Jan Anderssen is in the process of overhauling the covers for GLSA publications. Have a look, and send him feedback if the spirit moves.

Links, mildly linguistic and otherwise

• Dyslexia has a language barrier
• Sandwich sells on eBay for $28,000
• Running Extra Mile Sets Humans Apart in Primates' World

[Thanks Leah and Barbara!]

From the post-BU acquisition brain-storming session

From left: Ute Bohnacker, Celia Jakubowicz, Helen Stickney, Bart Hollebrandse, Barbara Zurer-Pearson, Tom Roeper, Theo Marinis

South College visitor Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei has put some electronic music at his website. He has also formed a band, De Nieuwe Vrolijkheid. Watch that page for downloadable musc soon.

Query from Barbara Partee

Is there an electronic-age term to replace paperwork? This is one word where just putting e- on front doesn't seem to do it. I was asking Sarah in an e-mail whether I needed to learn anything about the online systems for grant administration or whether she could do all the "paperwork" of the grant for me. The word paperwork didn't seem right, and e-paperwork sounds impossible to me, but I don't know a substitute!

John J. McCarthy Pahk Your Cah in Hahvahd Yahd: A Biography of the Boston Dialect Monday, November 29, 2004, 4:00 pm Mullins Center, Massachusetts Room

On the history of UMass colloquium speakers

by Shigeto Kawahara

Colloquia are among the most important events in our department. Who gets invited to speak at them? Is one gender favored over another? One subfield over another? Who gets invited most often? To begin to answer these questions, I obtained the list of UMass Linguistics colloq speakers for the past twenty years (thanks to Kathy Adamczyk), and I supplemented this with more recent data (thanks to Taka Shinya and Anne-Michelle Tessier). Here are some preliminary results of my analysis of these data.

Continue reading 'On the history of UMass colloquium speakers'

Kristen Syrett will give a practice talk (for the LSA) on Tuesday, November 30, 3:00-5:30 pm, in South College 403.

On November 30 and December 2, Chris Potts will deliver two guest lectures in Barbara Partee's class on mathematics for and in linguistics (1:00-2:15 pm, Herter 114). In general, the topic will be applications for model theory outside of semantics but inside linguistics. In the first lecture, he'll explain what that means by exploring modal languages for talking about relational structures. In the second lecture, he'll show how this perspective can clarify theoretical issues, with examples from syntax and phonology.

The first lecture will draw heavily on the following super-cool little paper:

Blackburn, Patrick, Claire Gardent, and Wilfried Meyer-Viol. 1993. Talking about trees. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 21-29. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. [PS version]

Tom Roeper:

I am writing you from the middle of the convention center in Philly at the ASHA convention --- they give free wireless. Jill deVilliers and I just gave a symposium to 200+ people on Point of View (however another 11,800 attendees did not make it). Christine Foreman (ComDis) and Barbara Pearson gave posters on the DELV. In a few minutes I am going to a lecture which is criticizing it. However they have an entire huge plastic stand built by Harcourt to advertise it.

• Connor, Ulla, ed. 2004. Applied Corpus Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective. RODOPI.

• Series Title: Language and Computers, Volume 52.

• Sinclair, John M. 2004. English Collocation Studies: The Osti Report. Edited by Ramesh Krishnamurthy. Continuum.

• Series Title: Studies In Corpus And Discourse.

• Adejunmobi, Moradewun. 2004. Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa. Multilingual Matters.

• Series Title: Languages For Intercultural Communication And Education. Volume 9.

[Thanks Jim Kelly!]