============================ WHISC ============================
What's Happening In South College
December 4, 2003
Issue 1:4
Archived at http://people.umass.edu/potts/whisc/
===============================================================
========================== OVERVIEW ===========================
-- Reading group (phonology)
-- Colloquium (Adamantios Gafos, Scott Soames)
-- Faculty work (Emmon Bach)
-- Larry Bohn and Pizza with Profs
-- New at DuBois (CGEL)
-- Linguists on the Dean's List
===============================================================
======================= READING GROUP =========================
The Phonology Reading Group meets this Friday (December 5),
at 2:15 pm, in Machmer W-26, to discuss Adamantios Gafos and
Stefan Benus's 2003 paper
2003. On neutral vowels in Hungarian. International Conference
of Phonetic Sciences 15, Barcelona.
The discussion will be, among other things, a way of preparing
for the afternoon's colloquium.
===============================================================
========================= COLLOQUIUM ==========================
The Graduate Linguistics Student Association presents:
'Transparency in Hungarian Vowel Harmony'
a colloquium presentation by Adamantios Gafos and Stefan Benus.
Friday, Dec. 5
3:30 pm
Machmer W-26
The colloquium will be followed by a reception in South
College. A post-colloquium dinner will be held at the home of
Joe Pater (directions will be available at the talk and
reception).
* * * * *
The Philosophy Department presents
Scott Soames
Princeton University
Saul Kripke, the Necessary Aposteriori,
and the Two-Dimensionalist Heresy
The talk will take place this Friday (tomorrow) in 206 Bartlett
Hall, at 3:30 pm.
Soames is an accomplished linguist as well as one of today's
preeminent philosophers. His 1979 textbook with David
Perlmutter, Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of
English, is one of the finest available. The emphasis is on the
title's first conjunct, and there it is impressive.
===============================================================
======================== FACULTY WORK =========================
On December 9, Emmon Bach will give a SOAS colloquium:
'Philology and endangered languages: Western Abenaki (Eastern
Algonquian)'. In February, he'll be at Cambridge University to
give a talk on Western Abenaki serial verb constructions.
Visit his website (http://people.umass.edu/ebach/) for in-
progress work on Western Abenaki and a recent paper on it from
the summer meeting of The Society for the Study of the
Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).
The following items are newly available from Emmon's website:
A invited plenary session paper at XVII International
Congress of Linguists, July 26, Prague: Linguistic Universals
and Particulars.
Postcolonial [?] Linguistic Fieldwork, in Massachusetts
Review XLIV, 1 & 2, (in honor of Jules Chametsky).
Emmon gave an invited paper at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics conference, May 19, in Nijmegen: 'Cross-
linguistic data and theories of meanings: Kinds of individuals:
syntax, semantics, concepts'. The to-be-published paper is in
the works.
A grant proposal by Emmon and Pat Shaw (UNBC) to the Hans
Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Project, for three
years of work on Haisla, has passed the first round. Results
will be announced in February.
Emmon writes: "Wynn, Chris, Gabby, and I will be at the LSA
meeting in Boston. I will be in Amherst a few days after that
(Jan 14 - 17). Look forward to seeing everybody!"
===============================================================
=============== LARRY BOHN and PIZZA WITH PROFS ===============
This evening, the Linguistics Department held its first
every-semester Pizza with Profs night, as a way of trying to
foster a stronger sense of community among its majors, minors,
and class-takers, and to make students more aware of the many
job opportunities that an education in linguistics prepares
them for. Lots of conversation about linguistics and related
things, and 100% of the pizza was eaten. Success!
The get-together followed a seminar:
The Dean's Seminar Series
CHFA in the World: Alumni Entrepreneurs
Larry Bohn
Venture Partner, General Catalyst Partners
At the seminar, Mr. Bohn reviewed the wild ups and downs of his
journey out of academia, through the tech-sector, and finally
into the realm of the venture capitalists. He seemed to view
starting and running a company as a difficult, extended
analytic project, and thus somewhat akin to what we do as
researchers.
===============================================================
======================= NEW AT DuBOIS =========================
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Rodney
Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, contributing eds.) is
available in the Reference Collection of the W. E. B. DuBois
Library (REF.PE1106 H74 2002).
===============================================================
======================== DEAN'S LIST ==========================
An (H) indicates honors.
(H) Brumfield, Sara 03 BA-LING
(H) Cargill, Vanessa J. 05 BA-LING
Dewart, Seth W. 05 BA-LING
Gordon Leavitt, Robin E. 05 BA-LINPHI
Hennessey, Diana A. 05 BA-LING
(H) Hotchkiss, Peter J. 04 BA-LINGER
Houghton, Patrick D. 06 BA-LINCHI
(H) Johnson, Aaron M. 05 BA-LING
Kromrey, Erica D. 05 BA-LINCHI
Mash, Daniel J. 04 BA-LING
Scott, Maegan L. 06 BA-LINGAN
(H) Walts, Heather M. 05 BA-LING
(H) Warren, Whitney Rose 05 BA-LINGAN
(H) Wintner, Rachel E. 04 BA-LING
[Angelika Kratzer,
soon the new undergraduate director]
===============================================================
What are our linguists up to when not up to linguistics? If
you're playing in a concert, participating in a sporting event,
acting in a play, or doing some other exciting extralinguistic
thing, please drop us a note.
---Chris
===============================================================