Tomorrow marks one year of WHISC!

this is our 42nd issue

Some UMass departments with monthly, quarterly, or seasonal newsletters

• CHFA (Illuminating; monthly)
• Computer Science (Significant Bits; monthly)
• Math & Stats (annual newsletter)
• Philosophy (annual newsletter)
• Physics (seasonal newsletter)
• Psychology (Tobin Times)

Carol Neidle
Boston University

Reflexes of Focus in American Sign Language

3:30 pm, Friday, November 12, Machmer W-26

Ute Bohnacker
University of Lund

From V2 to V2: On the Acquisiton of Verb-placement in L2 German by Swedish Speakers

Thursday, November 11, 4:00 pm, South College 403

Dear All,

The Syntax Group will feature presentations by two visitors from Leiden University, Aniko Liptak and Mark de Vos, in its next meeting on November 11 from 2.30 pm to 4.00 pm in the Node. Aniko will talk about 'The syntax of wh-exclamatives in Hungarian' and Mark will talk about 'Pseudo-coordinative predicates, agreement, and aktionsart'. Please note that this edition of the Syntax Group will meet in the afternoon from 2:30-4:00 pm instead of the evening slot.

Rajesh

A whole crew of UMass Linguists participated in the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) this past weekend (November 5-7, 2004).

• Angela Carpenter. Acquisition of a natural vs. an unnatural stress system. (Friday talk)

• Della Chambless. Sonority and head faithfulness in medial consonant cluster reduction. (Saturday talk)

• Kristen Syrett and Jeffrey Lidz. Children want to access every interpretation adults do. (Friday poster)

• Joe Pater. Learning a stratified grammar. (Friday poster)

[Thanks Kristen!]

Making Connections: The 14th Japanese/Korean Conference was held at the University of Arizona, November 5-7, 2004. (At least) four papers were presented by UMass-related people:

• Shigeto Kawahara and Takahito Shinya argued for a new level in the prosodic hierarchy in Japanese --- an Intonational Phrase that corresponds to a syntactic clause.

• Shigeto Kawahara, Hajime Ono (University of Maryland), and Kiyoshi Sudo (New York University) argued that, in the Japanese lexicon, there are gradient OCP effects akin to those found in Semitic languages.

• Jennifer Smith (2002 UMass PhD; now Assistant Professor at UNC) drew attention to new data indicating that Japanese people's perception of English words arguably results in deletion (rather than epenthesis),which suggests that loanword adaptation cannot just be perceptual distortion.

• Mana Kobuchi-Philip (UMass undergraduate, many years ago) presented a paper that argues that Japanese quantifiers function as a domain of quantification.

[Thanks Shigeto!]

The next event in the Feinberg Series on the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education is a Reading of Alice Childress's one-act play Wine in the Wilderness, directed by Rochelle Calhoun. The Reading will take place on Thursday, November 18, in Herter 227 at 7:30 pm. An open discussion will follow the Reading. This play, first produced in 1969, explores tensions among African-Americans around issues of social class and gender as these bear on the meaning of "black is beautiful."

A celebration of the Five College Dance Department's 25th anniversary will take place throughout the 2004-2005 academic year with a variety of activities including concerts, lectures and workshops. Also part of the celebration is the photo exhibit:

In Motion: Celebrating 25 Years of Five College Dance Department Faculty Performance

The exhibit was curated by Five College Dance Department Professor Constance Valis Hill; the artistic director is Kane Stewart, Professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College.

Dean's Seminar Series:
College of Humanities and Fine Arts Alumni in the World
UMass Amherst

Robert L. Lynch
President and CEO of Americans for the Arts

Arts in America at a Cultural Crossroads: The Future of Cultural Support and Policy

November 22, 2004, 4:30-6:00 pm, Campus Center 162
Reception immediately following lecture