Not spending enough of your precious time this semester thinking about
linguistics? We have the solution!
Last semester we began an informal undergraduate reading/discussion group.
Basically, people present work they are doing or that they find interesting.
If you are interested in joining the group this semester, please contact Paula Aden
() or Patrick Houghton (), and
let us know when you are available. There is no work required of anyone who
comes, except listening to each other -- and eating tasty snacks (which is
compulsory). This is just camaraderie for folks curious about the many facets
of language.
Contact us soon so we can set up a schedule that works for all interested
parties.
On August 29, Mike Key will present (once again, 11:00 am, Herter 114).
Mike has chosen the awesome title 'Apologia for Integrity'.
On August 12, Joe Pater presented some collaborative work with
Shinsook Lee on the perception of assimilated sequences in Korean.
On August 5, Michael Becker presented his JavaScript/Perl
implementation of OT with Candidate Chains, which is called
CCamelOT. The implementation is
here. Michael
welcomes comments on all aspects of this project.
On Friday, September 2, starting at 1:00 pm, the faculty will retreat ... to the new wing ... for what
is promised to be a reeeely long faculty meeting! It sounds somewhat tedious, but at least there will be a ropes
course, some trust-falling, and a roaring campfire.
On September 6, at 1:00 pm, Christopher Potts will
lead a special discussion
on game theory for pragmatics. He'll concentrate on using game-theoretic and
probabalistic tools for formalize pragmatic maxims. The meeting will take place
in the new conference room in the new wing.
The title 'Games and converstion' is not 100% accurate for this talk, but
it's such an obvious play on Grice's classic that Chris wants to register it
as his now, before it gets snatched up by someone in Amsterdam.
UMass now subscribes electronically to some important Kluwer journals. The links in the following list go to the online catalog pages,
which include links to the journals themselves:
Rainy Stanford (
) is looking to borrow or pay "NOT $150" for a book on Basque. "Basque,"
she writes, "is the most ridiculously fascinating thing EVER. So far all I can really do is count to four and
say 'Hello! My name is Rainy.' But hey, it's something hehe.
