Whamit!

SNEWS (”Southern New England Workshop in Semantics”) has been moved from the fall to the spring semester. The Amherst organizers would like to hold it on one of the four Saturdays of March:

March 07
March 14
March 21
March 28

If you would like to attend but have a conflict any of these days, let Giorgio (gmagri@mit.edu) know. The SNEWS website is still up at the following address:

http://people.umass.edu/harris/snews/snews.html

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and the Department of Linguistics at Harvard will host SULA 5 (Semantics of Under-represented Languages in the Americas) during the week-end of May 15-17 2009.

The call for papers is open, the deadline being January 20, 2009.

More information on the conference can be found on its website:

http://web.mit.edu/sula5/home.html

WAFL6 (Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics) will be held in Nagoya, Japan, May 22-25, 2009. Call for abstracts and other details including invited speakers can be found at the WAFL6 site:

http://www.gcoe.lit.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~wafl6/

UMass is hosting SNEWS (‘Southern New England Workshop in Semantics’) this year. This is an informal, one-day workshop where students can present their ongoing work in Semantics. A semi-functional website is up at:

http://people.umass.edu/harris/snews/snews.html

The organizers are considering the following dates for this year SNEWS:

October 25
November 1
November 15

The MIT contact person is Giorgio (gmagri@mit.edu). Let him know if you would like to present or if you would like to attend but have a conflict with any of the dates above.

MIT Semantics is well represented at Sinn und Bedeutung this year. The conference is taking place September 30 to October 2 in Stuttgart, Germany. The MIT contributions are:

• Martin Hackl (who will join the MIT faculty next year), Jorie Koster-Moeller and Andrea Gottstein (Pomona College): “Processing Opacity”
• Jacopo Romoli (Harvard University) and Yasutada Sudo (MIT): “De re/de dicto Ambiguity and Presupposition Projection”
• Marta Abrusan (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS — MIT alumn): “On wh-Islands”
• Luka Crnic and Tue Trinh (MIT): “Remarks on Embedded Imperatives”
• Raj Singh (MIT): “‘Maximise Presupposition!’ as Blind, Local Blocking”

The date for the second annual of the Northeast Computational Phonology workshop has been set:

• Date: Sat. November 15th
• Location: Yale (New Haven, CT)

Like last year, it will feature a limited number of talks in an informal and friendly setting, designed to keep up to date on computationally-related work going on in the region.

Please talk to Adam if:

1. You are interesting in attending— and if so, whether you would be able to drive, or if you’ll be looking for a ride. (It is, of course, also reachable by train or bus, but it’s quicker by car, so hopefully we may be able to coordinate rides)

2. You might have something you are interested in presenting.

There was a sizable contingent from the department at the Workshop on Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity, hosted by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing during the first week in August. The presenters were:

Claire Halpert: Overlap-Driven Consequences of Nasal Place Assimilation in Zulu.

Jonah Katz (poster): English Compensatory Shortening and Phonetic Representations.

Franz Katzir-Cozier: Encoding of perceived contrast between CC-clusters and their simplified counterparts in coda cluster simplification.

Donca Steriade: Syllabic quantity in Ancient Greek: effects of cluster compressibility.

The 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL18) took place July 21-26 in Seoul. The program included several talks by MIT students and faculty:

Adam Albright: Predicting innovative alternations in Korean verb paradigms (with Yoonjung Kang, University of Toronto)

Hyesun Cho & Maria Giavazzi: Perception of voicing in fricatives

Sachiko Kato: On information packaging of topicalized scrambled sentences in Japanese (with Hiroshi Aoyagi, of Nanzan Univ)

Courtesy of Ora Matushansky (via David Pesetsky):

From left to right: Ora Matushansky, Idan Landau, Martina Gracanin Yuksek, David Pesetsky, Omer Preminger.

The spring installment of the MIT//UMass Meeting in Phonology will take place on Saturday, Mar 29 at MIT (making it a MUMM, following up on last fall’s very successful UMMM in Amherst). Stay tuned for details concerning the time and location!

The preliminary program of talks for WCCFL 27 at UCLA (May 16-18) has been posted, and MIT promises to be well represented! Accepted talks or posters by current or recent MIT affiliates include:

Current MIT graduate students:

• Franz Cozier: Encoding perceived contrast between CC-clusters & simplified counterparts in coda CC simplification
• Jessica Coon: When Ergative = Genitive: Nominals and Split Ergativity
• Maria Giavazzi: On the distribution of velar palatalization in Italian
• Guillaume Thomas: An analysis of the Xiamen Tone Circle
• Gillian Gallagher: Identity and laryngeal features
• Claire Halpert: Overlap-Driven Consequences of Nasal Place Assimilation in Zulu
• Jeremy Hartman: Dwarf-class verbs, Theta-theory, and Argument Linking
• Ezra Keshet: Only the Strong: Restricting Situation Variables Jason Varvoutis: Verification Procedures for Modified Numeral Quantifiers (with Jorie Koster-Moeller and Martin Hackl)

MIT faculty:

• Adam Albright: Chaotic evolution in an unbiased learner

Recent alums:

• Liina Pylkännen (plenary speaker, Saturday)
• Marta Abrusan: An interval-based semantics for degree questions: negative islands and their obviation (with Benjamin Spector)
• Heejeong Ko: Economy in rightward movement: moving into inner edge (with Jae-Young Choi)
• Martin Hackl: Verification Procedures for Modified Numeral Quantifiers (with Jorie Koster-Moeller and Jason Varvoutis); D-Raising in Restrictive Relative Clauses (with Jorie Koster-Moeller)
• Jon Nissenbaum: The scope of too with gapped infinitival clauses (with Bernhard Schwarz)
• Tania Ionin (BCS PhD): An experimental investigation of the semantics and pragmatics of specificity
• Christina Kim (2003 S.B, linguistics minor): Information integration and domain restriction: Interpreting ‘only’ in context (with Christine Gunlogson, Michael Tanenhaus and Jeffrey Runner)

Recent or current visitors:

• Bartosz Wiland: Circumstantial Evidence for Syntactic Head Movement
• Chiyuki Ito: Analogical Changes in the Accent of Sino-Korean Words in Yanbian Korean

[Thanks to David Pesetsky]

The ECO5 Syntax Workshop will take place at UConn this Saturday, March 8. Patrick Grosz, Jeremy Hartman, and Guillaume Thomas are presenting talks there. A full schedule can be found at the conference website. If anybody would like to go and needs a ride, please contact Jessica Coon at jcoon@mit.edu .

Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 18 will take place March 21-23, 2008 at UMass Amherst. The program includes the following MIT people:

• Jon Gajewski (UConn): More on quantifiers in comparative clauses
• Paul Elbourne (Queen Mary, University of London): Implicit content and the argument from binding
• Marta Abrusan (Institut Jean-Nicod/Collegium Budapest): Islands of contradiction: Presuppositional and negative interveners
• Jon Nissenbaum (McGill) & Bernhard Schwarz (McGill): The scope of ‘too’ with gapped infinitival clauses (Poster)
• Alan Bale (Concordia) & Hrayr Khanjian (MIT): Armenian classifiers and number marking (Poster)
• Ezra Keshet (MIT): Only the strong: Restricting situation variables (Poster)
• Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz) & Valentine Hacquard (Maryland): Epistemics, embedding, and sentience: A case for information states (Poster)

And last but not least, Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod/NYU) is giving an invited lecture on “Local contexts”.

[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.

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!]

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

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

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.”