Author Archives: jkingstn

“Phonetic knowledge” (1994) appears in Best in Language III

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From John Kingston

Thanks to Seth, I learned that a paper Randy Diehl and I had published in Language in 1994, “Phonetic knowledge,” had been chosen for inclusion in the third collection of Best in Language for the period 1986-2106. Here’s a link to the collection:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/best-language-volume-iii

The criteria for inclusion are that the paper be “influential, controversial, or otherwise interesting.” You decide which criteria our paper met.

Now I have to get to work to produce another.

NSF grant awarded to support the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America

Our colleague, Emiliana Cruz, of the Anthropology Department, and I are very happy to announce that the National Science Foundation has approved funding for the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America. The conference will be held here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in October, 2018. Besides plenary and contributed addresses and poster sessions, the conference will include two round tables, one devoted to discussing effective techniques for fostering collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, and the other to discussing how to translate linguistic descriptions into useful pedagogical materials to be used in the indigenous communities. A call for papers will be sent out in October, 2017; abstracts will be due 1 March 2018; and decisions about acceptance will be made by a scientific committee by 1 May 2018. (John Kingston)

(This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (NSF BCS-1746391). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)

Chancellor’s Citation to Tom Maxfield

It is with great pleasure that I can now tell you that the Chancellor’s Citation was awarded to Tom Maxfield on Monday, May 8, 2017 for his exemplary contributions to the success and smooth running of the department and to the well-being of its faculty and students. Thank you, Tom, for all you’ve done! Please join me in congratulating Tom. You might also stop by Tom’s office to congratulate him yourselves.

Presentations at the next Experimental Labs meeting, Thursday, October 6, 2016

There will be two presentations at the next Experimental Labs meeting.

The first by Alex Goebel: My presentation will consist of two parts. In the first part, I will talk about an experiment (which I hope will be run by then) that is supposed to investigate the sensitivity of pronoun resolution in a discourse to the Non At-Issue – At-Issue distinction. The second part will be more of an open discussion regarding (i) the design of a direct follow-up study that is supposed to test the same sensitivities with different types of presupposed content and – if time allows for it – (ii) an extension of processing data of appositives collected here at UMass to a type of adverbial clause in German.

In case people find themselves interested and/or bored, background readings would be Dillon et al. (2014) (for those who haven’t read or written it) and Jasinskaja (2016) ‘Not at issue anymore’, a manuscript available here:

http://dslc.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/sites/dslc/katja_files/jasinskaja_any_more.pdf

The second will be by Matt Frelinger: At the experimental labs meeting next week I will be presenting a proposal for a research project investigating the extent to which implicit intonation contours generated during silent reading affect performance on memory tasks.  I know that some people in the department have done a lot of work on implicit prosody, so I am looking forward to getting a lot of input and advice!

Sound Workshop Schedule — Fall 2016

9/19 Preparation for NECPhon
9/26 Hauser Dispersion squib, Hauser & Hughto Opacity paper
10/3 Jarosz & Rysling Preparation for NELS, AMP
10/11 Hauser & Kusmer Koasati reduplication; Mullin Preparation for NELS
10/15 Hauser & Hughto Preparation for AMP
10/24 Available
10/31 Hughto Halloween sounds
11/7 Kusmer TshiVenda
11/14 Prickett GP
11/28 Yu Grant or Preparation for Yale
12/5 Hauser Dissertation
12/12 End of semester celebration