From the DailyJolt:

"Cool Fact: South College boasts huge bank vaults in its basement, which were originally used to hold deposits by the Bursar. Now they hold the Linguistics department's prized graduate theses, which sell for thousands of dollars a piece."

[Thanks to John McCarthy]

Liane Jeschull is organizing a workshop on the acqusition of aspect.

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
---H. G. Wells

[Thanks to Michael Becker]

Katz and Co. playing 'Focus', a composition by Jonah Katz dedicated to Lisa and Angelika

Today is the last day of registration for the Eastern European Summer School in Generative Grammar (the EGG school), which will be in Romania this year and is free to attend (and the lodging is extremely inexpensive). Tom Roeper is teaching there this year.

[Thanks to Liane Jeschull]

The 201 database that Shigeto Kawahara and Taka Shinya have compiled is a huge success. They ask that we all continue to contribute to this resource. They also welcome suggestions for how to make the database easier to use.

Many students scratched out or and replaced it with and. Barbara suggested that this might reflect Russian intuitions.

Bob Rothstein confirms Barbara's hypothesis. He writes:

"Barbara's Russian students did apparently apply Russian intuitions to their reading of her message Note! No class May 13 or May 20! In order to capture the appropriate Russian-based reading, she would have had to write No class May 13 nor May 20!"

This is the final issue of WHISC for the 2003-2004 academic year. Instead of its usual weekly print-schedule, WHISC will operate on a monthly basis for June, July, and August, returning to its weekly schedule in September. The summer issues will come out on the last Thursday of each month. So please keep the news items coming.

We would in particular like to get word from far-flung South College linguists (as always this includes visitors, alums, etc.). So please send us postcards. We will scan these postcards and include them in the summer issues of WHISC. Write your postcard messages in big, thick lines, so that they remain legible after scanning.

Send your postcards to

Haruo Kubozono is currently visiting MIT for a month or so. He has agreed to a sub-visit to UMass.

Illuminating Online reported last week that two Linguistics majors won prestigious College of Humanities and Fine Arts Achievement Awards.

The winners from Linguistics are:

Gillian Gallagher (class of 2006), who plans a polyglot's tour of the world: to Greece for Modern Greek, to Sweden for Swedish, and to Shanghai for Chinese ... and Greek! Gillian writes, "The only person I know in Shanghai is Greek! So hopefully I will be speaking Greek when I am there. I will feel very international."

Galina Lastovkina (class of 2006), who will spend time in Germany.

Ling 401 instructor Chris Potts confirms that both Gillian and Galina are prepared to study long-distance dependencies, islands, and c-commands wherever they go.

The Second-Year Seminar Conference took place on Monday, May 17, from 1:00-4:30 pm. All the second-year students gave 20-minutes talks followed by ten minutes of questions. It was exciting to hear about the research that is ongoing in South College, and the overall quality of the presentations was impressively high.

Anna Verbuk, in 'Acquisition of supplementary expressions', reported on her experimental results concerning children's acquisition of supplementary (appositive) relatives, as well as speaker-oriented adverbs like amazingly and utterance-modifying adverbs like honestly. Her most intriguing result is that speaker-oriented adverbs are acquired later than utterance-modifying adverbs. Anna hypothesized that this is linked to Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet's observation, in their textbook, that it is fairly easy to relate VP modifier uses of words like honestly (which are acquired relatively early) to their utterance-modifying uses, whereas this link is much less straightforward for speaker-oriented adverbs and their VP-modifying counterparts.

Kathryn Flack's 'Lateral phonotactics in Australian languages' was an investigation of the distribution of laterals in a variety of Australian languages with very cool names (Panyjima, Yanykunytjatjara, Ngandi). She argued for an account that involved restrictions on sonority and feature cooccurrence. During the discussion period, she received a broad range of questions, all of which she answered skillfully.

Shigeto Kawahara ('An acoustic and perceptual study of voiced geminates in Japanese') gave a very lively presentation of his work on geminates in Japanese loanwords. Shigeto's talk featured novel experimental data, and used them to argue for novel theoretical claims about the relationship between phonology and phonetics.

Jan Anderssen ('Apparent binding in non-binding contexts') explored various ways to model cases in which universal quantifiers seem to take scope over a wider stretch of discourse than the language usually allows.

Michael Becker has been exploring the hypothesis that a final rise in a Turkish declarative signals the presence of certain kinds of coherence relation. In 'Turkish boundary tones as coherence particles', he reviewed the factual situation suggested by his Turkish corpus (which he compiled), and then offered a semantics denotation for the H% tune when it appears on a declarative.

Youri Zabbal ('Compositional semantics of French n'importe') has formulated a semantic treatment of the French free-choice operator n'importe, which appears in a kind of covert-sluice construction.

Intonation Matters 2004, the conference to close our Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk's amazingly well attended Meaning and Intonation Seminar, took place on Wednesday, May 18, 2004. One can pretty fairly measure the success of a seminar by how much work it produces. By that measure, the seminar was a huge success, both for the enrolled students and for the visitors, many of whom participated in the workshop.

The talks ranged from 15 to 30 minutes long. All of them led to lively discussion. Midway through the schedule, everyone returned to the South College lounge for ice-cream, coffee, and lounging.

Some of the handouts are available for downloading in PDF:

Introduction to Semantics (Ling 510) finished this spring with a student conference. The presentations were of the highest quality and the question periods were full of thoughtful remarks.

The conference program is available here (PDF). It includes a short abstract for each of the talks.

The participants enjoyed a doughnutfest the last day of classes.

The official photo album of the event is here. A must see. Somehow, the linguist with the most hits at the Semantics Archive ended up in the role of janitor!

[Thanks to Luis Alonso-Ovalle]

We already reported that Ji-yung Kim is off to Georgetown, that Andries Coetzee will be in Michigan, and that Junko Shimoyama is going to UT Austin. Here is the other South College-related job news that we have so far.

Maria Gouskova (PhD 2003), currently at Rutgers, has accepted a Visiting Professor Position at Georgetown.

Minjoo Kim has accepted a Visiting Professor Position at Northwestern. Minjoo will defend her dissertation on August 5, at 2:00 pm, in Herter 205.

Meredith Landman has accepted a Visiting Professor Position at Rutgers.

Maribel Romero (UMass PhD 1998) has been awarded tenure in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

I was at SALT 14 this past weekend, at Northwestern. Like almost everyone who planned to arrive on Thursday evening, I was delayed for many hours by inclement weather in Chicago and environs. This gave me plenty of time to wonder how Chicago, where the weather is nearly always bad for flying, ended up as a major hub for so many airlines.

I arrived late on Thursday, but not as late as some. Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev didn't get to their hotel until after 1:00 am.

Once the conference got underway on Friday morning, there was plenty of stimulation, in the form of coffee and excellent talks. Kai von Fintel agrees: "a very good conference with lots of interesting presentations and convivial collegiality". This success was due in no small part to Chris Kennedy, Stefan Kaufmann, and the team of graduate students at Northwestern.

At the business meeting, it was decided that UCLA will host SALT next year (SALT 15). Chris Tancredi made a successful bid to host SALT 16 in Japan in 2006. Chris is going to try to score funding for all the speakers, so that SALT 16 is not beyond the budgetary constraints of most linguists. The thinking behind the move to Japan is that it might help to establish a stronger semantics community in Japan, perhaps giving rise to an Asian SALT. If Chris manages to find enough support, UMass will host SALT in 2007 (SALT 17). We are back-up for 2006, in case Chris's funding ideas don't pan out.

Barbara Partee is an invited speaker at TAG+7 (the Seventh International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms), at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She takes the stage at 9:00 am on Friday, May 21, to deliver 'The Russian Genitive of Negation and Diathesis Alternation: Interaction of Lexical and Compositional Semantics'. The talk forms part of Barbara and Vladimir Borschev's efforts to bridge the conceptual and geographic gaps between Western and Russian linguistics.

Angelika Kratzer sent us a bunch of pictures from the end-of-semester luncheon, which this year was in part devoted to honoring our graduating linguistics majors. We've compiled a small photo album.