Let’s Win the Linguist List Fund Drive!

In case you missed it, the 2015 Linguist List Fund Drive is ON, and we are slipping behind! We currently land in 3rd for overall donations from 8 donors. The University of Washington is currently rallying behind 25 individual donors… let’s match it and beat it!

The latest rankings are as follows – click here for a full list.

1. Indiana University Bloomington ($2,150)
2. University of Washington ($1,540)
3. Stanford University ($1,065)
4. North-West University, Potchefstroom and Vaal Triangle Campuses, South Africa ($820)
5. University of South Carolina ($740)
6. University of California, Santa Barbara ($675)
7. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ($535)
8. University of Kansas ($455)
9. Wellesley College ($400)
10. Arizona State University ($350)

Indiana University Bloomington has ranked first throughout the Fund Drive, but we can change that!

 

Annette D’Onofrio Wins Centennial Teaching Award!

Congrats and sesquikudos to Annette, who has received a Centennial Teaching Award!

Established in 1989, this award recognizes and rewards outstanding teaching by teaching assistants in the Schools of Humanities and Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Engineering.

Bonnie Krejci at Splash! April 12th

Bonnie Krejci will be giving a Stanford Splash! class on Sunday, 4/12 called “Linguistic Taboo?”

Splash! is a semi-annual, two-day event when middle school and high school students come to campus to learn from ungrads, grad students, and other community members.

From the class description:

Why are some English words considered profane or deeply offensive, while others can be used in any situation? How has this changed over time? What kinds of words are considered offensive in other languages?

In this class, we will examine the social contexts and situations where certain words are off-limits, with the broader goal of understanding the relationship between language and culture.

Read more about Bonnie’s class and Splash! here.

Look Who’s Talking!

Kate Lynn Lindsey is an invited speaker at the Gray Colloquium at St. Mark’s School in Boston, MA. She will be giving two workshops on linguistic diversity and sustainability on April 9, 2015.

Paul Kiparsky gave a talk yesterday at Cornell on “Syntactic Drift and Convergence.”

Penny Eckert gave a talk on April 6 at Edinburgh University on “ Variation, stylistic landscapes, and social change”, and will present again April 11 at the iMean conference in Warwick.

Dan Jurafsky presented at USC in Journalism 499: Media, Food, and Culture, and will be giving a book talk at Vroman’s in Pasadena.

BA alum and current Berkeley grad student Kayla Carpenter will take part in a guest panel on “Fruitful and unfruitful collaborations with academics” on April 13 at 3:15PM on campus (Native American Cultural Center, 524 Lasuen Mall).

Cognition & Language Workshop Thursday April 9: Syrett

Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University) will be speaking at the Cognition & Language Workshop this Thursday, Apr 9, at 4pm in the Greenberg Room (Building 460, Room 126).

CHALLENGES AND SUPPORT FOR VERB LEARNING

Young children the world over appear to expect that a verb presented in a transitive frame surrounded by nouns maps onto a causative meaning and is best associated with an event involving an agent and a patient. At the same time, however, they struggle when a verb appears in an intransitive frame in which two conjoined nouns occupying the subject position. This contrast in performance between the two syntactic environments has been replicated time and again across labs, and has led some researchers to conclude that the fault lies in children’s underdeveloped syntactic representations or in the heuristics they deploy to assign semantic roles to a verb’s arguments. However, I will present the results of a set of word learning studies demonstrating that not only do adults also flounder when presented with a novel verb in an intransitive frame, but when children are provided with semantic support for the form-meaning mapping in the form of an additional informative lexical item or distributional evidence concerning the intended interpretation of the syntactic frame in the discourse, they fare much better with the intransitive frame. These findings suggest that the problem may not be an immature grammar, but rather lack of sufficient information to narrow down the hypothesis space. Verb learning calls upon children’s syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. When these aspects of the linguistic system work in concert, mapping form to meaning is facilitated.

Phil Crone at SMircle Wednesday 4/8 at 4:15PM

This Wednesday at 4:15 in the Greenberg Room, Phil Crone will be talking about Arabic first conjunct agreement. This is a version of his upcoming talk at the 29th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics.

Arabic First Conjunct Agreement: Against Late Operations

Several recent analyses of Arabic first conjunct agreement (FCA) employ novel syntactic operations that may occur late in a syntactic derivation (Soltan 2007, Larson 2013). I show that these “late operations” analyses are empirically insufficient by failing to capture cases in which FCA and agreement with the full, conjoined subject DP (full agreement) occur on distinct elements within the same clause (mixed agreement). These cases are straightforwardly captured through an interaction between constraints on Agree and movement. I apply this analysis to non-standard dialects of Arabic, for which I use Lebanese Arabic (LA) as a representative example. I then show how this analysis can be extended to cover Standard Arabic (SA) data on the assumption that FCA and partial agreement with non-conjoined plural subjects have separate explanations in SA. The independence of FCA and partial agreement in SA is supported by corpus data from the Penn Arabic Treebank (Maamouri et al. 2010).

Colloqium today (4/3): von Fintel

Kai von Fintel (MIT) will be giving a department colloquium today (April 3) on imperatives, followed by a social and dinner. As always, it will happen in the Greenberg Room (460-126) at 3:30PM.

A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives

In this talk, I report on ongoing joint work with Sabine Iatridou. We discuss two challenges for any semantics for imperatives that has them denote (strong) modal propositions: the use of imperatives to signal acquiescence (“A: I’d like to open the window. B: Go ahead, open it!”) and their use in conditional conjunctions (“Ignore the slightest detail and the experiment is flawed”). We demonstrate remarkable cross-linguistic uniformity in these uses of the imperative. In the course of the investigation, we also explore several puzzles in the analysis of conditional conjunction. We conclude with a recommendation in favor of analyses that give imperatives a non-modal semantics paired with a modulated pragmatics.

Colloquium next Friday (4/10): Caponigro

Ivano Caponigro (UCSD/CASBS) will be giving a colloquium next Friday, talking about his work on Richard Montague’s life. It will be at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room (420-126).

Richard Montague: The simplicity of language, the complexity of life. Toward a biography.

Richard Montague (1930-1971) was a brilliant UCLA logician and philosopher. He revolutionized our conception of language meaning with a theory (known after his death as “Montague Grammar”) that unveiled the logical “simplicity” of natural language, and triggered a major breakthrough and the beginning of a new subfield in linguistics and philosophy of language: formal semantics.

Montague was more than just an exceptionally gifted academic: he was a man with a complex multifaceted personality. At Berkeley, he was a brilliant student, with Alfred Tarski as his advisor. He had a passion for languages and literature and was close to the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance. At UCLA, he was a dedicated teacher who wrote a successful introductory logic textbook with his colleague Donald Kalish and a caring advisor who mentored students like Michael Bennett, Daniel Gallin, Hans Kamp, and Jeff Pelletier. His manner and temper were not always easy to handle and many colleagues found him intimidating. He was an accomplished organist and harpsichord player. He was close to Christopher Isherwood and his literary circle in Santa Monica. He also managed to become wealthy and owned fancy cars and real estate properties in Beverly Hills and the in the San Fernando Valley. And he was a gay man, who had to deal with legal and personal trouble and was murdered in his own home at the age of 40 (the crime is still unsolved).

In this talk, I present some preliminary results of my project to create an intellectual and personal biography of Richard Montague aimed at a broad not-exclusively academic audience. I will start by highlighting Montague’s contributions to linguistics and then look back at his life to try to reconstruct his intellectual development and the cultural and social milieu around him (Stockton, CA in the 30s and 40s; Berkeley in the late 40s and mid 50s; Los Angeles from the mid 50s to the early 70s).