Monthly Archives: October 2015

Agreement Workshop Oct. 29th and 30th

From Brian Dillon:

The Department of Linguistics is hosting a workshop on agreement in natural language, aimed at bringing together researchers investigating agreement from theoretical and experimental points of view. The goal of this workshop is to promote cross-talk between researchers investigating agreement from grammatical and psycholinguistic perspectives. This workshop will particularly focus on the ways in which linear order can affect agreement processes, as well as the question of how best to model linear order effects on agreement. Presenters include:

Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
Jonathan Bobaljik (UConn)
Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)
Julie Franck (Université de Genève)
Maureen Gillespie (University of New Hampshire)
Laura Kalin (UConn)
Lap-Ching Keung (UMass Amherst)
Andrew Nevins (UCL)
Adrian Staub (UMass Amherst)
Francesco Vespignani (Università di Trento)
Martin Walkow (MIT)
Jana Willer-Gold (UCL)
Ellen Woolford (UMass Amherst)

The workshop takes place on October 29th and 30th at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We invite anyone who is interested to attend. Registration is free and all are welcome, but if you plan to attend, please visit our website and RSVP:

http://people.umass.edu/bwdillon/AgreementWorkshop/

Altman in Cognitive Brown Bag Weds. 10/7 at noon

Gerry Altmann of UConn Psychology will be giving the Cognitive Brown Bag on Wednesday, 10/7, at 12:00 in Tobin 521B.  His abstract (I don’t have a title) is as follows:

Abstract: Language is often used to describe the changes that occur around us – changes in either state (“I cracked the glass…”) or location (“I moved the glass onto the table…”). To fully comprehend such events requires that we represent the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of any object that undergoes change. But how do we represent these mutually exclusive states of a single object at the same time? I shall summarize a series of studies, primarily from fMRI, which show that we do represent such alternative states, and that these alternative states compete with one another in much the same way as alternative interpretations of an ambiguous word might compete. This interference, or competition, manifests in a part of the brain that has been implicated in resolving competition. Furthermore, activity in this area is predicted by the dissimilarity, elsewhere in the brain, between sensorimotor instantiations of the described object’s distinct states. I shall end with the beginnings of a new account of event representation which does away with the traditional distinctions between actions, participants, time, and space. [Prior knowledge of the brain is neither presumed, required, nor advantageous!].