Monthly Archives: November 2017

Gilbers on AAE and hip-hop Friday at 10 in N451

Steven Gilbers of the University of Groningen will be giving a special talk on: “Regional variation in African American English and hip-hop. Why 2Pac’s accent changed over time and why Snoop Dogg and Jay Z have different rap flows”. It will be held Friday Dec. 1 at 10 am in ILC N451. All are welcome! An abstract and bio are below.

Abstract. Relatively little is yet known about how African American English (AAE) regiolects differ from each other. However, we do know regional variation in AAE is salient to many of its speakers, especially those involved with hip-hop culture, in which great importance is assigned to regional identity, and regional accents are a key means of expressing regional identity and affiliation (Morgan, 2001). In hip-hop music, regional variation can also be observed, with different regions’ rap performances being characterized by distinct “flows” (i.e. rhythmic and melodic delivery), possibly due to certain language varieties being better suited for certain flows (Kautny, 2015).

The observations above inform Steven Gilbers’s dissertational research on hip-hop linguistics. During his upcoming talk at UMass Amherst, he will discuss how East Coast and West Coast AAE differ from each other in terms of vowel duration and prosody as well as how these differences are reflected in the rap styles associated with both regions. Moreover, he will discuss how Tupac “2Pac” Shakur – a native New Yorker – acquired a West Coast AAE accent, and how his second dialect acquisition trajectory was influenced by his role in the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop war of the 1990s.

Bio. Steven Gilbers (26) is a hip-hop linguist from Groningen, the Netherlands. His research interests include African American English, hip-hop music, and the sociolinguistics of hip-hop culture. Steven is in the process of writing his doctoral dissertation on second African American English dialect acquisition in relation to regional hip-hop identity at the University of Groningen. Supported by a Fulbright grant, he is currently visiting the United States to conduct an African American English accent perception experiment in New York City and Los Angeles. Aside from his academic endeavors, Steven is also a hip-hop musician, spoken word artist, and co-host of the Kick Knowledge podcast.

 

20th Anniversary Lawne November 18, 2017

2oth Anniversary of Lawne (Language Acquistion Workshop New England) met with a full day of talks—most of them retrospectives by all the involved faculty—and a host of talks by students.  It had its traditional genuine workshop atmosphere—and thanks are due to all the UConn,UMass, MIT students and faculty who got it all co-ordinated, led by Emma Nguyen of UConn  (with help from Jaieun Kim,  Magda Oiry,  Barbara Pearson  and lots of others).

Paper by Ivy Hauser in JASA

My paper “A revised metric for calculating acoustic dispersion applied to stop inventories” has been published by The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Express Letters. It is open access and available online (link) and will also appear in the print version of JASA.

Angelika Kratzer named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Angelika Kratzer has been named a fellow of the AAAS, in recognition of her “distinguished contributions to the field of formal semantics, particularly concerning modality and the syntax-semantics interface, for founding and co-editing the journal Natural Language Semantics, and for dedicated mentoring.” As Barbara Partee says,  “It’s a big honor, and a highly deserved recognition of her contributions to Linguistics & Language Science, and a distinction that reflects back in a very positive way on the field at large.” Angelika’s election will be celebrated at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin February 15-19.

Congratulations Angelika!

 

Lisa Selkirk at UC Santa Cruz

Source: SPOT website

Lisa Selkirk gave an invited talk on Syntactic Constituency Spell-Out through Match Constraints at SPOT (Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory) at UC Santa Cruz this weekend. The workshop was organized by alums Junko Ito and Armin Mester (both 1986 UMass PhDs) and was part of their research project “aiming to create a computational platform that generates prosodic candidate sets from syntactic structure.” The workshop also included a talk on Incorporation, Focus, and the Phonology of Ellipsis in Irish, where Emily Elfner (2012 UMass PhD) was one of the co-authors. From the workshop description: “The syntax-prosody interface is the study of how syntactic (grammatical) structures are mapped onto the prosodic structures in different languages. Several strands of work in prosodic theory have recently converged on a number of common themes, from different directions, broadly couched in Optimality Theory. Selkirk (2011) has developed a vastly simplified approach to the syntax-prosody mapping which distinguishes only three levels (word, phrase, and clause), and syntactic constituents are systematically made to correspond to phonological domains (“Match Theory”). In an independent line of research, a long string of papers reaching back into the 1980s has convincingly demonstrated that recursive structures are by no means an exclusive property of syntax, but also play a crucial role in phonology. One of the hallmarks of Match Theory is the idea that the main force interfering with syntax-prosody isomorphism is not some kind of non-isomorphic mapping algorithm flattening out the structure, as first contemplated in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 372) and more fully worked out in later proposals, such as the edge-based theory built on one-sided alignment. It is rather the effect of genuine phonological wellformedness constraints on prosodic structure.”

UMass Alums in Tokyo and Berlin

From Angelika Kratzer: Three UMass Alums were in Tokyo last week, presenting papers on Concealed Propositions (Ilaria Frana & Keir Moulton), Slurs (Chris Davis), and CHARACTER Assassination (Craige Roberts) at LENSL 14 (Logic & Engineering of Natural Language Semantics). I did the best I could to get pictures of everyone, but was only partly successful. Even though Craige gave an invited talk, she was only spotted from a roof top in a group of six, and Keir Moulton didn’t go to Tokyo at all, but gave an invited talk on Nouny Propositions at the Berlin SelectionFest instead.

Left top: Ilaria in front, and Chris behind her on the left. Left bottom: Craige spotted from a Tokyo roof top. Right top: Chris. Right bottom: Ilaria (without Keir) talking on Concealed Propositions.

Seth Cable at the University of Tübingen

On November 9th, Seth Cable visited the University of Tübingen and presented an invited talk on some of his recent work on the morpho-semantics of negative predicates in Tlingit. Former UMass visitors (and students) in attendance included Sigrid Beck, Polina Berezovskaya, Vera Hohaus, Anna Howell, Natasha Korotkova, Paula Menendez Benito, Konstantin Sachs, and Igor Yanovich (sincerest apologies to anyone who may have been left out).

As goes without saying, Seth had an incredibly wonderful and memorable time!