Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Issue of Monday, January 28th, 2008

Call for presenters for the ECO5 syntax workshop at UConn, March 8th

[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.

Welcoming new visitors

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!

Call for LingLunch Speakers

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.

MIT Linguistics at GLOW 31 in Newcastle

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!]