Whamit!

[From Jessica Coon:]

The time has come to start thinking about this year’s ECO5 Syntax Workshop. ECO5 is an informal, student-run workshop, where grad students from five East Coast linguistics programs (MIT, Harvard, UMass, UConn and Maryland) can share new work and work in progress. This year it will be held at UConn on Saturday March 8, 2008.

Talks are 20 minutes with 10 for questions, and there is room for three presentations from each school. If you are interested in presenting your work at UConn, please let me know. Again, it is an informal and friendly conference, and work in progress is more than welcome. Sign up for the three MIT slots will be on a first-come/first-serve basis, unless there is a lot of interest, in which case preference will be given to people who have not presented at ECO5 and who have less presenting experience generally. This is a great place to get some presentation experience.

Abstracts for the program will be due on March 1st, but they are asking for a preliminary list of presenters by Feb 15th. Once we have figured who will be going (you can also come along if you’re not presenting), we can arrange for car pools.

A warm welcome to several new visitors who have recently arrived in the department:

• Zhijun Jin (Professor, East China Normal University)
  Visiting Scholar until December 08
  Research interests: second language acquisition, language change and American second language education, including teaching methods, second language teachers formation, etc.

• Seok Han Kang (Professor, University of Incheon)
  Post-Doctoral Fellow until December 08
  Research interests: prosody, phonology, developmental structure for ESL, the relationship between production and perception

• Joan Mascaró (Professor, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catedràtic d’Universitat)
  Visiting Scholar for spring semester
  Research interests: phonology, morphology and romance languages; stress-controlled harmonic systems

More visitors will be arriving in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for further announcements!

We will continue this term in the Ling-lunch tradition. We will meet every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 pm in room 32-461. And, of course, we are looking for speakers for this term. As you may know, Ling-lunch is a perfect space for presenting work in progress and practicing conference talks. You can also present more developed papers, of course.

Please contact Jen (jenmich AT …), if you want to present something.

The GLOW31 Programme (March 25—29, Newcastle University) lists the following current MIT linguistics and recent PhDs:

• David Pesetsky (MIT): “Same Recipe, Different Ingredients: Music Syntax is Language Syntax”
• Omer Preminger (MIT): “Long-Distance Agreement in Basque, Locally Speaking”
• Rajesh Bhatt (UMass, Amherst and Umass) and Shoichi Takahashi (Amherst/University of Tokyo): “When to reduce and when not to: crosslinguistic variation in phrasal”
• Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (METU): “Linearizing Multidominance Structures”

And slightly less recent PhDs (last 10 years):

• Jonathan Bobaljik and Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut): “Word order and scope: transparent interfaces and the 3/4 signature”
• Ora Matushansky (CNRS/Université Paris 8): “More of the same”
• Idan Landau (Ben Gurion University): “What Case Transmission Tells Us About Control”
• Marie-Hélène Côté (University of Ottawa): “Is syllabification categorical or gradient?”

[Thanks to David Pesetsky for this news item!]

[From Andrew Nevins:]

In case you’ve always wanted to write papers with beautifully formatted trees, automatically numbered examples and footnotes, smooth IPA fonts without feeling guilty about supporting SIL, platform independent PC/Mac compatible, straight-to-PDF, free software that involves no fighting with animated paperclips but only pure logical function application, I’ll hold a 3 day tutorial on the basics of LaTeX Tuesday 1/22 through Thursday 1/24 in Boylston 303 at Harvard. All are welcome. If you could let me know in advance whether you are a Mac or PC user, I can send you some pointers to get LaTeX installed before you come. Bring your laptop if you want — but our primary focus will be on the syntax of LaTeX and how to do linguistics-specific things.

Mac: http://www.tug.org/mactex/
PC: http://miktex.org/2.7/Setup.aspx

The Manchester Phonology Meeting this year will be held May 22–24. The theme for invited talks this year is “Phonology and the mental lexicon”, but submissions on any topic are encouraged.

The deadline for abstracts is Feb 25 (an official call for papers will be forthcoming). For more information, see:

http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/16mfm.html

Reminder: The IAP statistics/R tutorial will take place this week M-F 11am-1pm in 32-D831. Contact Peter Graff (graff@mit.edu) for details.

MITing of the Minds 2008
4th Annual MIT Philosophy Alumni Conference
Thu Jan 24, Fri Jan 25, 09:30am-05:45pm, 32-D461

This year’s MITing of the Minds is the Fourth Annual MIT Philosophy Alumni Conference. The conference will showcase recent work in a variety of areas in contemporary philosophy. Presentations will cover topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, and will be accessible to a broad audience. Each day will feature talks by MIT faculty members, current students, and alumni of the graduate program.

Web: http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/mm/

FiLmprov
Parade: Animated Films with Musical Improvisation
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 8 PM.
Free.
Killian Hall, MIT, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

Animated films by Kate Matson with jazz improvisation by the FiLmprov Ensemble: Peter Bloom, Mark Harvey, Jay Keyser, Bill Lowe, Chris Rakowski, and Phil Scarff

Presented by MIT Music and Theater Arts

Join Kate Matson’s theatre of visual improvisation and the inspired brass band journey through time and space as FiLmprov presents Parade.

The FiLmprov Ensemble includes six renowned improvisers: Peter Bloom, flute and saxophones, Mark Harvey, trumpet, Jay Keyser, trombone, Bill Lowe, bass trombone and tuba, Chris Rakowski, accordion and saxophones, and Phil Scarff, saxophones. These musicians have performed with a wide array of artists, including the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert Ensemble, Natraj, the New Liberty Jazz Band, and Cecil Taylor.

Kate Matson has presented her animated films at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harvard University, MIT, the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, in New York City, among other venues.

http://filmprov.tripod.com

A Brief Introduction to the Kinande Language and Kinande Linguistics

This IAP class (organized by Jessica Coon and Patrick Jones) will introduce basic elements of the morphology, syntax, and phonology of Kinande, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the course of the 3 day class, students will develop a basic understanding of how words and sentences are formed in the language, and will also be introduced to the body of work on Kinande currently extant within the linguistics literature.

Specifics linguistic topics will include: vowel harmony, vowel coalescence, tone, nominal and verbal morphology, the role of word-internal domains, agreement, clause structure, topicalization, and question formation.

Time: 2:00—4:00 PM on Jan 28, 29, 30.
Place: 8th floor conference room in the Linguistics and Philosophy Dept.

Food will be provided!

Publishing Smart: A Hands-on Workshop on Journal Quality Measures and Publisher Copyright Policies

Addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.

WHEN: Friday, January 18, 2 - 3 pm
WHERE: 14N-132, DIRC

Don’t forget: this year’s WCCFL abstract deadline is 1/15

WCCFL 27 will be held at UCLA, 16-18 May 2008. In addition to the regular sessions, there will be two special themes:

• Experimental Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics
• Explaining Phonological Typology: Channel or Analytic Bias?

Deadline: Tues 1/15, 5pm pacific time

For details, see: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/wccfl27/Home.html

We will be learning about probability theory and how to implement it in the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. No previous knowledge of Statistics is required. The tutorial will take place in daily 2 hour long sessions from the 21st until the 24th of January 2008.

(For details, stay tuned, or contact Peter Graff: graff@mit.edu)

Thursday, 17 January, 2-4pm, in 32-D461

Raj Singh: “On the proviso problem for presuppositions” (practice job talk)

Stay up to date on developments in the phonetics lab — be on the phonetics lab mailing list!

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/phonlab

Phonology Circle
date: 15 Jan
time: 4 PM
location: 32D-831
presenter: Donca Steriade
title: Metrical Evidence for an Interlude Theory of Weight [pdf abstract]

Patrick Jones and Jessica Coon are planning a short introduction to Kinande for the last two weeks of IAP. The intro is primarily intended for students who will be taking Topics in a Less Familiar Language next semester, but is of course open to all. More details will follow.

Gillian Gallagher will present at ConSOLE XVI (Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe) in Paris January 10. She’s presenting joint work with Jessica Coon, entitled “Identity and Consonant Harmony in Chol (Mayan).”

6.911 Transcribing Prosodic Structure of Spoken Utterances with ToBI
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos
Tue, Thu, Jan 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 24, 29, 31, 11am-01:00pm, 32-044

Training in the ToBI system (for ‘To’nes and ‘B’reak ‘I’ndices) to transcribe the prosodic structure of spoken utterances in American English. 8 sessions will combine new ToBI tutorial presentation with extensive practice and discussion; opportunities to practice labelling outside of class. Participants are encouraged to submit sample utterances of particular interest to them, for general discussion. Class is appropriate for undergrad or grad students with background in linguistics (phonology or phonetics), cognitive psychology (psycholinguistics), speech acoustics or music, who wish to learn about the prosody of speech, i.e. the intonation, rhythm, grouping and prominence patterns of spoken utterances, prosodic differences that signal meaning & phonetic implementation.

More info: Web page from 2006 version of the class

The podcast team from the MIT Libraries interviewed Kai about the new journal Semantics & Pragmatics. The interview is about 11 minutes long. Take a listen!.

Quite a few members of our department were in Chicago this past weekend at the annual meeting of the LSA. Apart from Irene, David, Kai, and Jessica conducting many interviews of candidates for our open position, and apart from our own students interviewing for jobs, the following members of the department (and recent graduates) gave talks:

• Adam Albright: From clusters to words: grammatical models of nonce-word acceptability
• Tamina Stephenson: Epistemic modals and PRO
• Jessica Coon: Interrogative possessors and the problem with pied-piping in Chol Mayan
• Michael Kenstowicz: A phonetic study of Kinande ATR harmony
• Edward Flemming: Asymmetries between assimilation and epenthesis
• Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (Middle East Technical University): All auxiliary clitics in Croatian occupy the same syntactic position

Jessica Coon also gave a talk on “The source of split ergativity in Chol Mayan” at the concurrent meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).

And, subprime was voted as the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Among the winners in other categories: the prefix and combining form green- (as in greenwashing) won for both “most useful” and “most likely to succeed,” Googlegänger won for “most creative,” toe-tapper won for “most outrageous,” and human terrain team won for “most euphemistic.”

This is the first issue of our (more or less) weekly newsletter. Your editors are Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Jonah Katz. Thanks to Chris Potts (WHISC) and Jim McCloskey (WHASC) for advice. Thanks to Chris Naylor for technical assistance.

Members of the MIT Linguistics community are urged to supply material for the newsletter. The easiest way is to email us at whamit AT mit DOT edu. Please also send us any and all feedback on the newsletter.