Category: Faculty News

PADGETT AT WCCFL

Jaye Padgett spent the weekend in LA, where he was an invited speaker at WCCFL 32. Jaye’s talk was titled Word-edge effects as overphonologization of phrase-edge effects, and those interested can find the abstract here. Also at the conference were alums Rachel Walker (PhD 1998), who is now Professor of Linguisics at USC, and Sara Finley (B.A. 2003), who is now Assistant Professor of Psychology at Waldorf College. Being at WCCFL also gave Jaye the chance to reunite with his NYI-St. Petersburg summer institute pals Rajesh Bhatt, Sabine Iatridou (also an invited speaker), and Roumi Pancheva.

METASEMANTICS WORKSHOP AT BERKELEY

This past weekend, 40 some philosophers of language (including SCLP visitors past Sam Cumming, John Macfarlane, and workshop organizer Seth Yalcin) descended on UCB’s Moses Hall for a spirited discussion on some of the foundational issues in the semantics of natural language at the Metasemantics workshop. Issues discussed included the division between semantics and pragmatics, the relationship between natural language content and the content of cognitive states, and the roles of convention and rule-following in natural language productivity. Our very own Amy Rose Deal delivered a talk on the degree to which various languages are expressively equivalent, given their differing semantic resources. In addition to Amy Rose, scattered among the philosophers were a number of card-carrying linguists: Pranav Anand, Ryan Bochnak, Peter Jenks, and alumna Line Mikkelsen.

MCGUIRE IN THE MEDIA SPOTLIGHT

We reported last week that Grant McGuire, with co-authors Molly Babel and undergrad alum Joseph King, had published a paper (Towards a More Nuanced View of Vocal Attractiveness) in the online general science journal PLoS ONE. WHASC had the scoop of course, but other media outlets were quick to follow up. Molly Babel was interviewed for Southern California Public Radio on their Take Two show, while Grant was interviewed on Canadian television channel CTV. He is also scheduled to do an interview on Ireland’s NewsTalk radio station on Tuesday. The paper was also picked up by numerous online and print venues, most notably by Science Daily, whose coverage was impressively serious and accurate.

ANAND AND DEAL AT METASEMANTICS WORKSHOP

On March 8th and 9th there will be a workshop on MetaSemantics (Explanation in Natural Language Semantics) at UC Berkeley. The workshop is sponsored by the Meaning Sciences Club at Berkeley and by CSMN (Oslo) and will deal with foundational issues in semantics. Among the invited speakers is Amy Rose Deal, who will speak on Variation in Semantics on Saturday afternoon March 8th, and among the invited participants is Pranav Anand.

GRANT MCGUIRE IN PLOS ONE

PLOS One, the open-access online scientific journal, released a new issue on February 19th 2014. Among the articles published in that issue was Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness by Grant McGuire, Molly Babel and undergrad alum Joseph King. The paper provides an analysis of the acoustic features which contribute to perceptions of vocal attractiveness, suggesting in particular that such judgments are more complex than previously described. The abstract is available here and the paper is available for download here.

TOOSARVANDANI IN HOUSTON

Maziar Toosarvandani travelled to Houston to give a talk (on February 6th) in the colloquium series of the linguistics department at Rice University in Houston. Maziar’s talk was on The temporal semantics of clause chaining in Northern Paiute and it led to a lively discussion with faculty and students afterwards. Maziar reports: I had the unexpected opportunity to meet Professor Emeritus Sydney Lamb, who reminisced with me about his important fieldwork in the 1950’s documenting the speech of some of the last fluent speakers of Mono, the most closely related language to Northern Paiute.

BRASOVEANU IN PARIS

Adrian Brasoveanu visited CNRS (Paris) for two days as one of the invited speakers for the Co-Distributivity Workshop organized by Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Brenda Laca. The other invited speaker was former LRC research associate Jakub Dotlacil. On February 13th, Adrian and Jakub gave a brief tutorial on their joint experimental work concerning distributivity (the difficulties, the choices to be made and so on). On February 14th, Adrian gave an invited talk based on some of that work, entitled Sentence-internal same and its quantificational licensors: A new window into the processing of inverse scope. Slides for the talk are available here.

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