============================ WHISC ============================
What's Happening In South College
November 12, 2003
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This is the inaugural issue of WHISC, a weekly newsletter about
what's happening in the UMass linguistics community.
The "South College" part of the name refers to metaphorical
space. Our alumni in Asia, our emeriti in England, our past
visitors from Vancouver, these people are all *in South
College* in sense relevant for WHISC.
I was pleasantly surprised by the high number of things to
report. For instance, in October and the first part of
November, UMass linguists gave 13 presentations at
international conferences, and 4 UMass linguists received
awards or award nominations.
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========================== OVERVIEW ===========================
-- Awards (Harry Seymour, Kyle Johnson, Shigeto Kawahara,
Peggy Speas)
-- Grant (seed grant from NWO)
-- Conferences (BU, NELS)
-- Colloquium (Andrea Gualmini, Yael Sharvit)
-- New GLSA publications
-- Special report from abroad (Barbara from Denmark)
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=========================== AWARDS ============================
Harry Seymour (Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, Professor and
Chair of the Department of Communication Disorders) will
receive the highest award for service to the community of
Speech Pathologists from the American Speech and Hearing
Association in Chicago this week (before an audience of 5000).
The Psychological Corporation is holding a party in his honor
and a new scholarship for Minority students pursuing
communication disorders is seeking donations. [Tom Roeper]
* * * * *
Three UMass linguists have been nominated for Distinguished
Teaching Awards:
Kyle Johnson
Shigeto Kawahara
Peggy Speas
Details about this award are here:
http://www.umass.edu/provost/award/campus/dta.html
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============================ GRANT ============================
A joint seed grant from NWO in Holland to the University of
Groningen, UMass, and the University of South Carolina to
promote collaboration has been granted to Angeliek van Hout,
Bart Hollebrandse, and Alice ter Meulen. It will involve the
AAE project crew as well as Janice Jackson who is at the
University of South Carolina (and wrote a terrific Comdis
dissertation on Habitual Be in AAE.) [Tom Roeper]
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========================= CONFERENCES =========================
Talks and Posters were given at BU Child Language Conference by
students, faculty, alumni, and Visiting Scholars from UMass:
Della Chambless
Petra Schulz
Anna Perez and Alan Munn
Sonja Eisenbeiss
Juergen Weissenborn
Barbara Pearson
D'jaris Coles, Jill deVilliers, and Tom Roeper
William Snyder and Tom Roeper
Val Johnson and Jill deVilliers
Lisa Green, Kristen Asplin, Janet Randall were also present and
came to our annual dinner with a host of others. [Tom Roeper]
* * * * *
UMass was extremely well represented at the 34th Annual Meeting
of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS).
Luis Alonso-Ovalle:
'Simplification of disjunctive antecedents
in a Hamblin Semantics'
Shigeto Kawahara:
'Echo epenthesis and reduplication'
Minjoo Kim:
'Internally-headed relatives instantiate
situation subordination'
Christopher Potts (with James Isaacs, UCSC):
'Hidden imperatives'
Shigeto took some pictures of the UMass crew in action:
http://www.people.umass.edu/kawahara/nels34.html
UConn will host next year's meeting. We will host it the year
after that.
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========================== COLLOQUIUM =========================
Andrea Gualmini (MIT) will give this Friday's colloquium talk
(Machmer W-26 at 3:30 pm). The title is 'The rewards of
raising children at LF'. We'll have the usual shindig in the
department lounge afterwords. The colloquium is part of the
UMass Linguistics Department's Colloquium Series.
* * * * *
Yael Sharvit (UConn) will give a guest lecture in Chris Potts's
semantics proseminar on Monday, November 17, 2:30-5:15, in
Herter 113. The topic will be free indirect discourse. There
will be dinner at Chris's house afterwords. It will be pizza
unless someone suggests something more creative. Attendance at
the talk is *not* a requirement for attendance at Chris's.
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======================= GLSA PUBLICATIONS =====================
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers 27:
Semantic Processing
(Luis Alonso-Ovalle, ed.)
Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 33
(Makoto Kadowaki and Shigeto Kawahara, eds.)
For ordering information: http://glsa.hypermart.net/index.htm
[Masako Hirotani]
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================== SPECIAL REPORT FROM DENMARK ================
Barbara Partee submitted the following report on the (extremely
full) visit she is currently taking to Denmark with Vladimir
Borschev. They return on Sunday the 16th, with a promise that
this is their last trip out of town this semester.
"We're in Copenhagen this week. On Monday we gave a joint
talk, 'For a Fire, To Be is To Burn: Ontology and Semantic
Bleaching', for an Ontoquery Workshop in Roskilde (where all
Danish kings and queens are buried and where there is a
fascinating viking ship museum; a graduate student in
archeology was a terrific guide during a quick lunch-break
excursion).
"The Ontoquery Project is run by Per Anker Jensen of Southern
Denmark University and colleagues mainly in the
Computational Linguistics Department of Copenhagen Business
School. On Tuesday we met with Per Anker Jensen and Carl
Vikner to continue long-standing discussions of the
semantics of possessives.
"On Wednesday and Thursday we are giving an invited 4-lecture
'Master Class' for Gradeast, a consortium of linguistics
programs in eastern Denmark, and on Friday morning we will
meet with graduate students to discuss the students' project
proposals. The four lectures will concern formal semantics
in general and the integration of formal and lexical
semantics, and our research on possessives and on the
Russian Genitive of Negation.
"Wednesday evening I participated in a meeting of the
Advisory Board of the Department of Computational
Linguistics of the Copenhagen Business School.
"The last event of the week is my invited talk for the
Faculty of Humanities of Copenhagen University, 'Models of
What we Mean. Recent Developments in Formal Semantics: The
Dynamics of Adjective Meaning'."
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Later in the semester, WHISC will report on the many UMass
linguists presenting at the LSA.
Please keep the submissions coming.
Please let me know if any of the formatting in this WHISC looks
terrible when displayed in your mail program.
---Chris
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