Yearly Archives: 2017

Weigel on “What is political correctness” Friday 4/28 at 3:30

Next Friday April 28th at 3:30 in ILC S33, Moira Weigel of Yale University will be presenting a talk entitled “What is Political Correctness?” Weigel published a related article in the Guardian last November (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump), and she’ll have more to say next Friday. The talk is being sponsored by the Departments of Political Science, Sociology, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, English, Communications, Linguistics, the Institute for Social Science Research, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the College of Social and Behavioral Science. A reception will follow in the Linguistics department.

UMass @ WCCFL 35

The 35th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics is happening next weekend (28-30 April) at the University of Calgary. UMass will be well represented:

  • Hsin-Lun Huang is presenting the talk “Revisiting Pseudo-Incorporation: Post-verbal non-referential bare NPs in Mandarin”.
  • Jon Ander Mendia is presenting the poster “Epistemic Number”.
  • Troy Messick is presenting the poster “¾ agreement patterns beyond hybrid nouns”.
  • Rafael Nonato (in Spanish and Portuguese Studies) is presenting the talk “Skewed AGREE: accounting for a closest-conjunct effect with semantic implications”.
  • Yangsook Park is presenting the poster “Overt subjects in obligatory control constructions in Korean”.
  • Ethan Poole is presenting the talk “Movement of properties and properties of movement”.
  • Brandon Prickett is presenting the talk “Post nasal devoicing as opacity: A problem for natural constraints”.

Alumni Elan Dresher and Keir Moulton are invited speakers! Other alumni and people from the UMass world:

  • Alumnus Luis Alonso-Ovalle is presenting the talk “Anchored implicatives: Tagalog ability/involuntary action” with Henrison Hsieh.
  • Recent visitor Anna Marlijn Meijer is presenting the talk “The semantics and pragmatics of embedded polar replies with English so”.

Experimental Labs RAs to Grad School!

Grad-school-hunting season is over, and we are very proud to announce that four denizens of the experimental labs will be continuing their psycholinguistic research in excellent programs all around the globe! They are

Matthew Frelinger, who will be joining the Ph.D. program of UMass Psychological and Brain Sciences,

Kirk Goddard, who will be joining the MA program at the Basque Center for Brain and Language,

Grusha Prasad, who will be joining the Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, and

Anthony Yacovone, who will be joining the Ph.D. program in Psychology at Harvard University.

Congratulations, all! We wish you the best of luck in your studies! Come back and visit often 🙂

Nicoletta Biondo receives Marica di Vincenzi Scholarship

I’m very happy to share the news that former UMass visitor Nicoletta Biondo (Università di Trento) has been awarded a Marica de Vincenzi fellowship. The Marica de Vincenzi fellowship supports young Italian psycholinguists who seek to pursue studies abroad, and is run in Marica’s memory by the Marica de Vincenzi Foundation. With this support, Nicoletta will be continuing her studies at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language in Donostia – San Sebastián. She will be working with Simona Mancini, conducting a longitudinal ERP study to investigate the processing of agreement and tense in L2 learners of Spanish at different stages of proficiency. Congratulations, Nicoletta!

 

Why is this linguist #talmabout Twitter?

The Spring 2017 version of the UMass Magazine reports on Lisa Green’s collaborative case study of dialect in Twitter conversations among African Americans (with Brendan O’Connor and Su Lin Wang Blodgett from the College of Information and Computer Sciences). “Twitter gives us real, live data about the way people actually talk,” she says. “It’s exciting for linguists because we know all languages change, but now we can actually see change in progress and map it geographically.” The magazine also features a video of Lisa.

Ian Roberts on Friday 4/14 at 12:20 in N400

Ian Roberts will be speaking at LARC on connections between diachronic grammar and acquisition. His talk is entitled “The Typology of Parameters”. He is Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge University, currently visiting UConn and leads a EU grant on historical linguistics. He will be available during the day on Friday April 14th for meetings with students and faculty.  Interested people should contact Mike Clauss. The talk is in N400 at 12:20.