Linguistics Undergraduate, Yoojee Kim will give a virtual presentation at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference on April 22nd from 11:30-12:15. Her presentation entitled “Why you can’t say ‘former father’: a comparison of nominal tense in Muskogee and Guarani” reports on a research project coming out of her REU on Kimberly Johnson and Seth Cable’s NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (BCS 2024065).
Author Archives: scable
Paper by Kimberly Johnson Published in Natural Language Semantics
Kimberly Johnson’s paper “Time and evidence in the graded tense system of Mvskoke (Creek)” has just been published in Natural Language Semantics. Based upon portions of her recently defended dissertation, this paper explores the direct and indirect evidence inferences associated with four past tenses in Mvskoke (Creek), an indigenous language spoken in Oklahoma. Access the full text of her article here: https://rdcu.be/cKGzl
Kimberly Johnson Successfully Defends Dissertation
We’re delighted to share the news that Kimberly Johnson has successfully defended her dissertation, “On the Semantics of Verbal and Nominal Tense in Mvskoke (Creek)”.
The defense, which took place on Friday March 11th, was held remotely. Noteworthy among the participants were her two committee members from outside of UMass, Daniel Altshuler (University of Oxford) and Jack Martin (College of William and Mary). The other members of her committee are Ana Arregui and Seth Cable (Chair).
Dr. Johnson’s dissertation concerns the semantics of graded, evidential, and nominal tenses in Mvskoke (Creek), an endangered Muskogean language of North America. It is the first in-depth formal and empirical treatment of this system, and greatly advances our understanding of both verbal and nominal tenses across languages.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kimberly Johnson!
Katia Vostrikova Joins University of Göttingen
We’re delighted to share the news that Ekaterina Vostrikova (PhD, 2019) will be joining the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in July as a DAAD scholar, and will then in September begin a three-year position there as a post-doctoral researcher. Katia’s post-doc position is funded by a DFG project grant titled ‘A Crosslinguistic Investigation Into Phrasal and Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions’, and will be supervised by Clemens Steiner-Mayr.
In addition, Katia’s paper “Conditional Analysis of Clausal Exceptives” has just appeared in the newest issue of Natural Langauge Semantics (NaLS 29:2 159-227).
Congratulations, Katia!
Ceremony for Barbara Partee’s Franklin Institute Award **This Evening** (April 29)
We are very excited to share the news that the ceremonial presentation of Barbara Partee’s Franklin Institute award will be remotely viewable tonight (4/29) at 7PM. You will be able to view the awards ceremony remotely at the link below:
- Link to Franklin Institute Awards Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JjjGchn708
This year, our own Professor Barbara Partee is being presented with the Franklin Institute Award for Computer and Cognitive Science. Past recipients of this award have included Elissa Newport, William Labov, and Noam Chomsky. A special symposium was held in honor of this award on April 19th, a recording of which should be available soon.
Tonight (April 29th), however, is the main event, the actual induction of Barbara Partee as a Franklin Institute Awards recipient. Due to this event being held remotely this year, everyone will be able to view it at the link above – an incredibly special honor, that would not have been possible in more normal times. The ceremony will include a video tribute to Barbara and her work, which is not to be missed.
Franklin Institute Symposium in Honor of Barbara Partee (April 19th)
We are extremely happy to announce that, in honor of Professor Barbara Partee receiving the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, the Franklin Institute and the University of Pennsylvania are organizing a special symposium honoring her and her legacy in the field.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this symposium will be held remotely, and can be viewed publicly over Zoom. It will take place on Monday, April 19th, from 9:45AM to 3PM (EST), and will feature presentations by:
- Barbara Partee (UMass Amherst)
- Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University)
- Pauline Jacobson (Brown University)
- Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania)
- Seth Cable (UMass Amherst)
- Christopher Potts (Stanford University)
The website for the symposium, which includes the full program (with abstracts) as well as the Zoom link for the remote presentations, can be found at the link below:
- “The Past, The Present, and the Future of Formal Semantics”:
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/langscience/partee/
Again, this event is entirely public, and all are welcome (and encouraged) to attend.
UMass Linguists at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 2020!
This year’s remote meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung features presentations by a wide variety of current and former students and faculty from UMass Amherst.
During the main session of the conference, Ana Arregui will be giving one of the three invited talks, titled “The case of ‘every’ in the scope of ‘might’.”
The main session will also feature talks by the following UMass-affiliated persons:
- Jeremy Pasqureau: “A Unique Operator for Verbal Pluractionality and Numeral Distributivity”
- Daniel Altshuler (with Julian Schloeder): “If Pictures are Stative, What Does This Mean for Discourse Interpretation?”
- Mats Rooth (with Dorit Abusch): “Modalized normality in pictorial narratives”
Due to the conference being held remotely, these talks will not take place at a particular time, but instead will be recorded and publicly posted. There will, however, be synchronous Q&A sessions for these talks. For more information on how to participate in this year’s remote version of SuB, please go to the link below:
In addition to the main session above, there will also be two other special sessions, one on Gesture and Natural Language Semantics, and another on Semantic Fieldwork and Fieldwork Methodology. UMass linguists are particularly well represented in the second session.
- Zahra Mirrazi: “Licensing by modification: existential reading of bare plurals in Farsi”
- Andrew McKenzie: “Two types of habituals: Kiowa ingredients of a modular imperfective”
- Deniz Satik (a past UMass Linguistics Major): “De se ascription in PRO and logophoric pronouns”
This special session will also include a roundtable discussion of methodology in linguistic fieldwork, organized by our own Jeremy Pasquereau. The participants will include the following UMass-affiliated individuals:
- Jeremy Pasquereau
- Seth Cable
- Suzi Lima
- Lisa Matthewson
For more information on how to participate in the special session on Semantic Fieldwork, please see the link below:
Finally, the conference will feature as a special live event a series of interviews relating to the History of Formal Semantics. These interviews will (of course) include ones with our own illustrious emeritae faculty, Barbara Partee and Angelika Kratzer. Angelika will be interviewed by Daniel Rothschild, while Barbara will be interviewed by Jeff Pelletier.
It’s definitely an incredible program this year! Again, for more information on how to view these talks and events, please see the links above!
Kimberly Johnson to Receive NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant
We’re delighted to share the news that Kimberly Johnson’s application for an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant will be officially recommended for funding by the NSF Linguistics Program.
Kimberly’s project will be focused on the documentation and analysis of the complex tense system of Mvskoke (Creek), investigating three phenomena central to current debates surrounding cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics: (i) graded tense, (ii) tense & evidentiality, and (iii) nominal tense. In addition to advancing our theoretical understanding of these three interlocking phenomena, Kimberly’s project will contribute significantly to the documentation of this highly endangered language, producing in particular a rich corpus of dialogs between Mvskoke elders and between elders and learners.
Congratulations, Kimberly!
Kimberly Johnson to Receive NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant
We’re delighted to share the news that Kimberly Johnson’s application for an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant will be officially recommended for funding by the NSF Linguistics Program.
Kimberly’s project will be focused on the documentation and analysis of the complex tense system of Mvskoke (Creek), investigating three phenomena central to current debates surrounding cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics: (i) graded tense, (ii) tense & evidentiality, and (iii) nominal tense. In addition to advancing our theoretical understanding of these three interlocking phenomena, Kimberly’s project will contribute significantly to the documentation of this highly endangered language, producing in particular a rich corpus of dialogs between Mvskoke elders and between elders and learners.
Congratulations, Kimberly!
Kimberly Johnson Awarded APS Phillips Fund Grant for Research on Muskogee Creek
We’re thrilled to share the news that PhD student Kimberly Johnson has been awarded a Phillips Fund grant from the American Philosophical Society.
This highly competitive grant funds not only linguistic, but also historical and ethno-historical research on Native Americans both in the US and in Canada. Kimberly’s grant will support her ongoing semantic fieldwork on the Creek language.