Elena Benedicto has shared this nice picture of UMass linguists at the GLOW conference held in Budapest April 10th – 14th. From l-r: Rebecca Woods, Jon Ander Mendia, Tom Roper, Thuy Bui, Ethan Poole, and Elena.
Monthly Archives: April 2018
Second Year Student Mini-Conference Friday May 4th at noon
The second year student mini-conference will be held this Friday from noon to 3 in ILC N400. This is a great chance to hear about the work that they have been pursuing in their generals papers. All are welcome!
12:00 Andrew Lamont: The Serial Subsequential Hypothesis
12:30 Zahra Mirrazi: Low scope of Negation: a problem for Semantic approach of Neg-raising?
1:00 Kimberly Johnson: Optional Case in Muskogee Creek: phase sensitive morphology
2:00 Katie Tetzloff: Exceptionality in Spanish Onset Clusters
2:30 Leah Chapman: The Independence of Doxastic Centers
Diversity research grants to UMass linguists
As announced in this News Office release, http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/new-institute-diversity-sciences-awards, two seed grants from the new Institute of Diversity Sciences were awarded to teams involving faculty in our department:
“Discovering African American English Speech Melodies,” Kristine Yu and Lisa Green, linguistics, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, languages, literatures and cultures, with Brendan O’Connor, computer science.
“Processing Non-native Speech in Noisy Classrooms,” Lisa D. Sanders, psychological and brain sciences, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, Hispanic linguistics, Kristine M. Yu, linguistics, and Anne Gilman, visiting assistant professor of psychology.
These grants will allow the research teams to gather pilot data to form the basis of external grant proposals. The seed grant proposal process was highly competitive, so it’s a great accomplishment for Linguistics to be so well represented in them (2 of 6). Congratulations and thank you Kristine and Lisa!
Christopher Hammerly at UC Santa Cruz
Christopher Hammerly will be giving two invited talks this week at UC Santa Cruz Linguistics, both of which are on Thursday May 3rd. The first is “A verb raising analysis of the Ojibwe VOS/VSO alternation”, and the second is “The grammaticality asymmetry reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence” (joint work with Adrian Staub and Brian Dillon).
Spring 18 LAWNE (Language Acquisition Workshop of New England)
Spring 18 LAWNE (Language Acquisition Workshop of New England), our local language acquisition workshop involving UMass, UConn, Smith, and MIT, will be held at UConn (Storrs) on May 5th.
UMass will be represented by:
Jaieun Kim (Linguistics)
Danielle Thomas (Spanish and Portuguese)
Marco Tulio Bittencourt (Spanish and Portuguese)
The schedule will be announced by email, in the early next week.
All are welcome!
Linguistics in UMass Gives
This was the first year that the Linguistics Department participated in the UMass Gives fundraising drive, and it was a great kick-off. We wound up on the CHFA leader board with only one less donation than History, and only English had more donations amongst departments in our College. Thank you so much to everyone who participated!
Donations to the Department can of course be made at any time (https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/give-linguistics). Here’s our video for the launch of the Student Support Fund in case you missed it on the UMass Gives page.
Pearson and Roeper at USASEF
Barbara Pearson and Tom Roeper together with faculty and students from University of Maryland and Ohio University (Laura Wagner and Colin Phillips) operated a Language Booth at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC April 6-8, 2018, under a grant to Laura Wagner.
Tom Roeper reports:
USASEF is the nation’s largest celebration of STEM [usasciencefestival.org] and attracted by one source 350,000 people. Laura Wagner estimated that we had 100 children visiting every hour with mostly Middle School and elementary school children. We engaged children in games on recursion, presupposition, and quantification. And other models of phonological and language variation were all popular. It was a bit
overwhelming, but fun and useful for everyone.
UMass linguists at WCCFL
A strikingly large group of past and present UMass linguists presented talks and posters at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics held at UCLA April 20-22, 2018: http://linguistics.ucla.edu/conference/wccfl36/.
TALKS
Jyoti Iyer
“Bare singulars can object shift or pseudo-incorporate but not both”
Leland Kusmer
“Extraction from coordination in Khoekhoegowab”
Deniz Ozyildiz (with Travis Mjor and Emar Maier)
“Communicative reception reports as hearsay: Evidence from indexical shift in Turkish”
Vincent Homer (plenary speaker)
“That’s all”
Jon Ander Mendia, Ethan Poole and Brian Dillon
“Spurious NPI licensing is covert licensing”
Bernhard Schwarz (with Methieu Paille)
“Knowing whether and ignorance inferences”
POSTERS
Rodica Ivan and Brian Dillon
“When NPI Illusions fail: the case of strict NPIs and neg-words in Romanian”
Rodica Ivan
“No interpreted features? No Principle B!”
Peter Alrenga
“A single ‘single’: From emphasis to exclusivity”
Rong Yin and Jeremy Hartman
“Perspectives under Ellipsis”
Thuy Bui
“Aspectual Asymmetry: The Vietnamese (Im)Perfectivity”
Ekaterina Vostrikova
“Deriving the exceptive-additive ambiguity”
Alexander Göbel
Additives in ‘but’-clauses, ‘also’ as the Negation of EXH
Satoshi Tomioka
“Contrastive and Embedded Implicature”
Andrew McKenzie
“The role of semantics in licensing English synthetic compounds”
Andrew Lamont
“Precedence is pathological: The problem of alphabetical sorting”
Student Support fund launches with UMass Gives this week
The Linguistic Department’s new student support fund is being launched this week in conjunction with the UMass Gives fundraising campaign, this Thursday the 27th and Friday the 28th: https://umass.scalefunder.com/gday/giving-day/4514/department/8020. Please share the link in your social media, and check out the video on the site that we prepared for the launch, which features our lovely building and some of our great graduate students!
The student support fund will help to support graduate students’ summer research projects, conference travel, and research expenses. Increased summer funding is both a departmental and UMass Graduate School priority: it helps students of all backgrounds devote themselves to their research all year long.
Meghan Clayards colloquium Friday April 27 at 3:30
Meghan Clayards of McGill University will present “Flexibility and individual differences in speech perception” Friday April 27th in ILC N400 at 3:30. An abstract is below. All are welcome!
Abstract. In order to understand spoken words, listeners integrate information across multiple acoustic dimensions such as spectral frequencies and durations. For each phonological contrast (e.g. bet vs. bat) we must learn which dimensions are relevant and how much to pay attention to each dimension (cue weights). This talk will focus on two aspects of this process. First, flexibility in what we pay attention to in perception and how this is tied to production patterns. Secondly, despite consistent overall patterns for particular contrasts/languages, there seem to be important individual differences in how people perform in speech perception tasks. I will present some data from my lab that is beginning to explore these differences.