The October issue of Illuminating is available.

Artificial intelligence that actually works!

[Thanks Michael Becker!]

On the semantics of hometown

From the weblog Eschaton

CHENEY: "Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you Senator Gone." (An archive search finds no such reference in The News & Observer.

...Look, a mention in a weekly paper that isn't in his "hometown" does not qualify as his "hometown newspaper". If he'd said, "one newspaper in your home state," it would have been a stretch,* but not a lie. As said, it's a lie.

Friday, October 8, 3:30 pm
South College 403

Peggy Speas will discuss point of view, mood, modality, propositional attitudes, indexicality, logophoricity, evidentiality, indirect discourse, illocutionary force, context sensitivity, and related phenomena.

Abstract

Children have been said to "fail false belief tests" and therefore "lack Theory of Mind". However, there are various different ways that a given sentence can be true for one person and false for another. I will lead a discussion of the different kind of "false beliefs", with an eye toward finding ways to test the relationship between acquisition of the syntax and acquisition of the concept of "false belief."

Friday, 8 October, 3:30pm
Machmer W-25 (if W-25 is occupied, then in the nearest available room)

The topic will be the following article by Draga Zec:

Draga Zec. 1999. Footed tones and tonal feet: rhythmic constituency in a pitch-accent language. Phonology 16:2. 225-264.

This article is available in PDF through the UMass Libraries.

The Syntax Group will meet on Thursdays, 5:30-7:00 pm, in South College 404. In addition to these meetings, it will meet for lunch once a month on Wednesday afternoon at the Blue Wall (exact dates/times to be announced later).

The first actual meeting will be on October 14. Here are the readings:

Larson, Richard K. 1998. Events and modification in nominals. In Devon Strolovitch and Aaron Lawson, eds., Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory VIII. Ithaca, NY: CLC PUblications.

Larson, Rrichard K. 2000. ACD in AP? Paper presented at the 19th West Coast Conference of Formal Linguistics, Los Angeles, CA.

The plan is to read the first paper as background and work through the second paper in the reading group.

Future meetings have been planned for October 28, November 11, November 25, and December 9. On November 11, two syntacticians from Leiden will present their work: Aniko Liptak on exclamatives in Hungarian, and Mark de Vos on pseudo-coordination in Afrikaans and English.

[Thanks Rajesh!]

Chris Potts will deliver a guest lecture in Angelika Kratzer's Proseminar in Semantics:

Time: Wednesday (UMass Monday), October 13, 2:30-5:15 pm
Place: Hasbrouck 243
Title: 'Multidimensionality in semantics'

Abstract

Multidimensionality appears throughout semantic theory: in intensional denotations, in dynamic logics, in pragmatics, in interactions between sound and meaning. I am primarily interested in the sense of multidimensionality that allows individual syntactic nodes to have multiple independent denotations. I'll explore a variety of analyses that are multidimensional in this sense, from within semantics proper to outermost pragmatics, with the goal of better understanding the advantages and disadvantages of such systems. I aim show that they elucidate a range of relatively under-studied phenomena and that they usefully extend the logic of semantic composition. I will strive to make the lecture accessible to beginning semanticists. The logical concepts involved require minimal background knowledge, and the analytic techniques are, I hope, of general applicability.

Dear linguist friends,

For a project I'm working on, I need judgments about one sentence from a large number professional linguists who are native speakers of English and interested in syntax/semantics/pragmatics. Although I need only a very brief response as indicated (YES, PROBABLY, PROBABLY NOT, or NO) other comments and inquiries, of course, are welcome.

Thanks,
Muffy

Example sentence:

I don't think Lance is trying to be the David Duke of Salem County by what he is saying running for election, but it has that effect.

Question:

Would you say that the speaker is accusing Lance of being the David Duke of Salem County?

Answer choices:

The GLSA is planning to produce at least four new UMOPs in 2005. Editors of the planned volumes are:

These volumes will follow the two already in the works: UMOP 29 (the Posessives Proceedings), edited by Barbara Partee, Ji-yung Kim, and Yura Lander, and UMOP 30 (on prosody), edited by Shigeto Kawahara.

[Thanks Matt!]

Liane Jeschull was awarded an NSF grant to travel to the inaugural conference of GALANA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, December 17-20. She will present 'Lexical or grammatical aspect first: Evidence from the L1 acquisition of particle verbs'.

Liane will also present 'Children's comprehension of particle verbs and the aspect first hypothesis' at the Linguistic Society of America's Annual Meeting in San Francisco, January 6-9, 2005.

Angelika Kratzer will deliver two talks at New York University tomorrow (October 8). She first takes the stage at 1:00 pm, for a talk in the NYU Syntax/Semantics Lecture Series called 'Covert quantifier restrictions'. When it's over, she'll have just a little while to catch her breath before delivering a colloquium talk called 'Strategies of quantification' at 4:00 pm. Whew!

The deadline for submitting abstracts to the 10th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, which takes place triannually and will be held in Berlin, July 25-29, 2005, is November 15 (soon!).

The dealine for GLOW 2005 to be held in Geneva, March 31 - April 2, 2005, is one month earlier than in previous years, namely November 1 (very soon!).

The call for papers for the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 24) is now up. The deadline is November 30, 2004, 5:00 pm PST. The conference will take place at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

[Thanks Liane!]