Note to potential "friends" in the special LiveJournal sense in which "friend" has become a verb: I would like to know who you really are, especially if you'd like to be mutual friends. Please see the nice essay written on this topic by  petrark here:  http://petrark.livejournal.com/2690.html#cutid1, asking potential friends to let him know their identity: I agree with the sentiments expressed there. And getting in touch with me is not hard; my Live Journal profile includes my real website, and my website includes my e-mail address. Thanks!  

Volodja and I were at the Garden Ring Road demonstration today, starting near the Barrikadnaja Metro station and then at the end walking to the Smolenskaja Metro station. I've posted a bunch of photos on my Flickr site, and a smaller collection on my Facebook page, and two videos to YouTube, also linked on my Facebook page. It was exciting to be there. I know it won't change the outcome of the March 4 election, but something is changing, and definitely for the better.
    I can't really compare it to the demonstrations I attended in Prague in November 1989; those had an effect of incomparably greater magnitude than these can possibly be expected to. But I can say that in both cases I was very happy to be among such people.

The website for my 2012 course, History of Formal Semantics, is now up:  https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_Web_12/. It will meet Wednesday evenings at 7, starting the day we arrive, Feb 15. Initial plan is on the website; more details as we progress. This year in addition to doing a basic introduction to formal semantics, we'll explore its history.
If you know people who might be interested, please let them know. The first three or four weeks will be the same as in previous years; after that there will be quite a bit that's new, concentrating on the history of formal semantics in linguistics, philosophy, logic -- how things got to be the way they are, what debates are still going on. What Chomsky thought about semantics in the early years of generative grammar; what motivated Montague to move from foundational work in logic, set theory, and recursive function theory to a project of showing how the syntax and semantics of natural languages could be formalized in the same way as for logical languages. Differences between them; how a synthesis was achieved; how semantics and then pragmatics developed from there on.
     I've recently finished an article on some aspects of the history of formal semantics -- it gives  an idea of the kinds of issues we'll be discussing. Partee, Barbara H. 2011. Formal semantics: Origins, issues, early impact. In Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. Discourse, Context, and Models. The Baltic Yearbook of Cogntion, Logic, and Communication. Vol. 6 (2010), eds. B.H. Partee, M. Glanzberg and J. Skilters, 1-52. Lawrence, KS: New Prairie Press. http://thebalticyearbook.org/journals/baltic/article/view/1580/1228.
     Anyone who is interested and has questions or can't come the first day can e-mail me (partee sobaka linguist.umass.edu).

Spread the word – Aleksandr Kibrik is Linguist of the Day on Linguist List right now!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2011/linguists/AleksandrKibrik.cfm

Read his essay (adapted and translated from the longer interview in Russian on polit.ru : http://www.polit.ru/science/2011/03/09/kibrik.html ) about how he became a linguist.

 

And then if you can, please make a contribution to Linguist List! If you have a credit card, you can do it yourself, and your contribution can also be 'credited' to MGU or whatever your institution is, as part of the friendly competition among schools to see who contributes the most. (And it will also be part of the competition among countries – in the past, Russia once managed to get to #2 among European countries.)

 

If you want to contribute but don't have a Visa or MasterCard, I can help – tell me how much you want to contribute and I'll do it with my Visa card, and you can give me cash (please put it in an envelope with your name, the amount, and which school or institute to put with your name.) If you have any questions, let me know!

I was recently corresponding with Richard Hudson in England, and we were talking about OTiPL and the Olympiads and other things (I found out for him that the founders of the Linguistic Olympiad were Zhurinovsky, Uspensky, and Zalizniak), and he then asked me the following interesting questions -- I told him I would consult with my friends on Live Journal and then let him know what my Russian friends think.

I should add that I have been very impressed indeed about how much more math and logic the average linguistics student in Russia knows than the average linguistics student in the U.S. (though in the U.S. it's more varied, and some know a great deal indeed.) I already know and will tell him about the decision made at the beginning of the creation of OTiPL that all linguistics students should learn a good bit of mathematics, and the strong training that was initiated by Uspensky, Wentzell, and Shixanovich.

What do you think? What would you say?

Happy birthday to mitr ! (It's still your birthday over here!) With warmest wishes for a wonderful year and many more!

Happy Birthday, txori !

Happy Birthday, sesili !! Have a wonderful day, a wonderful year, a wonderful life!

The course website is here:  http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2010/ . The first meeting will be Feb 9, 15:45-19:00. Contact the LaTyp office if you need a propusk (try 499 973-4755 -- I think that's still right). The first three lectures will be pretty much the same as in previous years; then we will start being more specifically concerned with issues in the semantics of NPs. Probably the people who see my ЖЖ posts aren't the students who would be coming to the course, but if you know of relevant students who might somehow not have heard about it, you are welcome to let them know!

There's a description of my spring speckurs on Formal Semantics at RGGU on the RGGU Institute of Linguistics site ru_il , here.  The main focus this year will be the semantics of noun phrases -- different semantic types of noun phrases, semantic composition within the NP, languages with and without articles, quantifiers and quantifier scope, adjectives and relative clauses, numeral phrases, distributivity, and many other issues, taking a typological perspective whenever possible (with the help of the class).

The course will meet on Tuesdays, 5th and 6th para (15:45 - 19:00), lecture plus seminar. We'll have a full contentful meeting on the first day, February 9 -- that will be an introductory lecture very similar to the introductory lecture in previous years at RGGU and MGU.

If you want to attend and need a propusk or other RGGU-based information, I suggest you contact pa6tetus ; with questions about the course itself, contact me. (My e-mail is partee@linguist.umass.edu )  I'll set up a website for it pretty soon, but in the meantime, I hope the description on the RGGU site and the links to the previous two years' courses will give you a good preliminary idea about what it will be like.

I'll be lecturing in English, but you are welcome to communicate with me in Russian!

Everyone is welcome -- tell your friends about it!