Category Archives: Newsletter

Byron Ahn colloquium this Friday at 3:30

Byron Ahn of Princeton University will present our first colloquium of the semester: “Towards Uncovering (Some) Intonational Meanings in Mainstream U.S. English” (abstract below), Friday Feb. 23 at 3:30 in ILC S211. All are welcome. A reception will follow in the department.

Abstract. While modulation of intonation is known to correspond to modulation of meaning —suggesting (something like) intonational morphemes— as a field this area is far less understood as compared to the meanings of segmental morphemes. One reason for this is that there are large questions that remain unanswered at many levels: including practical questions (how to annotate intonation), variationist ones (what sorts of mergers/splits/realizations vary and along what social variables), and formal ones (what sorts of allophony to expect), among others.

This talk will review ongoing collaborative research on U.S. English, dealing in semantic/pragmatic meanings of mirativity, previous beliefs (bias), and epistemic authority. I will detail some of the new ways we are tackling these sorts of questions, using a new intonational annotation tool (PoLaR) and robust and replicable analysis (machine learning), while still appealing to a phonological model for intonation (A-M theory) and grammatical architecture (the Y-model).

Ana Arregui and Kyle Johnson inducted as Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America

At the January meeting of the LSA in New York, Ana Arregui and Kyle Johnson were inducted as Fellows for their “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. Congratulations Ana and Kyle – the recognition is richly deserved!

Ana and Kyle join these other distinguished UMass faculty members as LSA Fellows (with year of induction):

Emmon Bach, 2006

Lyn Frazier, 2014

Lisa Green, 2016

Alice Harris, 2012

Angelika Kratzer, 2012

John J McCarthy, 2012

Barbara H Partee, 2006

Thomas Roeper, 2013

Elisabeth Selkirk, 2012

Rebecca Tollen colloquium

Rebecca Tollen of the University of Delaware will be presenting “Split case marking at the syntax-pragmatics interface: How morphosyntax affects pronoun interpretation” (joint work with Lauren Clemens) in our next Linguistics colloquium, Friday Dec. 1 at 3:30 in ILC S221. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

ABSTRACT:  Anaphoric pronouns such as “it” in sentences like “The dog chased the cat, and it bit the rabbit” are linguistically ambiguous and therefore dependent on prior context for interpretation. In this talk, I examine how the morphosyntactic case forms (nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive) of noun phrases in a prior clause (e.g., “the dog” and “the cat”) influence a listeners’ choice of antecedent for the ambiguous pronoun. Data is drawn from an earlier experimental study (Tollan & Heller, 2022) of split-ergativity in Niuean (Austronesian), as well as new results from Copala Triqui (Oto-Manguean), which exhibits Differential Object Marking. Collectively, these findings indicate that accusative-marked objects are preferred as referents for pronouns over unmarked ones (in Copala Triqui), but that ergative-marked subjects are in fact dispreferred over unmarked (i.e., absolutive) ones (in Niuean). Lastly, a follow-up study on English, which adopts a type of “pseudo-marking” to allow manipulating prominence of subjects and of objects within a single experimental paradigm, provides support for a generalization that marking increases interpretative saliency of objects, but not of subjects.  

Jennifer Spenader RIP

We have received the very sad news that Jennifer Spenader, who was a visitor to our department in 2017, died on November 11th. An obituary, from which we share below a brief but very nice description of Jennifer and her work, can be found at this link: https://www.newcomerstlouis.com/Obituary/270457/Jennifer-Spenader/

Jennifer was full of fun and brimming with enthusiasm for any endeavor, but she was also one of those fortunate souls who truly enjoyed her work. She worked as an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at Stockholm University before taking a permanent position in 2005 at the University of Groningen where she thrived as a professor in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She was beloved by her colleagues and her students.

50th Anniversary Campaign, 50th Anniversary UMOP

50th Anniversary Campaign

In connection with our department’s 50th Anniversary we are launching a 50th Anniversary campaign for the future of the department. To contribute, please go to this page: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/give-linguistics. On that page, you will find the following description of the Endowment fund that we are targeting with this campaign (though donations directed in other ways are welcome!)

Support the Future
Linguistics Department Endowment
The Linguistics Department was founded in 1971 with the intention of creating an outstanding, accessible, and progressive academic program. Nearly 50 years later, it is one of the most highly regarded linguistics departments in the world and maintains its founders’ ethos. A gift to the endowment is an investment in the future and the founders’ legacy.

Whether or not you donate, another way you can help is by sharing the link above on your social media, with the information that on the occasion of our 50th anniversary we are fundraising for the future of the department by targeting the endowment.

50th anniversary UMOP

Earlier this year, we announced a 50th Anniversary UMOP. We are now reminding you about it, and setting the deadline for February 1. There will be both a scholarly works volume, and a volume for history and less formal recollections, and pictures. It would be great to have a broad representation of work by current and former residents of South College and the ILC in these volumes. On the scholarly side, this is a great chance to draw attention to new or older work (though make sure you have copyright or permission to republish any previously published work).

Submission links and other details can be found here:
https://websites.umass.edu/umassling50/50th-anniversary-umop/
As a teaser for the final product, see below for links to a few contributions to the history volume. 

Anne-Michelle Tessier’s “South College: A fond roast of a UMass Linguistics icon”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cz6KGzh115iYDaMSRTB6j-wqXR_NaR-a/view
Tim Austin’s “A Partial Early History of GLSA and UMOP”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/107YzUGS_T8yfGsPchruds-VMfbbmX-d1/view?usp=sharing
Don Freeman’s “Linguistics at UMass Amherst: Ends and Beginnings”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KCM8R3nl5oZepf_5UJHgy5Ye10-Bw9Lm/view?usp=sharing

Lingle on Wednesday November 29

The first Lingle (Linguist Mingle) of the year will happen on Wednesday, November 29 at 5:30. Lingles are events for all of our various linguistics undergraduate majors. They are partly social and partly informational. This Lingle will include:

1. Food and socializing
2. An info session (optional!) on computational linguistics, including a Q&A on jobs in linguistics with one of our recent graduates.

Everyone is welcome. Please join if you’re able!

From Here to Career!

There was strong Linguistics participation in the “From Here to Career” event on Homecoming Friday, Nov. 3. Alum Emily Brewster (Linguistics and Philosophy BA 1999) was there to discuss career paths, and her work at Merriam-Webster, with current Linguistics undergraduates. Her Merriam-Webster colleague Peter Sokolowski (MA French Literature) was also on hand to chat with our undergraduates, including Brian Cho and Loong-Kei Chin, who recently collaborated with him on a computational search to find definitions that Noah Webster wrote that are in the current dictionary (more on that in an upcoming UMLAUT).

Sriharsha Ayyagary, Nathaniel Korn, Jenna Marino and Emily Brewster
Loong-Kei Chin, Peter Sokolowski and Brian Cho

Amanda Rysling Colloquium Friday at 3:30

Amanda Rysling of UC Santa Cruz will be presenting “Comprehenders spend both more and less effort on focus than we might expect” (abstract below) in our colloquium series Friday Nov. 10 at 3:30 in ILC room S211. We are looking forward to welcoming our accomplished alum (PhD 2017) back to campus!

ABSTRACT:  

Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus — often described as the most important or informative part of a sentence — have found that comprehenders preferentially attend to focused material and process it more deeply or effortfully than non-focused material. But psycholinguists have investigated only a limited subset of focus constructions, and we have not come to an understanding of how costly focus is to process, what factors govern that cost, or why the language comprehension system behaves in the way that it does, and not others. In this talk, I discuss the problem for language comprehenders presented by the category of focus, and present evidence that focus processing in reading is generally costly, but this cost can be attenuated by the presence of contrastive alternatives to a focus in the context before that upcoming focus. Evidence from the processing of second-occurrence foci demonstrate that comprehenders seem to work harder than they should have to in processing given focused material, while other evidence suggests that comprehenders aren’t working as hard as they might have done to find and prioritize upcoming foci. These findings add to our understanding of what it means to be good enough or efficient in language processing, delineating conditions under which comprehenders do (not) find apparently important material to be worth processing deeply or effortfully.

UMass at NWAV 51

There was a large contingent of UMass folks at the 51st New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference held at Queen’s College October 13-15 2023.

Chloe Ostiguy, a recent BA recipient, presented “Caregiver Narratives: Variation in the Input and Child African American Language” (joint work with Lisa Green and Harmony Donald)

Dan DeGenaro, another recent BA recipient, presented “Acting different(-ly): Bringing derivational morphology into variationist linguistics”

Alessa Farinella, a current PhD student, presented “Moving beyond prosodic transcription in the analysis of African American English intonation: a case study with BIN utterances” (joint work with Lisa Green and Kristine Yu)

Si Berrebi, a visitor from Tel Aviv University, presented “Rhythm as a contested marker of ethnicity in Modern Hebrew” (joint with Sharon Peperkamp)

Joe Pater presented “Social and Phonological Factors in (r) Variation in 1930s Inland Massachusetts” (joint work with James Stanford), and “Is MaxEnt Cumulativity too restrictive? Evidence from varieties of NYC AAE”