We are happy to announce that Professor Diane Brentari, currently at Purdue University, has accepted an offer to become a full professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago starting next fall. Everyone in the department is very excited — adding her to the faculty will not only bolster our already impressive strength in phonological and morphological theory, but also help to make Chicago a leader in sign language linguistics.
Welcome, Diane!
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).