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publications/presentations
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!
[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'.
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!
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!
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!]
UMass Amherst WCCFL 27 Acceptances
UMass Amherst Linguistics will be well-represented at the upcoming WCCFL 27, UCLA, May 16-18, 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.
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
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.
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.
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'.
Topics in Ellipsis Hits the Shelves
He did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!]
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'.
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!]
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.
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.
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...
UMass Amherst Linguists at NELS 37
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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:
