Seth Cable will be the Chair of our Department starting on September 1st. Thank you Seth for taking on this position – we look forward to working with you in this new role.
Category Archives: Newsletter
AFLA 31 a great success!
The 31st meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association was held here at UMass Amherst June 12-13th, with the support of an NSF conference grant. Thank you to the organizers, Kristine Yu, Jed Guevara and Alessa Farinella for all their hard work, as well as to Narda Wakoluk for logistic support, and congratulations on such a successful meeting!
María Biezma awarded tenure
María Biezma, who holds a joint position between our department and Spanish and Portuguese Studies, has been awarded tenure and has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Congratulations María on this well-deserved recognition of your work!
Faruk Akkus’ book to be published at Oxford University Press
Faruk Akkus’ monograph (with David Embick and Mohammed Salih), titled “Case and the syntax of argument indexation”, has been accepted for publication at Oxford University Press (Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)!
The current version is available on lingbuzz: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007378
A short description of the monograph is below:
Abstract:
This book deals with case and the syntax of argument indexation. We argue for an approach in which case labels (‘Nominative’, ‘Ergative’, etc.) are shorthand for bundles of decomposed features; crucially, these features are part of the syntax, and also referred to in the morphology. A key idea in the approach is what we call Case Targeting: the idea that probes may target arguments with specific case features. Importantly, syntax and morphology can refer to these features differentially, leading to various interesting mismatches. This includes allowing Clitic Movement in syntax to produce both morphophonological clitic and affix on the PF side. Conversely, Agreement operation in syntax can produce morphophonological clitic and affix on the PF side. We focus primarily on Sorani Kurdish varieties (Iranian languages), but also investigate and apply our approach to other Iranian languages (Kurmanji, Zazaki, Laki, Persian, Rushani, Shughni), Indo-Aryan (Hindi, Nepali, Gujarati, Maithili), Semitic (Arabic, Neo-Aramaic), and Polynesian (Nukuoro). We elaborate on various implications of the approach for implicational hierarchies, case containment, case assignment mechanisms etc. We maintain that discussions of inherent vs dependent case approaches should be approached at a fine grain, one that is informed by the representation of case features that we argue for.
Thomas Truong Receives Grant to Attend Linguistics Summer Schools
Please join us in congratulating undergraduate Linguistics major Thomas Truong, who has received a competitive scholarship to attend this year’s DGfS Summer School at the University of Goettingen. All of Thomas’s airfare, lodging, and tuition will be covered by the grant. In addition, Thomas will be giving a student poster presentation of his research on the semantics of the Vietnamese tense/aspect particle “da”, which was conducted as part of an independent study course this year with Seth Cable.
Alongside the DGfS school, Thomas was also accepted to and will be attending this year’s Crete Summer School of Linguistics (a.k.a. ‘CreteLing’) in July.
Congratulations, Thomas!
Shay Hucklebridge Receives Multiple Grants to Support Fieldwork
We’re very happy to share the news that recent alum Shay Hucklebridge has received two highly competitive grants to support her fieldwork on the Dene languages of Northern Canada.
Shay was selected for both a Jacobs Research Fund grant (for $4077) and a grant from the Phillips Fund for Native American Research (for $3200). This is in addition to the $115,000 SSHRC postdoctoral research fellowship that Shay was awarded last year, and which continues to fund her scholarship at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
This summer, Shay will be conducting fieldwork on the Northern Dene languages of the Mackenzie Subgroup, including Tlicho Yatii, Sahtúgot’iné, K’ashógot’ine, and Shíhgot’ine. The project will be focusing upon the the languages’ future-marking morphology, and the possible variation in their semantics, as either temporal operators or modal operators.
Please join us in congratulating Shay!
Michael Wagner colloquium
Michael Wagner of McGill University will be presenting a talk on “Syntactic Alternative Projection” in our departmental colloquium series, Friday April 26th at 3:30 in ILC S11. All are welcome! An abstract follows
Abstract. Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and but also constrain scalar implicature, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions (building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Arstein (2002)). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.
Computational Linguistics BA receives final approval!
The Board of Higher Education has approved a Computational Linguistics major that will be offered by our department, in collaboration with the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences. Current students will be able to transfer into the major in Fall of 2024, and it will be included in the common application in the Fall of 2025. The curriculum can be found here. Special thanks to Rajesh Bhatt and Kristine Yu for all of their work on this initiative, as well as our colleagues in CICS for their collaboration on it.
Roger Higgins’ website restored
Update: We have temporarily taken this website off line. Please e-mail linguist@umass.edu with any questions.
Irene Heim wins prestigious Schock Prize
Alum Irene Heim (PhD 1982) is the co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, for work she did here at UMass Amherst. As an article in the Daily Nous notes, this award is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel prize” of philosophy. Her co-recipient Hans Kamp also has a UMass connection: he was on the Philosophy faculty here from 1982 to 1984. They were given the award “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.” A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes on to explain:
Natural languages are highly context-dependent – how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.
Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.