The 22nd annual Annual Undergraduate Research Conference took place last Friday, April 22, in the Lincoln Campus Center. The Linguistics Department was represented by:
Ashley Lee, who gave the talk: “Gender Assignment in German Loan Nouns from English."
Stephanie Rich presented the poster “Why not Both? Incremental Processing of Syntactic and Semantic Ambiguities."
Anthony Yacovone presented the talk “Investigating the role of predictability during syntactic resolutions."
Congratulations!
Deniz Ozyildiz writes:
Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!
The program is available here: http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/
The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh, at 9 Myrtle St. in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N
Alyson Reed, Executive Director of the Linguistic Society of America, writes:
I am pleased to inform you that three current members of the faculty at UMass Amherst, will be honored at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
· Dr. Barbara Partee will receive the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award
· Dr. Lisa Green will be inducted as a Fellow of the LSA
· Dr. Alice Harris will begin her term as the 92nd President of the LSA (at the conclusion of the meeting)
We have already notified the recipients of these awards, but wanted to be sure their colleagues in the department are also made aware of these important honors. For additional background information on the award, please visit our website: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards.
Congratulations to Barbara, Lisa and Alice!
UMass is hosting the third meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting this weekend. The meeting starts this Friday, October 2, with a tutorial from 2:30 to 5:30 on Building digital resources by Kie Zuraw and Matt Wagers. The talks start on Saturday at 9:00 and the conference ends on Sunday. UMass is represented by Hsin-Lun Huang who will be giving the paper “Argument structure and causatively in Mandarin resultatives,” Kristine Yu who will be giving the paper “Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan,” and Jaieun Kim who (with Inkie Chung) will be giving the poster “Locality in Suppletive Allomorphy of GIVE in Korean.” For more information, go here.
WHISC is pleased to announce next year’s entering graduate class. They are:
Carolyn Anderson graduated from Swarthmore in 2014 with interests in formal semantics and fieldwork, having worked on Moroccan Arabic and Zapotec. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Canada, working on the use of technology in fieldwork and the ethics of fieldwork.
Alex Goebel comes to us from Tübingen University. He has worked in the syntax-semantics interface but has broad interests, especially in cognitive linguistics. Alex has also studied philosophy and through that developed an interest in modals.
Chris Hammerly has recently learned that he won an NSF Fellowship. He majored in linguistics and psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, graduating in 2014. He is currently a Baggett Fellow at the University of Maryland doing research in psycholinguistics. Chris is also part Ojibwe and is interested in learning the language.
Jaieun Kim majored in economics at Sogang University in South Korea, and completed an M.A. in linguistics there in 2014. She was also a visitor at the University of Hawaii for a year. She plans to work on syntax, the acquisition of syntax, and psycholinguistics, and her interests include comparing acquisition across languages.
Brandon Prickett is interested in experimental phonology and in computational models of phonological learning. He has graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will soon complete his M.A. there.
Michael Wilson studied linguistics and Spanish at the University of Texas at Austin. At UMass he will work on experimental methods in lexical semantics and syntactic alternations, as well as in theoretical syntax and semanics.
Rong Yin did her undergraduate work in English at Nankai University in China, then came to the U.S., where she completed an M.A. in linguistics at Syracuse University. She wants to work on syntax and semantics and is interested in fieldwork and in statistical tools.
Tim Hunter arrives Monday to take up residence as this year’s syntax guru. Tim received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Maryland, and held post-doctorates at Cornell and Yale before taking up his present post at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation, published by John Benjamins in 2011, explores a way of breaking down the movement and merge operations into more fundamental operations, and uses this to model how movement and structure building operations interact. He meshes this syntax with a neo-Davidsonian semantics to characterize the “argument/adjunct” distinction that syntacticians often use. He has worked on a variety of the classic problems in movement theory: rightward movement, parasitic gaps, relative clauses, remnant movement and the constraints on these constructions. He has also done work on the semantics of certain quantifiers, and their connection with other cognitive systems, as well as the acquisition of determiners by four-to-five year olds. He’s also done work on the formal aspects of minimalist grammars. Some of his work has made direct connections between the form of minimalist grammars and on-line processing. You can get (much) more information from his webpage.
Tim will be in Peggy Speas’s office (N402) during his stay, which ends April 17. You can reach him at timh@umm.edu. His stay is short: be sure to get guru’d early!
Gillian Gallagher (NYU) will give the department colloquium this Friday, February 20, in the colloq room (N400) at 3:30. A title and abstract of her talk follows.
Natural classes in phonotactic learning
The core representational unit in phonology is the feature, used to define contrasts between sound categories (/i/ and /e/ are distinguished by [±high]) and to pick out classes of sounds that pattern together in the phonology ([+high] vowels may be restricted from final position in some languages). Traditionally, phonological features are thought to bear a direct relation to phonetic properties (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952; Chomsky & Halle 1968). Under more recent proposals, though, features are labels for phonologically active classes that may bear a loose or no relation to the phonetics of the sounds in question (Mielke 2008). In this talk, I present evidence that phonetics plays a direct role in the natural classes used in the phonological grammar.
The cooccurrence phonotactics of Quechua provide evidence for natural classes grouping aspirated stops with the glottal fricative [h], and grouping ejective stops with the glottal stop [?]. In addition to being phonologically active, both of these classes are phonetically definable based on articulatory properties of the glottis: [spread glottis] picks out aspirates and [h], [constricted glottis] picks out ejectives and [?]. Despite the phonological and phonetic support, two nonce word tasks fail to find evidence for these natural classes in speakers' grammars. Instead, aspirate and ejective stops seem to be targeted by the phonotactics to the exclusion of their glottal counterparts. It is proposed that the preference for these smaller classes of laryngeally marked stops is phonetically based, deriving from the salience of the acoustic properties unique to stops.
WHISC has intercepted this message from the department’s Candy Monster.
In the months since September, when I assumed the responsibilities of Candy Monster, this department has consumed $192.88 in candy. In that same time, the ceramic piggy has consumed only $179.84 in change. My predecessor was able to leave us with some small reserve, but as of this morning the department candy fund is now officially empty.
This most recent resupply has left us with enough candy to last us perhaps three weeks. Please help me to replenish our fund before then.
UMass is hosting the annual Southern New England Workshop in Semantics this Saturday, November 15. The conference starts with morning refreshments at 9:00, and the talks begin at 9:30. UMass is represented by Ethan Poole, Jon Ander Mendia, Megan Somerday and Deniz Ozyildiz. You can find the full program here.
The proceedings of NELS 44 (held October 2013 at Uconn) are now published and available for purchase on CreateSpace!
They can be found here:
The Candy Monster writes:
We are swift approaching Halloween and the cheap candy that follows in its wake, so I felt this would be a good time to remind everyone that the continued presence of candy in the department depends on the satiation of a certain ceramic pig. If you have spare change lying around, now would be an excellent time to free yourself from the hassle of counting it; we will also happily take cash donations as well. The pig has been unhappily hungry of late, and the goal is make a sizable purchase right after Halloween.
Alex Drummond will be a visiting professor in syntax for the 2014-15 academic year. He has worked on the Binding Theory, Quantifier Raising, issues in anaphora and ellipsis, Preposition Stranding and on general issues of the design of syntactic derivations. You can find out more about his work here.
He’ll be teaching a seminar in the Spring. This term, his office is in the CSAAL area of the department: N472.
One of the visiting phonology faculty this academic year is Sang-Im Lee-Kim, who has just completed a dissertation (“Contrast Neutralization and Enhancement in Phoneme Inventories: Evidence from Sibilant Place Contrast and Typology”) at NYU. You can find out more about her research (and name) here. Her office is N434.
The inaugural dissertation defense in the Seminar Hub (N400 of the new department) took place on July 25, and featured Robert Staub who successfully defended his dissertation, “Computational Modeling of Learning Biases in Stress Typology.” Robert will be visiting faculty in the department for the 2014-15 academic year, teaching a proseminar in Phonology (LING 730) in the Fall and LING 402 in the Spring. You’ll find him in room N454 of the department.
Joe Pater writes:
John Kingston writes:
This summer, the Linguistics Department will with great joy move into a new building, one called the Integrated Learning Center for the time-being. The department will at last have space for all our faculty, all our graduate students, a considerable number of visitors, and all the laboratories, on the fourth floor of the new building. We will inaugurate our occupation of this new space on 27 September 2014 with a variety of festivities, and perhaps the annual Freeman lecture. So please plan to join us that day to make a joyful noise in celebration of the move and all the opportunities it creates for us.
More details will be forthcoming as they are firmed up.
Please welcome the new members of the graduate program, who will be arriving this Fall.
Thuy Bui, who is from Viet Nam and is currently a student at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She is interested in working on Vietnamese syntax and has worked on adverbs and yes/no questions.
Rodica Ivan, who is from Romania and has studied at the University of Bucharest, as well as in Venice. She is interested in relativization strategies in Romanian, complementizers, and language acquisition, as well as many other topics.
Petr Kusliy, who is from Russia and studied philosophy at the Russian State University and the Institute of Philosophy. He has studied with Barbara in Moscow. He is interested in the semantics of attitude reports and the semantics of tense.
Deniz Ozyildiz, who is from Turkey but studied at Nanterre University in France and at UCLA; he is currently in the cognitive science program at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He is interested in syntax, semantics, and fieldwork, and has worked on tensed verbs in Turkish and on shifting indexicals.
Georgia Simon, who is an American student at Rutgers. She is interested in prosody and pragmatics, and has experience doing research using experimental methods.
Congratulations to Ivy Hauser and Leland Kusmer who have been awarded graduate student fellowships by the National Science Foundation. There were only 10 of these fellowships awarded to students at UMass. For more information about the program and awardees, go here.
Seth Cable writes:
I'm writing to let you know that Alejandro Pérez Carballo and I have just set up a blog site where linguists and philosophers can share events / classes / etc. that will be of mutual interest: http://blogs.umass.edu/lingphil/
Our hope is that this will become a resource to members of our campus (and the broader Five College community) who are interested in Logic, Language, Cognition, and related areas.
There's not much up there right now, but that's where you all come in! If you could, please let me know if you know of any additional upcoming events / talks / seminar presentations that would be of interest to and open to philosophers and philosophy students. Anything you want to share with the philosophers, I can post up there for us!
I should mention that we already plan to have linguistics course offerings up there soon. In addition, Alejandro is working on a Calendar of Events folks can subscribe to, as well as a mailing list that announces any updates to the site. Please, if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated!
The Proceedings of the 2013 Meeting on Phonology, edited by John Kingston, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs, have just been published by the Linguistic Society of America:
http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/amphonology/
The proceedings include papers by current UMass PhD students Claire Moore-Cantwell and Robert Staubs, and alumni Gillian Gallagher (BA), Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, and Anne-Michelle Tessier. The papers were developed from presentations at Phonology 2013, held at UMass in November. The next Annual Meeting on Phonology will be held at MIT September 19-21, and the fall 2015 edition will be hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
