SUMMER ADVENTURES
Nate Arnett travelled to AMLaP XX, the 20th annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference at The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nate delivered a poster Case and finiteness versus clausal position in subject-verb attachment, presenting research that grew out of his dissertation research and collaborative work with Matt Wagers. The poster presented the results of a series of experiments and computational simulations. In addition to the many excellent talks and posters on bleeding-edge Psycholinguistics research, Nate caught up with other members of the UCSC Linguistics community, including alumni Matt Tucker, Adam Morgan, Shayne Slogget, as well as former speakers, friends, and colleagues too numerous to list (you know who you are). Along the way, Nate participated in a workshop on the role of (working) memory in sentence processing, generously hosted by the Maryland Language Science Center at
Kiplin Hall in the north of England. (The connections between Kiplin and (U)MD are interesting, and are well worth a look.)
Nick Kalivoda presented joint work with Erik Zyman at a September meeting of the University of Gothenburg’s Grammar Seminar (Grammatikseminariet). The talk was entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec.
September saw the nineteenth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung, which was held at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the German town where Frege lived from 1871 to 1873. Among the presenters there were Karen Duek, who reported on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (The polysemy of container pseudo-partitives), and Erik Zyman, who presented On the semantics of P’urhepecha degree constructions. The complete program may be viewed here. Participants enjoyed the great variety of semantics and pragmatics talks they had to choose from and the conference’s vibrant international atmosphere.
Jim McCloskey stopped off at MIT on his way back from Ireland to California for a three-day visit, in the course of which he gave a colloquium and met with faculty and graduate students.
Clara Sherley-Appel gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Department of Stony Brook University on September 10th as part of their Brown Bag series. Her talk centered on her ongoing work on the analysis of Turkish relative clauses and the abstract is available here.