Beccy Lewis joins us this year as a Visiting Lecturer in Syntax.

We asked her to tell us a bit about herself:

“I am interested in comparative syntax and its interface with morphology and semantics. My dissertation (University of Connecticut, 2024) is an examination of the morphological expression of heterogeneous plurals (i.e. associative, similative and approximative plurals) cross-linguistically. I am particularly interested in languages that use regular plural morphology as (or as part of) a heterogeneous plural, and show that this (partial) homophony is tied to syntactic constraints on locality and differences in nominal functional structure cross-linguistically. Thus, I argue that what looks like a morphological phenomenon (the same morpheme expressing two different meanings) is in fact syntactic in nature.  

I am also interested in variation in British English, having worked on do-ellipsis (e.g., John has bought a magazine and Mary has done too) and singular ‘us’ (i.e., the first person plural pronoun ‘us’ with first person singular reference).

In my spare time I read too many books, buy too many plants or upcycle old furniture.”

The third Annual Conference of the Philosophy of Language Association will take place on September 20-21 at UMass. The invited speakers are Angelika Kratzer and Dilip Ninan. You will find the conference information and program here:

https://philevents.org/event/show/119886

Our graduate students Jia Ren and Andrea Matticchio will give presentations at Sinn und Bedeutung 29 in Noto, Italy (September 17-19).

Jia will give both a talk and a poster. Her talk is entitled ‘An experimental investigation of the homogeneity of conjunctions’, and her poster (co-authored with Satoru Ozaki and Qiuhao Charles Yan), ‘Quantificational Determiners vs. Partitive Nouns in Mandarin Chinese’.

Andrea Matticchio’s poster (co-authored with Maik Thalmann) is entitled ‘Trading beliefs: A new view on importation’.

The program of the conference can be found here: https://sub29.unime.it/programma/

We will have our second colloquium this Friday, September 20th, and our speaker will be Morgan Sonderegger from McGill. Here is the title and the abstract of his talk at 3:30 pm. The room number and a Zoom link will be provided in a reminder later this week.

New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies
I present two studies which aim to understand the structure and sources of variability in speech production, enabled by novel quantitative methods making it easier to study the same phenomenon across many languages (Study 1) or dialects (Study 2). I’ll first discuss open-source tools for automatic analysis of speech which enable such large-scale studies by speeding up or replacing manual processing (PolyglotDB, Montreal Forced Aligner). The first study asks how much “the same” phonetic effects vary across 20 languages, and what their distributions can tell us, focusing on effects of vowel height and consonant voicing on F0 (“intrinsic F0 effects”). Consonant-induced effects are larger and more variable than vowel height effects across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for why only the former commonly leads to sound change. The second study, using data from the SPADE project (https://spade.glasgow.ac.uk/), examines variability in English sibilants in 5k speakers from 27 geo-social-ethnic regions to ask: is /s/ more variable than /sh/? On the surface a simple question, the results differ according to the level at which we consider variability.

Morgan will also give two additional workshops this week.

Thursday workshop (4-5:30 Thursday, ILC N458): Unpacking results of regression models
On contrast coding, interpreting interactions, and (especially) marginal effects using the emmeans package. For people with some experience with fitting mixed effects models in R.

Psycholing Workshop (10-11:30 Friday, ILC N400): Walkthrough of corpus analysis, with corpus of sibilant variation as example
Based on https://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/sibilantsIcphs2023.pdf

Please join us in congratulating UMass alum Andries Coetzee for being named the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.

Professor Coetzee graduated the UMass Linguistics PhD program in 2004, and he joined the University of Michigan Department of Linguistics in the same year. From his own message on Facebook announcing this honor:

“As I start my 21st year as a professor at University of Michigan, it will be as the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics. Being named as a collegiate professor is a recognition that Michigan bestows on senior faculty for sustained contributions across all aspects of the profession. But here is what makes it particularly interesting and special: When awarded a collegiate professorship, you get to name it after a former Michigan faculty member. I chose Judy Irvine to name my professorship after. Judy is a leading thinker of 20th century linguistic anthropology. But more important to me personally, she has done significant work on the linguistic ecology of Africa, and has given African languages a prominent place at Michigan, in the US, and beyond. Judy has even done important work on South African languages. It is an honor to have her and my names connected for the rest of my career. I hope that I can continue Judy’s work of making Africa (and South Africa in particular) more visible and present on our campus and in US academia.”

Congratulations, Andries!

Please join us in congratulating Professor Michael Becker for being named one of this year’s UMass STRIDE fellows (Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence).

This will actually be Michael’s fourth year as a STRIDE Fellow, working to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty recruitment.

Congratulations, Michael!

Please join us in congratulating our graduate student Angelica Hill for receiving a prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (DDRI BCS-2416240, Priming modal representations in causatives and (other) models, total amount: $15510). This grant will help Angelica’s experimental research on the relationship between modality and causation.

Congratulations, Angelica!

We are happy to introduce you to our very accomplished incoming class!

Hee Joong Choi

Hello, I’m Hee Joong from South Korea. As some of you might already know, I just finished my third year of Ph.D. coursework in Hispanic Linguistics here at UMass. My interests in semantics and pragmatics have always attracted me to the Linguistics Department, and now I am joining the linguistics program as a second-year (joint Ph.D.) student. Currently, what interests me the most is how words translate into actions, which is why Speech Act Theory plays a significant role in my research agenda. Besides linguistics and learning/teaching languages, I enjoy doing core exercises and cardio workouts. Oh, and I like to try making new dishes from scratch, too!

Duygu Demiray

My name is Duygu (they/them), and I am from Istanbul. I work on sentence processing and I am specifically interested in the effects of syntactic structure on the encoding and retrieval of linguistic elements. I am hoping to get more into computational linguistics (and maybe theoretical syntax). I got my MA from UC Santa Cruz and my BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. When I am not doing linguistics stuff, I like reading about (socio)musicology and pop culture, and playing the same three video games. 

Kenta Kakenami

I’m Kenta Kakenami (he/him) from Japan. My research interests lie in syntax and semantics, particularly those of my native language, Japanese. I previously worked as a high school teacher in my hometown. In my free time, I enjoy watching Japanese TV shows and anime, and listening to various types of music.

Roger Liu

Hello, I am Roger Cheng-yen Liu (he/him) from Taiwan. I am interested in speech sound (phonetics, phonology, prosody) as well as its interface with other grammatical module (syntax and semantics) in different facets (theoretical, experimental, diachronic, and probably computational—in which I have very limited experience). I like language, because it pleases me both mentally and physically through analyzing grammatical formulae and manipulating the articulators respectively. I work on linguistics, because I wonder how theories can elegantly predict variations of human language with a finite set of parameters and elements. Besides linguistics, I am interested in popular music in Taiwan and Japan (especially before the 1990s), and I consider myself to be a good singer. I also like to play computer games (genre: JRPG), and I used to be familiar with the RPG Maker series.

Yanran Mou

Hi there, I’m Yanran (she/her)! I’m from Edmonton, Alberta, and recently finished up my undergrad at McGill University. I’m interested primarily in suprasegmental phonology, particularly in a language learning context, but would love to explore the world of information structure and its interaction with phonology. In my spare time, you can find me looking at birds in the woods or walking my dogs around town.

Nir Segal

Hi, I’m Nir. I’m from Jerusalem. My name comes from biblical Hebrew and means “plowing” or “plowed field.” My main interest is the study of meaning, which has led me to focus on formal semantics. However, thanks to some enthusiastic professors who showed me how to frame interesting research questions, I’ve also gotten into syntax and psycho-/neurolinguistics. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy music, films, reading, and laughing.

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.