First year, Andrea Beltrama, will be presenting “Can a decent student get into Harvard? A study on scalar implicature and gradable adjectives” at the upcoming XPRAG, an experimental pragmatics conference, at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, on June 2-4, 2011. Chris Kennedy and our alumna, Asli Ozyurek (joint PhD in Psych and Ling, 2000), are among the invited speakers to this conference as well. Have a blast in Barcelona!
Eleni Staraki will present “Attitude verbs and embedded tense in Greek” at CHRONOS, the 10th international conference on tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, which is going to be held at Aston University, Birmingham, on April 18 -20. Anastasia Giannakidou will also be presenting “Polarity indefinites in modal contexts” at the same conference.
Tommy Grano will present “Mental action and event structure in the semantics of ‘try’” at SALT 21 to be held at Rutgers University on May 20 – May 22, 2011. Chris Kennedy is also one of the invited speakers.
Jason Riggle just spoke at the linguistics colloquium of the University of Southern California, San Diego, on Generative models of variation within and between languages, the abstract of which follows:
In this talk, I evaluate three proposed mechanisms for generative
models of variation within language: (i) sampling from partially
specified grammars, (ii) grammars with noisy parameters, and (iii) probabilistic grammars. After describing qualitative differences among the types of variation they allow, I assess the ability of these three models to fit observed patterns of variation and ask whether there is (or could be) an empirical basis for selecting one of them. Finally, I ask the same questions in terms of the models’ ability to account for typological variation (i.e., the frequency with which various patterns are attested typologically).
Professor Chris Kennedy will be giving a colloquium at the University of Southern California on Feb 22, on “The number of meanings of English number words”.
He will be shortly followed by Chicago PhD student Max Bane, who will be giving his own colloquium at USC on Feb 25.
Professor Alan Yu gave a research seminar recently (Feb 1) at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The talk was titled “Individual variation in socio-cognitive processing and the actuation of sound change”.
He will also be giving a colloquium at Carleton University, Ottawa on March 11 on a similar topic.
Professor Jason Merchant will be giving an invited colloquium at MIT on March 11, and is also an invited speaker at a workshop on ellipsis at Stanford, this April 29-30. He doesn’t know yet what he’ll talking on at either place, but says it will probably be about gender features under ellipsis.
Professor Victor A. Friedman recently gave the keynote address for the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages at the annual meeting in January. The title was “Families, Leagues, and Hybridity: The Past and Future of Slavic and East European Languages”. The talk will be published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal.
Victor also gave two plenary papers in January:
Finally, a review of Victor’s edited translation of Bai Ganyo has been published on BULstack, a blog of Bulgarian culture.