Monthly Archives: April 2017

Keynote address at WCCFL 35: Keir Moulton

Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser University, 2009 UMass PhD) gave a keynote address at WCCFL 35 (West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics) this weekend at the University of Calgary. Keir presented joint work with his colleague Chung-hye Han and the SFU Experimental Syntax Lab in a talk entitled “A Defence of C-Command.” Here are the slides for his lecture.

As reported earlier, also on the program were Troy Messick, current UMass graduate students Brandon Pricket, Ethan Poole, Jon Ander Mendia, Yangsook Park, and Hsin-Lun Huang, last semester’s visitor Marlijn Meijer, alums Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill University, 2006 UMass PhD) and Elan Dresher (University of Toronto, 1978 UMass PhD), and Rafael Nonato from Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

(Pre-)Dissertation Fellowships for 4 PhD students!

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Sakshi Bhatia and Zahra Mirrazi have received Pre-Dissertation Fellowships, and that Ethan Poole and Leland Kusmer and have received Dissertation Fellowships. These Fellowships were granted by the Graduate School in a new program to provide summer support for graduate research.  

Congratulations to each of them on these outstanding achievements – the competition was very stiff! 

Green Receives Distinguished Community Engagement Award

It is our great pleasure to announce that Lisa Green has received this year’s University Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research. This well-deserved award recognizes Lisa for her exceptional achievements in community-engaged scholarship. For more on the award, including the winners from previous years, please see the link below:

https://www.umass.edu/sbs/faculty/awards/university-wide-awards/distinguished-community-engagement-awards-research-and

Congratulations, Lisa!

Dillon Receives CHFA Outstanding Teacher Award

It is our great pleasure to announce that Brian Dillon has received this year’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award.

Please join us in congratulating him on this well-deserved recognition. Special thanks are also owed to the students who supported his nomination by writing such powerful statements testifying to Brian’s outstanding skills as a teacher.

Alicia LeClair at Cornell Undergraduate Colloquium

Alicia LeClair will present the results of her research with Lisa Green at the 11th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC 11). The topic of her paper is: Development of Past Tense Marking in Child African American English. Alicia’s paper was selected as one of only five full-length student papers (as opposed to the more common posters) to be presented at the conference. Alicia writes:

“I will forever be grateful for all of the opportunities I have had with research experiences in the Linguistics Department here at UMass. I am especially excited to be presenting research from this past summer and this current semester with Lisa Green and the Center for the Study of African American Language. Child African American English Acquisition is an important topic of study and with Lisa’s help I have been able to create a body of work about past tense acquisition by 4- to 6-year-old AAE speakers that brings up possibilities for future more specific research within the AAE past tense acquisition path. It has been a rewarding, but at times difficult, challenge to understand the systems of AAE and how it maps out in child speech, but throughout this experience, I believe I have grown as a critical thinker, researcher, and student. Thank you again, UMass Ling!”

UMass Semanticists at TOM 10

The 10th instantiation of TOM (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal Semantics Workshop) took place last weekend in Toronto. Alums Junko Shimoyama and Luis Alonso-Ovalle were the two invited speakers. Junko presented joint work with alum Keir Moulton on Japanese internally-headed relative clauses. Luis gave a joint paper (with Henrison Hsieh) on the ability/involuntary action inflection of Tagalog verbs.  Here is a group picture that also includes Toronto semanticists and alums Suzi Lima and Youri Zabbal.

Linguists in Undergraduate Research Conference Friday 4/28

From Brian Dillon
We’re very proud and happy to share the news that four (!!!) of our undergraduates will be presenting their research at the 23rd Annual Massachusetts Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference. The conference takes place This Friday 4/28 from 8am-5pm in the Campus Center.
There are four talks/posters from our department. If you can, please do come see what our undergraduates have gotten up to over the last year:
Vishal Sunil Arvindam (Room 163, 2:30pm – 3:15pm): Processing singular they with discrete referents: A study contrasting gender-nonconforming with gender-conforming individuals.
Amanda Doucette (Poster C71, 3:30pm – 4:15pm): Inherent biases of recurrent neural networks for phonological assimilation and dissimilation.
Jack Duff (Room 165, 8:30am – 9:15): That punk! An experiment on epithets and perspective dependence.
Emma Jane Merritt (Room 165, 8:30am – 9:15am): How does the presence of shape-based classifiers in Mandarin Chinese influence speakers’ object categorization compared to speakers of English?
The Undergraduate research conference is a venue for undergraduate research from across the state, and it’s really a great opportunity to see what folks have gotten up to both on our campus and in our sister institutions across the Bay State. In addition to talks from linguistics, there will be presentations from undergraduates working across the Cognitive Science Initiative, including Psychology and Communication Disorders. You can check out the whole schedule here:
Hope to see you there!

Weigel on “What is political correctness” Friday 4/28 at 3:30

Next Friday April 28th at 3:30 in ILC S33, Moira Weigel of Yale University will be presenting a talk entitled “What is Political Correctness?” Weigel published a related article in the Guardian last November (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump), and she’ll have more to say next Friday. The talk is being sponsored by the Departments of Political Science, Sociology, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, English, Communications, Linguistics, the Institute for Social Science Research, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the College of Social and Behavioral Science. A reception will follow in the Linguistics department.

UMass @ WCCFL 35

The 35th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics is happening next weekend (28-30 April) at the University of Calgary. UMass will be well represented:

  • Hsin-Lun Huang is presenting the talk “Revisiting Pseudo-Incorporation: Post-verbal non-referential bare NPs in Mandarin”.
  • Jon Ander Mendia is presenting the poster “Epistemic Number”.
  • Troy Messick is presenting the poster “¾ agreement patterns beyond hybrid nouns”.
  • Rafael Nonato (in Spanish and Portuguese Studies) is presenting the talk “Skewed AGREE: accounting for a closest-conjunct effect with semantic implications”.
  • Yangsook Park is presenting the poster “Overt subjects in obligatory control constructions in Korean”.
  • Ethan Poole is presenting the talk “Movement of properties and properties of movement”.
  • Brandon Prickett is presenting the talk “Post nasal devoicing as opacity: A problem for natural constraints”.

Alumni Elan Dresher and Keir Moulton are invited speakers! Other alumni and people from the UMass world:

  • Alumnus Luis Alonso-Ovalle is presenting the talk “Anchored implicatives: Tagalog ability/involuntary action” with Henrison Hsieh.
  • Recent visitor Anna Marlijn Meijer is presenting the talk “The semantics and pragmatics of embedded polar replies with English so”.