Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Issue of Monday, January 21st, 2008

LaTeX for Linguists Tutorial TUE-THURS this week, 3-4:30pm, Boylston 303

[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

Manchester Phonology Meeting

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

IAP Statistics/R Tutorial

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

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/

Film and Music event Jan. 25!

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

IAP: Intro to Kinande

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!