On June 19, Ellen presents at the Human Brain Mapping Conference in Seattle, as part of a workshop on "Current Directions in Neuroimaging of Language and Language-Related Disorders".

June 21-23, Tom presents "Aspect out of control and the finite/nonfinite distinction in Mandarin" to the 25th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics at the University of Michigan.

Congratulations to Shevaun who will soon begin a postdoc in the Language and Cognition Lab at the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins.

Felicitations to Ewan, who has accepted a post-doc in the Laboratoire de Science Cognitive et Psycholinguistique at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

2013 is an exciting year for several recent alumni! Phil Monahan and Eri Takahashi begin at U. Toronto, Scarborough, Phil as Assistant Professor and Eri as Lecturer. Jon Sprouse is moving to Connecticut as Associate Professor of Linguistics. Lisa Pearl and Usama Soltan have both been promoted to Associate Professor, Lisa in Cognitive Science at UC Irvine and Usama in Arabic at Middlebury. Tim Hunter begins his Assistant Professorship of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. And Matt Wagers, Assistant Professor at Santa Cruz, together with Sandra Chung, received an NSF grant on "The Real-Time Grammar of Chamorro WH-Dependencies." Congratulations to all our old friends!

Congratulations to Yuki Ito, whose paper "Raising to object in wager/assure-class verbs: A PF account of the defective paradigm" has been accepted for publication by Studia Linguistica.

In June, Paul will be in Paris for a month-long appointment at the École Normale Supérieure. He will be teaching a seminar entitled Meanings First at the Institut Jean Nicod.

Big congratulations to Dave Kush, who this fall begins a post-doc at Yale's Haskins Lab with Julie Van Dyke.

May 14 at the CUNY Syntax Supper, Tom presents "Verb meaning, restructuring, and the grammar of complement control."

Big congratulations to Wing-Yee who in September begins a post-doc at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. BCBL is in Donostia-San Sebastián, capital city of Gipuzkoa, on the Bay of Biscay.

May 16-18 at the University of Riga, Alexis Wellwood will present work with Rachel Dudley, Chris Vogel and Brendan Ritchie, at the 9th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication: Perception and Concepts. Their paper, "Talking about Causing Events," grew out of a project with PHLING.

In the sixth installment of the WORLDWISE Arts & Humanities Insights Videos, Colin Phillips provides insights on how we seem to understand language so effortlessly even though it is not effortless at all. Also featured in the video are many of our students, graduate and undergraduate, including Chris Heffner, Glynis MacMillan, Kate Harrigan, Morgan Moyer, Sol Lago, Dan Parker, Shota Momma, Wing Yee Chow, Shevaun Lewis, and Dave Kush.

April 2 at the Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science Colloquium, Naomi presents 'A probabilistic model of categorical effects in speech perception'.

Warm congratulations to Brad, who is to be Lecturer on Linguistics at Harvard for the academic year 2013-14.

May 3-5 at Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23, Michaël presents "Part and Parcel of Eliding Partitives". This paper argues, contrary to the common analysis, that in sentences such as "Ten students entered and many sat down", "many" is equivalent not to "many students" but rather to "many of them," with ellipsis of the partitive.

Congratulations to Alison Shell, Shevaun Lewis, and Colin Phillips who won honors at Saturday's Azalea Classic 5K run! Alison took 2nd place overall among women, while Shevaun took 2nd in the women's 20-29 age group. Colin took 3rd place overall among the men, with an mean speed of 10.205 mph. Hot on their heels were Yakov Kronrod and Bob Slevc.

Yakov Kronrod has been awarded the first annual Distinguished Graduate Student Award for Leadership. The award is "in recognition of his leadership skills and for exemplifying a new generation of student leaders from the University of Maryland, College Park." This was one of only three awards given campus-wide, one each for the categories of leadership, innovation, and community development.

Congratulations to junior Sophia Sanborn, a double major in linguistics and philosophy, for winning the Beinecke Scholarship, one of only 20 awarded nationally each year. Sophia was nominated by the Philosophy Department to the University, who then chose her to represent Maryland in the annual competition. The scholarship provides a very substantial stipend for graduate study in a field of the winner's choosing. Sophia plans to choose either linguistics or philosophy.

April 18, Naho Orita and Rachel Dudley will be giving talks in Masaya Yoshida's lab, Northwestern University. Naho will present, "The role of discourse in the acquisition of pronouns," and Rachel will present, "Bootstrapping the semantics of attitude verbs."

In April 17-19, in New York (CUNY), Carolina Petersen is presenting her paper "Raising and hyper-raising across experiencer in Brazilian Portuguese: a vP phase evidence" at the 43th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL).

April 18-20 at CLS 49, Yuki Ito presents "Asymmetric A-movement within vP," while Rachel Dudley, Naho Orita, Morgan Moyer, Valentine Hacquard, and Jeff Lidz present "Three year olds' understanding of "know" and "think"".

April 13, Dustin Chacón goes to Northfield, Minnesota, to present at the Minnesota Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium as an invited speaker. He presents his research done in collaboration with Mike Fetters, Kate Harrigan, Eric Pelzl, Colin Phillips, and Rachel Dudley on learning that-trace effects and language variation. This project started as a Special Interest Group last Winter Storm.

April 13 at Johns Hopkins, the The Third MACSIM will feature five UMD presentations. Chris LaTerza will present a talk on "Plural De Se Reports." There will also be four posters.

• Rachel Dudley and Naho Orita: "Are three year olds really insensitive to factivity?"

• Michaël Gagnon: "Noun Phrase Ellipsis Revisited"

• Alexis Wellwood: "How much plurals count"

• Aaron Steven White: "An experimental investigation of partial control"

MACSIM, the Mid-Atlantic Colloquium for Studies in Meaning, is a regional workshop on issues related to meaning in natural language. It consists of presentations and posters by graduate students from the participating departments in the Mid-Atlantic: NYU, CUNY, Rutgers, Penn, Delaware, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, Georgetown. Faculty from these departments participate in audience discussion. There is also one invited talk by a faculty member, and plenty of time to get to know people and their work.

April 12 at the NYU Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag series, Tom presents "Verb meaning, restructuring, and the grammar of complement control".

The talk explores the consequences of Cinque’s (2006) suggestion that whereas Partial Control instantiates 'true', biclausal control, Exhaustive Control predicates realize functional heads that instantiate monoclausal raising structures. Tom shows that this view makes accurate predictions about a number of correlates of the EC/PC split, including the crosslinguistic distribution of restructuring (monoclausality effects), the distribution of finite complements (in English), and the distribution of overt embedded subjects (crosslinguistically).

April 13 at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, Sol and Wing Yee, with co-authors Shannon, Dan, Giovanna and Ellen are presenting a poster , titled "Long-term memory effects in the N400 during sentence processing: evidence from a novel recognition memory – sentence comprehension paradigm".

Chris Heffner and Josh Falk have each been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for 2013-2016. These highly competitive fellowships are NSF's most prestigious awards for graduate study. They carry a generous stipend, and a large virtual feather-in-the-cap. Chris is a student in the NACS program, with Linguistics and Hearing & Speech Sciences as his home departments. Josh is a Baggett Fellow in our Department of Linguistics. Congratulations Chris and Josh!

March 30 at UConn, Zoe Schlueter, Rachel Dudley and Dongwoo Park give talks at the East Coast Workshop in Syntax.

• Zoe Schlueter, "The Effect of Proficiency on the Antecedent Preferences of Personal Pronouns and Anaphoric Demonstratives by English Second Language Learners of German"
• Rachel Dudley, "Bootstrapping the semantics of attitude verbs"
• Dongwoo Park, "Functional Phrase and Subject-to-Object Raising in Korean"

Susan Ojo, an intern in our acquisition lab, won first place in her category again, this time at the regional science fair! This is the second blue ribbon Susan has won by presenting research done with Rachel Dudley, Naho Orita, Morgan Moyer, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz.

March 21-23, Brad, Dan, Dave, Dustin, Glynis, Sol, Shota, Wing Yee, Colin, and Jeff represent UMD Linguistics at the 26th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in Columbia, South Carolina, with a total of nine talks:

• Dave Kush, Colin Phillips, and Jeff Lidz, "Retrieval respects crossover"
• Sol Lago, Shayne Sloggett (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Wing Yee Chow, and Colin Phillips, "What types of lexical information are reaccessed during pronoun processing?"
• Shota Momma, Robert Slevc, and Colin Phillips, "Advance planning of verbs in head-final language production"
• Wing Yee Chow, Colin Phillips, and Suiping Wang (South China Normal University), "Are our eyes really faster than our brains? Aligning eye-tracking and ERP time estimates"
• Dustin Chacón and Colin Phillips, "Biases in resolving wh-dependencies in a hybrid language"
• Dan Parker, Glynis MacMillan, and Colin Phillips, "Illusory NPI licensing: Now you see it, now you don’t"
• Wing Yee Chow, Cybelle Smith, Glynis MacMillan, and Colin Phillips, "Argument identity impacts predictions faster than argument roles"
• Wing Yee Chow, Colin Phillips, and Suiping Wang (South China Normal University), "Predictive computations underlie the N400’s sensitivity to thematic role-reversals"
• Dan Parker and Bradley Larson, "Two flavors of long distance dependency discerned through island effects"

In addition there are five talks by Maryland language scientists from other departments or from CASL:

• Erika Hussey, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Isaiah Harbison and Jared Novick, "Trainability and selective transferability of conflict resolution skills to parsing and non-parsing domains"
• Suzanne Freynik and Polly O'Rourke, "L2 processing of Arabic derivational morphology"
• Polly O'Rourke, "The underlying cognitive components of sentence processing: Not all P600s are alike"
• Yi Ting Huang, Xiangzhi Meng and Kathryn Leech, "Who did what to whom? An investigation of syntactic reanalysis in English and Mandarin"
• Yi Ting Huang and Alix Kowalski, "Baseball bats and butterflies: Context effects on pragmatic inferencing in adults and children"

March 22-24 in Philadelphia, Brad presents "Unelided basic remnants in Germanic ellipsis or: ÜBRIGE Arguments," at the 37th Penn Linguistics Colloquium at the University of the Pennsylvania.

Yakov Kronrod was awarded the Honorable Mention at the 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting Student Poster Competition in the Brain and Behavior category. The poster, "A Unified Model of Phoneme Perception", was based on joint work with Emily Coppess (U Chicago) and Naomi Feldman. He will be recognized in a spring issue of Science.

Our warmest congratulations to Shannon, who is to be Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, starting in fall 2013!

Congratulations to Susan Ojo, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School who has been interning in our acquisition lab, for winning first prize in the behavioral sciences category at her school's science fair! Presenting research on the acquisition of factive verbs done with Rachel Dudley, Naho Orita, Morgan Moyer, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz, Susan beat out researchers interning in other University of Maryland labs and the Children's National Medical Center. This weekend, March 9-10, Susan advances to the regional science fair at Prince George's Community College. Good luck at regionals, Susan!

March 12-15, Brad Larson presents "The Inherent Syntactic Incompleteness of RNR" at the Parenthesis and Ellipsis workshop at the 35th Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society in Potsdam, Germany.

March 1, Valentine presents "Attitude problems" for Harvard's Linguistics Circle Workshop. The talk examines asymmetries in the semantics and pragmatics of attitudes of belief and desire and in their acquisition. The talk explores a semantic explanation for the asymmetry in children's understanding of think and want, as opposed to an explanation relying on a fundamental change in conceptual structure.

Congratulations to Brad Larson for his squib with Norbert Hornstein, "A note on P-stranding and adjunct extraction from nominals," to appear in Linguistic Inquiry. The paper identifies a problem for a unified analysis of adjunct extraction and preposition stranding. Prohibitions of adjunct extraction are obviated under sluicing while prohibitions of P-stranding are not.

Congratulations to Wing-Yee, whose recent paper with Colin is to appear in Brain Research. The title is "No semantic illusions in the 'Semantic P600' phenomenon: ERP evidence from Mandarin Chinese."

February 15, 150 students from Northwood High School in Silver Spring visit the University to learn about language science from graduate students and faculty associated with the IGERT project on biological and computational foundations of language diversity. Students will participate in hands-on activities examining topics ranging from infant speech perception to machine translation (and everything in between), with the goal of learning how different methods contribute to our understanding of human language.

February 13, Ellen presents 'Predictive facilitation in lexical processing: mechanisms and neural implementation' at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Buffalo.

Now out here, "The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers" by Shevaun Lewis, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz, along with "Null complement anaphors as definite descriptions" by Alexander Williams.

Philip Resnik's React Labs is working with Frank N. Magid Associates to measure consumers' reaction to the Super Bowl and its advertisement. Read the story here!

Yakov Kronrod was awarded the Joshua E. Neimark Memorial Travel Assistance Award. This award will provide financial support to attend and present his work at America’s largest general scientific conference, the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 14-18 February in Boston. The award was established by Dr. Edith D. Neimark to honor her brother, Dr. Joshua E. Neimark, who received his doctorate from MIT but died in 1961, at the age of 30, from respiratory disease. It is intended to assist young scientists in attaining a career in their chosen field, a goal that Joshua Neimark did not live to achieve. Four awards are awarded annually to deserving candidates selected to present their work at the annual meeting.

Congratulations to Masahiko Takahashi! Masa has been appointed to a lectureship at Mie University (Japan) in the Liberal Arts Center.

Just out, "What complexity differences reveal about domains in language" by Bill Idsardi and Delaware's Jeff Heinz. The article argues that humans employ distinct learning mechanisms for phonology and syntax, since this is the best explanation for a difference that has been overlooked: all phonological patterns belong to the regular region of the Chomsky Hierarchy, but not all syntactic patterns do.

On February 8, Brad Larson will present "The what and when of processing coordinated-wh questions", joint work with Dave Kush and Shevaun Lewis, at the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics at Arizona State University in Tempe. Brad will discuss psycholinguistic evidence supporting the hypothesis that non-final wh-words in coordinated-wh questions do not participate in movement dependencies, but rather form purely semantic relationships with the verb.

On January 16, Wing Yee is giving a talk at the Department of Linguistics at University College London. She presents "Unfolding predictions in semantic interpretation: Insights from N400 blindness to thematic role reversals," where she will discuss recent electrophysiological and eye-tracking research that is starting to provide insights on how comprehenders compute predictions during language processing.

January 12, Valentine presents "Children's Attitude Problems" at Mindreading, Understanding, and Emotion, a two-day conference at the University of North Carolina. The paper explores the connection between children’s linguistic acquisition of mental state (‘attitude’) verbs and their mindreading development.

January 7 at the University of Wroclaw, Valentine presents "Modals: meaning categories?", as a part of a workshop on categories in linguistic theory.

This year's LSA, January 3-6, features several Maryland presentations.

Shevaun Lewis, Dave Kush and Brad Larson present "Processing filled gaps in coordinated wh-questions." Shevaun is also presenting "Pragmatic parentheticals and the acquisition of 'think'," with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz. Brad Larson and Dan Parker present a poster titled "'Across the board movement’ is actually asymmetrical." Dave Kush presents "Online sensitivity to Strong Crossover (and Principle C)," work with Colin Phillips and Jeff Lidz. Wing Yee Chow presents "Unfolding predictions in semantic interpretation: Insights from blindness to thematic role reversals," joint work with Colin Phillips and Suiping Wang. With Alexis Wellwood and Jeffrey Lidz, alumna Annie Gagliardi presents "Modeling meaning choice for novel adjectives using Bayesian learning."

In addition, Amy Weinberg and Colin Phillips are giving invited talks, Amy at a panel on policy implications of linguistics research, and Colin at the LSA student panel on publishing in linguistics.

Finally, alumnus Jon Sprouse, PhD 2007 will receive the 2013 LSA Early Career Award, which recognizes scholars early in their career who have made outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.

On December 17 and 19, Jeff Lidz and Michaël Gagnon gave lectures to AP Psychology classes at Northwood High School (Silver Spring) and Paint Branch High School (Burtonsville). The students from these classes will also be visiting UMD for intensive introductions to research in language science in February. On December 20, Colin Phillips gave a talk at Laurel High School as part of the International Baccalaureate program. Also recently, Paul Pietroski talked about theories of meaning to students at Montgomery-Blair High School.

Congratulations Kenshi! Just out in Linguistic Inquiry is "On Headless XP-Movement/Ellipsis." The paper makes two proposals: 1) an economy condition on the operation Copy, which states that Copy should apply to as small an element as possible; and 2) the “two types of head movement” hypothesis, which states that Universal Grammar allows head movement via substitution as well as head movement via adjunction. He argues that with these proposals, we can not only explain two generalizations about what I call headless XPs, but also attribute cross-linguistic variation in the applicability of these generalizations to parameters that are responsible for the availability of multiple specifiers.

Deep thanks to Barbara Partee, for three fascinating days of lectures and meetings, generously supported by Dave Baggett. Professor Partee shared her perspective on how formal semantics has developed over the last 50 years, through fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, logicians, psychologists, computer scientists, and others.

November 2-4 at this year's BUCLD:

• Kate Harrigan, Valentine Haquard, and Jeff Lidz will be presenting a poster, "Desire really is easier than belief."

• Jeff Lidz, Akira Omaki and Naho Orita will present a talk, "Input in the lab causes 15-month-olds to learn an English non-adjacent dependency."

• Susan Teubner-Rhodes from UMD Psychology will present a poster with Jeff Lidz, titled "When good predictions go bad: The role of cognitive control in word learning from syntax."

• Megan Sutton, Mike Fetters, and Jeff Lidz will present a talk, "Children really know Principle C by 30-months."

November 2-3 Brad Larson presents "Psycholinguistic evidence for non-syntactic dependencies in coordinated-wh questions", joint work with Dave Kush and Shevaun Lewis at the Workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of Sharing in Nantes, France.

Congratulations to Ellen, whose "Dissociating N400 effects of prediction from association in single word contexts" has been accepted to the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The paper was co-authored with Phil Holcomb and Gina Kuperberg of Tufts University.

October 26 Naomi Feldman is giving colloquium talk at the University of Delaware, titled "The role of the developing lexicon in constraining statistical learning".

Warm congratulations to Tara Mease, who on October 22 gave birth to a happy and healthy baby boy, Xander. The department celebrates Xander's zeroth birthday, and wishes Tara a joyful time with her family.

October 8-11 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Paul Pietroski taught a mini-course on his work, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul. Notes for the seminar can be found here.

October 25-27 at the Neurobiology of Language Conference in San Sebastian, Spain, Wing Yee Chow presents "When having more time doesn't help: Predictions are necessary for "smart" N400s," joint work with Colin Phillips and Suiping Wang (South China Normal University). Also Ellen Lau presents joint work with Kirsten Weber, Nate Delaney-Busch, Candida Ustine, Kristina Fanucci, Matti Hamalainen, and Gina Kuperberg, titled "Contextual prediction in schizophrenia: Multimodal imaging evidence from a semantic priming paradigm."

The sixth annual Northeast Computational Phonology workshop (NECPhon 6) was held on October 6, 2012, at UMD. The event was a great success, bringing together 40 researchers working on topics related to computational phonology, from UMD, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Yale, and UMass Amherst, including talks from locals Josh Falk and Ewan Dunbar. Congratulations to organizer Naomi Feldman, and thanks to local volunteers Shannon Barrios and Dustin Chacón and hosts Josh Falk, Chris Heffner, Rachel Dudley, Zoe Schlueter, and Alix Kowalski.

October 19 at the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning in Maryland, Naho presents "Simulation of Pronoun Acquisition" joint work with Naomi Feldman and Jeffrey Lidz.

October 19-21 at NELS 43 in New York City, there will be two presentations from Maryland. Annie Gagliardi, Alexis Wellwood and Jeff Lidz present their paper "With no help from syntax: Four models of meaning choice for novel adjectives". Featured in the poster session is "Discovering classes of attitude verbs using subcategorization frame distributions", by Aaron White, Rachel Dudley, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz.

Congratulations to Brad, whose "Arabic First Conjunct Agreement and Primitive Operations" is soon to appear in Linguistic Inquiry.

Yakov Kronrod was selected to attend the IGERT Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development Workshop in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on October 7-8. This workshop is sponsored by the Virginia Tech and University of Idaho IGERT programs. It brings together 40 current and future faculty to discuss developing and sustaining interdisciplinary graduate programs. Participants have the opportunity to develop ideas for interdisciplinary graduate programs by considering learning outcomes, faculty team members, administrative challenges, program growth and sustainability, and funding opportunities.

October 11-13 at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition in North America 5 there will be several presentations by Maryland linguists:

• Megan Sutton, Mike Fetters, and Jeff Lidz will be presenting a talk, "Principle C behavior is caused by Principle C in 30-month-olds: Evidence against a transitivity bias".

• Shevaun Lewis, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz will be presenting a talk, "Pragmatic Influences on 3- and 4-year-olds' interpretation of 'think'".

• Kate Harrigan, Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz will be presenting a poster, "Is desire really easier than belief?"

• Colin Phillips will be the plenary speaker, giving a talk entitled, "Grammatical development and parser development."

October 12-13 at a workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Quantity Expressions in Konstanz, Germany, Alexis gives an invited talk titled "A matter of degrees: Composing cross-categorial comparatives".

On September 3 before the first presidential debate, Philip Resnik introduced React Labs, a real-time crowd-sourcing reaction platform, at the University of Maryland.

October 5 Valentine gives a colloquium talk at UMass Amherst, titled "Attitude Problems".

Contratulations to Masa whose paper "On restructuring infinitives in Japanese: Adjunction, clausal architecture, and phases" is soon to appear in Lingua. The paper investigates the syntax of Japanese restructuring verbs and makes two major claims: (i) there are (at least) three types of restructuring infinitives in Japanese, which is consistent with Wurmbrand's (2001) approach to restructuring infinitives and (ii) there is a general ban on adjunction to complements of lexical restructuring verbs, which is best explained by an interaction of spell-out domains and Case-valuation. It is also shown that this ban regulates adverb insertion, adjective insertion, and quantifier raising.

Roaring cheers for our Ragnar Relay team, who placed 10th out of 293 teams and 3rd in the Men's division (teams with with more men than women). See the complete results here. The Ragnar Relay is a 200 mile relay race. Team "Psycho Linguists" finished in 26 hours, 48 minutes, and 11 seconds.

October 1 Jeff Lidz gives a colloquium talk, "On competence and performance, mostly", at the USC Department of Linguistics.

Hail to a team of 12 Maryland linguists and their support crew, who ran the Ragnar Relay, from 11:00am on September 21 through to 1:48pm on September 22! It was a grueling 200-mile route from historic Cumberland, in the western tip of Maryland, to the National Harbor just down the Potomac from Washington DC. Each runner covered 3 of the 36 legs, covering 13-22 miles each. The crew ran continuously for 26 hours and 48 minutes, running many legs at night, and ushering in a lovely first day of fall. This the second year the "Psycho Linguists" team has joined Ragnar. This year was 42 minutes faster than last year, when there were heavy rains.

On the 2012 team were 4 faculty and 8 graduate students. An amazing effort by runners Yakov Kronrod, Tom Grano, Tess Wood, Shevaun Lewis, Katie Leech, Jeff Lidz, Dave Kush, Dan Parker, Colin Phillips, Brad Larson, Annie Gagliardi, and Aaron Steven White. The indispensible support crew was Carolina Petersen, Elizabeth Nguyen, Tara and Jon Mease, Andrea Zukowski and Zoe Phillips, along with refueling directors Norbert Hornstein and Amy Weinberg.

September 27 Tonia presents "Delayed Tree- Locality, Set-locality, and Clitic Climbing" at the 11th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms in Paris, with co-authors Joan Chen-Main and Aravind Joshi from the University of Pennsylvania.

September 19-23 new RA Allison Fogel presents "Processing Emotion and Taboo in Native vs. Second Language" at the Annual Meeting for the Society for Psychophysiological Research in New Orleans.

Terje Lohndal (PhD, 2012) has been named one of the 10 most outstanding Norwegian researchers below 40. Terje, now Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, is one of only two scholars representing the humanities, and also the youngest person on the list. In addition, Terje has recently been elected a member of the Agder Academy of Science and Letters in Norway, becoming the youngest member ever.

We are happy to welcome two new Baggett Fellows, Lawrence Chen (U. British Columbia) and Josh Falk (Stanford), as well as new RAs Glynis MacMillan (UMass Amherst) and Allison Fogel (Tufts U.), and MEG Lab manager Elizabeth Nguyen (Reed). Visiting us this semester are Ana Maria Suarez Fernandez, Mahayana Godoy, and Carmen Gallar Sanchez (CASTL, Madrid).

We are delighted to welcome six new members to our graduate program: Rachel Dudley (NYU), Peter Enns (UMD), Mike Fetters (UMD), Chris Heffner (MSU), Dongwoo Park (Seoul National) and Zoe Schlueter (York, Edinburgh).

Welcome to Tom Grano, who joins us after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago with a dissertation titled "Control and restructuring at the syntax-semantics interface". This semester Tom is teaching a syntax seminar, "Topics in the grammar of complement clauses."

September 11-13 Jeff Lidz teaches a course at the École d'Automne de Linguistique, sponsored by the Department of Cognitive Studies at the École Normale Superieure, Paris. Jeff's course is titled "Inside the LAD: Learning in Generative Grammar."

Congratulations to alumnus Jon Sprouse, PhD 2007, who has been awarded the 2013 Early Career Award by the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society America. This award recognizes scholars early in their career who have made outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.

Alexis Wellwood will be presenting her paper, "Back to basics: more is always much-er", at the 17th annual Sinn und Bedeutung conference, held this year at the École Normale Superieure in Paris, September 8-10, 2012.

Tim Hunter and Jeff Lidz's paper "Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners" has been published in the Journal of Semantics. The paper shows that children can learn a novel conservative determiner, but that they fail to learn a semantically similiar nonconservative determiner.

Featured in the new Semantics and Pragmatics, a paper by Valentine and Alexis: "Embedding epistemic modals in English: A corpus-based study." The paper presents a corpus study on the distribution of epistemic modals, aimed at the question of whether epistemics contribute to semantic content. Illuminating subtle aspects of their distribution, it concludes that they do, citing natural examples where an epistemic is interpreted within the scope of other operators.

August 1-4 in Sapporo, Japan, Annie Gagliardi, Yakov Kronrod, Alexis Wellwood and Cybelle Smith will present the following papers at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society:

• Annie Gagliardi, Naomi Feldman and Jeffrey Lidz, "When suboptimal behavior is optimal and why: Modeling the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez."

• Annie Gagliardi, Erin Bennett, Jeffrey Lidz and Naomi Feldman, "Children's inferences in generalizing novel nouns and adjectives."

• Yakov Kronrod, Emily Coppess, and Naomi Feldman, "A unified model of categorical effects in consonant and vowel perception."

• Alexis Wellwood, Darko Odic, Justin Halberda, and Jeffrey Lidz, "Choosing quantity over quality: Syntax guides interpretive preferences for novel superlatives."

• Cybelle Smith and Michael C. Frank, "Zero anaphora and object reference in Japanese child-directed speech." (Awarded NSF travel grant and research fellowship to pursue a short-term project at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan)

Recent alumnus Akira Omaki will also be presenting a member abstract poster.

Congratulations to Alexis Wellwood and Aaron White who have both received scholarships to NASSLLI, held June 18-22 at UT Austin. This NASSLLI is the fifth annual North American Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information.

Congratulations to alumnus Chris Dyer, (PhD 2010), who now becomes Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science, with a cross-appointment in the Machine Learning Department. Chris's dissertation at Maryland was "A Formal Model of Ambiguity and its Applications in Machine Translation."

Welcome to Anna Bonnett, Morgan Moyer, Ilanna Newman, Emma Nguyen, Alex Ralph, and Sandy Wan – six undergraduate Linguistics majors who have been awarded funded research positions to work on language science projects this summer.

Three students – Anna, Emma and Sandy – were awarded a Baggett Summer Scholarship (now in its seventh year, and going strong!). Anna will be working with Naomi Feldman and Shannon Barrios. Emma Nguyen and Sandy Wan will be working with Jeff Lidz, as well as Alexander Williams, in the baby lab.

Three additional students – Alex, Morgan and Ilana – were awarded a brand new CASL-UMD Language Science Summer Scholarship (an award so new the name is still in flux). Alex Ralph will be working with Melinda Martin-Beltran (of the Education Dept., otherwise known as "Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership"). Ilanna Newman will be working with Jeff Lidz in the baby lab. And Morgan Moyer will be working with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz.

Also new this year, the CASL-UMD program will be organizing a series of once-per-week lunchtime meetings where faculty mentors of the CASL-UMD program will each give a short presentation about their work. These meetings will be very useful, particularly for linguistics majors with an interest in getting involved in research fellowships next summer.

Congratulations to alumnus Tim Hunter (PhD 2010) who has accepted an Assistant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, within its Institute of Linguistics. Tim will begin at Minnesota in Fall 2013. Until then will be at the Cornell University Department of Linguistics, on a research postdoc with John Hale. This comes after a fruitful two years at Yale working with Bob Frank. Tim's dissertation at Maryland was "Relating Movement and Adjunction in Syntax and Semantics".

May 31-June 1 at the 27th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop at Yale, Brad Larson presents "Wh-dependencies without movement in Germanic."

May 18-20, at Semantics and Linguistic Theory 22, Shevaun Lewis presents "The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers", reporting work done with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz. Alexander Williams presents "Null Complement Anaphors as Definite Descriptions".

May 18-20 in Stuttgart, Kenshi Funakoshi presents "Backward control in external possession constructions in Japanese" at the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) at Universität Stuttgart, Germany.

May 11-13 at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics in Bloomington, Indiana, Brad Larson presents "Not-so-across-the-board-movement in Macedonian".

Congratulations to Annie Gagliardi, who has been awarded a Postdoc Fellowship from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Fund. She will use the fellowship to pursue her project "Acquiring an Endangered Language: A corpus of child directed and child produced Tsez" with Marsha Polinsky at Harvard.

May 4-5, the department hosts Mayfest 2012, "The Role of Computational Models in Linguistic Theory". Mayfest is an annual two-day workshop organized by our graduate students. It brings together 8-12 distinguished researchers, representing diverse perpectives, to discuss some fundamental issue in linguistics. This year we welcome:

• Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway University of London)
• Robin Clark (University of Pennsylvania)
• Gaja Jarosz (Yale)
• Rick Lewis (University of Michigan)
• Roger Levy (University of California, San Diego)
• Lisa Pearl (University of California, Irvine)
• Amy Perfors (Adelaide)
• Jason Riggle (University of Chicago)
• Ed Stabler (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Matthew Stone (Rutgers)

Big congratulations to Terje Lohndal, who has accepted a position as Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim!

Congratulations to Naomi Feldman who, together with Rochelle Newman, won a UMD ADVANCE seed grant for a project titled "Children's real time processing of words and sounds." These one-year grants for female faculty provide funding for projects that include inter-disciplinary research.

Congratulations also to several other members of the Maryland Language Science community who also won ADVANCE grants:

• Elizabeth Redcay and Meredith Rowe, "Investigating shared neural systems for gesture and language comprehension"

• Yi Ting Huang and Meredith Rowe, "Exploring socioeconomic differences in children's syntactic development through real-time processing"

• Carol Espy-Wilson and Sandra Gordon-Salant, "Speech processing algorithms for elderly listeners with hearing loss"

Last year, the first year of the ADVANCE program, an award went to Valentine Hacquard and Erin Eaker (Philosophy).

Congratulations to Annie, Colin, Jeff, Rachel, Tess, and Yakov, who all ran well in the Azalea Classic in University Park on March 21. The results were impressive! Colin took 4th place overall, and 1st in his age group, with a time of 18:32, only a minute behind the winner. Yakov (21:14) came in 22nd overall, narrowly outpacing Jeff (21:42) at 27th. Tess had a time of 24:29, 3rd in her age group among the women. And 1st among the twenty-something ladies was Annie at 26:59. Also among the ling-related runners was Phlinger Chris Vogel.

Congratulations to Wing Yee Chow for receiving an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship! It is a one-semester award for outstanding doctoral students in the final stages of writing their dissertation. The Graduate School awards approximately 40 Wylie Dissertation Fellowships per year.

April 18th, at Northwestern University's Syntax-Semantics lab, Brad presents "Strange Constituencies: Multidominance and an alternative".

April 19-21 in Chicago, Brad Larson and Alexis Wellwood will be presenting papers at the 48th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Brad's paper is "Sprouting Anew: Fragment answers, and here's why." Alexis's is "Meaning more or most: evidence from 3-and-a-half year-olds", co-authored with Darko Odic (JHU), Justin Halberda (JHU), Tim Hunter (Yale), Paul Pietroski (Maryland), and Jeff Lidz (Maryland).

On April 13-15, Shevaun Lewis presents "The pragmatics of belief reports in development" at WCCFL XXX, reporting on work in with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz . The paper concerns 4-year-olds' non-adult-like truth value judgments of sentences with "think". It argues that these reflect parenthetical interpretations of ‘think’, arising from to a failure to grasp the pragmatic relevance of belief in context.

Jeff Lidz is also giving the last of three plenary lectures at this WCCFL, an honor granted despite Jeff's near arrest on the Santa Cruz beach nine years ago at WCCFL XXI.

Also on the program are talks by Maryland alums Chizuru Nakao, Masaya Yoshida & Ivan Ortega-Santos, and Tim Hunter, plus a poster by former postdoc Ming Xiang.

April 6, Valentine Hacquard gives a colloquium talk at New York University Linguistics.

March 31-April 3, Wing Yee Chow will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting (CNS 2012) in Chicago. She will be presenting a poster, "Wait a Second: Eliminating the 'Semantic Illusion' in Role-reversed Sentences", coauthored by Colin and Suiping Wang at South China Normal University.

March 31-April 1, the first annual PHLINC brings together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. There will be eight talks by students – coming from UCLA, Michigan State, Buffalo, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Hopkins, and Maryland – plus invited talks by Professor Achille Varzi of Columbia University, and our own Paul Pietroski. PHLINC is organized by PHLING, a graduate research group on shared issues of linguistics and philosophy.

In the March issue of Language, "A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects" by alumni Jon Sprouse and Matt Wagers with Colin Phillips. The authors report finding no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects, in tests of three hundred speakers of English.

March 29, Alexander Williams is giving a colloquium talk in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.

March 28-30, Wing Yee Chow, Ewan Dunbar, Dave Kush, Sol Lago, Shevaun Lewis, Terje Lohndal, Dan Parker, and Megan Sutton are presenting at the 35th annual Colloquium of Generative Linguistics in the Old World.

Sol Lago and Dan Parker will present "Retrieval interference in the resolution of anaphoric PRO" as part of the workshop The Timing of Grammar: Experimental and Theoretical Considerations

Philip Resnik is a plenary speaker at this year's American Association for Applied Linguistics conference (AAAL 2012) in Boston, March 24-27, for which this year's conference theme is Interdisciplinarity. He'll be speaking on “The Linguistics of Spin: A Computational Linguist’s Forays into Social Science”.

March 25 in Philadelphia, Masahiko Takahashi and Kenshi Funakoshi present "On PP left-branch extraction in Japanese" at the 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

March 21 at the Workshop on Perception: Reality and Illusions, hosted by Georgetown's Program in Cognitive Science, Colin Phillips presents "Linguistic Illusions: Where You See Them, Where You Don't".

March 16, Valentine Hacquard is giving talks at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on modality and the acquisition of attitude verbs. Her Friday colloquium talk is "Understanding desire and belief reports."

March 14-16, Brad, Colin, Dan, Dave, Jeff, Shevaun, Sol and Wing Yee represent UMD at the 25th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. One of the invited talks, "Fast Stuff and Slow Stuff: Is a unified theory desirable?", will be given by Colin Phillips and Shevaun Lewis. The other talks are:

• Shevaun Lewis, Bradley Larson and Dave Kush, "What and when can you fill a gap with something?"
• Wing-Yee Chow, Colin Phillips and Suiping Wang, "Turning the 'Dumb N400' into the 'Smart N400': What role-reversed sentences tell us about the time course of predictions"
• Dave Kush, Jeffrey Lidz and Colin Phillips, "Interference-insensitive local anaphora resolution: Evidence from Hindi reciprocals"
• Dave Kush, Jeffrey Lidz and Colin Phillips, "Online use of relational structural information in processing bound-variable pronouns"
• Dan Parker, Sol Lago and Colin Phillips, "Retrieval interference in the resolution of anaphoric PRO"
• Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Ryan Corbett, and Jared Novick (University of Maryland, College Park), Llorenç Barrachina and Mònica Sanz-Torrent (Universitat de Barcelona), and John Trueswell (University of Pennsylvania), "The bilingual advantage: Conflict monitoring, cognitive control, and garden-path recovery"

The conference is also rich with Maryland alumni: recent postdoc Ming Xiang; recent PhDs Brian Dillon, Matt Wagers, and Masaya Yoshida; recent Baggett Fellow Dave Kleinschmidt; and recent BA Cynthia Lukyanenko.

March 15, Dustin Chacón presents work with Alexis Wellwood at the Workshop for Languages with and without Articles, at CNRS / Paris 8. The talk, "A Superlative Puzzle for Bošković's DP/NP Parameter", observes that across languages prenominal possessors block a 'relative' interpretation of superlatives, and argues for a unified account of asymmetries in the interpretation of superlatives in languages with and without articles. The argument relies crucially on the existence of a D projection.

March 8-12 at Georgetown, Annie Gagliardi, Megan Sutton, Kate Harrigan, Tara Mease and Jeff Lidz present "Now you see it, now you don't: Advantages and pitfalls of in-depth analysis of preferential looking data" at the 2012 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics.

Congratulations to Sol Lago and Wing Yee Chow, joint winners of the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award for 2012. This is an award for the best paper by a young researcher (student, postdoc, early faculty) at the 2011 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Stanford University in March 2011. The title of their presentation was "Word frequency affects pronouns and antecedents identically: Distributional evidence." They will be presented with the $500 award at the 2012 CUNY conference, which will take place in New York City March 14-16.

Now online, videos of both Howard Lasnik's and Brad Larson's talks at "Islands in Contemporary Syntactic Theory," at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 16-19 November 2011. Howard's talk was "Another Look at Island Repair by Deletion", Brad's was "What can Multidominance tell us about islands?".

On Feb. 18 Maryland hosted the Second Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning, with five presentations by UMD students in linguistics and philosophy:

• Michaël Gagnon "Against an NPE analysis of D-type pronouns"
• Shevaun Lewis "Pragmatics in the development of belief reports"
• Yu Izumi "Why we need no reference to kinds: A four-dimensional approach to the semantics of bare nominals"
• Chris LaTerza "Japanese tachi"
• Alexis Wellwood, Chris Vogel, Brendan Ritchie, Rachel Dudley, Erin Bennett "Events and their causes: A transparency issue"

Roger Schwarzschild of Rutgers University gave the invited talk, "A Neo Neo Neo Davidsonian Analysis of Nouns".

MACSIM brought together over 70 graduate students and faculty from the region between DC and NYC to share and develop new student research on linguistic meaning, from theoretical, experimental, and philosophical perspectives. This year's MACSIM was organized by Alexander Williams and Valentine Hacquard, and generously supported by the College of Arts and Humanities, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Philosophy.

Congratulations to Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar and Bill Idsardi whose "A single stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut'' is to appear in Cognitive Science. The paper argues against the view that phonological acquisition is a 'two-stage' process, suggesting an alternative conception and presenting a Bayesian model that acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using data from Inuktitut, it is shown that the model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of the lexicon. A prepublication draft is available.

Please greet Romy Lassota and Lyn Tieu who are visiting UMD Linguistics this semester. Romy is a graduate student at the University of Geneva studying Language Acquisition and Sentence Processing. Lyn is a graduate student at the University of Connecticut specializing in Language Acquisition.

Recently Philip Resnik appeared on WAMU's "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" (transcript) to discuss automatic sentiment analysis and social media.

On Feb. 7 Brad Larson is presenting "WYSIWYG RNR" at the CUNY Syntax Supper. Brad argues against current approaches to Right Node Raising constructions, positing instead a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach where the first conjunct is syntactically inchoate, its interpretation being derived post-syntactically.

On January 26, Yakov Kronrod, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, and Jeff Lidz went to Northwood High School in Silver Spring to speak with 100 AP Psychology students about linguistic structure and its connection to language acquisition and other areas of cognition.

Congratulations to Kenshi Funakoshi, whose "On Headless XP-Movement/Ellipsis'' is to appear in Linguistic Inquiry. The paper makes two proposals: that Copy operation must apply to as small an element as possible, and that head-movement may be instantiated either by substitution or by adjunction. It argues that these proposals explain the syntax of "headless XPs".

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz and Csilla Katjar, on issue 19(1) of Language Acquisition, the first with Jeff as Editor-in-Chief and Csilla as Managing Editor.

Annie Gagliardi, Brad Larson, Dave Kush, and Alexis Wellwood – with Naomi Feldman, Colin Phillips, Jeff Lidz, Paul Pietroski and Justin Halberda from Johns Hopkins – are presenting at the Linguistics Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, January 5th-8th 2012.

Brad will present "Sluicing without antecedents is fed by extraposition".

Annie is presenting two talks. The first, "Distinguishing input from intake in Tsez noun class acquisition," is being presented as part of an LSA symposium called Psycholinguistic Research on Less Studied Languages. The second, "Psycocomputational approaches to the acquisition of noun phrases in Tsez", is to be presented with Naomi Feldman and Jeff Lidz, at Psychocomputaional Models of Language Acquisition, a meeting being held in conjunction with the LSA.

Dave, with Jeff and Colin as co-authors, will present "Processing bound-variable anaphora: Implications for memory encoding and retrieval".

Alexis, with Jeff, Paul and Justin Halberda as co-authors, will present "When to quantify: syntactic cues in the acquisition of novel superlatives", showing that 4-5 year-old children use the category distinction between Adjective and Determiner as a cue to the interpretation of words in superlative form, relying more on this than on the cue of partitive "of".

Juan Uriagereka, Professor in Linguistics and Associate Provost of Faculty Affairs, has recently published a new book, Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program. Since Juan invented the multiple spell-out model in 1999 it has been one of the most influential lines of research in syntactic theorizing. The model simplified a crucial element of the minimalist account of language making it a more accurate reflection of syntax and its acquisition. In this book he explores important consequences of the multiple spell-out hypothesis and of the linked notion of cyclicity. He combines the latest thinking in linguistics with perspectives drawn from physics, biology, and animal behaviour, aiming thereby to advance the field first described by Noam Chomsky as biolinguistics.

The LSA's Best Paper in Language 2011 Award goes to Jon Sprouse, a Maryland Linguistics alumnus, for his "A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments", in Language 87(2). The award is given for the best paper published in the journal in any given calendar year. This year Jon shares the award with Thomas Weskott and Gisbert Fanselow, for their "On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability".

Dave Kush has a paper published in the Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21, entitled "Height-Relative Determination of (Non-Root) Modal Flavor: Evidence from Hindi". The paper pursues the idea that a modal's flavor is determined by its attachment height.

Dave Kush is back from three weeks in India running experiments on the processing of Hindi reciprocals. The work was done at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited" by Robert Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama and Noam Chomsky has appeared in September's Cognitive Science. The article develops the claim that "poverty of the stimulus arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire."

Philip Resnik was recently in California to give the keynote talk at the 2011 Sentiment Analysis Symposium, and to speak to the machine translation group at Google Research about his work on crowdsourcing and translation, in a new Google-funded collaboration with Ben Bederson (UMD Computer Science) and Chris Callison-Burch (JHU Computer Science) called "Translate the World".

Comments by Philip were also featured in New Scientist's story about Apple's new voice assistant, Siri on November 3.

Howard Lasnik is the invited speaker at "Islands in Contemporary Syntactic Theory," at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, November 16-18. Brad Larson is giving a talk at the same venue, entitled "What can Multidominance tell us about islands?".

Representing UMD on Nov. 4-6 at the B.U. Conference on Language Development are Annie, Angela, Megan, Jeff, and undergrad major Mike Fetters, with these presentations:

• Annie Gagliardi and Jeffrey Lidz, "The Power of the Prior: Asymmetries in Word Learning vs. Word Class Learning"
• Angela Xiaoxue He and Jeffrey Lidz, "Mapping Intransitive Verbs to Self Propelled Motions"
• Megan Sutton, Mike Fetters & Jeffrey Lidz, "Parsing for Principle C at 30-months"
• John Trueswell, Alon Hafri, Dan Kauffman and Jeff Lidz, "Development of parsing ability interacts with grammar learning: Evidence from Tagalog and Kannada"

Dustin Chacón will be presenting his work on head movement in the Bangla DP at the CUNY Syntax Supper on Nov. 1st. He will argue that the complex feeding and bleeding relationships between noun-to-classifier substitution and classifier-raising in the Quantificational Approximateness construction show that certain word formation operations must be ordered before and after syntactic operations. This means that the common belief that head movement effects are entirely post-syntactic is not a tenable one, and suggests a four-tiered DP structure (as in Tang's (1990) or Borer's (2005) work) with distinct numeral and number/classifier projections.

Title of Paper: "Word Formation before and after Spellout, or, Deriving Simpson's Conjecture"

Colin Phillips will be the keynote speaker at the Linguistics Association of Portugal conference in Lisbon, October 26-28.

On October 20 at the Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science Colloquium, Valentine Hacquard presents "Understanding Desire and Belief Reports". In this talk Valentine develops a semantic account of the asymmetry in young children's understanding of "think" versus "want", against alternatives that link this to development in children's Theory of Mind.

Colin Phillips is giving a talk in the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture series, 4:00pm on Thursday October 20th in 1400 Marie Mount Hall. The title of the talk is "Linguistic Illusions: Where you see them, where you don't".

Terje Lohndal will give a linguistics colloquium talk on Friday, October 14th at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He will explore the consequences of a dynamic theory of Spell-Out where two phrases can never be merged, showing how this theory provides a transparent mapping onto Neo-Davidsonian logical forms. He will further discuss the theory's syntactic implications with respect to copy theory, movement and multi-dominance structures.

Title: "Spell-Out, Movement, and the Copy Theory"

Arizona colloquium website

Michaël Gagnon and Alexis Wellwood have a paper published in the Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21, entitled "Distributivity and modality: where 'each' may go, 'every' can't follow". The paper examines the differential behavior of "each" and "every" with respect to the Epistemic Containment Principle proposed by von Fintel and Iatridou (2003). It is shown that this principle can be derived from more general mechanisms of quantifier scope-taking in grammar.

Alexis Wellwood and Valentine Hacquard (along with co-author Roumyana Pancheva at the University of Southern California) have a paper appearing in the Journal of Semantics. The paper is called "Measuring and Comparing Individuals and Events", and looks at parallelisms in the interpretation of comparison across the nominal and verbal domains.

Norbert Hornstein and Juan Uriagereka will be giving invited talks at the University Potsdam, October 4th and 5th, for "The Minimalist Program: Quo Vadis?- Newborn, Reborn, or Stillborn".

Jeff Lidz will be giving the keynote address at the European Experimental Pragmatics (Euro-XPrag) Pisa Workshop on October 1.

Congratulations to a team of 12 Maryland linguists, and their hometeam support crew, who took part in the Ragnar Relay on September 23-24 (2011). The relay covered a grueling 200-mile route from Cumberland, in the western tip of Maryland, to Washington DC. Each runner covered 3 of the 36 legs, covering a total of 13-22 miles. The crew ran continuously for around 27 hours and 30 minutes, running many legs at night, and many in heavy rain. Despite it all they finished 150 minutes sooner than expected. On the team were 5 faculty and 7 graduate students, all of whom are now looking forward to running in dryer fall weather. An amazing effort by runners Aaron, Akira, Annie, Brad, Colin, Dan, Dave, Ellen, Jeff, Shevaun, Tess and Yakov!

The first Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning was held on September 23, 2011, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was jointly organized by students and faculty from Johns Hopkins and UMD.

The event brought together 140 faculty, researchers and students working on computational topics related to human language, from 14 universities: Delaware, Princeton, George Mason, George Washington, Columbia, Penn, Michigan, Haverford, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, University of Maryland Baltimore County, plus the two organizing institutions. Capitalizing on the breadth of computational research into human language, the colloquium stimulated fruitful discussion between linguists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and information scientists on a very impressive range of genuinely cutting-edge student research.

Congratulations to our local members of the organizing team: Ewan Dunbar, Raul Guerra, and Hal Daumé III.

Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago recently taught a two-hour workshop on EEG and MEG to a group of fourteen students in the NSF-funded Visual Language and Learning (VL2) Science of Learning Center hosted at Gallaudet University. The students came from a number universities: Gallaudet, UC Davis, Boston University, U Toronto, U New Mexico, UT Austin, Rochester, Georgia Tech, and UI Urbana-Champaign.

Howard Lasnik has recently contributed chapters to several important new collections and handbooks, including:

• "Some roots of Minimalism" with R. Freidin in the Oxford University Press Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (OUP)

• "Minimalism" and "Government and Binding" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences (CUP)

• "Syntax" in the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Elsevier)

• "Structure" with Juan Uriagereka in the Handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics (Elsevier)

• "Brief overview of the history of generative syntax" with Terje Lohndal in The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax (CUP)

• "What kind of computing device is the human language faculty?" in The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty (OUP)

• "Single cycle syntax and a constraint on quantifier lowering" in Biolinguistic Explorations: Interfaces in Language Design (John Benjamins)

Official opening ceremonies for the Maryland Neuroimaging Center will be at 12pm on Tuesday September 20th. This is a large new facility that currently houses a state-of-the-art MRI scanner, and will soon be a truly multi-modal center, which will include magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalograpy (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) facilities. The center is managed by the cross-department Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program. It has been made possible by a $2M Major Instrumentation Grant from NSF, and by substantial investment from many different colleges and centers across the university. Linguistics has played an important role in this effort. David Poeppel (now at NYU) was one of the founders of the initiative, together with Nathan Fox (Human Development). Colin Phillips was one of the PIs on the NSF grant, and is a member of the MNC leadership team.

Colin Phillips is giving the "Linguistics Association" Lecture at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting in Manchester on Sept 7-10. His talk is entitled "What is a mental grammar?" and it will be accompanied by a special session of the conference on the theme of the Psycholinguistics of Grammar.

Please greet new postdoc Kristine Yu. Kristine works on computational modeling of tone, prosody, and their acquisition. She recently received her PhD from UCLA, with a dissertation titled "Learning tone from the speech signal," under advisors Ed Stabler and Megha Sundara.

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz and Csilla Kajtar! Beginning in 2012, Jeff will be the Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition, a leading journal for research in language development and linguistic theory. Csilla will join Jeff at the journal, in the position of Managing Editor.

Carolina Petersen and Kenshi Funakoshi will be presenting their work at GLOW in Asia. The workshop will take place in Mie, Japan on September 7-8, 2011. Carolina Petersen will present a poster titled "Control in Subjunctive Clauses in Brazilian Portuguese: Evidence for Tense Defectiveness", showing the role of tense in accounting for the behavior of null subjects in subjunctive clauses in Brazilian Portuguese and in explaining the obviation effect in Romance languages. Kenshi Funakoshi will present a paper titled "Cyclic Spell-Out and Ellipsis", proposing a convergent-based Spell-Out model, which deduces PIC effects and gives a simple account for a MaxElide paradigm.

Terje Lohndal will be teaching a PhD course at the University of Oslo from September 5-23. The title of the course is 'Language as Cognitive Science'.

Shevaun Lewis is presenting her work in Paris at AMLaP, the annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, on September 1. She will be discussing results from an eye-tracking study on the processing of scalar implicatures, with a poster titled "Computing scalar implicatures is cost-free in supportive contexts."

Congratulations to Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz, who have been awarded a 3-year research grant from the National Science Foundation on "Acquiring the semantics and pragmatics of attitude verbs."

We are happy to welcome six new members to our graduate program: Juliana Gerard (UCLA), Yuki Ito (University of Tokyo), Jeffrey McMahan (U Michigan), Shota Momma (U Washington), Carolina Petersen (Universidade de São Paulo), and Rachael Richardson (Maryland and JHU).

A warm welcome to Masahiko Takahashi, our new postdoctoral fellow in syntax. Masa recently graduated from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, with a dissertation focusing on Case in Japanese.

We are happy to welcome two new Baggett Fellows, Rachel Dudley (NYU '11, Linguistics) and Erin Bennett (UCSD '11, Linguistics), as well as Cybelle Smith (Stanford '11, Linguistics), a new Research Assistant to Colin Phillips in the psycholinguistics lab.

Congratulations to Ariane Rhone, who is starting a postdoctoral position at the University of Iowa. Her appointment is split between the Department of Psychology and the Medical School. She recently completed a PhD dissertation supervised by Bill Idsardi on the topic of neural measures of audio-visual integration.

Shayne Sloggett is beginning the PhD program in linguistics at UMass Amherst, after one year as a Research Assistant to Colin Phillips in the pycholinguistics lab. Congratulations and best of luck to Shayne!

Brad Larson's "A Dilemma with Accounts of Right Node Raising" is to appear in issue 43(1) of Linguistic Inquiry, Winter 2012. Earlier this summer Brad presented a paper at the Comparative Syntax Workshop in Amsterdam ("Swiping Subdued: A simpler approach"), and gave an invited talk to the Syntax Roundtable at the University of Washington ("Any Way You Sluice It: A new way to escape ellipsis").

The July 15 issue of Science includes "Sentence and Word Complexity", by Jeffrey Heinz (Delaware) and Bill Idsardi. A prepublication draft is available.

Shiti Malhotra has accepted a lectureship in the Program in Linguistics at Northeastern University, for the coming academic year.

Alex Drummond is beginning a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University (England). He will be working on a project with Professor Wolfram Hinzen, supported by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

PHLING, the Philosophy & Linguistics reading group, will meet every Thursday this summer, 3:30-5:30 in the 1407 lounge. New and old participants welcome.

Jeff Lidz and Colin Phillips have been invited to teach courses this summer at the LSA Linguistic Institute, hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder. Jeff's course is "Learning in Generative Grammar: Representation, Intake and Update". Colin's is "Grammatical Illusions: Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Structures in Real Time".

Yakov Kronrod won an NSF Scholarship to attend the Machine Learning Summer School at Purdue University from June 13 to 24 of 2011.

Congratulations to Shevaun Lewis, who has won the College of Arts and Humanities Service award in the category of Graduate Student, for all of the work she has done above and beyond the call of duty for the linguistics department, for the language acquisition lab, and for the executive committee of the "Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity" IGERT. The award will be presented to Shevaun at the Fall 2011 College Convocation on September 13, 3:30pm at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Naomi Feldman recently joined the Department of Linguistics as an Assistant Professor in computational psycholinguistics. Her research uses tools from statistics and machine learning to formalize questions about at how people learn and represent the structure of their language. For example, behavioral evidence indicates that perception of sounds is biased toward the centers of phonetic categories. Can we predict this bias by assuming that listeners are using knowledge about which sounds tend to occur most often? Infants learn to segment words around the same time that they learn phonetic categories. How would learners benefit by using information about which sounds occur together in words to constrain phonetic category acquisition? Naomi’s courses include two introductory graduate level courses, one in computational psycholinguistics and one in phonology.

Ellen Lau is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, specializing in the cognitive neuroscience of language. In her research Ellen uses measures of brain activity such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI to develop better theories of language processing and its neural instantiation. One recent focus of her work is investigating the mechanisms by which readers and listeners use expectations to guide language comprehension. Speakers of a language possess a vast knowledge of deterministic and probabilistic constraints on the input - for example, that an adjective cannot be followed by a verb, that the object of "eat" is likely to name some kind of food, and that a male voice is unlikely to utter the phrase "I'm pregnant". In the face of a signal that is often noisy and ambiguous, proactively using this kind of knowledge to predict the upcoming input may be critical for rapid, accurate, and efficient language processing. Ellen uses the fine-grained temporal and spatial resolution provided by these neuroimaging measures to explore what kinds of linguistic knowledge contribute to expectations in comprehension and how these expectations are implemented in real-time processing.

Dustin Chacón, a first year student, Flagship fellow and Beinecke scholar in the Linguistics department at UMd, has been recently awarded a prestigious NSF-GRFP grant. The grant will be covering his stipend, tuition costs, and cover a bit of funding for travel costs for 3 years.

The project that Colin Phillips and he proposed was to see whether the robustness of applying grammatical coreference constraints in parsing that have been observed in English are due to the properties of those constraints or whether they are due to the way that word order and memory mechanisms interact. He will test this by looking at correlative clause constructions in Hindi in which the same coreference constraints exist, though the relevant phrases come in reverse linear order with respect to their English counterparts.

A student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. The AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science.

The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and Philip Resnik, which is supported by NSF and a Google Research Award. The students will be recognized in a spring issue of Science and on the Annual Meeting web site for AAAS, in addition to receiving a cash prize and a subscription to Science.

Particular recognition goes to Yakov for his leadership in creating and presenting the poster, and to all four students for the excellent work represented here and in the project as a whole. Congratulations on this well deserved recognition!