BLING

More fun stuff to report:

Second-year student Rebekah Baglini presented her paper “Modeling Variation and Change in Raddoppiamento Sintattico“ at the Fifteenth Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (McWOP) at Indiana University last Sunday, October 11.

Alice Lemieux’s paper “Small but significant: Body part incorporation in Washo” has been accepted for presentation at the 15th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), Feb. 5-7 2010, in Ottawa, Ontario.

Linguistics faculty member Karlos Arregi will present “The Syntax of Comparative Numerals” at NELS 40, to be held at MIT November 13-15.

Slavic/Linguistics joint-Ph.D. student Andrew Dombrowski will be giving a paper entitled “On Vowel Contraction in Macedonian” at the 7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies, which will be held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, November 5-8. He will also participate in a roundtable entitled “Macedonian Language Contact – from Linguistic League to Diaspora” at the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), in Boston from November 12 – 15. Slavic faculty member Victor Friedman is likewise scheduled to give papers at the MNACMS and AAASS, as well as AATSEEL and a special conference on linguistic minorities in Turkey and Turkish minorities outside Turkey at the University of Cyprus.

We are pleased to announce that Greg Kobele will join the department as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor. Greg is a syntactician and a computational linguist trained at UCLA. He has been Assistant Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2007. Greg will hold a joint-appointment in Linguistics and the Computation Institute. Welcome to Chicago, Greg!

Several of our current and former linguistics undergrads will be heading to graduate schools this Fall.

Eric Prendergast, who’s currently on a Fulbright fellowship researching in Macedonia, will be heading to Berkeley, joining fellow Chicago grads Clara Cohen and John Sylak in the Department of Linguistics.

Eric Morley, who has been serving in the Peace Corp in Benin the past couple years, will begin his graduate studies in emotion and speech synthesis at the Oregon Health and Science University. 

Patrick Rich, our current BA/MA student, will begin PhD studies in Linguistics at Harvard. 

Mitcho Erlewine, who was on a Fulbright fellowship teaching in Taiwan, but is now working for Ubiquity in Japan, will be heading to MIT. 

Justin Murphy will be starting his master’s degree in Journalism at Syracuse University in the Fall. 

Congratulations to all!

Attributive Adjectives and the Semantics of Inappropriateness

May 14, 3:30-5pm, Cobb 201

Nick Fleisher, Wayne State University

In this talk I discuss the syntax and semantics of a previously unexamined English attributive adjective construction and its implications for the study of gradable adjectives in the positive degree. The construction, which I call the nominal attributive-with-infinitive construction (nominal AIC), is exemplified by sentences likeMiddlemarch is a long book to assign. I argue that the major semantic characteristic of the nominal AIC—the interpretation of inappropriateness associated with it—arises compositionally from the interaction between the positive degree comparison operator and the modality of the infinitival relative clause, which contributes to the computation of the standard of comparison. Nominal AICs are compared and contrasted with a surface-identical construction I call the clausal AIC (Middlemarch is a bad book to assign), with attributive too (Middlemarch is too long (of) a book to assign), and with attributive comparatives (Middlemarch is a longer book than that); they are shown to exhibit major syntactic and semantic differences from all of these. Finally, I consider what light nominal AICs can shed on recent approaches to the determination of standards of comparison for positives. The standard provided by the infinitival relative can override the default for minimum standard absolute adjectives, but typically not for maximum standard absolutes, suggesting that there may be a difference in the linguistic status of these two types of default standard.

The second in a series of public conversations entitled Lives in Linguistics

Lila Gleitman
Professor  
Rutgers University
 
Monday, 11 May 2009
4 pm
Franke Institute for the Humanities
Regenstein Library
The University of Chicago

“The Jungle is Neutral: Newcomer Languages Face New Media”
Nicholas Ostler, President, Foundation for Endangered Languages

Tuesday, May 12
4:00-5:30 pm with reception to follow at

Franke Institute for the Humanities
1100 East 57th Street, JRL S-118

Co-sponsored by the Big Problems program in the College and the Franke Institute for the Humanities

Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (2005) and Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (2008). The first is an unparalleled account of major language expansions through colonization since antiquity, richly grounded historically in dynamics of trade, political domination, and other socio-economic interactions between different populations.