The November 2004 issue of Illuminating is now online.

Collected links

Tone languages and perfect pitch

Written Japanese baffles the natives

Reduce these sentences to familiar proverbs

[Thanks Leah and Uri!]

New DuBois Library item

Booth, Wayne C. 2004. Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Blackwell.

Adam Albright
MIT

The evaluation of contrastiveness in UR selection

Friday, December 3, 3:30 pm, in Machmer W-25.

On Monday (November 29), John McCarthy delivered his Distinguished Faculty Lecture to a packed house. The talk's rich overview of Massachusetts dialects, past and present, had all the locals yukking it up, and John merged this material elegantly with personal experiences, and even some OT-style analysis. The Daily Hampshire Gazette has an affectionate write-up:

A lecture rated R ... and A

At the fancy dinner that followed the reception that followed the lecture, our deep-cover source learned that John delivered his distinguished lecture in a designer sport coat that he found at a thift store. You heard it here first!

From Rajesh:

In its next meeting, December 2, 5:30-7.00 pm, in the Node, the Syntax Group will feature a presentation by Henrietta Yang and a discussion of a recent paper/talk on the interpretation of English present participles by Nigel Duffield. Henrietta's talk will be a dry run for her LSA talk. She will talk about the contribution of the Mandarin pluralizing morpheme -men, leading to the conclusion that plural pronouns in Mandarin are syntactically complex and semantically compositional.

The paper by Nigel Duffield can be found here. There is also a shorter handout from his NELS talk this year, but unfortunately I do not have access to an electronic version of it. So I will make physical copies and put them in the mailboxes of the regulars. If you don't find a copy in your mailbox and would like to have one, I'll leave some extras in my mailbox.

On December 6, Bernhard Schwarz will deliver a guest lecture entitled 'Interpreting superlatives' in Angelika Kratzer's proseminar in semantics (Hasbrouck 242; 2:30-5:15). The abstract and other details are here.

Florian Schwarz is off to Amsterdam to present his paper 'Focus Constructions in Kikuyu – Syntactic and Semantic Issues' at the workshop Topic and Focus: Information Structure and Grammar in African Languages at the University of Amsterdam, December 3-4.

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.

Lee Edwards, Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst, will host the exhibit in the College's Office at 214 South College. The thirty black and white photos of the exhibit will be on display from Wednesday, December 1st through Friday, January 14th from Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 5 pm. There is no admission fee. For directions to South College: 413-545-4169.

The photos were taken by several different photographers: Tom Eckerle, Fred Moore, Gail B. Oakland, Stephen Petegorsky, Eric Poggenpohl, Kane Stewart, Frank Ward and David J. Watson. They were gathered for this exhibit from a variety of places including personal archives and the archives at Mount Holyoke College. Photos are of solo dancers as well as ensembles of dancers. Five College faculty members in the photos include current and retired faculty members, and visiting artists.