Phonology meeting

Don’t miss the Manchester Phonology Meeting, taking place in Hulme Hall (as usual) from Thursday to Saturday. Details here!

Koontz-Garboden exhausting the pages in his passport

Colleague Andrew Koontz-Garboden has had a busy few weeks.  He was in Boston last week at SULA 5 (Semantics of the Under-represented Languages of the Americas), representing the Manchester Native American semanticists (who are hosting the next SULA in 2011).  This coming week, he heads to Madrid, for a workshop on Events across categories: Theoretical and experimental approaches to event structure.  A couple weeks later, you’ll find him in Stuttgart at Workshop on Roots: Word formation from the perspective of “core lexical elements.”

Inbal Arnon to join department as new psycholinguist

Manchet is very pleased to announce that Inbal Arnon, currently in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford, has accepted our offer for the Lectureship in Psycholinguistics!  Inbal’s interests, which can be read about in more detail here, lie at the interfaces of grammar, processing, and language acquisition, and her research in these areas is informed by a range of experimental methods on a variety of languages.  Manchet is very much looking forward to giving her a proper Mancunian welcome when she joins us in January, 2010!

SPINfest!

The inaugural SPINfest!, a festival for Semantics and Pragmatics in the North (of England), will take place this coming Monday in the Whitworth Hall Council Chamber starting at 11am.  All the details, including a schedule, follow:
Monday, 25 May, location:  Council Chambers in Whitworth Hall
(Building 51 here:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/visitors/travel/maps/az/ )

11:00, Coffee, biscuits, tea, followed by brief welcome

11:30, Andrew Koontz-Garboden (Manchester) “Derived statives”

12:10, Martina Faller (Manchester) “Pluractionality in Cuzco Quechua”

12:50–14:00, Lunch

14:00, Eytan Zweig and George Tsoulas (York) “Distributivity and Plurality
across Languages and Logics:  Preliminary Thoughts”

14:40, Graham Stevens and Michael Scott (Manchester)
“Category-crossing metaphors”

15:20–15:40, Coffee

15:40, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester) “The discourse-pragmatics of
clause-negation in Old and Middle French”

16:20, Iván García Álvarez (Salford) “There are no exceptive
determiners in English”

17:00, Wine reception

18:00, Dinner

New departmental calendar

Apropos the previous posting, now seems a good time to remind people of our excellent new departmental calendar, which can be found here.

Freeland in seminar

Manchet is behind…  If you having been keeping up with the seminar series, then we’re afraid to report that you missed a smashing final episode in this year’s seminar series, featuring Jane Freeland (Southampton) on “Considering popular language ideology in revitalizing the language of the Mayangna of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast”.

Languages of Early Britain

The workshop on Languages of Early Britain, organized by colleague Stephen Laker, will take place tomorrow in the historic Whitworth Hall Council Chambers.  All the details can be found here.

Former colleague McCully doing poetry reading in Chorlton

[Hat tip to McCully's former advisee, Ricardo, for this.]

As part of this year’s Chorlton Arts Festival, our former colleague Chris McCully will be doing a poetry reading at the Chorlton Library on Friday 15 May at 7.30pm.

This will include a selection from his excellent collection of metrical translations _Old English Poems and Riddles_ (Carcanet, 2008). Many of you will be familiar with these wonderful works, which provide an astonishingly faithful recreation of the aural and structural experience of the Old English originals, whilst being supremely successful as poems in their own right.

Relevant web links are listed below:

_Old English Poems and Riddles_:
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-
bin/indexer?product=9781857549256

Chris McCully:
http://www.chrismccully.co.uk/

Chorlton Arts Festival:
http://www.chorltonartsfestival.com/index.html

Chorlton Library:
http://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/scripts/document
s_info.php?documentID=592

Meakins, shining linguistic star, turns film-star!

Investigative reporters for Manchet have uncovered an interview with colleague Felicity Meakins starting at 5:11 in the film entitled “The Linguists–Archiving for speakers and linguists” in which she teaches us how Mary hits John, and how unlike in English, in the language she works on even changing the word order (e.g., John hits Mary) can’t save John from Mary’s vengeful can of whoop-ass.  Check it out here!

Simard in seminar

Via Stephen Laker:

Tomorrow’s seminar will be given by Candide Simard on the topic of “Information structure and prosody: How focus is encoded in the prosody of Jaminjung.”  I look forward to seeing you all at 4pm in S.3.1.