Sarah Thomason (University of Michigan) will give a colloquium talk on Friday, March 2, at 4pm in Room 104 of 10 Washington Place. The title and abstract are below.

Title: Contact-Induced Language Change and Typological Congruence

Abstract:

Tim Leffel is going to present a poster on "Non-restrictive adjectives and the theory of scalar implicature" and Lucas Champollion on "Temporal dependencies: anaphora vs. movement" at GLOW 35, Potsdam, March 28-30.

Juliette Blevins will give a colloquium talk on Friday, Feb. 10, at 4pm in Room 104 of 10 Washington Place. The title and abstract are below.

Title: Duality of Patterning: Absolute Universal or Statistical Tendency?

Abstract:

Unless otherwise noted, all talks will take place on Friday from 1.30-3pm in Room 103 of 10 Washington Place. See the Brown Bag website for details and updates.

February 3rd- Jim Wood (NYU)
February 10th- Omer Preminger (Harvard/MIT)
March 2nd- Jeffrey Watumull (University of Cambridge/MIT)
March 19th- Jessica Coon (McGill) (Special Time: Monday, 12.30-2pm)
March 23rd- Meera Saeed Al Kaabi (NYU)
April 6th- Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University)
May 4th- Gisli Har∂arson (UConn)

Chris Barker is giving an invited talk on "Negotiating Temperature Standards" at the workshop on Vagueness in Language, Reasoning, and Cognition, Amsterdam, January 27-28.

Sang-Im is one of the authors on a talk with Melanie Pangilinan, Seunghun Lee, and Shigeto Kawahara: "An acoustic comparison of palatal fricatives and whistled fricatives in Xitsonga." The conference is in New Orleans on March 15-17.

Ur Shlonsky of the University of Geneva is stopping by for a special syntax brown bag talk today at 5pm, titled Why is "John wonders Mary saw who" ungrammatical in French, while "John thinks Mary saw who?" is not?

Abstract: The idea I would like to develop is that when a feature incorporates into a criterial head, it induces freezing of that head. This proposal is a natural extension of the format of Criterial Freezing developed in Rizzi & Shlonsky (2007). It constitutes the major component of an explanation of two phenomena, the ungrammaticality of wh in situ in indirect questions in French and the preponderance of subject clitic inversion (i.e., enclisis as opposed to proclisis of subject clitics) in interrogatives in North Italian Dialects.

Richard Kayne, Liina Pylkkanen & Philippe Schlenker will all be speaking at 50 years of Linguistics at MIT: a scientific reunion. Their sessions are "Principles and parameters," "Laboratory linguistics," and "Semantics and grammar," respectively. Gillian Gallagher will be presenting a poster.

The ninth Old World Conference in Phonology will be at ZAS-Berlin in January, and NYU will be represented by the following linguists:

Tal Linzen, Sofya Kasyanenko & Maria Gouskova: "Lexical and phonological variation in Russian prepositions"

Bálint Feyér (Eötvös Loránd U), Péter Rácz (U Freiburg), Márton Sóskuthy (U Edinburgh) & Daniel Szeredi: "A phonetic study of l-deletion in Hungarian"

Daniel Szeredi: "Phonetically unnatural alternation as a result of regular sound change: the case of rounding harmony in Hungarian"

See the full program here.

Bryan Gick will give a department colloquium titled Quantal biomechanics, multidimensional tasks, and why we should care about sphincters this Friday, Dec. 9. The talk is at 4 pm in room 104 of 10 Washington Place.

Abstract: Speech production models and phonetic description have been determinedly focused on the midline of the tongue, with concomitant downplaying of the surrounding structures of the vocal tract. The lips have long been recognized as problematic for this view (e.g., Kelso & al 1986), being a muscular sphincter and having little to do with either the tongue or the midline. Close examination and modeling of the lips reveal fatal flaws in dominant models of speech production, with solutions resting on quantal relations in the biomechanics of sphincters and other complex structures. Further examination and modeling reveals sphincters and sphincter-like structures "all the way down" - and the principles that make sense of the lips are shown to enable a more accurate and robust model for the whole vocal tract.

Sonia Das will be giving a talk in the Sociolinguistics Lab (3rd floor, 10 Washington Place) on Monday, Dec. 5, at 1:30pm. The title and abstract are below.

Title: You Speak “Written Tamil” and I Write “Spoken Tamil”: Ideologies of Ethnolinguistic Differentiation in a Multilingual Urban Diaspora

Abstract:

Jim Wood reports that he will be giving a couple of talks at Lund University (see the abstract and handout here) on the 30th of November, and at Stuttgart the week after that. The title of the Lund talk is "Figure reflexives and other complex predicates."

The last PEP Lab talk of Fall 2011 is by Peter Graff of MIT, and it will be at 3:00 pm in the 5th floor phonetics lab. Here is the title and the abstract:

Perceptual Dispersion in the Lexicon

It has often been noted that the sound inventories of human language are subject to considerations of distinctness (Trubetzkoy 1939, Martinet 1955, Hockett 1955, Liljencrants and Lindblom 1972, Lindblom and Maddieson 1988, Flemming 2002, Clements 2003, Padgett 2003, Campos-Astorkiza 2007, Ni Chiosain and Padgett 2009). While both {/t/, /p/} and {/p/, /pʷ/, /k/, /kʷ/, /c/, /cʷ/, /t̪/, /t̪ʷ/, /t/, /tʷ/, /ʈ/, /ʈʷ/} are attested stop inventories, in Tahitian and Arrernte respectively, the inventory {/t̪ʷ/, /tʷ/, /ʈʷ/} is absent from human language. This is because the phones that compose it are not sufficiently distinct (i.e., all of them are coronal, all of them are labialized) given the number of categories in the inventory.

I show that not only inventories of phonemes but also a language’s inventory of words (i.e., the lexicon) is subject to the very same pressures of distinctness. I call this hypothesis Lexical Dispersion; it states that words preferentially rely on highly perceptible contrasts for distinctness beyond what is expected from language-specific phonotactics. I present evidence in favor of Lexical Dispersion from the cross-linguistic distribution of minimal pairs. Using a corpus of phonetically transcribed dictionaries of 58 different languages from 23 major language families, I show that the number of words disambiguated solely by place contrasts in intervocalic (a[p]end:a[t]end), pre-vocalic (s[p]y:s[t]y), and post-vocalic (swee[p]s:swee[t]s) position decreases as a function of the perceptibility of cues to place in those contexts observed in perceptual experiments (Repp 1978, Fujimura et al. 1978, Ohala 1990, Wright 1996, Kochetov 2004). Using log-linear mixed-effects models, I show that this effect goes beyond what is expected from the frequency and relative distribution of individual sounds in the language: There are more minimal pairs for highly perceptible contrasts than expected from sound specific distributions.

A second study finds that the number of minimal pairs based on consonantal differences in English increases significantly with the perceptual distinctness of the consonants distinguishing them, while controlling for sound specific distributions. There are indeed more pairs like pop:shop relying on the highly distinct /p/:/ʃ/ contrast, than pairs like thought:fought relying on highly similar /θ/:/f/ in the English lexicon. I argue that these results have important implications for theories of the kind of knowledge speakers have access to in learning and using their language (cf Hayes and Steriade 2004 and Blevins 2004 for differing views). While many cross-linguistic patterns in sound inventories are amenable to explanations in terms of what Ohala (1990) terms innocent misapprehension, Lexical Dispersion is not. If speakers simply misperceived certain contrasts more, then these contrasts should drop out regardless of whether they distinguish among words or not. For the patterns identified above to arise, language usage or learning must be sensitive to the perceptual similarity of words.

This year's installment of the annual SUNY/Yale/NYU/CUNY mini-conference (SYNC) will be held on Saturday, December 3 in our department. The program and other conference information can now be found here.

We are delighted to announce that NYU alum Tom Leu (UQAM) will be the keynote speaker.

The conference is free of charge, but please do register if you plan on coming so that we can estimate how many people to plan for. Hope to see you there!

Neil Myler and Tim Leffel,
the SYNC organizing committee

Greg Guy was one of the two featured speakers at the Workshop on System, Usage, and Society last week at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study (FRIAS), Freiburg, Germany. His paper was entitled 'The grammar of use and the use of grammar.'

Muralikrishnan Ramasamy, a new post-doc at the NYU Abu Dhabi lab, will be giving a talk next Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 3pm in the Neurolinguistics Lab on the 6th floor of 10 Washington Place. The talk is title "An Electrophysiological Investigation of Tamil Dative-Subject Constructions" - see below for the abstract.

Tricia Irwin is giving a talk on "Unaccusativity, Direct Objecthood, and Information Structure" at WECOL on Nov. 18-20 at Simon Fraser University.

Suzanne Dikker (NYU PhD alumna) is giving a talk on "Predicting language: MEG evidence for lexical preactivation" at the upcoming Neurobiology of Language Conference in Annapolis, MD, and members of our department present eight posters:

Doug Bemis (NYU, Psychology) and Liina Pylkkänen: Simple composition in reading, listening, and production: an MEG investigation

Jon Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen: The Neural correlates of incremental structure-building and interpretation

Joe Fruchter (NYU, Psychology), Linneae Stockall, Queen Mary, University of London) and Alec Marantz: Early decomposition effects during visual processing of past tense verbs: an MEG study using masked priming and single-word lexical decision tasks

Kim Leiken and Liina Pylkkänen: Increasing combinatoric complexity in MEG

Gwyneth Lewis (NYU, Psychology) and Alec Marantz: The latency of lexical access in visual and spoken word recognition

Tal Linzen, Einat Shetreet (Children's Hospital, Boston) and Naama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University): Exploring the neural bases of dependency resolution using coordination sentences

Einat Shetreet (Children's Hospital, Boston), Tal Linzen and Naama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University): The effects of complement predictability on the processing of verbs' complementation options

Masha Westerlund (NYU, Psychology) and Liina Pylkkanen: Characterizing the role of the left anterior temporal lobe in combinatory processes

Vincent Chanethom will be presenting a poster entitled "Dynamic approach to the production of diphthongs by bilingual children" at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) annual convention in San Diego, CA, November 17-19, 2011.

Vincent will also be giving a talk entitled "Teaching phonetics and pronunciation in second language classrooms" at the Phonetics and Pedagogy Workshop of Princeton University's Department of French and Italian, December 1, 2011.

Lucas Champollion has been invited to speak at the "Workshop in Honor of Arnim von Stechow" (Nov 10-11, 2011 at University of Konstanz. His talk will be about temporal prepositional phrases and implicit variables.

The NYU Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag Series continues today with two special talks: one by Asaf Bachrach (CNRS Paris 8), at 12:00pm, and one by Ane Berro (University of the Basque Country), at 1:30pm. Both take place in Room 103 of 10 Washington Place. The abstracts and titles are below. All are welcome!

Simon Charlow will speak about "Cross-categorial donkeys" and Lucas Champollion, who is joining our faculty next Fall, about "Each vs. jeweils: A cover-based view on distance-distributivity" at the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, December 19-21, 2011. The full program is posted now; ten-page paper versions of the talks will be available at the same web site during the colloquium.

Anders Holmberg will give a department colloquium called "The syntax of answers to yes/no questions" this Friday, Oct. 28. The talk is at 4 pm in room 104 of 10 Washington Place.

Paul Portner is speaking about "Clause types in context" in the Semantics Group at 1:30pm on Friday, Oct 28.

There will be quite a few current NYU faculty and students as well as alumni at the upcoming Linguistic Society of America in Portland, OR. The full (preliminary) program is posted here.

Zong-Rong Huang (National Taiwan University), Kuo-Chiao Jason Lin (New York University): Placing Atayal on the ergativity continuum

Vincent Chanethom (New York University): Diphthong production by French-English bilingual children

Michael Becker (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Maria Gouskova (New York University): A wug study of the grammar of Russian yers

Colin Wilson (Johns Hopkins University), Lisa Davidson (New York University), Sean Martin (New York University): Bayesian interaction of phonetics and phonotactics in cluster production

Kara Becker (Reed College), Amy Wing-Mei Wong (New York University): What happens when the roadblock to merger is lifted? The status of the low back vowels in New York City

Daniel Erker (New York University): Change in progres/s/: Phonological evidence for the convergence of regional dialects in the Spanish of the New York City

Amy Wing-mei Wong (New York University), Lauren Hall-Lew (University of Edinburgh): Regional variability and ethnic identity: Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York City

Gregory Guy (New York University), Malcah Yaeger-Dror (University of Arizona/Linguistic Data Consortium): Current approaches to language and ethnicity

Inna Livitz (New York University): The effect of focus on the interpretation and expression of embedded pronominal subjects

Patricia Irwin (New York University): Presentational unaccusativity: argument structure and information status

Sang-Im Lee (New York University): A perceptual account of the Mandarin apical vowels

Ryan Bennett (University of California, Santa Cruz): Foot structure and cognitive bias: An artificial grammar investigation

Lisa Levinson (Oakland University/University of Pennslyvania): The morphosemantics of (anti-)causative alternations

Jennifer Nycz (Reed College): Frequency and social meaning in dialect change

Christo Kirov (Johns Hopkins University), Colin Wilson (Johns Hopkins University): Specificity of online variation in speech production

Roger Levy will give a colloquium talk this Friday, Oct. 21, at 4pm, in Room 104, 10 Washington Pl.

Title: Probabilistic Knowledge and Uncertain Input in Rational Human Sentence Comprehension

Abstract:

Our second Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag talk of the week will be given by Jorge López-Cortina (Seton Hall University) on Friday, Oct. 21 at the usual time of 1.30 in Room 103 of 10 Washington Place. The abstract and title are below.

All are welcome! A range of snacks and drinks will be provided.

Answers are not (exactly) Focus: Questions about the Spanish Left Periphery

In this paper I make the claim that the left periphery of the sentence includes a functional projection specific to answers, included in the Focus set of projections (Benincà & Poletto, 2004), but separate from the Focus Phrase. I call this projection Answer Phrase.

There are at least three characteristics of answers that make them recognizable to the listener. First, answers have a specific intonation pattern. The second characteristic is the prevalence of ellipsis in answers and the way such ellipsis is related to the question asked. The third one is that answers can include lexical items that are only used in answers and would not be appropriate as part of a regular declarative sentence. Take English yes, for instance. All three of these characteristics are compatible with, and suggest the existence of, a syntactic operation.

The NYU Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag Series continues this Thursday at the special time of 5pm, in Room 103 of 10 Washington Place. Pierre Pica will be giving the talk. As usual, snacks and drinks will be provided. The abstract and title are below. All are welcome!

Pierre Pica - CNRS Paris

NUMBERS AS A TEST CASE FOR THE I-LANGUAGE E-LANGUAGE CONNECTION

Few number languages such as Mundurucu (Pica et al. 2004), (Dehaene et al. 2008) and their import for the understanding for the Successor Function have been subject to intensive discussion. We propose an analysis according to which the fact that restrictions on numerals words and numerals interpretation that can be observed on numbers and numerals in Mundurucu can be reduced to a more general constraint on object tracking and sets (Much in the spirit of Feigenson).

This restriction, we claim, is directly observable in few number languages such as Mundurucu because numbers are projections of a SET head. We show that this analysis can then explain apparently unrelated phenomena such as the interpretation and structure of the person system and/or agreement. We contrast this type of language with languages where a determiner system is at work and stress the implication of our analysis for the emergence Successor function. We discuss the general implications of the analysis for linguistic variation and acquisition.

On Friday, Oct. 14, Gillian Gallagher gave a colloquium at Stony Brook called "Speaker awareness of non-local phonotactics in Quechua."

Current NYU graduate students, faculty, and PhD, MA, and BA alumni are presenting the following papers and posters at the 40th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation. Some of the presentations are co-authored with non-NYU colleagues, indicated below as "et al". The full program is posted here.

(Thanks to Greg Guy for the full list.)

Current
Amy Wong: ‘BOUGHT-lowering and its impact on the low back distinction: Evidence from Chinese Americans in NYC’
Renee Blake, Cara Shousterman, Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz, Lindsay Kelley: ‘A study on ethnicity: Examining feature co-occurrence to understand the linguistic behavior of black New Yorkers’
Emily Nguyen: ‘The urban/rural distinction and so much more: Monophthongal /ow/ in Minnesota’
Nathan LaFave and Gregory Guy: ‘Channel of communication and lexical frequency in English adjective gradation’
Daniel Erker: ‘Of categories and continua: discrete and gradient properties of sociophonetic variation’

POSTERS:
Allison Shapp and Renee Blake: Sociolinguistic variation in American English adverbial -ly
Nathan LaFave, Daniel Szeredi, Allison Shapp, Timothy Mathes, Morakinyo Ogunmodimu and Gregory Guy: Variable auxiliary contraction in spoken American English
Tal Linzen: ‘The weakening role of inalienability in the Hebrew possesive dative: a corpus blog study’
Daniel Szeredi: Loss of agreement between Hungarian relative pronouns and their antecedents

Alums
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo: ‘Effects of production on the variable rating of sh and zh in Buenos Aires Spanish listeners’
Sonya Fix: ‘A quantitative and qualitative consideration of language and material style in a study of white women in contact with African American English’
Jennifer Nycz: ‘Frequency effects on second dialect acquisition’
Simanique Moody: ‘The ties that bind: African American English in contact with Gullah-Geechee in southeast Georgia’
Kara Becker: ‘The social meaning(s) of raised BOUGHT in NYC: A perceptual approach’
Erez Levon, Ronald Mendes (et al.): Panel on ‘Sexuality in language: Analyzing complex social practice’
Rafael Orozco, ‘What happens when dialectal parallelism meets language contact?
Cecelia Cutler (et al.): Panel on ‘Emergent methodologies for analyzing youth language practices in new media’
Bill Haddican et al.: ‘Social correlates of change in mid-vowels in Northern England’
Bill Haddican et al.: ‘Effects on the particle verb alternation across English dialects’
Anna Marie Trester et al.: ‘Second dialects and shifting linguistic identities: British women in the United States’
Anna Marie Trester et al.: ‘Talking business, taking charge: communicative and interactional norms in the MBA classroom’

Libby Coggshall, Maryam Bakht (2010 PhD alumna, currently at Hunter College), and Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson (also at Hunter) are presenting on "A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Jersey Shore," at the University of Chicago Conference on Jersey Shore Studies, on October 28th.

There will be three talks by NYU linguists at the 162nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego, CA, Oct. 31 - Nov. 4, 2011:

Vincent Chanethom will be presenting a poster entitled "Dynamic differences in the production of diphthongs by French-English bilingual children."

Sang-Im Lee will be presenting a poster entitled "An articulatory and acoustic investigation of Mandarin apical vowels."

Sean Martin will be presenting a poster entitled "Modeling the Recovery of Articulatory Information from Acoustics."

Vincent Chanethom received a grant from the Acoustical Society of America to travel to the conference.

On Friday, Oct. 14, Tricia Irwin is giving a Syntax Colloquium at Yale entitled "Totally high: Drama SO and the distribution of a speaker-oriented adverb". Here is the abstract:

A relatively new construction in colloquial English contains the obligatorily pitch-accented word so, followed by a constituent that is not of the syntactic category that so normally modifies. I refer to this use of so as “Drama SO”:

(1) Drama SO
a. Chris is SO next in line. (so + PP) (Potts, 2004:130)
b. Jamie SO dates that type of guy. (so + VP)

Focusing on data such as (1b), I describe the distribution of Drama SO and propose a syntactic and informal semantic analysis of it. So is analyzed as a degree word that modifies the speaker-oriented adverb totally, which can be silent or pronounced. On this analysis, all occurrences of so in Drama SO are really [SO TOTALLY], and the word so is simply a degree modifier of totally. I also show that speaker-oriented totally has specific scopal properties: it cannot be scoped over by a truthconditional operator like negation. In this way, totally acts like an evidential or epistemic modal (see e.g. von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) on must). These properties explain some interesting facts about the distribution of Drama SO.

There will be two talks at NELS 42 in Toronto by NYU people. Gillian Gallagher will present her work on Quechua, "Speaker knowledge of laryngeal phonotactics in Cochabamba." Maria Gouskova will report on joint work with Michael Becker, "Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar". The full program can be seen here.

The next talk in the PEP Lab series is by Peter Staroverov (Rutgers). He will tell us about "Vocalic elements in Russian word-final consonant clusters." The talk is at 3:00 pm in the 5th floor phonetics lab.

Jaye Padgett of UCSC will give a talk called " Irish Palatalization: an Ultrasound Study" in the second meeting of the PEP Lab. The talk will be on Friday Sept. 30, from 10:30 a.m. till noon, in the 5th floor phonetics lab.

We're pleased to announce that the Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag, our main forum for new research in these areas from within the department and from other departments nearby, will be convening once again this semester. Talks take place on Fridays from 1.30-3pm, in room 103 of 10 Washington Place.

The following page will always be kept up-to-date directly by the BB organizers:
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/nyusyntaxbrownbag/ . Keep an eye on it.

The schedule so far is as follows.

September 23rd- Mark Baltin

October 7th- TBA
October 14th-TBA
October 21st- Jorge Lopez Cortina

November 4th- TBA

December 2nd-David Basilico
December 9th- Txuss Martin

It is with great pleasure that we announce the full schedule for the NYU Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series for the academic year 2011-2012.

Fall 2011:
Sept. 30 Jaye Padgett
Oct. 21 Roger Levy
Oct. 28 Anders Holmberg
Nov. 18 Norvin Richards
Dec. 9 Bryan Gick

Spring 2012:
Feb. 10 Juliette Blevins
Mar. 2 Sarah Thomason
Mar. 23 Chris Potts
Apr. 6 Valentine Hacquard
Apr. 20 Phillip Carter

All talks take place at 4pm on a Friday, in Room 104 of the Linguistics Department (10 Washington Place). As usual, each talk will be followed by a reception in the department and dinner at a nearby restaurant.

Two of the upcoming talks in the Semantics Group are,

Sept. 30, 1:30pm, Chris Barker on actions
Oct. 28, 1:30pm, Paul Portner (Georgetown), TBA

The preliminary schedule of the rest of the semester is posted here. We typically do not announce the individual talks on the blog. Please keep an eye on the schedule if you are interested in participating. Talks usually start at 10:30am (unlike the above two). Presentations are interleaved with discussion; meetings tend to last 2hrs or sometimes longer.

Four papers and one poster were presented by current graduate students, recent alumni, and faculty of our department at Structuring the Argument at CNRS, Paris, Sept. 5-7 (some in collaboration with non-NYU-ers):

Einat Shetreet, Tal Linzen and Naama Friedmann, Are all complementation options activated when accessing the verb?
Lisa Levinson, Diagnosing the Causative-Inchoative Alternation
Lisa Levinson and Jonathan Brennan, The Costs of Zero-Derived Causativity in English: Evidence from Reading Times and MEG
Francesca Delogu and Liina Pylkkänen, MEG Evidence for Covert Syntax in Intensional Transitives
Alec Marantz [with comments by Victor Acedo], Syntactic Approaches to Argument Structure Without Incorporation: Doing the (anti-lexicalist) Dance without Doing the Dance

Sang-Im Lee is presenting a paper on 'Spectral analysis of Mandarin Chinese sibilant fricatives' at ICPhS XVII (International Congress of Phonetic Sciences) in Hong Kong next week. Her trip to the conference is supported by the Gösta Bruce scholarship from IPA (International Phonetic Association).

Salvador Mascarenhas will speak about "Licensing by modification: the case of positive polarity pronouns," and Chris Barker will be one of the invited speakers, at Sinn und Bedeutung 16, Utrecht, September 6-8.

Chris Barker is giving a talk on "Delayed evaluation as an explanation for various reconstruction effects" at the Workshop on Reconstruction Effects in Relative Clauses at ZAS, Berlin, July 8-9.

Chris Collins and John Singler are two of the four organizers of African Linguistics School II, to be held in Porto-Novo, Benin, from July 17 to July 30. It is a two-week institute held biennially for graduate students in linguistics at African universities. (The other two ALS organizers are Profs. Enoch Aboh of the University of Amsterdam and Akinniyi Akinlabi of Rutgers). The faculty comes from Africa, Europe, and North America. Joining Chris and John on the faculty from NYU will be Violeta Vazquez-Rojas, a 5th-year graduate student in this department, who will be teaching "An Introduction to Semantics," and 3rd-year student Tim Mathes will be attending ALS II.

Funding for ALS II comes from the NSF, the University of Amsterdam, GLOW, and other sources. The initial ALS was held in 2009 at NYU Accra.

John Singler gave a paper at a one-day conference at the University of Essex on June 17. It was entitled "Data elicitation for a linguistic analysis for the determination of origin (LADO), as seen through the lens of sociolinguistics." The conference was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK and was devoted to the topic of "Data Elicitation for LADO."

John is one of the organizers of the Society for Pidgin an Creole Linguistics meeting to be held at the University of Ghana in Legon (just outside of Accra) from August 2 to August 6. Major support for the meeting is coming from the NYU Office of Global Programs, the NYU FAS Dean for Social Science's Office, and NYU's Africa House. During the conference, John will be presenting a paper entitled "Stereotypes, stigma, and agency in Vernacular Liberian English."

Tom Leu is going to teach two research courses at the EGG school this summer, one on "Dissecting determiners: A course in Germanic Morphosyntax" and another "On x-to-C: A Germanic slide ride into Morphosyntax".

On Wednesday, June 8, Ruth de Diego Balaguer (University of Barcelona/DEC, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) will be giving a talk called "Prosodic Cues as Attentional Markers for Rule Extraction from Speech."

The talk will be in room 104, 10 Washington Place, at 11 am.

Learners of a new language have to extract words and the rules from speech. Learners are endowed with the capacity to extract statistical regularities from their environment allowing them to extract words from continuous speech in the absence of other cues. However, it has been proposed that natural languages have an intrinsic cue: prosodic information. This cue seems to trigger the application of different computational resources that allows the extraction of rules. In this talk I will present work indicating that attention has a critical role in the early stages of language acquisition, in the absence of semantic information. Event-related potentials while participants learned artificial languages with embedded morphological rules show dissociations between the brain responses associated to word and rule learning. Complementary functional imaging measures indicate that salient cues such as prosody help to direct attention biasing perception to ignore irrelevant information and attend to the relevant segments containing the rule, shifting from word acquisition to rule extraction. Finally, data from brain-lesioned patients point to the basal ganglia as a coordinator structure among language, working memory, and attention through its rich connections with brain areas responsible for these functions.

Liina Pylkkanen will be lecturing in the Neuroscience of Communicative Meaning course at the Utrecht Summer School 2011.

Greg Guy is presenting at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB-8), in Oslo in June. He will be the discussant at a panel on ethnolects.

Neil Myler is giving a talk on "Light verbs, hidden relatives, and control: the case of derived nominals" at JeNom4, a workshop on nominalizations, in Stuttgart.

Vincent Chanethom will be giving a talk entitled "Dynamic differences in child bilinguals' production of diphthongs" at the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics in Paris, May 25-27.

Three NYU linguists are speaking at ACAL, the 42nd Annual Conference in African Linguistics, Maryland, June 10-12.

Tim Leffel, Epistemic modality in Masalit
John Singler, “Say 8 so I can know wat 2 do”: Text-messaging conventions in Vernacular Liberian English
Franca Ferrari-Bridgers (PhD 2005), Luganda verb morphology: A new analysis of the suffixes [YE] and [-A] and their distribution across the indicative, subjunctive and imperative mood

Anna Szabolcsi is talking about "Compositionality in Quantifier Words" at the International Workshop on the Syntax-Semantics Interface, Taipei, June 17-18.

Greg Guy is going to teach a course on Language in Latin America at the 2011 Linguistic Institute (Colorado).

See this page for more info!

Title: The Case of a Wh-in-situ in a Multiple Wh-Fronting Language

Abstract:

The last PEP Lab talk of the semester will be given by Jongho Jun of Seoul National University.

Time: 3 pm, May 6
Place: 5th floor phonetics lab

Speakers’ knowledge of alternation is uni-directional: evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms

In this talk, I will address the issue of whether and how speakers internalize lexical statistical patterns. I have investigated speakers’ responses when they are faced with unpredictability in allomorph selection by conducting a wug test on Seoul Korean verb paradigms. The test was performed in two directions. In forward formation test, the pre-vocalic base and pre-consonantal non-base forms were the stimulus and response respectively whereas in back formation test, the stimulus-response relation was switched.

The results show patterns approximating statistical patterns in Seoul Korean verb lexicon, thus confirming the lexical frequency matching reported in many previous studies. However, it seems that speakers do not internalize lexical patterns in the way suggested in most previous studies. It has been argued or assumed that different lexical statistics are usually active in forward and back formations since different sets of (non)alternation classes compete in different directions. This assumption has been adopted by mainstream phonological theories, whether rule or constraint-based, positing underlying representations to explain alternation.

Contrary to these conventional arguments and assumptions, the present study shows that lexical frequencies relevant to the forward formation are relatively consistent with the results of both forward and back formation tests. Lexical frequencies which have been considered active in back formation play almost no role in explaining test results. This observation can be understood only under the single base hypothesis (Albright 2002, 2005, 2008) in which only forward, not back, formation rules are in principle available to speakers.

See this page for more info!

Title: The Morphosemantics of (Anti-)Causative Alternations

Abstract:

See this page for more info.

Title: Weak Crossover, Scope, and Information Structure

Abstract:

James Walker will give a talk and workshop this Friday, April 22.

The workshop is at 12:30pm, and the talk is at 4pm. Details of both are below.

Will Starr (NYU Philosophy) is talking about "A preference semantics of imperatives" in the Semantics Group at 11:00am on April 15 (Rm 104). -- See the meeting schedule here.

Edward Flemming will give a colloquium talk this Friday, Apr. 15, at 4pm, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: Violations are ranked, not constraints: A revised model of constraint interaction in phonology

Abstract:

Shigeto Kawahara will be visiting us from Rutgers on Friday, April 22 to give the next talk in the PEP Lab series. Here are the details:

Time: 3:00 pm
Place: PEP Lab, 10 Washington Place 5th floor

The role of spectral discontinuity and amplitude drop in the perception of length contrasts

This study begins with two phonological observations: (i) sonorant geminates are disfavored in many phonological systems and (ii) the more sonorous the geminate, the more it is disfavored. Podesva (2000) hypothesizes that the preference against sonorant geminates exists because these geminates are easily confused with corresponding singletons. This confusability problem arises because sonorants have blurry transitions into and out of flanking vowels, and consequently their constriction durations are difficult to perceive. This problem is worse for more sonorous segments. We report perception experiments that test these hypotheses. The stimuli were non-speech sounds that mimicked the spectral properties of geminate contrasts in obstruents and sonorants. The results of the first two experiments show that spectral continuity in sonorants makes the singleton-geminate distinction less distinct. Two follow-up experiments show that length contrasts in sonorants with smaller amplitude drops from the surrounding vowels are harder to perceive. We conclude that the phonological preference against sonorant geminates has its root in the perceptual imperative to avoid segments that are confusable with other segments.

Florian Jaeger will give a colloquium talk this Friday, Apr. 8, at 4pm, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: How communicative pressures may come to shape language over time

Florian Jaeger presenting work with Masha Fedzechkina, Alex Fine, and Ting Qian
http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/
Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester

Abstract:

John Singler gave a colloquium talk at Yale last week (Mar. 28), titled, "Verbal -s in Liberian Settler English: When the Northern Subject Rule goes south, and then goes south."

On April 15, he will give a talk at the University of Freiburg (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) on "Stereotypes, stigma, and agency in Vernacular Liberian English".

Simon Charlow is giving one of the invited talks at the Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop, April 8-10, 2011, on "More on the LFs of Attitude Reports" (joint work with Yael Sharvit).

Dan Lassiter is giving a talk at SALT 21, "Nouwen’s Puzzle and a Scalar Semantics for Obligations, Needs, and Requirements;" and at the ESSLLI 2011 Workshop on Projective Meaning, "Presuppositions, Provisos, and Probability."

Here are the details of Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero's talk, presented to you by the PEP Lab series. Note the atypical date and time.

Title: Currently available data on English t/d-deletion fail to refute the classical modular feedforward architecture of phonology

The PDF of the abstract can be viewed here.

Date: April 13
Time: 3:30 pm
Room: 10 Washington Place, Room 104

Greg Guy gave a talk on Monday at Rutgers, on "The spread of language change". Last month, he was at a conference in India at the University of Delhi, on the sociolinguistics of the Asia-Pacific region, where he presented a paper ("Constraints and communities in early New Zealand English") and gave a workshop ("issues in Quantitative Analysis").

During the week of April 4, Maria Gouskova is visiting UC Santa Cruz, where she will give two talks: "Vug, vga: An experimental investigation of Russian yer deletion" and "Cyclicity, locality and selectional restrictions."

Gillian Gallagher will be presenting a talk "Auditory features: The case from laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions" at the Chicago Linguistic Society on April 9.

On Friday, April 1, Stephanie Harves is giving a talk at Pomona College entitled, "On needing and wanting: (a)symmetries in the land of intensional transitives." She is also giving a colloquium talk at Princeton on April 7th entitled, "To have and to need."

Violeta Vazquez-Rojas is giving three conference presentations on her dissertation research on Purépecha. At WCCFL 29 she is talking about "Purépecha classifiers and distributive predicates". One of her SULA VI talks in Manchester is on"Purépecha numeral classifiers: distributive predicates and individuation", the other (with Lluvia Camacho) is on "Numeral inflection in Purépecha".

Liina Pylkkanen gave the Language and Cognition colloquium at Columbia last week, on “The Neuromagnetism of Natural Language Combinatory Semantics”. She is giving the IRCS colloquium at Penn on April 15th, probably with the same title.

Chris Barker is giving departmental colloquia at MSU and Wayne State this week. The title is "Truth is free, permission is scarce". He is also an invited speaker at MOSS 2, the Moscow Syntax and Semantics conference on April 22-24.

This year's Undergraduate Research Conference is bigger than ever, with seven student presenters. The schedule for the linguistics session is below (or see the full schedule here). Everyone is welcome to attend--come and support our undergraduate researchers!

37th Undergraduate Research Conference
Friday, April 15, 2011
Issues in Linguistics
Room 711, Silver Center
9:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Linden Bairey (Linguistics) Cot or Caught?: The Low Back Vowel in California English

Ruth Brillman (Anthropology and Linguistics) Subject and Imperative Agreement in Masarak

Rachel Dudley (Linguistics) An Investigation of Verbal Agreement in Spanish Imposters

Michael Feder (Psychology) Vowel Sound and Spatial Distance

Lindsay Kelley (Anthropology and Linguistics) African American English: The Importance of Ethnic Identity

Kristina Lustig (Linguistics) Orthographically Speaking: "b" and "v" in Buenos Aires Spanish

Amanda Rysling (Linguistics) Morphological Exceptions Across Verbal Aspects in Polish

Louis Goldstein will give a colloquium talk at 4pm, Friday, April 1, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: Nonlinear Coordination Dynamics in Phonological Grammar and Sound Change

Abstract:

See this page for more info.

Title: To call or address? A syntactic distinction in vocative use

Abstract:

The next talk in the PEP lab series is by Christina Bethin of Stonybrook.

Time: 12 pm, March 25
Room: 104

Paradigmatic Effects on Russian Vowel Reduction

Reduction of unstressed /o/ and /a/ to [ɐ] or [ə] after non-palatalized consonants and to [ɪ] after palatalized ones in Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) is systematic. But in certain inflectional suffixes [ə] occurs instead of the expected [ɪ] after palatalized consonants. In order to explain these apparent exceptions, I argue that vowel reduction after palatalized consonants is constrained by the morphology and that reduction to [ɪ] is blocked in certain cases of the paradigm by the interaction of Relativized Paradigm Uniformity (PU) and Paradigm Contrast (PCON) constraints (Rebrus and Törkenczy 2005; Steriade 2000). The main finding is that there is a critical contrast between the singular and plural within a given case, Number x Case, and [ɪ] is blocked when it would result in homophony with an /i/ [ɪ] suffix in the relevant situation. When the morphological contrast is implemented by some other means, then regular vowel reduction to [ɪ] takes place. The gen sg /-a/ suffix has special status due to type and token frequency of the [ə] variant, and in certain cases the quality of the target vowel may play a role in how contrast is maintained.

Tyler Kendall will give a colloquium talk on Friday, Mar. 25, at 4pm, in Room 103 at 10 Washington Place.

Title: Speech Rate, Pause, and Language Variation: Explorations through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project

Abstract:

See this page for more info.

Please note: This brown bag will be at a special time, 12:00-1:30.

Title: Doubling and the syntax of relative clauses

Abstract (.doc)

See this page for more info.

Title: V movement to a V-related head and enclisis: a view from finiteness sensitive and Tobler-Mussafia languages

Abstract:

Wendell Kimper will give a talk at 12:30pm, Thurs., Feb. 17, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: Non-locality in harmony: Transparency/opacity and trigger competition

Abstract:

Scott AnderBois will give a talk at 12:30pm, Tues., Feb. 15, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: Inquisitiveness in Questions and Assertions

Abstract:

Here are the details of our third PEP lab meeting of the semester:

Kyle Gorman, University of Pennsylvania
March 4, 3 pm
Phonetics lab (5th floor of 10 WP)
Title: "What phonotactics might not be"

Halle (1962) claims that phonotactic patterns are either epiphenomena of the phonology, or accidents. But the separation of structural description and structural change in Optimality Theory and related approaches to phonology has made it possible to formulate theories of the "Pure Phonotactic Learner" (PPL; Hayes 2004, Tesar 2004), a system that learns phonotactic constraints prior to (or independent of) knowledge of a language's structural changes. Support for such a system has been drawn from experimental studies of infants and adults, and the existence of what appear to be phonotactic "gaps".

A corpus study is used to assess whether there is evidence for phonotactic gaps which do not follow from independently-attested phonological patterns. The inventory of English syllable contact consonant clusters have been previously reported to show phonotactic gaps not explained by phonological alternations (Pierrehumbert 1994 and passim). However, the results of the corpus study suggest that the gaps described by previous accounts are unreliable and exception-filled, in contrast to the regularities entailed by the gaps predicted by surface-true phonological processes. Since the relative frequency of sound sequences are Zipfian, the pure phonotactic learner must overcome a non-trivial data sparsity problem, but current PPL models (e.g., Hayes & Wilson 2008) are found to not be up to the challenge. The observed gaps are not organized around natural classes, and the rate at which gaps occur is consistent them being accidental. Unattested syllable contact clusters are, as Halle claimed, predicted by the phonology, or accidental gaps.

Lucas Champollion will give a talk at 12:30pm, Feb. 10, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: The common core of aspect, distributivity and measurement

Abstract:

Inna Livitz is presenting a paper on Reducing PRO: a Defective Goal Analysis at the 34th Annual GLOW conference in Vienna.

Our PhD alumni Bill Haddican and Eytan Zweig have a co-authored poster on The syntax and semantics of "be like" quotatives.

Gillian Gallagher will be giving a talk at 12:30pm on Tues., Feb. 8, in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.

Title: Contrast and non-local dependencies

Abstract:

See this page for more information.

Title: A constraint on the lexicalization of logical operators

Abstract:

Marcos Rohena-Madrazo
When: Friday, February 4, 3-4:30 pm
Where: the 5th floor lab in 10 Washington Place

The social life of a sound change: production and perception of fricative voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish

Language is a social entity and, as such, social factors constrain it in every circumstance, making it a highly variable entity as well. Studying this variation across different social groups in a speech community can provide clues to how language change occurs and how it is diffused throughout the community. One such change is the devoicing of the postalveolar fricative in Buenos Aires Spanish, where the sound represented by ‘y’ and ‘ll’ in words like “llave” and “playa” used to be pronounced voiced, as the ‘j’ in Jacques, but it has become increasingly more common for it to be pronounced voiceless, as the ‘sh’ in shock. In previous studies, the voiced variant had been associated with upper class speakers, whereas the voiceless variant had been identified as characteristic of the younger, middle class females.

In this talk, I examine the past history and current progression of the devoicing of the postalveolar fricative. I utilize instrumental acoustic measurements in order to precisely determine how different social groups in the Buenos Aires speech community vary in the pronunciation of ‘y’/’ll’. This novel methodology provides a metric for determining when a sound change has been completed by comparing the production of the postalveolar fricative to other sounds in the phonological system. Contrary to what had previously been described by impressionistic means, my results from instrumental analysis show that this sound change is still ongoing even among upper class speakers, demonstrating the wide range of voicing variation present in the speech community.

In addition to production, I investigate the effect that the variable voicing of the postalveolar fricative has on the perception of sounds in a foreign language. My findings from perception experiments suggest that the presence of voicing variation in the speech community affects the way in which sounds in a foreign language are perceived and discriminated. This has implications for second language acquisition, suggesting that by understanding the sociolinguistic variation in the students’ native language one can foresee and address their potential difficulties, thus improving the students’ command of the foreign language.

Jim Wood and Simon Charlow are giving talks at the 33rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society in Goettingen:

Jim Wood, The unintentional causer in Icelandic (in AG 10)
Yael Sharvit (UConn) & Simon Charlow, Bound de re pronouns and concept generators (in AG 12)

The following members of the department are presenting or organizing workshops at the LSA (in order of appearance):

Mark Baltin, organizer: Workshop on Structural Approaches to Ellipsis
Mark Baltin: How semantics (and overt syntax) is affected by deletion: Syntactic deletion
Oana Savescu Ciucivara (NYU/Bucharest) and Jim Wood: RE-prefixation and Talmy’s parameter
Jonathan Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen: Teasing apart the relationship between syntactic structure-building and semantic composition using MEG
Kevin Roon and Adamantios I. Gafos (NYU/Haskins): Dynamical modeling of phoneme classifications and response times
Lauren Hall-Lew (Edinburgh) and Sonya Fix: Perceptual coding reliability of /l/ vocalization in casual speech data
Gregory R. Guy: Shared constraints on phonological variation in New Zealand English
Tuuli Morrill Adams: The interaction of native and non-native prosodic structure in acquisition
Danielle Alfandre (Louisiana), Maryam Bakht, Scott Grimm (Stanford) and Olivia Sammons (Alberta), organizers: Workshop: Navigating Grad School and Beyond: Skills for Academic Success
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo: Sociophonetic variation and paradigm leveling in Buenos Aires Spanish sibilants
Jim Wood: Affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax
Gillian Gallagher: Auditory features: the case from laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions
Elizabeth L. Coggshall: Glottalization in New York City English

See this page for details.

Title: Even More on The Anaphor Agreement Affect: When Binding Does Not Agree

Abstract:

See this page for details.

Title: Bare Nouns

Abstract:

See this page for details.

Title: Reflexives and Antipassives

Abstract:

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour will be giving a colloquium talk on Friday, December 3, at 4pm, 10 Washington Place.

Title: On the relevance of phases as domains of linguistic computation

Abstract:

Neil Myler will be presenting at the CUNY Syntax Supper on Tuesday, Nov. 23 at 6:30 pm. The title of his talk is "Light verbs, hidden relatives, and control: The case of derived nominals."

Abstract:

This talk will address the question of why some derived nominals formed from control verbs allow control into a to-infinitive, while others do not. A typical paradigm is given in (1)-(2).

(1) a. John attempted to play football

b. John hated to play football

(2) a. John’s attempt to play football

b. *John’s hatred to play football

I will argue that this distinction, along with certain well-known restrictions on raising and control from derived nominals into to-infinitives, receives a natural account under the following assumptions: (a.) derived nominals as a default never allow control or raising from a to-infinitive, and (b.) derived nominals that seem to allow control are actually instances of a hidden relative clause containing a silent light verb corresponding to make, have or give. Assumption (b.) will be supported by the novel observation that all derived nominals that allow control into to-infinitives are also allowed to appear in light verb constructions, whereas those that disallow such control are unable to appear in light verb constructions (so, one can make an attempt but not *have/make/give (a) hatred). Assumption (a.) is derived if nominalizing derivational morphemes are functional heads with nominal features which select a verbal substructure (following Marantz (1998), Alexiadou (2009) and Borer (2009) amongst others) and if, following Kayne (1999/2000), infinitival to is introduced as a functional head above the matrix vP level and is related to the infinitival verb by movement. In the default case, nominalization will make it impossible for infinitive to to be introduced, causing the embedded non-finite verb to go unlicensed and crashing the derivation. However, those derived nominals that are compatible with light verbs allow for the merger of a silent light verb, ‘reverbalizing’ the structure and allowing to to be introduced. Following Collins (2006), a relative clause derivation then ensues, with genitive ‘s in example (2) being introduced among the nominal projections above the relative C head. The impossibility of raising from a to-infinitive into a derived nominal, (known since Chomsky (1970:205)- see example (3)) will be argued to follow from the impossibility of raising the would-be subject from its theta-position past the C-head into a nominal Case position.

(3) a. John is likely to leave

b. *John’s likelihood to leave

Amy and Libby are presenting this weekend at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans:

Amy Wong: "I'm a bad Asian": Stance acts and stylistic moves among American-born-Chinese preadolescents in New York City's Chinatown.
Libby Coggshall: The phonological effects of the Red Power Movement: Prosodic rhythm and change in Lumbee English.

Title: The indirect licensing of DP-internal adjectival agreement: strong and weak adjectival inflection in Germanic

Abstract:

Title: Object movement (a)symmetries in British English dialects

Abstract:

Title: Typology of non-standard negation in simple declarative sentences

Abstract: Download PDF

Zoltan Gendler Szabo (Yale) is going to talk about "Epistemic Comparativism" (joint work with Jonathan Schaffer, ANU) in the semantics group on Oct. 29, Friday, at 11:00am in Rm. 103.

See this page for more information.

Title: Having-for: the case of the Russian modal possessive and of English get

Abstract:

NYU Linguistics is the most prominent program at NWAV 39, to be held November 2-6 at UT San Antonio. Over a dozen NYU linguists are presenting over fifteen papers and one poster!

Jennifer Nycz, The Phonetics/Phonology Distinction in Second Dialect Acquisition by Adults.
Jennifer Nycz, (with Watt, Llamas, Docherty and Hall), The Effects of a Border: A Detailed Examination of Production, Attitude and Perception.
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, Effects of native voicing variation on the perception of non-native voicing contrasts.
John Singler, Stigma, Covert Prestige, and the Continuum: The Special Case of Vernacular Liberian English.
Libby Coggshall and Paul Ellis, The Sixth Borough?: Jersey City's Place in New York City English.
Gregory Guy, Goldvarb: Still the Gold Standard. (Statistical Tools Workshop presentation).
Maryam Bakht, presentation in Workshop on Issues in Field Methodologies in Younger Populations.
Sonya Fix (with Lew-Hall), Multiple Measures of L-Vocalization.
Amy Wong, presentation in Workshop on Issues in Field Methodologies in Younger Populations.
Amy Wong, Diverse Linguistic Resources and Multidimensional Identities of American-Born Chinese Youths.
Danny Erker and Gregory Guy, Exemplar Theory & Variable Syntax: How Lexical Frequency Conditions Subject Pronoun Use in Spanish.

Maryam Bakht, Libby Coggshall, and Marcos Rohena-Madrazo organized panel session on A sociolinguistic investigation of the “Jersey Shore”. In it:
Maryam Bakht, Here’s “The Situation”: Style and Identity on the “Jersey Shore”.
Elizabeth L. Coggshall, Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz, Emily Nguyen (with Acosta), Jersey Shore” Down the Jersey Shore: Transient Communities and Perceptual Folk Linguistic Ideologies.
Maryam Bakht, Marcos Rohena-Madrazo (with Valentinsson), “Anyone know what that means?”: Meta-Pragmatic Discourse and the Use of Stereotyped and Stigmatized Language in “Jersey Shore”.

Rafael Orozco (NYU alum), Veracruz Speech Perceptions: A Preliminary Study.
Erez Levon (NYU alum), Gender, Prescriptivism, and Language Change: A New Way of Analyzing Morphological Variation in Hebrew.

Paul DeDecker (NYU alum) and Jennifer Nycz, For the Record: Which Digital Media Are Good Enough for Sociophonetic Analysis? (poster)

Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman, Equalizing Partnerships: Blogging on African American English (at African American Language 2 (AAL2), the NWAV pre-conference)

Oct. 1 11am Jim Wood, The unintentional causer in Icelandic
Oct. 8 2:00pm Inna Livitz & Salvador Mascarenhas, Semantic aspects of having-for in Russian modal possessives and English "get"
Oct. 15 12:30 pm Dan Lassiter TBA

On Oct. 8, Inna & Salvador will discuss the syntactic aspects of the same topics in the Brown Bag series at 11am. (Note the morning/afternoon switch for the two meetings.)

The schedule of the Semantics Group meetings is posted here. Please check for changes and for further meetings.

Title: Subject-Agreeing Adverbial Adjectives in Ancient Greek

Abstract:

What a delight, the NELS 41 program! I apologize for not putting all the names in the title of this post, but eight...? Cheers to all the authors and also to the collaborative spirit!

Papers:

The Unintentional Causer in Icelandic
Jim Wood (NYU)

Investigating the Relationship Between Syntactic Structure-Building and Semantic Composition Using MEG
Jonathan Brennan, Liina Pylkkanen (both NYU)

Bound De Re Pronouns and Concept Generators
Simon Charlow (NYU), Yael Sharvit (UConn)

Morphological Effects on the Articulation of English Intervocalic /l/
Sangjin Hwang, Sang-Im Lee, Lisa Davidson (all NYU)

Poster:

Re- Prefixation and Talmy's Parameter
Oana Ciucivara, Jim Wood (both NYU)

THE WORKING GROUP IN URBAN SOCIOLINGUISTICS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

is pleased to announce a talk and a workshop by

ISABELLE BUCHSTALLER
Newcastle University

THE TALK:
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, at 4 p.m.
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, 10 WASHINGTON PLACE, RM. 104

QUOTATIONS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: Investigating strategies for speech and thought representation across four generations of Tyneside speakers

Cheers to Laziz Nchare and Rahul Balusu (PhD 2009), whose papers have been accepted for presentation at GLOW-in-Asia VIII, Beijing, August 2010.

Nchare & Terzi, Lexicalizing structure crosscategorially
Balusu, OCP effects in Telugu

Dan Lassiter is speaking on "Restrictions on adverbial modification with auxiliary and adjectival modals" in the Syntax Colloquium series at Yale on April 23.

John Singler will be the keynote speaker at the The 12th Annual University of Michigan ­ University of Chicago “Michicagoan” Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology, which is to be held at the University of Chicago on May 14-15. The theme of the conference is "Linguistic Terrains: Landscapes and Socioscapes." His talk is titled "Keeping Pace with Space: The Negotiation of Linguistic Landscapes."

He also gave a colloquium at Penn on April 15, on "Variationist Sociolinguistics in the Niger-Congo Languages of West Africa: The Non-State of the Art."

Jim Wood is speaking in the Syntax Colloquium Series at Yale on April 16. The title of his talk is "Title: Singular -st Syncretism and Featural Pied-Piping".

Paul De Decker is giving two talks: "Whose norm is it anyway? Dialect contact in St. John's, Newfoundland" at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, Southhampton, UK, September 1-4, and "Stopping grounds: Institutional identity and phonetic variation in the coffee shops of St. John's, Newfoundland" at the 55th Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association, SUNY New Paltz, NY, April 15-17.

This year's Undergraduate Research Conference features not one, not two, but three linguistics sessions. The full schedule is here; below are just some highlights. Anyone is welcome to attend and cheer for our undergraduate researchers!

World Languages: Speaking, Analyzing, Understanding
9:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Room 501, Silver Center

Margarita Zeitlin (German and Linguistics) "The Search for German Identity through German-Jewish Sociability"
Timothy McEniry (Language and Mind) "The Role of Language in the Formation of Worldview"
Sarah Parrish (Spanish and Linguistics) "A Sociolinguistic Code-Switching Study of Nuyorican Poetry"
Dante Wadley (Anthropology and Linguistics) "Arabic-French Code Switching and Young Moroccans: A Culture of Accommodation"

Issues in Linguistics
9:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Room 520, Silver Center

Nessa Berezin-Bahr (Anthropology and Linguistics) "SY Vernacular English"
Alexandra Furukawa (Linguistics) "Accommodative Teacher-Talk in New York City High Schools"
Anna Greenwood (Linguistics) "The Status of Glides in Italian Syllables"
Shannon Mooney (Anthropology and Linguistics) "Social Variation in the Pronunciation of /r/ in Glasgow"
Amanda Rysling (Linguistics) "An Investigation of Word-Internal Syllabification in Moroccan Arabic"
Gabriel Slamovits (Linguistics, Literature) "Comparativism: Literary Linguistics"

Language in Context: Dual Language Immersion Programs in the Public Education System Room
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
429, Waverly

Jessica Combs (Spanish and Linguistics) "Language Use in a Dual Language Environment"
Autumn Gerami (Spanish and Linguistics) "Developing Dual-Language Programs"
Sarah Parrish (Spanish and Linguistics) "A Study of Improving English Instruction for a Dual Immersion Kindergarten Program"

Tricia Irwin will be giving the CUNY Psycholinguistics Supper next Tuesday, April 13.

title: "The Prosodic Consequences of Unaccusativity"
location: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Room 7102
time: 6:30 to 8:00pm

Information about the CUNY Psycholinguistics Supper

Jennifer Nycz will be giving a talk at The 4th Northern Englishes Workshop at the University of Sheffield. The talk is titled Linguistic variation, geography, and identity: Sound change along a national border (work with Gerry Docherty, Damien Hall, Carmen Llamas, and Dominic Watt).

Six of our (neuro-)semanticists are presenting at the Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM) held at IRCS, UPenn, April 10:

Doug Bemis, Evidence for a Domain-General Cognitive Mechanism in the Construction of Basic Linguistic Meaning
Jon Brennan, Teasing apart structure-building and semantic composition during story-reading with MEG
Simon Charlow, Two kinds of de re blocking
Tim Leffel, Continuation semantics for expressives and epithets
Salvador Mascarenhas, Contextual givenness vs. existential quantification
Mike Solomon, Quantifiers, alternatives, and ‘certain’ indefinites

Inna Livitz will present at the 19th Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics conference at the University of Maryland. Her talk is entitled "Distinguishing Existentials: Modal Possessive Constructions in Russian."

Jennifer Nycz and Paul De Decker will be presenting a poster titled Reliability of formant measurements from lossy compressed audio with James Bulgin at the British Association of Academic Phoneticians Colloquium (BAAP) in London, March 29-31st.

Jennifer will also be giving a talk at BAAP, Voice Onset Time and the Scottish Vowel Length Rule along the Scottish-English border, based on work from the Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border project (with Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty, and Damien Hall).

Gregory Guy and Jennifer Nycz will be presenting papers at the 34th International LAUD Symposium (Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language Variation in its Structural, Conceptual and Cultural Dimensions), March 15-18th, in Landau, Germany.

Greg will be speaking on The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables?

Jen will be presenting on
Speaker awareness, differential use of linguistic variables and the expression of identity (with Dom Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty & Damien Hall) and Changing words or changing rules? What second dialect acquisition can tell us about phonological representation.

Anna Szabolcsi is giving one of the invited talks at the Symposium on "Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models" in Riga, Latvia, April 23-25. The program is posted at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-1150.html.

Three of our semanticists are presenting at Semantics and Linguistics Theory 20 (SALT 20), April 29-May 1, Vancouver:

Papers:

Daniel Lassiter (New York University)
Gradable epistemic modals, probability and scale structure

Raffaella Bernardi (Free University of Bozen/Bolzano) and Chris Barker (New York University)
Principles of interdimensional meaning interaction

Poster:

Simon Charlow (New York University)
De re anaphors

See the abstracts at the conference web site.

NYU is hosting the 2010 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing on March 16-20.

Invited Speakers:

Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (University of Marburg)

Matt Davis (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK)

Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, College Park)

Kuniyoshi Sakai (University of Tokyo)

Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Conference website: http://psych.nyu.edu/cuny/

Presentations by locals:

Anna Greenwood, a senior linguistics major, will be presenting at McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates the weekend of March 12, 2010. She will speak about "A study of vowel duration as a function of prevocalic consonantal size and quality in Arabic." The paper originated in Adamantios Gafos's seminar, Phonolab.

Chris Barker will be one of the invited speakers at the Chicago Linguistic Society's annual meeting. He is speaking at the parasession on "Re-evaluating the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface".

Claire Bowern, Yale, will give a talk entitled "Novel Object Naming: Report on a Psycholinguistic Experience in the Field". Details:

February 23rd
2-3:15
Room 104
10 Washington Place

Jan. 22, 1:30pm, Igor Yanovich: "Introducing evaluation tree logics"
Feb. 5, Chris Barker colloquium at Rutgers: "Free choice permission as resource sensitive reasoning"
Feb. 12, 10am, Mike Solomon on indefinites
Feb. 19, 10am, Dan Lassiter on gradable modals
Feb. 26, 1:30pm, Katrina Przyjemski: "The Lewis semantics for dream reports: an impossible dream"
Mar. 5, 10am, Dan Lassiter on quantity implicatures and Geurts's new book

For the schedule after the Spring break, see updates here.

Dan Lassiter will present his paper "Why symmetry is not a problem for a Gricean theory of scalar implicature" at the conference Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models in Brussels. The talk will be on February 7.

Tricia Irwin will present her paper "Intransitive sentences, argument structure, and the syntax-prosody interface" at WCCFL 28 in Los Angeles. She will be joined by Richie Kayne and Diamandis Gafos, who are the keynote speakers.

Simon Charlow is giving a talk about "De re anaphors" at Ling-Lunch in the Linguistics Department at MIT on March 11.

Our visitor Patrick-André Mather will be giving a RISLUS talk at CUNY entitled Acquisition of NYC English phonetic features by Caribbean immigrants: a pilot study. The talk will be on Mar. 5; see link for time+place.

The 2010 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America features no fewer than nine talks by NYU linguists:

Adam Buchwald, (New York University), Michelle Miozzo (University of Cambridge/Johns Hopkins University): Evidence for language-internal cluster well-formedness differences

Oana Savescu Ciucivara (New York University): When syncretism meets word order: The case of Romanian postverbal clitics

Jason Shaw (New York University): Linguistic influences on the temporal organization of words

Tuuli Adams (New York University): The effect of word learning and fluent speech listening on second language segmentation

Kara Becker (New York University): The current state of bought-raising on Manhattan's Lower East Side: Who uses c[ɔ]ffee t[ɔ]lk?

Lisa Levinson (Oakland University, NYU Ph.D. 2007), Jonathan Brennan (New York University): The behavioral and neural correlates of silent causativity in verbs

Marcos Rohena-Madrazo (New York University): Perceptual assimilation of non-native obstruent voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners

Lisa Davidson (New York University), Jason Shaw (New York University): Perceptual illusions in non-native clusters are context-dependent

Cara Shousterman (New York University), Renee Blake (New York University): Ethnic and linguistic diversity within AAE: The case of black New Yorkers and postvocalic /r/

Plus, Elika Bergelson, an NYU BA alum currently at UPenn Psychology, is giving a talk:

Elika Bergelson (University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Merickel (University of Rochester), William Idsardi (University of Maryland), Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland): Structural biases in phonology: Evidence from artificial language learning in adults

Renee Blake is giving an Urban Sociolinguistics colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center on December 3. Chris Collins is giving a Syntax Supper talk on December 8. See the program here.

This year's mini-conference (hitherto CUNY/SUNY/NYU, henceforth SunyYaleNyuCuny = SYNC) is going to take place on December 5th at Yale. The alumnus keynote speaker is David Pesetsky. NYU speakers are Dan Lassiter, Oana Savescu, and Jim Wood. The link to the program and other relevant info is here.

Zvjezdana Vrzic, NYU alum (PhD '99) and adjunct instructor in the department, will be presenting a paper at the Borders & Identities Conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England on January 8, 2010. Her talk is titled 'Interpretations of the identity of the Vlaski/Zejanski speaking community in Istria'.

Maria will be giving a colloquium at her undergraduate alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, on Friday the 20th of November.

John Singler, on sabbatical in this semester, gave the keynote address to the annual conference of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa / Southern African Applied Linguistics Association at Cape Peninsula, University of Technology in Cape Town. The talk was entitled "Variationist Sociolinguistics and the Niger-Congo Languages of West Africa: The Non-State of the Art."

He has recently given colloquia at the University of Western Australia, the University of Cape Town, and the University of the West Indies (Mona). The Mona campus of UWI is in Jamaica.

Maria Gouskova is giving a colloquium at MIT on Oct. 30, 2009. The title of her talk is "Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers".

Seven NYU linguists are presenting at NWAV 38, University of Ottawa, October 22-25, 2009:

Kara Becker, 'Is Coffee Talk Lost? BOUGHT raising on Manhattan’s Lower East Side'

Renee Blake, Cara Shousterman, Lindsay Kelley, 'Rethinking AAE research: The use of postvocalic /r/ by two groups of black New Yorkers'

Gregory R. Guy, 'Co-variables: Are sociolects coherent?

Sonia Fix, `Representations of blackness by white women: Linguistic practice in the
community versus the media'

Philipp Angermeyer (York U.),
`Translation effects as evidence in language contact studies: The case of variable subject pronouns in NYC Spanish'

Marcos Rohena-Madrazo is presenting at two conferences in October:

"Perceptual assimilation of obstruent voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners" at the 2009 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium in San Juan, Puerto Rico on October 23.

"Perception of non-native voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners", a poster at the 2009 Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Antonio, Texas on October 30.

Jason Shaw and and Lisa Davidson will be presenting a talk called “Perceptual Similarity Does Not Account for Repairs of Non-native Phonotactics”.

Lisa Davidson is also presenting another talk at NELS with Colin Wilson (JHU) called "Explaining non-native consonant cluster processing".

NYU Linguistics BA alum Ryan Bennett, currently at UC Santa Cruz, will be speaking about "Wh-reciprocals, quantifier raising, and phasehood."

Philippe Schlenker (Jean-Nicod and NYU) is talking about "Non-restrictive relative clauses in a unidimensional semantics" and also about Donkey anaphora in French Sign Language.

The following three posters by NYU linguists (with psychologist and philosopher friends) will be presented at the first Neurobiology of Language Conference (NLC 2009) in Chicago, IL, on Oct 15-16:

Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Thomas Farmer, and Liina Pylkkänen: "Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: the role of form typicality."
Douglas Bemis and Liina Pylkkänen: "The neural correlates of basic linguistic composition: an MEG investigation."
Gwyneth Lewis, Alec Marantz and Olla Solomyak: "The neural basis of obligatory decomposition of suffixed words: Tracking the “broth” in “brother”."

Jon Brennan, Alec Marantz and Liina Pylkkänen will be giving talks at the MEG and Language (MEGLANG) 2009 workshop in Paris on Oct 8-9.

Jon Brennan: "Incrementally dissociating syntax and semantics with MEG"
Alec Marantz: "Single trial regression analyses in source space for linguistic variables: some results for visual word recognition"
Liina Pylkkänen: "Studying the neural bases of semantic composition with MEG"

Mike Solomon is giving a talk on "Partitives and the semantics of same" at Sinn und Bedeutung 14, Vienna, Sept. 28-30, 2009.

The semantics group will be meeting 10am to 12pm on Fridays, save for the first Friday of each month, when it meets at noon. The first talk was given by Violeta Vazquez Rojas on 9-18 (on the quantificational adjective puros), the second one will be by Inna Livitz on 9-25 (on the distributive vs collective readings of both). The subsequent schedule will be posted here. Members of the department and longer-term visitors should email Anna if they wish to be on the email list of the group.

Anna Szabolcsi is giving a talk entitled "Certain verbs are syntactically explicit quantifiers" at Logic, Language, Mathematics, a philosophy conference in memory of Imre Ruzsa, Sept. 17-19, 2009, Budapest.

Jen Nycz will be presenting a paper with Dom Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty, & Damien Hall at The 7th UK Language Variation and Change Conference, to be held at Newcastle University (Sept 1-3). The title of the paper is "Variation and Change in /r/ in the Scottish/English borderland".

Dan Lassiter is giving a talk on 'Externalist intuitions and coordination games', at the conference Philosophy of Linguistics, Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 7-12, 2009.

Liina will talk about Studying the neural bases of semantic composition with MEG on July 28.

Chris's CSSP talk is on "Linear implicature and free choice permission".

Vincent Chanethom will be presenting a paper entitled "Acquisition of English Aspiration: a Longitudinal Study" at the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, which will be held at Utrecht, the Netherlands on July 8-11.

Jen Nycz will be presenting a paper at ICLaVE (International Conference on Language Variation in Europe), at the University of Copenhagen on behalf of the Accents & Identity on the Scottish-English Border project. The paper is entitled "The Scottish-English Borderland: Phonological Production, Perception and Attitude" (authors: Carmen Llamas, Dominic Watt, Gerry Docherty, Damien Hall & Jennifer Nycz).

Suzanne Dikker will give an invited lecture entitled Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute on July 8th.

Cheers to Dan Lassiter, Simon Charlow, Salvador Mascarenhas, and Eytan Zweig (PhD 2007), who will be busy and keeping others busy at ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information), Bordeaux, July 20-31.

Dan has three talks (plus papers in the proceedings):

"Symmetric presupposition satisfaction is intra-sentential presupposition correction", Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition.
"Vagueness as probabilistic linguistic knowledge", Workshop on Vagueness in Communication.
"The algebraic structure of amounts: evidence from comparatives", ESSLLI Student Session.

Simon has two talks (plus papers in the proceedings):

“Strong predicative presuppositional objects", Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition.
"Can DP be a scope island?", ESSLLI Student Session.

Salvador is co-chair of the Logic and Language section of the ESSLLI Student Session.

Eytan co-teaches Plurality and Distributivity Across Language(s) and Logic(s) with George Tsoulas.

The Department of Cognitive Studies at the Paris Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) organizes its seventh international Fall School in Linguistics. The goal of this interdisciplinary Fall school is to provide exposure to linguistic theory, and to grammar based approaches to cognitive studies. The EALing VII teachers include Guglielmo Cinque, David Pesetsky, Liina Pylkkänen, Luigi Rizzi, Benjamin Spector, Megha Sundara, Roger Schwarzschild, Michael Ullman, and Alan Yu.

Three people from the department are participating in the Cross-Language Speech Perception and Variations in Linguistic Experience workshop at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Portland, OR, May 18-22. Lisa Davidson and Jason Shaw will present a poster called "A closer look at perceptual epenthesis in cross-language perception", and Tuuli Adams will present a poster on "Second language word segmentation in a fluent speech listening task".

Gregory Guy will be presenting the keynote address at SIS-Vogais II (The second International Symposium on Vowels), at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on May 23.

During the summer of 2009, there will be a two-week school at the NYU-in-Ghana campus in Accra, Ghana that focuses on the study of African languages and linguistic theory. Chris Collins and John Singler are both organizers and lecturers; Violeta Vazquez-Rojas is one of the lecturers.

Katrin Scultz, from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation
at the University of Amsterdam, will give a talk entitled "If you wiggle A, then B will change. On causal conditionals - again". Further details:

Tuesday May 5th
at 11:00am
in the seminar room of the Linguistics department.

Jeroen Groenendijk will be giving a talk on Inquisitive Semantics and Pragmatics this Wednesday, 29 April, 2009, Linguistics department, 7th floor, 726
Broadway, New York, at 12:00 Noon.

**Please note that the starting time is noon.**

Liina Pylkkanen is presenting two papers in May, and Hugh Ragliabati is presenting a third one co-authored with Liina and Hanna Gelfand, this week:

The Anterior Midline Field: Progress Report. Maryland Mayfest: Moving Beyond Truth Conditions: The Computation of Meaning. University of Maryland, College Park, MD. May 8-9, 2009.

Event coercion in brain and development. Events across categories: Theoretical and experimental approaches to event structure. Madrid, Spain. May 27-29, 2009.

Hugh Rabagliati, Hanna Gelfand, Gary Marcus & Liina Pylkkänen: The acquisition of ontological shifts and the process of lexical semantic development. XPrag, April 23-25, Lyon, France.

Chris Barker is going to teach a six-week course in semantics at the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute (UC Berkeley).

Maria Gouskova is going to UMass Amherst on April 17 to give a talk on "Unexceptional Segments: A Non-Representational Theory of Yers".

Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado is giving a talk at SULA5 (Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas) on "Case Marking and Semantic Incorporation in Tarascan", May 15-17.

Maria Gouskova is going to the Center of Advanced Studies in Theoretical Linguistics in Tromsø, Norway to give two talks: "The prosodic and morphological structure of compounds in Russian" and "A non-representational theory of ghost vowels." The talks will be on April 30.

Jon Brennan will be giving a talk on "Irish pronouns and inflection" at Yale on April 17.

Vincent Chanethom is giving a colloquium talk entitled "Acquisition of English aspiration: a longitudinal study" on April 17 at Syracuse University.

Txuss Martín is presenting a poster on "The internal structure of dative clitics" at the Colloquium on Generative Grammar, to be held in Vitoria, Basque Country, April 1st - 3rd.

Anna Szabolcsi is giving a colloquium on "Raising verbs as quantifiers" at MIT on March 20.

We have five people going to ACAL this year, including one undergraduate. Shupamem was the language in Chris Collins's field methods course last year.

Verb Focus in Shupamem
Chris Collins and Laziz Nchare

The Definite Interpretation of Shupamem Numerals
Violeta Vázquez Rojas Maldonado

Spatial Expressions in Shupamem
Arhonto Terzi and Laziz Nchare

Contour Tones on Short and Long Vowels in Shupamem
Corey Silverstein

The Syntax of Agreement/Definiteness in Shupamem DP and Greenberg’s Universal 20
Laziz Nchare

Marcos Rohena-Madrazo will be giving a talk titled "Perception of non-native fricative voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners: does native variation help?" at the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Tucson AZ, March 28).

Tricia Irwin will be giving a talk called "Polarity and Degree in "so totally" Constructions" at the CUNY syntax supper on March 10.

Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Thomas A. Farmer (Cornell), and Liina Pylkkanen will give a poster entitled "Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: the role of phonological typicality" at the 22nd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, UC Davis, CA, March 26-28 2009.

Gregory Guy is attending the International Congress and Institute of the Associação Brasileira de Lingüística (Brazilian Linguistics Association, ABRALIN), in João Pessoa, Brazil, March 5-15. He is presenting a paper on Linguistic minorities in the USA, and teaching a one-week course on language change in progress.

Anna Szabolcsi is giving colloquium on "Raising Verbs as Quantifiers?" on February 27 at the Umass Amherst Department of Linguistics.

Dan Lassiter is giving a talk at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium in Philadelphia on March 29 entitled "Explaining a restriction on the scope of the comparative operator".

Inna Livitz is giving a talk on March 28 at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at UC Davis, entitled "The role of animacy information in syntactic processing: a case study of middle constructions."

Stephanie Harves (Pomona) will be giving a talk "To have and to need in Russian and beyond" on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 9am in the linguistics department conference room.

Jason Shaw will give a practice job talk for an upcoming interview on Friday Jan 29 2009. The talk will be in either the seminar room or the library.

Asya Pereltsvaig

"The syntax of noun phrases in Russian: Elucidating functional architecture"

Friday January 30, 9am - 10:30am
Linguistics Department Conference Room
726 Broadway, room 701

There will be a Special Lecture in Linguistics and Philosophy given by Derek Bickerton (Professor Emeritus, Univeristy of Hawaii) on Wednesday, April 2 and 5pm in Meyer 815. The talk is entitled "Bastard Tongues: A Life in Linguistics".