At the next LARC meeting at noon Friday in ILC N458, Marco Tulio Bittencourt (UMass Spanish and Portuguese) will speak on: “An analysis of the progressive periphrasis with stative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese”
Everyone Welcome!
Monthly Archives: September 2017
Alex Goebel awarded XPrag internship for Summer 2018
Our own Alex Goebel has been awarded an XPrag Internship for Summer 2018. He’ll be spending the summer in Cologne working with Professor Petra Schumacher, as part of her project “InfoPer: Processing speaker’s meaning: Informativeness and perspective.” During that time, Alex will work with Professor Schumacher on an investigation of the relation between German demonstrative pronouns and perspective. One particular focus of this work will be on the influence of expressive speech acts, and the question of how a comprehender is able to identify a speech act as expressive in the absence of unambiguous cues. Congratulations, Alex!
UMass at GALA in Mallorca
At the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA) on Mallorca, Jill deVilliers, Tom Roeper, and Jessica Kotfila gave presented a talk on 3 clause Long -Distance extraction “When do Children Use Recursion” and Tom Roeper, Jennifer Rau, Dagmar Bittner, Nadine Balbach, Milena Kuehnast, gave a talk “Cbildren do not Repair Presuppositions”. Former UMass visitors Anca Sevcenco, Maria Arche. Petra Schulz, and Angeliek van Hout all were involved in presentations as well.
Talking Brains Exhibit [Cosmo Caixa Museum Barcleona]
Angeliek van Hout and Tom Roeper visited the “Talking Brains” exhibit which has half a dozen ongoing language exhibits currently that involve experimentation in parsing and spectrogram visualization etc, as well as exhibits on parameter-setting and other linguistic principles. We conferred with Wolfram Hinzen and his associates about bringing the NEMO Amsterdam exhibit on recursion to this Barcelona Science Museum. The organizers were very positive about the possibility.
Welcome Jennifer Spenader!
From Tom Roeper
We are delighted to welcome Jennifer Spenader from the University of Groningen this semester to LARC and the Department. She has an active research program in language acquisition with a number of graduate students and projects. She is active both in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics and has focussed on spreading, distributivity, and exhaustivity and has collaborated with former department members Bart Hollebrandse and Angeliek van Hout. We look forward to a productive semester.
Carolyn Anderson Giving Talks at Two Upcoming Conferences
We’re pleased to share the news that Carolyn Anderson will be presenting work related to her first GP at two major upcoming conferences.
Carolyn will be presenting a talk titled “The Andative and Venitive Construction in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec” at the conference Multi-Verb Constructions: Semantic, Syntactic and Typological Perspectives (MVC2017) at Humboldt University in Berlin on December 7-8.
She will also be presenting a talk titled “The San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec Andative and Venitive” at this year’s meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), which (as always) will be held with the LSA (Salt Lake City; January 4-7).
Both talks will be presenting Carolyn’s original fieldwork on the syntax and semantics of the so-called ‘andative’ and ‘venitive’ makers in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, which forms a major part of her first GP (defended last semester).
Fieldwork on Brazilian Languages
Suzi Lima (2014 Umass PhD) has just come back from Rio, where she took a group of her University of Toronto undergraduate students for a (not-in-the-village) fieldwork course on Brazilian languages that she directed. On the first page of the group’s blog, Suzi writes: “Today we concluded our (intensive) course on fieldwork methods based on Brazilian languages. I would like to take a moment to say that this was a rewarding experience for me as an instructor for two reasons. First, because of the participation of four women who are leading research on indigenous languages and cultures to new and interesting directions and who are an example for other women: Anari (speaker of Patxohã), Francy (speaker of Nheengatu), Nelly (speaker of Marubo) and Sandra (speaker of Guarani Ñandeva). I was very honored to be able to work with them and learn more about them and their research. Second, because of our students from Canada (Cal, Karoline, Natália, Tiffany, Vidhya) as well as my colleague Ivona and our teaching assistant Ohanna. This was the first fieldwork experience of the students and I was glad to be able to share their excitement, their engagement and their interest during the whole course.”
Welcome Emar Maier!
Emar Maier is visiting us this semester. You can find him in my (former) office (ILC N420). Emar is Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, affiliated with both the Philosophy and Linguistics Departments. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen (2006), held several postdoc positions, and led an ERC Starting Grant project. He is currently heading a NWO VIDI research project investigating the semantics of imagination and fiction. His research interests include narrative, quotation, indexicals, and attitudes. He publishes in linguistics journals (like Theoretical Linguistics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Journal of Child Language, Semantics and Pragmatics, Glossa) but also in neighboring fields (Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, among others). Emar’s ERC project “Between Direct and Indirect Discourse” (€ 677,000) led to a genuine shift in our way of thinking about reported speech, and combined insights into “the nature of reported speech with formal semantic rigor and linguistic data from child language, native signers, and Greek philology.” Here is an interview with Emar after he won the ERC grant. Emar’s current VIDI grant (€ 800,000) on the Language of Fiction and Imagination aims at “a cognitive/formal semantics of fiction that will shed new light on a wide variety of current debates about fiction, imagination, and narrative style.”