Author Archives: carissa

Final two weeks . . .

. . . of the Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computation in the Karen Landahl Center (basement of Social Science). May 29 will be the final meeting for the academic year, so don’t miss your chance:

May 22: Michael C. Frank (Brain Cog Sci, MIT) (Abstract below)

What is the relationship between language and thought? Traditional approaches to this question have staked out extreme positions: either that language determines the shape of the thoughts you can entertain, or else that language is only an overlay on top of a more basic “language of thought.” Our work in the domain of numerical cognition supports a middle view: that language is a tool which can help with complex cognitive tasks, supplementing but not altering other basic cognitive capacities. We show that the Pirahã, an Amazonian group with no words for numbers, use the same mechanism for numerical estimation as MIT undergrads who are temporarily prevented from counting via verbal interference. In addition, language may be only one among a range of possible “cognitive technologies” for representing exact number, as suggested by our recent studies of schoolchildren in Gujarat, India who have learned to use a mental representation of an abacus–an exact representation of number that relies on visual rather than linguistic resources–to perform arithmetic calculations.

May 29: Morgan Sonderegger (Computer Science, U. Chicago)

We hope that all those interested have been taking advantage of this prolific weekly workshop featuring both local and non-local invited speakers, and welcome even more to attend this month!

CLS 43 proceedings now available!

Thanks to lots of hard work, back issues of CLS proceedings are catching up to date. We are very pleased to announce that the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society have arrived!

Congratulations to the editors, Malcolm Elliott, James Kirby, Osamu Sawada, Eleni Staraki, and Suwon Yoon on an excellent job!

CLS 45 says, Thanks!

To commemorate this one-month mark after the closing of our fabulous CLS 45 conference, we’ve put up a summary page on the website so you can relive it. Be sure to check out the photo album, chock full of pictures from the conference and banquet, taken and compiled by our own Christina Weaver. Thanks again for helping us make CLS 45 great!

–Ryan Bochnak, Peter Klecha, Alice Lemieux, Nassira Nicola, Jasmin Urban, and Christina Weaver

CLS 45

Success! Even more QP defenses

Congratulations to Juan Bueno-Holle, Alice Lemieux and Ryan Bochnak for each successfully defending a qualifying paper this spring!

Juan defended his second QP, entitled “Lexical Tone in Isthmus Zapotec.” Meanwhile, Alice successfully defended her first QP, “A Reanalysis of Washo Bipartite Stems,” and Ryan defended his, “Half as a promiscuous modifier.”  Great job to all of you—may there be more to come!

Attention Slavicists:

Kelly Maynard of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures has announced a new web page dedicated to the Albanian Linguistics Workshop which was held on February 28, 2009 at the University of Chicago. Speakers included Eric Hamp, Brian Joseph, Jerry Morgan, and others.

Audio recordings of many of the talks accompanied by .pdf files of the handouts or screen captures of the presentations (combined audio recordings and slides) are available.  Scrolling down, there’s even a video of Eric Hamp’s full 90-minute lecture. Enjoy!