25 | Michael Key (UMass Amherst) | Dialect-specific perception: "ar"-epenthesis and "a<r>" deletion in Boston English |
| 3:30-4:10 | Gillian Gallagher (MIT) | Perception and contrast in laryngeal (dis)harmony |
| 4:10-4:25 | Break | |
| 4:25-5:05 | Wendell Kimper (UMass Amherst) | Markedness-on-markedness variation: Some implications for serialism and convergence |
| 5:10-5:50 | Tara McAllister (MIT) | Fricative neutralization in strong position in child phonology |
[Thanks John K!]
Pruitt and Kimper at The Sixth Old World Conference in Phonology
Kathryn Pruitt and Wendell Kimper are presenting papers at the The Sixth Old World Conference in Phonology, January 21-24, 2009. Kathryn's paper is titled 'Parallelism vs. serialism in stress assignment', and Wendell's is titled 'Deriving local optionality: harmonic serialism and phonological variation'.
Chris Potts at Univerity of Michigan Philosophy
Chris Potts will be at the University of Michigan Linguistics and Philosophy Workshop on Implicatures this weekend. His task is to comment on a paper by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. He has written a short paper, Indirect answers and cooperation, to serve as the basis for the commentary.
November 13, 2008
First Issue of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics
The inaugural issue of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics has appeared. The journal is coedited by Rajesh Bhatt and Miriam Butt. Here's the table of contents for the issue:
- Eystein Dahl . Performative Sentences and the Morphosyntax-Semantics Interface in Vedic
- Alice Davison. A Case Restriction on Control: Implications for Movement
- Umesh Patil, Gerrit Kentner, Anja Gollrad, Frank Kügler, Caroline Fery, Shravan Vasisth. Focus, Word Order and Intonation in Hindi
Volodja Borschev in the Russian Science News
Volodja Borschev in action at a recent conference in Moscow!
Barbara Partee reports:
The conference was in honor of Yulij Shreider, a mathematician and theoretical scientist who was the head of Volodja's department at VINITI (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences) for many years, and his sometimes co-author, who died quite a few years ago – various mathematicians and philosophers discussed Shreider's ideas and what influence they had on later work.
As the article notes, Volodja discussed both Shreider's ideas about scientific infrastructure and their relevance to the internet age, and Shreider's innovative topological approach to formal grammar description. Shreider's "neighborhood models" of language are directly relevant to model-theoretic syntax, as Volodja and I discussed with Geoff Pullum and Chris Potts at Santa Cruz in May 2002, which was the first time we met Chris!
[Thanks Barbara!]
November 6, 2008
NECPhon on November 15
The second North East Computational Phonology Workshop takes place on Saturday, November 15, at Yale. Here's a tentative schedule; the precise timing of everything is still being sorted out:
Update [Thanks Joe]: The website is now up.
| Joe Pater (UMass Amherst) | Emergent simplicity bias in a Gradual Maximum Entropy Learner |
| Bruce Tesar (Rugers) | Learning phonological grammars for output-driven maps |
| Sarah Eisenstat (Brown) | Learning underlying forms together with constraint weights |
| Mark Johnson (Brown) | Improving word segmentation by also learning syllable structure |
| Jennifer Michaels (MIT) | Summing up constraint interactions: Chain shifts in a split additive model |
| Giorgio Magri (MIT) | A convergent version of the GLA for standard OT |
| Gaja Jarosz & J. Alex Johnson (Yale) | Comparing phonotactic cues to word boundaries in three languages |
Forthcoming Papers from Joe Pater
Joe Pater has had an extremely productive year. In addition to starting his joint NSF project with John McCarthy, he has published a number of papers.
Joe's 'Harmonic Grammar and linguistic typology" has been accepted for publication in Cognitive Science, a premier interdisciplinary journal (here is an earlier version).
Joe has also recently been involved in a number of collaborative projects on Harmonic Grammar. A paper with Andries Coetzee, 'Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic', has just been published in NLLT (pre-publication draft), and papers with Chris Potts, Rajesh Bhatt and Michael Becker (Harmonic Grammar and linear programming: From linear systems to linguistic typology) and Paul Boersma (Convergence Properties of a Gradual Learning Algorithm for Harmonic Grammar) are in submission.
Tom Ernst's Paper to Appear in NLLT
Tom Ernst's paper 'On speaker-oriented adverbs as positive polarity items' has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations, Tom!
October 30, 2008
Seth Cable's Book to be Published by OUP
Seth Cable's book The Grammar of Q is soon to be published by Oxford University Press. Congratulations, Seth! (And congratulations, OUP!)
October 23, 2008
Syntax Reading Group
Syntax Reading Group meets today (October 23), 8:00 pm, at Rajesh's house in Northampton. The meeting features Meg Grant giving a practice talk for her NELS 39 talk 'A psycholinguistic investigation of MaxElide in variable-binding contexts'.
[Thanks Annahita!]
UMass Amherst Linguists at BUCLD
The Boston University Child Language Development (October 31-November 2) will be bustling with UMass Amherst linguists. Anna Verbuk, Helen Stickney, Joe Pater, Jill deVilliers, Barbara Pearson, Ana Perez and D'jaris Coles White will all present papers or posters. In addition, Tom Roeper is giving a plenary lecture on Saturday evening, title 'From Input to Mind: How acquisition work captures the heart of linguistic theory and the soul of practical application'.
October 16, 2008
New Work by Seth Cable
Seth Cable has made a lot of new work available:
- Towards the Elimination of Pied-Piping: Evidence from Tlingit
- A New Argument for Lexical Decomposition: Transparent Readings of Verbs
- Wh-Fronting (in Hungarian) is not Focus-Fronting
- The Grammar of Q
In addition, Seth is giving colloquia at Cornell (October 30) and Maryland (November 21), and he is giving a talk at the LSA meeting in January, as part of an LSA/SSILA panel Inflectional Contrasts in the Languages of the Northwest Coast.
Barbara Partee in New York and Berlin
Barbara Partee was at Cornell two weeks ago, presenting a colloquium talk on September 25 that had four other (absent) co-authors – Vladimir Borschev, Elena Paducheva, Yakov Testelets, and Igor Yanovich: "Russian Genitives, Non-Referentiality, and the Property-Type Hypothesis". This was a version of their FASL 16 paper, which they plan to revise into a journal article.
Barbara spent time with Mats Rooth and Dorit Abusch (one of only two couples of whom both were her Ph.D. students – see the Partee PhD Genealogy), Sally McConnell-Ginet, Wayles Browne, saw Molly Diesing, and met with students; took a walk at the Cornell Ornithology center (there were indeed lots of birds there, but they cheat – they have lots of bird feeders); and it's a beautiful drive between Amherst and Ithaca at this time of year.
Barbara is now Berlin, as an invited discussant at the second International Conference on Quotation and Meaning (ICQM2) at ZAS, October 16-18, organized by Manfred Krifka and his colleagues.
October 9, 2008
Barbara Pearson at the University Club October 15
Barbara Pearson is reading from her new book Raising a Bilingual Child at the University Club, October 15, 7:00-9:00 pm. She'll also be signing books! Here's a poster.
September 25, 2008
Conor Quinn in the Speas-Woolford Seminar
Conor Quinn, who was a postdoc at MIT until recently and has done a lot of work on Penobscot, will be speaking in Peggy and Ellen's seminar on October 1 (Wednesday, 2:30-5:15 pm, Hasbrouck 106). You can check out his 2006 Harvard dissertation Referential Access Dependancy in Penobscot, along with a bunch of other work, at his website.
[Thanks Peggy and Ellen!]
September 18, 2008
GALANA 3 Report
GALANA 3 (Generative Approaches to Langauge Acquisition North America 3) was held at UConn, September 4-6. Miren Hodgson and Anna Perez, who are from UMass Amherst Spanish and did lingusitics dissertations, gave papers. In addition, faculty, former visitors, and students gave a series of posters: Angeliek van Hout and Jill deVilliers; Emily Sowalsky, Valentine Hacquard and Tom Roeper; Anna Verbuk; and Liane Jeschull and Tom Roeper.
September 11, 2008
Potts and Schwarz in UCSC Alumni Conference
UC Santa Cruz Linguistics is holding a graduate reunion conference, September 12-13. Chris Potts is giving a joint paper with Florian Schwarz called 'Expressives in the wild: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora' (associated paper). Chris is also a (part-of) Bargunnedytts, for whom the description theory of names is true.
The alumni conference got some press.
August 28, 2008
New Mexico Adopts Parsons Yazzie and Speas Textbook
Evangeline Parsons Yazzie and Peggy Speas' Navajo textbook, Diné Bizaad Bínáhoo'aah: Rediscovering The Navajo Language Description, has been adopted by the state of New Mexico as its official textbook. New Mexico is the first state to have its own official textbook! The AP story ran in lots of newspapers. Here's a link to the USA Today version.
June 26, 2008
Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee at DIALOG 2008
From Barbara:
Volodja and I [[+distributive] presented] papers at DIALOG 2008, June 4-8, at a pleasant 'pansionat' outside Moscow, the Bekasovo Spa (which translates roughly as Woodcockville Spa; 'bekas' is woodcock (a little plumper than a snipe)). There were goldfinches, fieldfares, magpies, greenfinches, wagtails, and probably more, not counting chaffinches and hooded crows, which are everywhere (I'm composing this on the 5th). It's been a very cold May in and around Moscow, and there were still lily-of-the-valley in bloom here in early June, though the light late nights meant it must be summer.
Volodja's paper was ' "Ja ne byl ..., menja ne bylo..." or how many different "byt' " in Russian.' (' "I.NOM NEG was.MASC.SG, ... I.GEN NEG was.NEUT.SG..." or how many different "BE"s in Russian'). My paper was 'Symmetry and symmetrical predicates'.
The annual DIALOG conference brings together theoretical, descriptive, and computational linguists, and it's always stimulating and fun. There are many Russian linguist "families", and there were several 3-generation-families at the conference in its lovely family-friendly setting -- for instance our colleague Elena Paducheva and her wonderful linguist husband Andrej Zalizniak's daughter Anna Zalizniak is a linguist and is married to another linguist Mixail Mixeev, and their daughter Melania is 9 now -- they were all here except Zalizniak senior. Apresjan and his wife are both linguists, their daughter Valentina is a very fine linguist, her husband is not a linguist, but they're all here together with Valentina's 4-year-old son Iosef -- I love watching the grandparents and parents all taking turns with Iosef on his little rented bike while the others go to talks.
I am having trouble, as you see, writing a past tense report while living in the present tense. It's an interesting exercise. At this point I stopped and got back to work on my Power Point presentation for the talk I gave on June 7.
[Thanks Barbara!]
May 15, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists at NAPhC 5
John Kingston gave an invited talk, 'Is auditory processing autonomous from linguistic knowledge', at the Fifth North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC 5) in Montreal. Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD, now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan) gave another of the invited talks, 'Integrating grammatical and extra-grammatical factors in phonological variation'.
Chris Potts at Stanford
Chris Potts is giving a colloquium at Stanford on May 23. He is also speaking in the Pragmatics Reading Group on the same day.
May 8, 2008
Annual Mini-Conference
The Annual Department Mini-Conference will take place on Thursday, May 15, starting at 9:00 am, in the Math Lounge in Lederle Tower.
Downloadable version of the schedule
| Jesse Aron Harris | Events and extraction in pseudo-coordination | 9:00-9:35 |
| Wendell Kimper | Syntactic reduplication and the spellout of movement chains | 9:35-10:10 |
| Meg Grant | The (non-)interaction of ellipsis and binding: Evidence from re-binding | 10:10-10:45 |
| Misato Hiraga | Japanese Many quantifiers and their interaction with demonstratives | 10:45-11:20 |
| Break | Lunch provided | 11:20-12:00 |
| Emily Elfner | The interaction of linearization and prosody: Evidence from pronoun postposing | 12:00-12:35 |
| Pasha Siraj | How to win the discourse game using particles | 12:35-1:10 |
| Martin Walkow | When can you ask a inner negation polar question? | 1:10-1:45 |
[Thanks Kyle!]
Semantics Reading Group
Semantics reading group meets today (May 8), at 8:00 pm, for the last time in Spring 2008, with a very special program featuring two WCCFL 27 practice talks!
- Alumni and professors Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito: 'Minimal domain widening'
- Jesse Harris: 'Interpreting raising and matching analyses of relative clauses: Two roads to Heim's ambiguity'
[Thanks Aynat!]
Kyle Johnson in Maryland
Kyle Johnson is giving a talk called 'Fitting islands to the semantics of movement' at the Maryland Linguistics MayFest this coming weekend (May 10-11).
Joe Pater in Chicago
Joe Pater is giving a colloquium today (May 8) at the Unversity of Chicago. The title is Serial Harmonic Grammar. Check out the abstract or the related slideshow.
Chris Potts in Tucson
Chris Potts is giving an invited address at the Arizona Linguistics and Anthropology Symposium this weekend (May 9-11). The title of his talk is 'The coin of the expressive realm'.
April 24, 2008
Amy Rose Deal Paper to Appear in Syntax
Amy Rose Deal's paper The origin and content of expletives: evidence from "selection" has been accepted for publication in the journal Syntax. Congratulations, Amy Rose!
April 17, 2008
Barbara Pearson's Book is Out; Party April 27
Barbara Zurer Pearson's new book Raising a Bilingual Child has been published by Random House. It's a step-by-step guide, aimed at parents, and it has a wealth of information about language learning in general. The people who did the blurbs for the book said they thought it would be of interest to "parents, educators, and policymakers" — as well as monolinguals. Check out the book's website for more information.
- Book Launch Party at the Jones Library, Sunday, April 27, from 2:00-4:00 pm.
- Reading at the Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley, Tuesday, April 29, at 7:00 pm.
Congratulations, Barbara!
April 3, 2008
Tanja Heizmann is presenting at the interdisciplinary conference ISES 5 in Mainz, Germany, April 3-5. Her talk is called 'Die Entwicklung von Exhaustivität in Spaltkonstruktionen, Fragen und Quantifikatoren in Deutschen und Englischen Kindern'.
Tom Ernst at OSU
Tom Ernst is giving at invited talk at NAACL 20 (North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics) at The Ohio State University on April 25. The talk is called 'Adverbs and Positive Polarity in Mandarin'. Tom writes, "This meeting is a celebration of the conference's 20th anniversary; I was involved in getting it established 20 years ago and have served as NACCL's coordinator until this year." Very cool!
Angela Carpenter's Dissertation now Available
Angela Carpenter's dissertation Learning Artificial Languages: The Role of Universal Grammar is now available on Amazon.
[Thanks Kathy!]
March 20, 2008
UMass Amherst WCCFL 27 Acceptances
UMass Amherst Linguistics will be well-represented at the upcoming WCCFL 27, UCLA, May 16-18, 2008.
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito: Exceptional scope across islands
- Jesse Aron Harris: Interpreting raising and matching analyses of relative clauses: Two roads to Heim's ambiguity
- Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner: Reduplication without RED: evidence from 'diddly'-infixation
March 13, 2008
Team Kingston at NEST
On March 8, John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, and Eve Brenner-Alsop presented a talk called "Contextual effects on the perception of duration in speech and non-speech" at NEST (New England Sequence and Timing). NEST was held at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. Michael Key and Sarah Watsky attended the meeting and helped quell the unruly hordes.
March 6, 2008
UMass Amherst Linguists at CUNY 2008
CUNY 2008 takes place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 13-15. A number of UMass Amherst linguists will be presenting:
- Lyn Frazier, Helen Majewski, Paula Menendez-Benito and Keith Rayner: The Puzzle of Processing Any in Subtrigging Contexts
- Tanja Heizmann: (Un)Frozen Scope in English and German Double Object Constructions
- Kathryn Pruitt: Mapping Prosody to Interpretation in Alternative Questions
February 28, 2008
Andrew McKenzie at CLS 44
Andrew McKenzie's paper 'Kiowa switch-reference and variable-based contextual restriction' was accepted for presentation at CLS 44, University of Chicago, April 24-26, 2008.
February 21, 2008
Maria Biezma at the Penn Colloquium
Maria Biezma is presenting a paper called 'On deontic modality in Spanish' at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium, February 22-24.
February 14, 2008
Key and Kingston to LabPhon 11
Mike Key and John Kingston have had papers accepted to LabPhon 11, which will be held at Victoria University of Wellingston, NZ, June 30-July 2. Mike's is called 'Interactive and autonomous modes of speech perception: Consonant place discrimination', and John's is called 'The independence of auditory and categorical effects on speech perception'.
February 7, 2008
Topics in Ellipsis Hits the Shelves
He did.
January 24, 2008
Parsons Yazzie and Speas Textbook in Stores Now
In bookstores now, Diné Bizaad Bínáhoo'aah: Rediscovering The Navajo Language Description, by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie and Peggy Speas.
December 13, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists at the LSA
A number of South College linguists will be presenting work at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, January 3-6, 2008.
November 15, 2007
Popular Review of the Prism of Grammar
Tom Roeper's book The Prism of Grammar was reviewed by William O'Grady in the Columbia Teacher's College Record, one of the premier education journals. Check it out.
October 25, 2007
Speas and Parsons Yazzie Navajo Textbook
Peggy Speas and Evangeline Parsons Yazzie have published a textbook on Navajo, and it is currently available for pre-order.
September 13, 2007
Sinn und Bedeuting 12 Presenters
A number of UMass Amherst linguists are presenting work at Sinn und Bedeutung 12, in Oslo, September 20-22:
| Amy Rose Deal | Property-type objects and modal embedding |
| Luis Alonso-Ovalle (UMass Boston; 2005 UMass Amherst PhD) | Innocent Exclusion in an Alternative Semantics |
| Ana Arregui (Ottawa; 2003 UMass Amherst PhD) | On past facts and the semantics of counterfactuals |
| Francesca Foppolo (Milano-Bicocca; former SC visitor) | Between 'cost' and 'default' of scalar implicature |
| Irene Heim (1982 UMass Amherst PhD) | Invited talk |
| Valentine Hacquard (Maryland; 2006-7 Partee Visiting Professor) | Restructuring and implicative properties of volere |
| Uli Sauerland (ZAS; former SC visitor) | Hardt’s surprising sloppy readings: A flat binding account |
| Lynsey Wolter (Rochester; former SC visitor) | That is Rosa: Identificational sentences as intensional predication |
Amy Rose Deal in Manhattan and Boston
Amy Rose Deal will given an invited talk on Sept 25 at the CUNY syntax supper entitled 'Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce'. She will also present related work at the MIT ergativity research seminar on Oct 31.
August 30, 2007
UMass Amherst Linguists at GALA
The most prominent three-day biannual European conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA, Sept 6-8, Barcelona) features no less than 13 UMass Amherst people presenting 10 papers and posters: faculty member Tom Roeper, students Helen Stickney and Keir Moulton, UMass Amherst-Smith collaborators Jill de Villiers, Kate Hobbs, Catherine Léger, alums Bart Hollebrandse, Anna Perez (UMass Amherst Spanish), and Miren Hodgson (UMass Amherst Spanish), former visitors Angeliek van Hout, Petra Schulz, Magda Oiry, Eric-Jan Smits, and Kazuko Yatsushiro. In addition, a special session on Theory of Mind was jointly organized by Bart Hollebrandse and former visitor Uli Sauerland.
No other institution in the world comes even close to having this level of representation.
[Thanks Tom!]
The Prism of Grammar in the Vocabula Review
A chapter from Tom Roeper's new book The Prism of Grammar was featured in The Vocabula Review this month.
May 31, 2007
Bhatt and Butt Found Online Journal of South Asian Linguistics
Rajesh Bhatt and Miriam Butt have not only founded an innovative new journal, but they've done it in an innovative way: online. The Journal of South Asian Linguistics is published by CSLI. Visit the website for information about how to submit work. The first issue is due out in January. Wow, thank you Rajesh and Miriam!
New Book by John McCarthy
John McCarthy's new book is out: Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory. It's the first book in the new book series, Advances in Optimality Theory (Equinox Publishing). The series editors are Armin Mester (1986 UMass Amherst PhD; now Professor at UCSC) and Ellen Woolford.
Michael Becker Report from Israel
Michael Becker is teaching and doing research in Israel this semester. He's been busy running experiments in Ram Frost's lab. He writes, "Ram has very generously let me join his team of grad students who run dozens of psycholinguistic experiments every semester. "
In June, he will be talking in Amsterdam about joint work with Peter Jurgec at the workshop on segments and tone. From Amsterdam, he will continue to CASTL to give an informal talk about allomorph selection in Hebrew. Back in Israel, he will give the same talk more formally at IATL, "but it will almost certainly be too warm for a tie".
This Tuesday (May 29), Michael returned to teaching his course at Ben-Gurion University, for the first time since March, after the 41-day student strike ended with no real achievements for the students, sadly.
Michael closed by saying, "Looking forward to being back on the right side of the Atlantic again".
Workshop Report: Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory
The workshop Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory was held at the University of Michigan, May 18-20. It was organized by UMass Amherst alum Andries Coetzee (2004 UMass Amherst PhD; now Assistant Professor at University of Michigan) and had a large UMass Amherst contingent amongst the participants. Presenters included Joe Pater and alums Ellen Broselow (1976 PhD; Professor at Stonybrook University), Andries Coetzee, and Elliott Moreton (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC). Maria Gouskova (2003 PhD; now Assistant Professor at NYU) and Jen Smith (2002 PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC) were also in attendance. All involved judged the conference a huge success, and it looks like it will be held again elsewhere in the near future.
May 17, 2007
SULA 4
SULA 4 takes place in São Paulo, May 24-26. The program includes papers by Amy Rose Deal, Andrew McKenzie, and Keir Moulton, as well as a commentary by Angelika Kratzer.
SALT 17 Report
There was a very strong UMass Amherst presence at SALT 17 this past weekend. Many students turned out to hear the talks and ask insightful questions. And the program included a joint paper by Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi, a joint paper by Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Peggy Speas, as well as an invited lecture by UMass Amherst Linguistics alum Gennaro Chierchia (1984 PhD; now Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics at Harvard) and a paper by former visitor Uli Sauerland (ZAS).
Titan Arum (the Corpse Flower)
[Thanks for the photo Barbara!]
March 15, 2007
Team Kingston at Haskins Lab
Team Kingston (John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Dan Mash, and Eve Brenner-Alsop) is going to present a talk titled 'Contextual effects on the perception of duration in speech and non-speech' at the upcoming workshop New England Sequencing and Timing (NEST) at Haskins Lab, May 17.
Lisa Sanders (UMass Amherst Psychology) is also giving a talk: 'Temporally selective attention modulates early auditory processing: Event-related potential evidence'.
March 8, 2007
SULA Acceptances
SULA 4 (Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas) will take place May 24-26, 2007, in São Paulo. Three UMass Amherst linguists are presenting:
In addition, Angelika Kratzer is a member of the SULA scientific committee.
SALT 17 Acceptances
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists will be presenting at SALT 17, UConn, May 11-13:
- Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Peggy Speas: Evidential marking, interrogtives, and the maxim of quality
- Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi: Direct comparisons: Resurrecting the direct analysis of phrasal comparatives
February 22, 2007
Cherlon, Rajesh, and Lyn at WCCFL
Cherlon Ussery's paper 'What It Means to AGREE: the Behavior of Case and Phi Features in Icelandic Control' was accepted to WCCFL 26, UC Berkeley, April 27-29.
Also on the program: Rajesh Bhatt and Shoichi Takahashi (UMass Amherst/Tokyo University). Their talk is called 'Direct comparisons: Resurrecting the direct analysis of phrasal comparatives'.
And Lyn Frazier is an invited speaker!
February 8, 2007
Tom Roeper's New Book
We're a bit late on this, but we won't let that get in the way of our celebration: Tom Roeper's new book The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism has been published by MIT Press. The title says it all: this is serious linguistics that aims to provide important general lessons and insights about the human experience.
Update: It turns out that we're not late on this, we're early. Amazon says January 1, but they apparently haven't told MIT Press about this. We can, it seems, expect the book in early March, at which point we should all write reviews at Amazon.
December 21, 2006
Good Luck at the LSA!
Many from South College are giving talks and interviews at the 2007 LSA Annual Meeting, January 4-7, in Anaheim, California.
A special note for those of you who are giving interviews: We assume you are busy estimating the number of bicycles in the United States and imagining how you'd design Bill Gates' bathroom. Good. But we recently learned, via experts in the department, that you need to be prepared for an even tougher question: Your interviewer might have the nerve to say, out of fatigue or malice, "So, tell us a bit about yourself." How can you turn that into a friendly, modest, relatively short, but quietly self-serving reply?
Current UMass Amherst Grad Students Presenting
(let us know if we missed anyone)
Kathryn Flack: Phonotactic restrictions across prosodic domains
Matthew Wolf: Vice-versa as contrastive focus
Helen Stickney: Children's acquisition of the partitive: A deficient DP
Shai Cohen: Too in the complement of the verb believe
Shigeto Kawahara (with Matthew Wolf): A root-initial-accenting suffix in Japanese
Cherlon Ussery: AGREE to control: Case optionality in Icelandic
Michael Becker (with Nihan Ketrez an Andrew Nevins): When and why to ignore lexical patterns in Turkish obstruent alternations
Adam Werle: Three approaches to Serbo-Croation second-position clitic reordering
Anna Verbuk: Why children do not compute irrelevant scalar implicatures
There are also boatloads of South College alums presenting their work --- check out the full schedule for more details.
Update: The Annual Meeting of SSILA happens at the same time, in the same impersonal conference center, as the LSA. Elena Benedicto (1998 UMass Amherst PhD) is giving a talk, as is Emmon Bach, in a joint presentation with UBC-ers Fiona Campbell and Pat Shaw.
December 7, 2006
Roeper and Verbuk at ZAS
Tom Roeper and Anna Verbuk gave an invited joint talk 'Implicatures and Discourse in Pronoun Resolution' at the Conference on Intersentential Pronominal Reference in Child and Adult Language that took place at the Centre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals Research (ZAS) in Berlin, December 1-2.
November 9, 2006
Report from BUCLD
Liane Jeschull writes
UMass Amherst was well represented at BUCDL 31. Altogether, there were nine presentations by former and current UMass Amherst students, visitors and allied faculty:
- Jill and Peter de Villiers
- Tanja Heizmann
- Bart Hollebrandse
- Liane Jeschull
- Catherine Léger
- Magda Oiry
- Anne-Michelle Tessier
- Angeliek van Hout
- Anna Verbuk
Magda, Tanja and Catherine provided for an entire session solely representing research by the UMass Amherst Acquisition Group.
I personally was very pleased to receive a Paula Menyuk Travel Award.
Outshining the success of the conference, however, latest news from Tom and Laura and their new grandchild quickly spread and engaged BUCLD conferees...
[Thanks Liane!]
November 2, 2006
Michael Becker Talk at Yale
Michael Becker is giving a talk at the Turkish Linguistics Workshop, Yale, November 11. He is presenting joint work with Nihan Ketrez and Andrew Nevins.
October 12, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at The OSU
Craige Roberts is hosting an all-star workshop on presuppositions accommodation at The OSU, October 13-15, as part of The Pragmatics Initiative. Lyn Frazier is giving an invited lecture on novel definites, and Florian Schwarz has a poster on the morphosemantics of definites. There are in addition a number of distinguished UMass Amherst Linguistics alums involved: Kai von Fintel is giving an invited paper, and Dorit Abusch, Mats Rooth, Greg Carlson, and Nirit Kadmon are commentators.
Talks by Adam Werle
Adam Werle is having a busy semester. On September 29, he spoke at the University of Victoria: The syntax-phonology interface and clisis in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian and Ditidaht.
He is in addition presenting a paper at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the LSA: Serbo-Croatian second-position clisis by PF movement versus copy selection.
And he'll have another paper at SSILA 2007: Second-position clitics and second-position suffixes in Southern Wakashan.
More LSA Acceptances
Michael Becker, Shai Cohen, Kathryn Flack, Shigeto Kawahara, Helen Stickney, Cherlon Ussery, Matt Wolf, Adam Werle, ... the list of UMass Amherst linguists giving papers at the 2007 LSA Meeting keeps growing...
October 5, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at NELS 37
p>NELS 37 is at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 13-15. There are lots of South College people involved.Lisa Selkirk is an invited speaker.
Two current grads are giving talks: Keir Moulton and Youri Zabbal.
One current BA student (!) is giving a talk: Lisa Shiozaki.
And a number of alums are on the program as well: Elliott Moreton (2002 PhD, now Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel-Hill), Bernhard Schwarz (2000 PhD, now Assistant Professor at McGill), and Paul Portner (1992 PhD, now Associate Professor at Georgetown).
UMass Amherst LSA Acceptances
The LSA has made it decisions for the 2007 Annual Meeting, which is being held in Anaheim, California, January 4-7. We're starting to get word of acceptances. So far: Michael Becker, Shai Cohen, Kathryn Flack, Shigeto Kawahara, and Matt Wolf. There are probably more. We'll have a fuller report in December.
September 14, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at Sinn und Bedeutung 11
UMass Amherst Linguistics will be well represented at Sinn und Bedeutung 11, September 24-25, in the Departament de Traducció i Filologia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
- Valentine Hacquard: Speaker- vs. Subject-Oriented Modals: a Split in Implicative Behavior
- Yurie Hara: On Quantification over Questions: a Case Study of Exhaustification in Japanese
- Gennaro Chierchia (1984 UMass Amherst PhD)
- Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD)
September 7, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at the BU Child Language Conference
The UMass Amherst Acquisition Group will be well represented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 31), November 2-5. Indeed, one of the (unfortunately few) theoretical sessions will consist entirely of South College denizens (Tanja, Magda, Catherine):
Students and former students
- Tanja Heizmann
- Anna Verbuk
- Liane Jeschull
- Bart Hollebrandse
- Anne Michelle-Tessier
Current and recent visitors
- Catherine Legere
- Magda Oiry
- Angeliek van Hout
In addition, Jill de Villiers (Smith Psychology and one of our allied faculty members) is presenting.
[Thanks Tom!]
August 31, 2006
Report from GALANA 2
GALANA 2 (McGill University, August 17-19, 2006) was dominated by UMass Amherst linguists.
Helen Stickney and Liane Jeschull compiled a photo album.
[Thanks Liane and Helen!]
Report from Osaka
The 4th Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics Conference was held in Osaka, August 17-19. Many UMass Amherst linguists presented their work:
- Lisa Shiozaki (UMass Amherst Linguistics undergraduate)
- Shigeto Kawahara and Ben Gelbart (UMass Amherst graduate student, alumnus)
- Junko Ito and Armin Mester (UMass alumni)
- Mana Kobuchi-Philip (UMass Amherst Linguistics BA)
- Yurie Hara (UMass Amherst Linguistics visiting scholar, JSPS Research Fellow at Kyoto University)
Thanks Shigeto
July 27, 2006
Team Kingston in Paris
Team Kingston at LabPhon in Paris this year, plus Jaye Padgett (1991 UMass Amherst PhD):
From left: Eve Brenner-Alsop, Dan Mash, Shigeto Kawahara, John Kingston, and Jaye Padgett
[Thanks Shigeto!]
Shigeto Kawahara on Half Rhymes in Rap
Shigeto Kawahara's paper 'Half rhymes in Japanese rap lyrics and knowledge of similarity' has been accepted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
June 29, 2006
Amy Rose Deal has a new Snippet
Amy Rose Deal's squib 'Does English have a genitive case?' has just been published in Snippets. She writes that the highlights include "-analysis of your all's" and "citations from the H section". We'll add that she has occasion to cite Scott McClellan. Here's the direct link so that you can find out what that means.
May 18, 2006
GALANA 2 Acceptances
Della Chambless, Liane Jeschull, Karen Jesney, Helen Stickney, Anna Verbuk, and Jill de Villiers, had papers accepted to GALANA 2, which will take place at McGill University, August 17-19, 2006. Joe Pater is an invited speaker.
Tom Roeper in Cyprus
Tom Roeper is in Greece this week. He'll be at the Conference on the InterPhases, May 18-20. The conference is part of a celebration giving Noam Chomsky an honorary degree from the University of Cyprus. Tom's paper is called 'LF effects in DP: Evidence for phases and edges'. It is part of the special Edges in Syntax workshop.
May 11, 2006
Second-Year Miniconference
This year's Second-Year Miniconference will take place on Friday, May 18, from 9:00-12:00. It will probably be on Floor 9 of the Campus Center. Check WHISC next week for the precise and unhedged details.
| 9:00-9:30 | Mike Key | Metrical attraction and Bantu imbrication |
| 9:30-10:00 | Andrew McKenzie | On the attraction of universal quantifiers |
| 10:00-10:30 | Leah Bateman | Sandhi domains in Shanghai Chinese |
| 10:30-11:00 | break | |
| 11:00-11:30 | Cherlon Ussery | Case transmission in Icelandic control |
| 11:30-12:00 | Elena Innes | Learning interacting phonological alternations |
[Thanks Joe!]
May 4, 2006
Proceedings of NELS 35 Now Available
The Proceedings of NELS 35 are now available from BookSurge:
Leah Bateman and Cherlon Ussery, eds. 2006. Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society: Volume 1 [$18.99] and Volume 2 [$20.99]
Many thanks to Leah and Cherlon for editing, and to Jan for resolving a daunting succession of font problems.
[Thanks Matt!]
WCCFL Photo
Much of the UMass Amherst crowd at WCCFL 25 this past weekend: Jan, Ilaria, Marcin, Anne-Michelle, Ania, Alexandra Teodorescu (UT Austin), and Kylito.
[Thanks Ilaria!]
April 27, 2006
Paula Aden at the Undergraduate Research Conference
Paula Aden, erstwhile DARLing and fellow newsletter writer, is presenting at the 12th Umass Undergraduate Research Conference in Boston today (April 27). Her talk is called 'Positionally licensed extended lapses'. Her advisor for the project is John McCarthy.
UMass Amherst Linguists at LABPHON 10
Our phoneticians, current and graduated, are everywhere these days. Shigeto Kawahara kindly pulled together the following summary of UMass Amherst people on LABPHON 10 program. LABPHON takes place in Paris, June 29-July 1.
Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole, Kevin Roon, Chakir Zeroual. Variation in timing and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic clusters. (Adamantios Gafos was a visiting professor here.)
Scott Myers, Benjamin Hansen (University of Texas, Austin). The origin of vowel length neutralization patterns. (Scott Myers, 1986 UMass Amherst PhD)
John Kingston, Della Chambless, Daniel Mash, Jonah Katz, Eve Brenner, Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Amherst). Sequential contrast and the perception of co-articulated segments'. (Daniel and Jonah are recent UMass Amherst Linguistics BAs; Eve is a current major; Della and Shigeto are current grad students.)
Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Amherst). 'Sonorant Geminate: Aperceptually-grounded phonological constraint'.
Jaye Padgett, Marzena Zygis (UCSC; ZAS). 'A perceptual study of Polish fricatives, and its relation to historical sound change'. (Jaye Padgett, 1991 UMass Amherst PhD).
April 6, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists in Aalborg
Helen Stickney's paper has been accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Language Acquisition at the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics 2006 in Aalborg, Denmark, at the end of June.
Fall 2005 visitor Erik-Jan Smits will also be presenting a paper that he coauthored with Bart Hollebrandse (2000 UMass Amherst PhD) and Tom Roeper co-authored.
UMass Amherst Linguists at GLOW 29
Lisa Selkirk is an invited speaker in the Workshop on Prosodic Phrasing at GLOW 29, April 6-8 in Barcelona. Her talk is called Minimalist spellout of prosodic major phrases.
John McCarthy is also an invited speaker. His talk is called 'Derivations: Optimal and otherwise'.
And 1998 UMass Amherst PhD Ania Lubowicz (Assistant Professor at USC) is a speaker at the workshop on phonological opacity. Her talk is called Opaque allomorphy in Polish.
March 30, 2006
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.
March 16, 2006
UMass Amherst Linguists at SALT
SALT 16 takes place at the University of Tokyo, March 22-24. The program is full of South College-goers:
Angelika Kratzer is an invited speaker. Her talk is called Building a pronoun.
Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called On concealed questions.
Ilaria Frana is giving a talk called Wondering about concealed questions.
Florian Schwarz is giving a talk called On NEEDING propositions and LOOKING FOR properties.
Irene Heim (1982 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called 'Little'.
March 9, 2006
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:
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!]