Attempting to motivate the unaccusative hypothesis for English? If you decide to use the anti-reflexive test, you'll need to tell a mighty good story to escape the song title

The calendar hung itself

Are you brave enough to say that this must be an agentive calendar?

[Thanks to Paula Aden]

Rome is beautiful. I'm learning a lot of Italian the hard way and practicing my Latin with all the buildings and churches. Looking forward to spending next year at UMass! See you then!

Sincerely,
Vanessa Cargill

Twenty-five undergraduate linguistics students made the Dean's List:

[Thanks to Angelika Kratzer, undergraduate advisor]

Anne-Michelle Tessier will be presenting this Friday (4/16) in the Phonology Group. The topic will be her upcoming WCCFL 23 presentation, 'Contrast preservation and input scenarios in Optimality Theory'. WCCFL 23 runs from April 23 to 25, at UC Davis.

The UMass/UConn/Smith Acquisition Workshop will be held at Smith this year, on Saturday, May 1, from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, with a reception afterwards.

Everyone is invited to submit a suggestion for a brief talk on any topic in acquisition, including purely theoretical and largely applied topics in syntax, semantics, or phonology. The setting is informal, and work at all stages of completion is welcome.

The organizers are aiming to have four papers from UMass, four from UConn, and two from MIT. We at WHISC would like to suggest that MIT appear in the workshop's title, if only to achieve the acronym WASUUM.

The deadline for submissions is today, so contact Jill pronto! Tom Roeper writes that "Over the years this workshop has developed into one with a particularly pleasant environment for student presentations."

Our very own Hotze Rullmann has accepted the semantics position at UBC. Hotze earned his PhD from UMass in 1995. His dissertation, Maximality in the Semantics of Wh-Constructions, is a classic work in the fields of comparatives, wh questions, and aviation. Most of his papers are downloadable from his website. Hotze's name is notable for being a counterexample to the generalization that 2 ns implies German, 1 n implies Dutch.

Edward L. Keenan the linguist^* strongly encourages YOU to attend this year's NASSLLI. WHISC editor Chris Potts^** would like to second Ed's strong endorsement. NASSLLI typically has first-rate linguistics, and it is a terrific place to find out what's going on in the neighboring fields of logic and theoretical computer science.

^* Not to be confused with Edward L. Keenan the Harvard historian or the Ed Keenan who wrote to Harper's Magazine (August 2001, p. 4) to say in part that "skirts are so insanely more comfortable than pants that to argue in favor of pants verges on the nonsensical".

^** Not to be confused with the maths professor or the bandana-wearing, bloody-knuckled, 225-pound linebacker ("who is a nice guy, really").

And, while we're at it, John McCarthy is not John McCarthy, nor is Mark Johnson Mark Johnson.

From the website:

The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is again offering an exciting summer school opportunity for a limited number of graduate and undergraduate students interested in the field of Human Language Technology.

The summer school will be held June 21-July 2 at The Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the pre-workshop classes of the CLSP 2004 Summer Workshop on Language Engineering. Five to ten students will be selected to attend two weeks of lectures and hands-on laboratories that will include general introductions to the major areas of study within the field of Human Language Technology (e.g. Natural Language Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Information Retrieval) as well as sessions on specialized research topics of current interest in the field.

The application deadline is May 12, 2004.

A comment on a band's new song, from the cartoon Daria:

[Thanks to Jason Fossella]

In 1998, the pop singer Alanis Morissette (whose website bombards you with flashy things upon arrival, hence no link from here) released an album called

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie

• Question 1: How many different bracketings does this string have?
• Question 2: How many logically distinct meanings does this string have?
• Question 3: Is spurious ambiguity still supposed to be a theoretical problem?
• Bonus round: Which famous 1972 syntactic generalization is counterexemplified in the first verse of the album's third track, 'Thank U'?