{"id":1530,"date":"2010-04-26T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=1530"},"modified":"2010-04-26T00:50:48","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T04:50:48","slug":"formal-approaches-to-mayan-linguistics-last-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2010\/04\/26\/formal-approaches-to-mayan-linguistics-last-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics last weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/mitcho.com\/photos\/albums\/boston\/ling\/famli\/famli67.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"166\" alt=\"FAMLi sign\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<br clear='none'\/>\nMeanwhile, our department hosted the first-ever conference on &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/famli\/www\/FAMLi\">Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi)<\/a>&#8221; this weekend.  We won&#8217;t repeat all the details of the conference. which we already described in <a href=\"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/2010\/04\/19\/1491\/\">last week&#8217;s WHAMIT<\/a> \u0097 except to say that it was a tremendous success.  The papers were excellent \u0097 many breaking new ground in grammatical description, others offering competing explanations for particularly puzzling phenomea in Mayan (especially Agent Focus, central to at least three of the talks). The discussion was lively and productive after each and every talk, the room was full, and the spirit of the conference was magnificent. The two official languages of the conference were English and Spanish, as about half the participants were native-speaker linguists. Combinations of English handout with Spanish presentation (and vice-versa) were common and worked very well for those of us with less than perfect bilingualism skills.  From our own department, talks were given by <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/kirills\/www\/\">Kirill Shklovsky<\/a> (&#8220;Person-Case effects in Tseltal&#8221;); by <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/jcoon\/www\/Jessica_Coon\/Home.html\">Jessica Coon<\/a> with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linguistics.ku.edu\/gradstudents\/index.shtml\">Pedro Mateo<\/a> (University of Kansas) (&#8220;Extraction and embedding in two Mayan languages&#8221; \u0097 Chol and Q&#8217;anjob&#8217;al); and by <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/norvin\/www\/home.html\">Norvin Richards<\/a>, who was one of the five invited speakers.  A particular highlight of the conference (and a chance to get out of Cambridge) was a Friday dinner reception at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sre.gob.mx\/boston\/\">Mexican Consulate<\/a> in Boston, hosted by Consul Fernando Estrada.  Thank you, <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/famli\/www\/FAMLi\/Contact.html\">Jessica, Robert, Kirill and Katie<\/a> for this unforgettable workshop, and thanks also to everyone who helped!<br clear='none'\/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/famli58x.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"130\" alt=\"FAMLi conversation\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n(<i><small>photo credits: Mitcho Erlewine.  More photos <a href=\"http:\/\/mitcho.com\/photos\/boston\/ling\/famli\/\">here<\/a>.<\/small><\/i>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meanwhile, our department hosted the first-ever conference on &#8220;Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi)&#8221; this weekend. We won&#8217;t repeat all the details of the conference. which we already described in last week&#8217;s WHAMIT \u0097 except to say that it was a tremendous success. The papers were excellent \u0097 many breaking new ground in grammatical description, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1530"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1560,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions\/1560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}