Think linguists are groping around at the margins of society? Here is a different perspective:

"In his hovel, the linguist dreams of the emperor, of the one who commands with a wave of his hand. He dreams of power and the freedom it confers.

"On his throne, the emperor dreams of the linguist, of the one who understands. He dreams of knowledge and the meaning it confers.

"And who are they, this improbable pair? Does it matter? They are eternal types who have always existed and who always will."

[Thanks to Angelika Kratzer!]

The book is full of wonderful examples that are framed in terms of punctuation but which actually concern semantically important attachment ambiguities. Its place on the bestseller list suggests that we might attract more students if we talked about colons and apostrophes instead of VP-adjunction and grammatical roles. Go figure.

Devoted WHISC readers already know what the joke is.

The Australasian Journal of Logic gets extremely high marks from the WHISC crew. It is an online-only journal of extremely high quality, in terms of both content and overall look.

Download a paper and you'll notice that the result looks exactly like a high-quality print publication.

The newest issue contains articles by Max Cresswell and David B Martens, both writing about issues in intensionality. 'Nuff said.

Linguistics has one online-only journal, Snippets, which publishes lots neat little analyses and juicy unsolved problems.

UMass visitor Uli Sauerland is a frequent contributor. Other UMass Snippets authors: Shigeto Kawahara, Makoto Kadowaki, Winfried Lechner (Tübingen), Christopher Potts, and Kazuko Yatsushiro.

Thanks to Jonathan Bobaljik and Tim Beechey for writing to us about the online-only journal Linguistic Discovery, which is run out of Dartmouth College and "is dedicated to the description and analysis of primary linguistic data".

Jonathan noted that Glot International is presently online-only, though it is on hiatus now.

Dear All,

There's a new plan for the End of Semester Lunch this year. Please come and celebrate the (near) end of another full semester. Linguistics graduates, undergraduates, faculty, and staff are all welcome.

• The new day is Doctoral Guidance day, so everyone can attend without class conflicts. That's Friday, May 14 at 12:30 (till 2pm).

• The new venue is the Math Lounge, so there's plenty of room to move around, and so that the event has a special flavor. That's the Math Lounge, on the top (16th) floor) of the high rise Graduate Research Center.

• The new "program" for the lunch will include, in addition to eating and relaxing a little, honoring the undergraduate majors who are graduating this semester (plan on something happening at 1pm). We hope there will be increased attendance by the undergrads, especially our graduating majors.

• Any suggestions for a new menu would be most welcome.

We have six graduating linguistics majors this year:

Congratulations to all of you! We hope to see you at the end of semester luncheon.

[Thanks to UG guru Angelika Kratzer for this item.]

UMass was well represented at last weekend's HUMDRUM conference, which was held at Rutgers University.

Michael Becker, using Turkish data, argued for a grammar-based over a representation-based theory of exceptions.

Shigeto Kawahara presented his work on Japanese geminate devoicing and its implications for positional faithfulness/licensing by cue.

Anne-Michelle Tessier talked about the problem of defining the candidate set in a contrast-maintenance theory, arguing for a grammar-based characterization of the candidates.

Adam Werle addressed the knotty problems of epenthesis in Ditidaht (AKA Diidiitidq), proposing a constraint relating grammatical structure to the contents of word appendices.

The quality of these four presentations was outstanding -- among the very best at the conference. Furthermore, the UMass entourage (which also included Tim Beechey, Kathryn Flack, John McCarthy, Joe Pater, and Ellen Woolford) dominated the question period after every talk. A prominent phonologist with a name evocative of royalty and a tendency to understatement was heard to remark that "You've got a pretty good group of students there."

Masako Hirotani is giving an invited lecture in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa this Friday, May 7. The title of her talk is 'Prosody and Processing Scope: Japanese Wh-questions'.

Minjoo Kim is giving an invited lecture at CUNY on May 11. The talk starts at 6:30 pm and finishes at around 8:00 pm. It is part of the CUNY Syntax Supper Series.

Minjoo is advised to eat fast, lest she end up like David Dowty, who is said to have delivered an entire syntax supper talk at Stanford while holding a greasy piece of pizza in his right hand.

The title of Minjoo's talk is 'Internally-Headed Relatives in Korean: A View from the Syntax-Semantics Interface'.

Barbara Partee has won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Lecturing Award. The award is for six months of teaching in Moscow (January to June 2005). She will teach one course at Moscow State University and one course at the Russian State Humanities University, both in formal semantics: one introductory, and one advanced (recent work in English and Russian on selected topics in the semantics of English, Russian, and other languages, with student projects).

Barbara writes:

I wouldn't mind if you passed on the information that my application for an IREX grant for the same period was turned down in March, for the third year in a row. (I like letting the younger generations know that we all have to expect some number of nos for every yes - normally people talk only about their yesses, so the younger generation might get a misleading impression and feel worse than they should about the nos.)

On Tuesday, May 4, Chris Potts guest lectured in Andrew McCallum's natural language processing class, CMPSCI 585. He spoke about model-theoretic approaches to natural language syntax:

• The slideshow
• The handout (content-identical to the slides, but 4up)

The talk was based in part on unpublished work by Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara Scholz. Geoff recently posted a short paper on the topic:

Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara Scholz. 2003. Contrasting applications of logic in natural language syntactic description. Invited presentation to the Philosophy of Linguistics section at the 13th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Oviedo, Spain, August.