24 January 2016

Linguistics Club meets tomorrow

The first meeting of the Linguistics Majors Club meets tomorrow, January 25, at 4PM in the Integrated Learning Center N400. If you are interested in any of the linguistics majors, or in linguistics or linguists, come!

SSRG meets tomorrow

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will have it's first meeting of the semester next Monday, January 25th, at 7:30pm. We'll meet at my place. This will be an organizational meeting to plan the rest of the semester — we'll talk about when we'd like to meet, who'd like to present, whether we want to do more journal overviews, and whether / how we'd like to read a book together this semester.

As always, please remember to RSVP so I know how much food to buy:

http://doodle.com/poll/g7dcq9ig8eavfd5f

LARC on Wednesday

LARC’s first meeting of the semester will be this Wednesday, January 27, in ILC N451 at noon. This meeting is devoted to organizing the rest of the meetings this term. Everyone who has an interest in first or second language acquisition is welcome!

UMAFLAB becomes UMAFLAA

Seth Cable and Peggy Speas write:

Happy New Year! And, with a new year comes a new session of UMAFLAA (the UMass Funny Languages Afternoon — formerly UMass Funny Languages Breakfast)! 

What is UMAFLAA, you might ask? Well, the purpose of UMAFLAA is to bring together individuals with a shared interest in puzzling linguistic data, optimally (but not necessarily) from understudied or minority languages.

*Presentations are always informal*. We are *not* looking for polished work or practice talks (though those are welcome).  Rather, participants are free to present any puzzles they like. They needn't have any analysis in mind; indeed, part of the fun of the group is hearing other people's thoughts on some difficult problem.

Thus, if all you have is an interesting pattern worth 'boggling at', that's perfect for our group (particularly if it's from an otherwise not-very-much-talked-about language or variety). For example, a run down of all the crazy data obtained during some recent field work (or experimental work, or whatever) would be quite ideal.

As the name suggests, our meetings will be in the afternoon. Our preliminary plan is to meet during the colloquium slot when no colloquium has been scheduled. 

The first meeting will be soon announced. If you’re interested in presenting something, get in touch with Seth.

Call for papers: Definiteness across Languages

The Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies of El Colegio de México will host a workshop on definiteness across languages,  which will take place in June 22-24, in Mexico City. The aim of this event is to bring together linguists working on syntactic and semantic description as well as on the development of theories aimed to answer two main questions:

i. What formal strategies do natural languages use to express definiteness?ii. What are the possible meanings of their definite noun phrases?

Invited speakers
Bert Le Bruyn (Utrecht University) 
Florian Schwarz  (University of Pennsylvania, UMass Alumnus) 

Abstract submission

We invite submissions contributing to the study of any aspect of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of definite noun phrases in natural languages. Please submit an abstract in PDF format of no more than one page of text with an additional page for extra data, figures, and references. This file must not contain any personal information or affiliation, and must be submitted via EasyChair. If you are not familiar with EasyChair, please follow these submission instructions. The talks, which can be given either in English or in Spanish,  should be 30 minutes long followed by 10 minutes of discussion. 

Important dates
Deadline for abstract submission: February 14, 2016 Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2016 Conference dates: June 22-24, 2016