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Past Announcements:

10/15/09: We will be meeting at 5:30pm on Monday, October 19th, at 2 Arrow St #420. Carlos Gómez Gallo will be presenting a talk titled "Interclausal Planning in Interactive Communication." The background reading can be downloaded here. If you plan to attend, please email us if you have not received instructions on how to enter the building.

10/04/09: Our first meeting will be held tomorrow at 5:30pm, in room 420 at 2 Arrow St.. This will be an organizational meeting. If you plan to attend, please email us for instructions on how to get into the building. Hope to see you there!

05/10/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 12th, at 5:00pm, in Vanserg 130. Jenny Lee, from Wellesley, will be giving a talk titled Second language processing of dative and instrument prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguities: Toward an improved understanding of the argument/adjunct distinction (the abstract can be downloaded here).

04/25/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 28th, at 5:00pm (in Vanserg 130). We will be reading a paper by Wilhelm (2008), titled Bare nouns and number in De Sułine. The discussion will be led by Ming Xiang, from Harvard.

04/22/09: The 2009 MBB Distinguished Lectures Series will continue today and tomorrow, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm, in the Yenching Auditorium. Professor Daniel Dennett will be giving two talks, titled My Body Has A Mind Of Its Own: So What Does It Need Me For?, and My Body Has A Mind Of Its Own: So What Does It Need Me For? (click here, for further details).

04/21/09: The lab meeting today will consist of Professor Daniel Dennett's MBB lecture at 4pm, titled Battles in the Brain, which will take place in the Yenching Auditorium, at 2 Divinity Ave. At 6pm, we will attend Jeanette Gundel's lecture, titled Clefts from a Cross-linguistic Perspective, in Emerson 101.

04/13/09: The next meeting will take place tomorrow (April 14th), at 6:30pm, at Professor Michael Flier's house (please email us for directions/rides). Masha Polinsky will be giving a talk about A' movement and Russian heritage speakers, titled Nothing to Lose but their Chains.

04/02/09: On April 7th, Wendy Sandler, from the University of Haifa, will be speaking about the phonological system in a new Bedouin sign language, at a meeting organized by the Language Universals Group (the abstract for the talk can be found here). The meeting will take place at 6pm, in Grays Hall 5. There will be no separate meeting in Vanserg Hall next week.

03/31/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 31st, at 5:00pm. We will be discussing talks and posters from the CUNY 2009 Conference on Human Sentence Processing (posters presented by lab members can be found here).

03/12/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 17th, at 5:00pm. Peter
Graff, from MIT, and Jacopo Romoli, from Harvard, will be presenting their CUNY topic, titled Exploring a Learning Bias against Non-Conservative Determiners (click here, to download the absract).

03/07/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 10th, at 5:15pm. We will be reading a paper by Bobaljik and Wurmbrand (2008), titled Word Order and Scope: Transparent Interfaces and the ¾ Signature, in preparation for Jonathan Bobaljik's talk on Friday (please see the events page, for more details). Peter Jenks, from Harvard, will be leading the discussion.

03/01/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 3rd, at 5:00pm. Shukhan Ng, from CUNY, will be giving a talk on the processing of Chinese empty categories (click here, to download the abstract). Please plan to arrive on time for the meeting (feel free to email us, if you need directions to the lab).

02/25/09: The lab meetings, unless otherwise noted, will from now be held on Tuesdays, and will begin at 5:00pm, sharp. Check back soon for info about the next meeting!

02/18/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 24th, at 5:15pm. Cilene Rodrigues, from the University of Brasilia and Emmanuel College, will be speaking about Pirahã and Human Universals (click here to download the abstract).

02/16/09: Maria Polinsky and Suzanne Flynn are currently teaching a course at MIT, titled Looking for Generalizations in Unexpected Populations. For more information, please click here, to download the course description.

02/16/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 17th, at 5:15pm. Nomi Erteschik-Shir will be giving a talk on Atom Theory and aspectual focus (please click here, to download the abstract). The background reading for the talk is chapter 5 of Information Structure: The Syntax-Discourse Interface (the reading can be downloaded here).

02/06/09: (location update!) On February 10th, William O'Grady, from the University of Hawaii, will be speaking at the joint meeting of the Polinsky Lab and the Language Universals Group. The subject of the talk will be scope transfer in Korean-English heritage (the abstract can be found here). The meeting will take place at 6pm, in Barker Center Thompson Room 110. There will be no separate meeting in Vanserg Hall that week.

01/31/09: We will have our first meeting of the semester on Tuesday, February 3rd, at 5:15pm. Nayoung Kwon will be speaking about the processing of syntactic and anaphoric gap-filler dependencies in Korean (please click here to download the abstract). We will also be discussing general issues for the upcoming semester.

12/08/08: The slides for Ming and Masha's December 2nd presentation on the Russian count noun experiment, from the seminar at Prof. Michael Flier's residence, have been posted, and can be downloaded here.

11/27/08: The next meeting will take place on December 9th - we will meet to discuss a paper by Edith Aldridge, on generative approaches to ergativity. Jeremy Aron-Dine will lead the discussion, and the paper can be downloaded here. There will be no meeting on December 2nd: Ming and Masha will be presenting the Russian count noun experiment at a seminar (the slides will be posted).

11/19/08: We will meet in the lab next Tuesday, November 25th, at 5pm. Sun-Hee Lee, from Wellesley College, will talk about using a historical corpus-based approach to constraints on Korean reflexives. The abstract for the talk can be downloaded here.

11/11/08: There has been a schedule change! On Tuesday, November 18th, we will hear two talks. At 5pm in Vanserg 130, CJ Kelly will present her research on Chinese classifiers. Afterwards, at 6pm in Boylston 303, Ken Wexler from MIT will give a talk on understanding the delayed acquisition of clefts, inverse copulas, and passives as phasal difficulties. Please check the events page for more details.

11/01/08: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 4th. Ekaterina Kravtchenko will be presenting her research, concerning the effect of antecedent person and syntactic position on intrasentential null subject interpretation in Russian.

10/30/08: This week's meeting will take place at 5pm on Thursday, October 30th. Annie Gagliardi, from the University of Maryland, will talk about the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez. The Boston University Conference on Language Development will also take place this week, from October 31th to November 2nd. Please check the events page for more details.

10/17/08: On Tuesday, Anna Verbuk will present her research on relevance implicatures and non-linguistic inferences. The background reading for the talk is: Kasher, A. (1991) "Pragmatics and the Modularity of Mind," in S. Davis eds., Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, p. 567-582.

10/03/08: On October 7th, Dustin Heestand will present ongoing research on resumptive pronouns. The background reading for Dustin's presentation is the first 10 pages of Resumption by Jim McCloskey (2004).

09/25/08: Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative is presenting two events in October: The State of Cognitive Neuroscience: Accomplishments and Prospects (Oct. 2nd), and Conversations in Mind/Brain/Behavior (Oct. 14th). Both events take place in Yenching Auditorium. More information can be found here.

09/25/08: Next Tuesday, Nayoung will continue her presentation on the processing of gap-filler dependencies in Korean. The background reading is chapter 5 of Nayoung's dissertation.

09/18/08: On Tuesday, Nayoung will talk about the processing of syntactic and anaphoric gap-filler dependencies in Korean. Background reading: chapter 4 of Nayoung's dissertation, which can be downloaded here.

09/16/08: We will have an organizational meeting in the lab on Thursday.