OVERVIEW
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The August Issue of Illuminating is online.
Visiting Assistant Professor Position, UC-Santa Cruz
The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, announces the opening of a two-quarter visiting position in semantics for 2004-05.
Dana-Farber
Fundraising News
The Potts family receives special mention in the current issue of the Dana-Farber newsletter Impact. During the course of their 14-year involvement in the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge, the Pottses have raised $250,000 for cancer reasearch. Read more here (page 10).
Word of the Week
NOSEGATE intr. When a
car passes you and then cuts in so close that you find yourself in a
tailgating position but you didn't do it.
Barbara Partee, who invented the word somewhere between South College and Alaska, writes, "I went through an interesting reaction and re-reaction to that word when I thought of it. When it occurred to me (I'd been seeking a word for the phenomenon for a couple of days) it seemed natural and right; but on immediate reflection it seemed "wrong", because tailgating isn't tail + gating. But on third thought, it seemed quite natural for the way American English at least (also British?) coins words, like all our -gate words since Watergate, or all the -athon words."
SUCCESSFUL SUMMER DEFENSES
| Defender | Date | Title | Where to? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andries Coetzee | June 17 | What it means to be loser – non-optimal candidates in Optimality Theory | Michigan |
| Minjoo Kim | Aug 5 | Event Structure and the Internally-Headed Relative Clause Construction in Korean and Japanese |
Northwestern |
| Masako Hirotani | Aug 12 | Prosody and LF Interpretation: Processing Japanese Wh-questions |
Max Planck (Leipzig) |
FALL 2004 GLSA COLLOQUIA
| Hubert Truckenbrodt (Tübingen) | October 1 |
| Paul Portner (Georgetown) | October 29 |
| [Freeman Lecture: Mark D. Hauser (Harvard) | November 4] |
| Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown) | November 19 |
| Adam Albright (MIT) | December 3 |
Departmental colloquia will be announced separately.
NEW WORK
Joe Pater, Christine Stager, and Janet Werker. 2004. The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts. Language 80.3.
Joe Pater and Adam Werle. 2003. Direction of assimilation in child consonant harmony. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48 (3/4): 385-408.
New at the Semantics Archive:
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Angelika Kratzer. Building resultatives. To appear in Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein-Leisten, eds., Event Arguments in Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
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Christopher Potts and Shigeto Kawahara. 2004. Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions. To appear in Kazuha Watanabe and Robert B. Young, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 14. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
NELS 35 Posters:
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Luis Alonso-Ovalle. A (Kratzer and Shimoyama Style) Hamblin semantics for disjunction.
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Masako Hirotani. A negative concord exceptive: Japanese -sika.
And that's not all for Luis this fall:
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle. Disjunction: The view from a Hamblin semantics. Sinn und Bedeutung 9, University of Nijmegen, November 1-3.
REPORT FROM EGG 2004
Tom Roeper taught two courses at the EGG 2004 (Eastern [European Summer School in] Generative Grammar): Introduction to Acquisition and Derivational Morphology and Minimalism. He was also interviewed briefly on Romanian television as the representative of the EGG faculty. Of the experience, he says, "it was a pleasure to have a chance to say how terrific it was to have a topflight linguistics event in an Eastern European country, bringing together students from 30 countries. However, since this occurred on the first day, I managed to sleep through the actual broadcast, so I have no idea what actually got transmitted."
Tim Roeper was a student in the school, and also, according to Tom, a useful tutor for Tom in Orin Percus's ) Introduction to Semantics (co-taught with Luisa Marti).
Some of Tom's handouts and course materials from his EGG courses are available from his newly revamped website.
JOE PATER (ATOMICA) AT THE FLYWHEEL
Joe Pater (right in both shots) playing with his band Atomica at the Flywheel, in Northampton on August 12. They played some of the songs that Joe recorded last year as Push/Pull, plus a bunch of new stuff. |
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UPCOMING CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
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NELS 35 (UConn)
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Présuppositions et Implicatures (Paris workshop)
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Sinn und Bedeutung 9 (Nijmegen)
AT SUMMER'S END
A collection of links for some lazy end-of-summer reading:
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The virtue of idleness (by Tom Hodgkinson; link discovered at the excellent collaborative weblog Crooked Timber)
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Odds-are-Prime: An extended version of the joke for linguists
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LingBuzz ("an article archive and a community space for Generative Linguistics"; link discovered at semantics etc., which discovered it at Thoughts, Arguments and Rants)
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Jakobson vs. Nabokov Jakobson Nabokov After emigrating to the States, Nabokov wanted to get a job at Harvard, in the linguistics department. But Roman Jakobson was large and in charge there at the time. He refused to accept Nabokov. Why? He quipped: "Even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?" "Nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects --- Basic Basque and so forth -- spoken only by certain esoteric machines." (from Pnin, p. 10) [Thanks to Rajesh Bhatt for the tip.]