Tom Roeper reports:

The GALA 15 conference (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) took place in Frankfurt (sept 22-240)–organized by Petra Schulz (former visitor here) with an invited address by Ana Perez, former student here,  and with papers by  former visitors Angeliek van Hout, Camelia Bleotu (with Tom Roeper), and Petra Schulz, and LAWNE member William Snyder, and a poster by Uscha Lakschmann, Deb Foucault, and Tom Roeper.

       A  very nice memorial was held for Jürgen Weissenborn at the GALA Conference in Frankfurt on Sept 24th.  Jürgen died at 83 on Feb 28th.  He was a frequent visitor at UMass,  had many friends here (including Peggy Speas, Barbara Partee, and others).  He married one of our students, Janet Randall,—who attended by zoom.   His wife Bettina, daughter Pia, and 3 grandchildren came. In addition to many remembrances, letters from Barbara Partee and Jill deVilliers were read.

Jürgen collaborated with Jill deVilliers and me on acquisition of long-distance rules,  with Angeliek van Hout on auxiliary learning, with Sandra Waxman on word-learning, among many topics he worked on.      

I also gave a lecture at ZAS in Berlin on “Minimal Interfaces as a Guide to L2, and the formulation of the Thought-Cognition connection”, and the same talk (more or  less) at the Conference in Wuppertal on “Optionality and Variation in Multilingual Syntax” organized by Leah BAuke (a former visitor here) with many leaders in the field (Antonella Sorace, Marit Wetergaard, Theresa Biberauer, among others).