An unprecedentedly large contingent of Chicagoans will be heading to the annual meeting of the LSA and SSILA (*) in Portland next January:

• Peter Alrenga, Chris Kennedy, and Jason Merchant: Standard of Comparison/Scope of Comparison
• Andrea Beltrama and Ming Xiang: How beautiful is a pretty girl? Scalar implicatures and context effects with gradable adjectives
• Ryan Bochnak: Cross-linguistic variation in degree semantics: the case of Washo
• *Amy Dahlstrom: The place of Meskwaki in a typology of comparatives
• Tommy Grano: Wanting (to have) null verbs: A view from Mandarin and beyond
• Jonathan Keane, Diane Brentari, & Jason Riggle: Handshape and coarticulation in ASL fingerspelling
• Peter Klecha: Modal Domain Shifting: An Imprecision-Based Account
• Martina Martinovic: Pseudoclefts as a source of fragment answers in Wolof
• Yaron McNabb: Hebrew mamaš ‘Really’ vs. Real Cases of Degree Modification
• Chieu Nguyen: The independence of specificity types in Vietnamese
• *Jerry Sadock: A report on NSF H10195: The lexicon of a polysynthetic language
• Morgan Sonderegger, Andrea Beltrama, Tasos Chatzikonstantinou, Erin Franklin, Brett Kirken, Jackson Lee, Maria Nelson, Krista Nicoletto, Talia Penslar, Hannah Provenza, Natalie Rothfels, Max Bane, Peter Graff, & Jason Riggle: Coronal stop deletion on reality TV
• Julia Thomas, Holly Craig and S. Hensel: The Need for Bi-dialectal Education with Child Speakers of AAE: A Look at Copula Acquisition
• Ming Xiang, Jason Merchant and Julian Grove: Silent Structures in Ellipsis: Priming and Anti-priming Effects
• Suwon Yoon: Embedded Root Phenomena in Korean versus V2 in German
• Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier, Morgan Sonderegger: Individual differences in phonetic convergence
• Alan Yu and Morgan Sonderegger: Frequency effects on perceptual compensation for coarticulation

Two students are also organizing their own special sessions.

• Ryan Bochnak is co-organizing a special session with Lisa Matthewson (UBC) on “Methodologies in semantic fieldwork”
• Rebekah Baglini (the current LSA Bloch fellow) is c0-organizing with Scott Grimm a special session titled “Funding Your Research: Grants for Graduate Students.”  Panelists include Lenore Grenoble and Gregory Anderson (PhD 2000), who will talk about “Funding for linguistic fieldwork and language documentation.”

Last but not least, Ryan Bochnak won the first runner-up in the Best Student Abstract competition. Being runner-up is not just a consolation prize: Ryan will receive a $300 prize, and his achievement will be announced in the  meeting handbook and at the Awards Ceremony prior to the Presidential Address. Well done, Ryan!

Chicago semanticists were busy making a name for themselves this summer!

Many were in Utrecht for Sinn und Bedeutung:

• Rebekah Baglini: The scalar source of stative passives
• Tim Grinsell: The imperfective imperative
• Peter Klecha: Positive and conditional semantics for gradable modals
• Yusuke Kubota (Post-doc 2010-11, now at University of Tokyo): Scale compatibility and scale composition: An analysis of manner of motion verbs in Japanese
• Yaron McNabb: Some degree modifiers are standard fixers and context manipulators in one: an experimental investigation of “very”

Yaron McNabb was also the discussant at the Workshop on degree semantics and its interfaces, a satellite event of Sinn und Bedeutung.

Several were in Paris for the 9th Syntax and Semantics Conference (CSSP 2011):

• Thomas Grano (U Chicago) Exhaustive control is not control: Cinque’s IP and the raising/ control divide
• Thomas Grano & Chris Kennedy (U Chicago) Severing the degree argument from the adjective: Evidence from Mandarin transitive comparatives
• Yusuke Kubota (U Tokyo) & Robert Levine (Ohio State) Against ellipsis: Arguments for the direct licensing of ‘non-canonical’ coordinations
• Yusuke Kubota (U Tokyo) Revisiting the progressive/ perfect ambiguity of -te iru in Japanese: A scale-based analysis

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!