New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling (NISM 2016) will take place in Paris on September 7-8. Paul Portner (Georgetown University, 1992 UMass PhD) is one of the invited speakers. He will talk about verbal and sentential mood, a topic that is related to his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press.  Chris Davis (University of the Ryukyus, 2011 UMass PhD) will give a joint talk (with Eric McCready) arguing that expressives are not presuppositions, with evidence coming from expressive wh-constructions. Yangsook Park will present a paper on obligatory de se elements with a de re Logical Form, which is part of her ongoing dissertation work at UMass.

Paula Menéndez Benito (Marie Curie Fellow at Pompeu Fabra University, 2005 UMass PhD) is teaching an advanced level seminar on Modal Indefinites at this year’s European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2016) in Bolzano (Italy). The seminar is connected to Paula’s Marie Curie project on Modal Determiners, which is funded by the European Commission and hosted by Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Together with Luis Alonso Ovalle (McGill University, 2006 UMass PhD), Paula edited a related book on Epistemic Indefinites, which was published by Oxford University Press last year. From the OUP description: “This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algun: the sentence Maria se caso con algun medico (‘Maria married some doctor or other’) both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker’s inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question.”

Shai Cohen (2009 UMass PhD) will be an Instructor in Hebrew in the Department of Eastern and South Asian Studies of Emory University as of this Fall. Shai has worked on presuppositions (in particular those triggered by only and too), but is also interested in the semantics of counterfactuals and conditional interrogatives. In his Hebrew classes, he teaches students to use Hebrew in a wide variety of settings, including asking for information, discussing poems, describing pictures and drawing conclusions. Source: Emory University.

Ilaria Frana (2010 UMass PhD) will start a tenure-track position (assistant professor equivalent) in the English Department of the Kore University of Enna in Sicily this Fall. The Kore University of Enna is a ‘young’ Italian university with strong international ties, in particular with universities across the Mediterranean, but also with institutions in the Americas and in Northern and Central Europe. Ilaria has just finished her book on Concealed Questions, which will be published by Oxford University Press in the Spring. The book presents a new analysis of concealed questions. Concealed question constructions are reports of a mental attitude where part of a sentence looks like a nominal complement (e.g. Eve’s phone number in Adam knows Eve’s phone number), but is interpreted as an indirect question (Adam knows what Eve’s phone number is). Source: OUP.