A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of Tübingen has asked us to announce the Call for Papers for the 20th meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung, to take place during the 9-12 September, 2015. Abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language and psycholinguistic investigations related to meaning are welcome, and the deadline to submit is February 15, 2015. More detailed information can be found here.
Idibon Technologies has contacted WHASC asking us to announce the availability of internships for undergraduate and graduate students in the company. More detailed information is availablehere and here. Idibon has a team of computational linguists, and natural language processing experts which they are interested in expanding, with the goal of creating new technologies to cull insights from digital text. Students who are interested in these possibilities are asked to email a resumé by December 5th to Edgar Nuñez and in a paragraph or less, answer the question: what does language mean to you? Those who have an online portfolio (not required) should include a link to the portfolio.
We were also contacted by our colleagues in Linguistics at Indiana University with a request to get the word out about new opportunities for graduate study in the department there. In the context of recent faculty hires, they are particularly interested in attracting students who work in (i) the interaction between formal syntax and semantics (ii) formal phonology incorporating experimental phonetics. More detailed information is available here.
On Thursday, November 6, Donka Farkas gave a colloquium at Cornell entitled Assertions, questions and the land in between. Donka sent WHASC the following report:
My talk reported on joint work I am doing with former LRC visitor, Floris Roelofsen. I then stayed on for the annual linguistics and philosophy workshop organized by Sarah Murray and William Starr. The theme this year was the semantics of plurals. The program of the conference featured two UCSC alums: Robert Henderson (Wayne State) was one of the presenters, and Chris Barker (NYU) was one of the commentators. It was an extremely enjoyable conference, with interesting talks and good, animated discussion. Sara and Will did a great job organizing it all seamlessly.
Meanwhile Jim McCloskey travelled to Ireland to give a talk at the annual Tionól (Symposium) organized by the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The abstract for Jim’s talk is here.
Angelika Kratzer has asked us to help get the word out about two Summer Institutes (in 2015 and 2016) co-organized by Angelika and Manfred Krifka. These are SIAS Summer Institutes, co-sponsored by the National Humanities Center in the US and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in Germany. Both will bring together scholars working in (a) Theoretical Linguistics, especially Semantics and its interfaces with Pragmatics, Syntax, and Phonology, (b) Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, and (c) Linguistic and Anthropological Fieldwork. Their goal is to foster the development of scholarly networks and collaborative projects among young scholars from the United States and Europe. They are open to scholars who have received a Ph.D. within the past five years and Ph.D. candidates who are now studying or teaching at a European or American institution of higher education. Each institute is built around two summer workshops, one held in the United States and another in Europe. The first will take place in Berlin in July 2015, the second at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in July 2016. The application deadline for the 2015 institute is January 6th 2015 and application materials and further information are available here. Information is also available here.
Our Berkeley colleague and alum Line Mikkelsen has also asked for our help in spreading the word about a new initiative, this one a new book series. Line is a member of the editorial board of the new series Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface (TGDI) which is to be published by Language Science Press. Language Science Press publishes open-access books in the field of linguistics and their publications are free for both authors and readers. The TGDI series will address issues in discourse structure, rhetorical relations, information structure (within and beyond the clause), anaphora resolution, textual cohesion, ellipsis, salience, and so on and will have an emphasis on the use of naturally-occuring data wherever possible. More information about the series and the people behind it is available here. The editors and publishers of the series are actively seeking book proposals and suggestions for suitable monographs or collections of papers.