"We are a team of writers/translators based in St. Petersburg, Russia, whose native languages are Russian and English. We have extensive experience in translating and editing academic, literary, legal, commercial, and technical texts. We work in tandem, thus insuring that there is always a native speaker overseeing each project."

The New York Times on Nicaraguan Sign Language

Nicholas Wade. Deaf Children's Ad Hoc Language Evolves and Instructs. The New York Times, Science Times, September 21, 2004.

[Thanks Barbara!]

The Phonology Group will have its first meeting on Friday, October 8.

The Department of Music and Dance Presents

MULTIBAND POPS, 2004: CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF MULTIBAND CONCERTS

An evening of fun, fast-paced jazz, wind and percussion music, and dance encompassing a variety of styles, historical periods and genres

Friday, October 1 at 8 pm

Fine Arts Center Concert Hall

$12 for senior citizens, students and children under 18. $18 for the general public

Tickets are available at the Fine Arts Center Box Office (413-545-25411), and online.

This past Saturday, September 18, linguists and friends from far and wide braved the rains and the winds to attend our retirement festivities for Barbara Partee (who is currently teaching Mathematical Linguistics and administring two large grants).

Many of Barbara's students and friends sent in cards, pictures, papers, and letters. Lisa Selkirk is putting together a scrapbook. But many of the items we received are electronic, so we've collected them into an

e-scrapbook.

For those of you who missed the festivities but would like to see just what happened, the scrapbook links to a 40 minute video, mostly of the lunchtime presentations.

People started trickling in, trickling wet, at about noon.  The chatter and laughter gradually merged with lunch, and then the presentations began, with Lisa Selkirk as MC. The presentations were a testament to the depth and breadth of Barbara's influence on the field of linguistics, on the UMass Department of Linguistics, and on her individual advisees. Robin Cooper couldn't attend the festivities, but he sent a lovely squib in his stead.  The squib argues that Barbara is one of the few shining exemplars of the concept ADVISOR. Its close:

We bow, we salute and we say, "Thanks, Barbara. It really helped. I think I'm beginning to understand."

Or, as Mark Stein said, "Barbara, you are a fire chief".  (The video outs this in joke! 33:29)

The festivities featured two major intellectual tributes to Barbara. 

• Chris Potts, Jan Anderssen, and Youri Zabbal presented the Partee PhD Genealogy, which records information about all the researchers whose PhD committees Barbara chaired, all the PhD committees they have chaired, and so forth. The tree has 176 nodes.  It covers an impressive amount of intellectual and geographic space. And it continues to grow.

• Greg Carlson presented Barbara with the forthcoming Festschrift in her honor. The volume, edited by Greg and Francis Jeffry Pelletier, is called Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect. It will be published by CSLI.

The other presentations were also rich in gifts, physical (e.g., one unicorn, at long last!) and spiritual.

As the lunch drew to a close, the weather began to clear. So the party moved to Barbara's house, for a suped-up version of the yearly department picnic. It was a bit too wet for volleyball, but the ping-pong table in the basement got this reporter through to the evening, when the lawn was dry enough for frisbee. 

This website is circulating a pertition to ask the Italian government to recognize LIS (Italian Sign Language) as a language. The official petition is here. Sign it! One rarely has the chance to act in a way that is so clearly right and good!

[Our thanks to Francesca Foppolo]

Liane Jeschull will present her new experimental ideas on telicity at this week's meeting of the Acquisition Lab, Friday, September 24, 3:30 pm, in South College 403.

The website for the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute is now up. Angelika Kratzer will be teaching an advanced seminar on alternatives in semantics. The scheduling is still in flux, but one thing is certain: despite what you might have heard, the class won't begin at 8:15 am (or earlier!). Additionally, John Kingston will be teaching Introduction to Phonetics with Aditi Lahiri.

Peggy Speas presented 'Agreement, information source and the structure of the left periphery' at CUNY on September 23 (today!).

Liane Jeschull. 2004. Coordination in Chechen. In Martin Haspelmath, ed., Coordinating Constructions, 241-65. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Mark Hauser will deliver this year's Freeman Lecture, on November 4. Barbara Partee has kindly gathered together materials related to Hauser's recent work. These could form the backbone of a lecture or discussion in a linguistics class, in preparation for Mark's presentation.

• Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298(5598):1569-1579, 22 November.

• Thomas Bever and Mario Montalbetti. 2002. Noam's ark. Science 298(5598):1565-1566, 22 November.

• Mark Liberman. September 3, 2003. Update on Fitch & Hauser. Linguist List 15.2450.

• W. Tecumseh Fitch and Mark D. Hauser. 2004. Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate. Science Magazine 303(5656):377-380, 16 January.

• Pierre Perruchet and Arnaud Rey. 2004. Does the mastery of center-embedded linguistic structures distinguish humans from nonhuman primates? To appear in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

• Mark Liberman. January 16, 2004. Language in humans and monkeys. Language Log.

• Mark Liberman. January 16, 2004. Hi Lo Hi Lo, it's off to formal language theory we go. Language Log.

• Mark Liberman. August 31, 2004. Humans context-free, monkeys finite-state? Apparently not. Language Log.

• Greg Kochanski. 2004. Is a phrase structure grammar the important difference between humans and monkeys? A comment on 'Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate'.

• Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker. In press. The faculty of language: What's special about it? Cognition.

[Thanks Barbara and Jonah Katz!]