Rajesh Bhatt is newly back from a sort of world tour. He and Shoichi Takahashi gave a joint talk at GLOW 31 on March 31, and he gave a UCLA colloquium based on joint work with Shoichi on April 18. Both talks reported on their ongoing joint work on the variation found in phrasal comparatives focusing on English, Hindi-Urdu, and Japanese.
From Kyle Johnson, Guru of Gurus:
This year's syntax guru arrived Tuesday, April 1, and will stay with us until April 15.
He is Jason Merchant, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. Jason is known best, perhaps, for his work on Sluicing — a construction that he literally wrote the book on. That book, published in 2001, focuses on the island relieving property of Sluicing, and outlines an ambitious project that tracks this property back to slight mismatches which arise between sluices and their antecedents. It inspired a slew of papers and dissertations on islands, sluicing and ellipsis. He followed up this book with cross-linguistic work on Sluicing, including two influential papers on sluicing in Greek, and research on "fragment answers," which he shows to have a syntax and semantics related to Sluices. In a paper that has circulated for some time, he also uses Sluicing to reveal an effect that he explains with an OT-style violable constraint on ellipsis (MAX ELIDE) that has generated considerable interest in the ellipsis community.
Unsurprisingly, he has worked on other forms of ellipsis as well. His important paper with Chris Kennedy on attributive comparative deletion (published in NLLT in 2000) kicked off another line of papers and dissertations, and continues to influence work on this construction. His pair of papers on Antecedent Condition Deletion in the journals Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry zero in on an intriguing problem for the standard accounts of this construction. And in the last year or two, he has been investigating why certain forms of ellipsis (VPE, for instance) allow mismatches between the voice of the elided phrase and the voice of its antecedent, while other forms of ellipsis (Pseudogapping, Gapping and Sluicing) don't.
You can learn more about his work, his interests, and his face, from his webpage.
As those of you familiar with his publications will know, Jason's polyglotism enriches his work with a useful comparative dimension. He has a surprisingly complete grasp of how islands and ellipses vary cross-linguistically. He also has a surprisingly complete grip on the syntax canon. He is among the best read syntacticians I know. He will be hanging out in Barbara's office, on the third floor. His time with us is short; be sure to use him early and often.
[Thanks Kyle!]
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!
Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst Linguistics visitor) defended her dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance movement in French at Nantes, March 17, with Bernadette Plunkett and Tom Roeper on the committee.
[Thanks Tom!]
From Tom Roeper:
Celia Jakubowicz, the leading light of work in gernerative acqjuisition work in France for more than 20 years, died last week, of cancer. She worked at CNRS in Paris. She visited our department many times and gave talks at various workshops we held, reaching back to 1983, and most recently three years ago, so several of our faculty and students knew her.
She was involved in extending some of our work on wh-movement to French and had begun work on disordered populations in that area as well. She worked with determination until the end, editing a volume with another visitor here, Petra Schulz, which is still being completed and will be dedicated to her. The acquisition community has lost an important figure and friend. Celia was Argentinian and came to Paris as the wife of the Argentinian ambassador.
(I am recollecting these few details from memory because I have not yet gotten any official obituary.)
Eric Potsdam
University of Florida (and current UMass Amherst visitor)
Backward control in Malagasy and selective copy pronunciation
Thursday, November 8, 8:00 pm, Amy Rose's place
Edward Garrett, from Eastern Michigan University, will be visiting to work with the Evidentials project, September 21-25.
On Saturday, September 22, there will be an informal get-together + barbecue at Peggy's house (253 Shutesbury Rd., Leverett) beginning at 4:00 pm.
On Monday, September 24, Edward will present some of his work on Tibetan Evidentials to the grant group, at 12:15, in the Partee room.
Then, on Tuesday, September 25, Edward and Leah Bateman will be talking at Smith College about the field work that they did this summer. The meeting at Smith will be in Bass Hall 401 (or larger place to be posted on the door of 401).
All are welcome to any of these events. If you would like to make an appointment to meet with Edward during his visit, contact Peggy.
[Thanks Peggy!]
On Monday, September 17, at 2:30 pm, Markus Bader will speak in Lyn Frazier's graduate psycholinguistics class (Herter 106). The title of his talk is 'Parsing and branching direction.' Everyone is welcome to attend.
[Thanks Lyn!]
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!]
Check out the visiting scholars page of the department website for information about the current crew of visitors.
[Thanks Sarah!]
Liane Jeschull has accepted a permanent teaching position at Harvard University as a preceptor in the Institute for English Language. Congratulations, Liane!
Valentine Hacquard has accepted a tenure-track offer from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
Gaja Jarosz has accepted a tenure-track offer from the Department of Linguistics at Yale.
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!]
Yurie Hara will present a paper a LENLS 2007, June 18-19, Miyazaki, Japan. Yurie's time as a visitor here in South College comes to a close soon. She's headed next to Amsterdam. All the best, Yurie!
Syntax Guru Roumi Pancheva is speaking today (April 26) in a joint meeting of the Syntax and Semantics Readings Groups. Her talk, joint work with Uffe Bergeton, is called 'On the history of English reflexives and intensifiers'. The meeting starts at 8:00 pm at Amy Rose's place.
The semester's final meeting of the Syntax Reading Group will be on May 3. Maziar Toosarvandani will present.
[Thanks Cherlon and Florian!]
Rajesh Bhatt was at OSU earlier this month (April 5-6) to give two talks:
More recently, Rajesh was at GLOW, in Tromso, Norway, also reporting on joint work with Shoichi. Rajesh writes, "This is the only conference I've been to where the conference party involved dog-sledding."
Bart Hollebrandse (2000 UMass Amherst PhD; curently visiting UMass Amherst and Smith) will soon head to Brazil to work with Dan Everett (newly genuinely famous thanks to a lengthy New Yorker story), under a grant run by Manfred Krifka, Uli Sauerland, and Everett. The work relates to tests Bart is developing for verbal and non-verbal recursion.
Bart and Tom Roeper will present a paper at a conference on recursion organized by Everett in Bloomington, April 27-29.
Bill Hagamen passed away on March 26. Barbara Partee has written a lovely essay about Bill's research and teaching on anatomy, his innovative early work on computational linguistics and its pedagogical applications, his long-time involvement with the department, and his friendships with the people in it.
[Thanks Barbara!]
Paul Elbourne is visiting next week. He will guest lecture in Angelika Kratzer's seminar (Tuesday, 2:30 pm, Machmer W-21), and he will also be available for meetings on Monday and on Tuesday morning. Write to Angelika by Friday if you would like to set something up.
[Thanks Angelika!]
From Kyle:
I'm happy to announce that Roumyana Pancheva, this year's Syntax Guru, has arrived to South College where she will be in residence until the end of April. You can find her in Barbara's office.
Professor Pancheva has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California since the completion of her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. She is an expert on an interesting array of subjects in syntax, semantics and neuro-linguistics.
Her dissertation not only studied the free relative in all its glory but discovered much of its glory. It argues that the constrained form of the free relative nonetheless allows it to function in a dizzying array of constructions, including comparatives, concessives and correlatives. She has authored a large body of work on comparatives, conditionals, concessives and correlatives that builds on her dissertation work. In an important paper with Rajesh Bhatt, she has even found the free relative form in conditional sentences (e.g, "If this is a free relative, then it's heavily disguised").
She has also worked on the perfect participle, and its relation to tense, modality and aspect. In a series of interesting papers, one with Arnim von Stechow, she has provided a solution to the so-called present perfect puzzle, which is the name given to the observation that temporal adverbials of a certain sort cannot modify perfects when they are in the present tense (*She has danced yesterday) but can otherwise (She must have danced yesterday). In many closely related languages --- German and Italian for instance --- the present perfect is not constrained in this way. She argues that what makes English different is not the meaning of the perfect, but rather how the meanings of present and past tense are carved out in English as opposed to German or Italian. She has explored how the perfect varies in its form and meaning across a wide range of languages and shown how in some languages, Turkish for example, it can (surprisingly!) have a meaning like that of an evidential.
She has also done extensive work on clitics, especially in the Balkan sprachbund. Some of this work has been diachronic in nature: a good example is her 2005 Natural Language and Linguistic Theory paper in which she chronicles the rise of a second-position clitic in Bulgarian from postverbal clitics. In this work she also argues for a model of clitic placement that divorces it from strictly prosodic, or other phonological, controls, bucking a popular trend in this arena. She is presently working on an NSF project The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic.
And finally, in collaboration with colleagues at USC, she has worked on certain aphasias and on fMRI studies that distinguish semantic anomalies from syntactic ill-formedness. She is presently involved in a study funded by USC's Zumberge Research and Innovation grant that is investigating the fMRI patterns associated with distinguishing weak and strong nominals in the positions that they are licensed.
You can learn more about her research, download some of her papers, and find out what she looks like at her website.
Don't hesitate to get the guru's help on your work --- she's only here for one month!
Roumi Pancheva, our Syntax Guru, will give a talk on Monday, April 2, at 4:00 pm, in Machmer W-21. The title is 'Partitive comparatives'. Here's an abstract.
René Kager
University of Utrecht
Phonological constraints in speech processing
Tuesday, March 27, 4:00 pm, Dickinson 212
Craige Roberts will be visiting in the week of March 26, right after spring break. She will speak in Angelika Kratzer's seminar on situations, and she will be around to talk with people.
[Thanks Angelika!]
Roumyana Pancheva is this year's Syntax Guru. She will be in residence from March 26 until April 30, with a brief sojourn to GLOW in Norway in the middle there.
[Thanks Kyle!]
Craige Roberts will visit Angelika Kratzer's seminar on March 27.
[Thanks Angelika!]
Angela Rickford and John Rickford will visit the UMass Amherst Linguistics Department at the end of April. The visit will include a talk, probably on Friday, April 27. WHISC will have more details later in the semester.
[Thanks Barbara Z P!]
Visiting Professor Gaja Jarosz has filed her Johns Hopkins dissertation. It's called Rich Lexicons and Restrictive Grammars --- Maximum Likelihood Learning in Optimality Theory. Congratulations, Gaja!
Tom Roeper and Bart Hollebrandse are teaching a special evening undergraduate seminar in experiments relating to language acquisition. The course is open to undergrads with experience designing and running such experiments --- an unofficial follow-up to Ling 411 (Introduction to Language Acquisition). It's a great chance to gain more hands-on experience in this kind of research.
The class meets on Monday evenings, starting at 7:30 pm, for about two hours. Contact Tom if you are interested.
Bart Hollebrandse earned his Linguistics PhD from here in 2000. He's now a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Groningen, but he's visiting us this year.
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
Current and recent visitors
In addition, Jill de Villiers (Smith Psychology and one of our allied faculty members) is presenting.
[Thanks Tom!]
Gaja Jarosz will be the 2006-7 Visiting Professor in Phonology. Gaja is finishing now at Johns Hopkins. He research interests include not only phonology, but also computational linguistics, learning models, and language acquistion. It will be a delight to have her perspective on things next year. Welcome!
2006 Syntax Guru Ora Matushansky gave a special lecture on superlatives yesterday (April 26, 3:30 pm). We're sorry to have missed the chance for a preannouncement of this event, but we're happy to report that it was a well-attended and lively discussion.
The talk was called 'Superlatives at the interface'. (That link is to the handout.)
We missed our chance to announce that Meredith Landman was visiting Angelika Kratzer's seminar on pronouns this week. Meredith spoke on Tuesday, April 25. The talk was called 'Possible variables'. It was a thought-provoking, free-ranging discussion of the nature of pronouns, what it means to be an individual, the limits of quantification in natural language, and the nature of the relationship between syntax and semantics.
From Kyle Johnson:
This year's syntax guru is Ora Matushansky. She arrived on April 18, and she will be in residence until Thursday, April 27. She is housed in Barbara Partee's office in South College.
Ora presently has a position as a researcher at CNRS/Universite Paris VIII. She taught previously at L'Ecole Normal Superieure. She finished her PhD at MIT in 2002 with a dissertation on a famous problem in the syntax of DPs -- degree phrase movement (illustrated by, for example: so tedious an email). She squeezed out of that phenomenon an interesting set of conclusions about how the syntax and semantics function together in putting adjectives, numerals and determiners together. She has done interesting work on the syntax of comparatives and superlatives --- constructions related to those studied in her dissertation, on "phases," and what defines them, on the syntax of head movement, on the morphology/syntax interface in Russian inflectional paradigms, on partitives and pseudo- partitives, on the scope of adjectives and on names, and name-like predicates. (This is an incomplete list.) You can learn more about her work, her present research projects, and see what she looks like by visiting her website.
She will give a talk on Wednesday, April 26, at 2:30 pm, on comparatives/superlatives. The title, an abstract, and the location will be posted next week.
[Thanks, Kyle, for bringing in these wonderful visitors!]
Orin Percus will be semanticist in residence here until tomorrow (April 21). This past Tuesday, Orin lectured in Angelika Kratzer's seminar on pronouns. The topic was his joint work with Uli Sauerland on dream reports (Pronoun movement in dream reports).
Angelika writes:
Orin will be sharing Barbara's office with Ora Matushansky. Orin taught here some years ago, and it was he who got Paula Menendez- Benito, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Meredith Landman, and Marcin Morzycki hooked on semantics. They were all in his LING 610 class. When he was teaching here, Orin went out of his way to help students with their generals papers, dissertations, and job talks --- with greatest success --- so don't miss the opportunity to talk to him about your work, whatever it may be!
Orin received his PhD from MIT in 1997 with a thesis that has the simple title Aspects of 'A'. It's not about the first letter of the alphabet, but about the indefinite article. He is probably best known for his 2000 landmark article 'Constraints on some other variables in syntax' (Natural Language Semantics 8(3)), which many have read in one of my recent classes.
