Alex Nazarov returned to UMass on Friday to participate in graduate commencement. He is pictured here with his dissertation supervisors, Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater. This was the last ceremony officiated by Graduate Dean John McCarthy, who will be full-time Senior Vice-Provost next year.
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.
I’m very happy to announce that I’ve accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto for the coming academic year. —Nick LaCara
Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser University, 2009 UMass PhD) gave a keynote address at WCCFL 35 (West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics) this weekend at the University of Calgary. Keir presented joint work with his colleague Chung-hye Han and the SFU Experimental Syntax Lab in a talk entitled “A Defence of C-Command.” Here are the slides for his lecture.
As reported earlier, also on the program were Troy Messick, current UMass graduate students Brandon Pricket, Ethan Poole, Jon Ander Mendia, Yangsook Park, and Hsin-Lun Huang, last semester’s visitor Marlijn Meijer, alums Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill University, 2006 UMass PhD) and Elan Dresher (University of Toronto, 1978 UMass PhD), and Rafael Nonato from Spanish and Portuguese Studies.
It gives us great pleasure to announce that Sakshi Bhatia and Zahra Mirrazi have received Pre-Dissertation Fellowships, and that Ethan Poole and Leland Kusmer and have received Dissertation Fellowships. These Fellowships were granted by the Graduate School in a new program to provide summer support for graduate research.
Congratulations to each of them on these outstanding achievements – the competition was very stiff!
It is our great pleasure to announce that Lisa Green has received this year’s University Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research. This well-deserved award recognizes Lisa for her exceptional achievements in community-engaged scholarship. For more on the award, including the winners from previous years, please see the link below:
Congratulations, Lisa!
It is our great pleasure to announce that Brian Dillon has received this year’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award.
Please join us in congratulating him on this well-deserved recognition. Special thanks are also owed to the students who supported his nomination by writing such powerful statements testifying to Brian’s outstanding skills as a teacher.
Alicia LeClair will present the results of her research with Lisa Green at the 11th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC 11). The topic of her paper is: Development of Past Tense Marking in Child African American English. Alicia’s paper was selected as one of only five full-length student papers (as opposed to the more common posters) to be presented at the conference. Alicia writes:
“I will forever be grateful for all of the opportunities I have had with research experiences in the Linguistics Department here at UMass. I am especially excited to be presenting research from this past summer and this current semester with Lisa Green and the Center for the Study of African American Language. Child African American English Acquisition is an important topic of study and with Lisa’s help I have been able to create a body of work about past tense acquisition by 4- to 6-year-old AAE speakers that brings up possibilities for future more specific research within the AAE past tense acquisition path. It has been a rewarding, but at times difficult, challenge to understand the systems of AAE and how it maps out in child speech, but throughout this experience, I believe I have grown as a critical thinker, researcher, and student. Thank you again, UMass Ling!”
The 10th instantiation of TOM (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal Semantics Workshop) took place last weekend in Toronto. Alums Junko Shimoyama and Luis Alonso-Ovalle were the two invited speakers. Junko presented joint work with alum Keir Moulton on Japanese internally-headed relative clauses. Luis gave a joint paper (with Henrison Hsieh) on the ability/involuntary action inflection of Tagalog verbs. Here is a group picture that also includes Toronto semanticists and alums Suzi Lima and Youri Zabbal.