The UMass semanticists took to the virtual Sinn und Bedeutung conference last week from September 3rd to September 9th! The Virtual SuB 25 was co-hosted by the University College London and the Queen Mary University of London.

Among the invited speakers was our very own Ana Arregui, who gave an invited keynote presentation entitled “The case of every in the scope of might“. In addition, Ana was given a video introduction by Professor Emeritus Angelika Kratzer.

There was a special session on the History of Formal Semantics where Professors Emerita Barbara Partee and Angelika Kratzer were interviewed to discuss the history of formal semantics. Barbara did an interview on the topic with Jonathan Pelletier, and Angelika did an interview on the topic with Daniel Rothschild (recordings linked). During this session UMass Alumni / Faculty Ana Arregui, Jeremy Pasquereau, Satoshi Tomioka, and Gennaro Chierchia also helped to facilitate ‘hangout’ discussions on topics including ‘Fieldwork and formal semantics’, ‘Topics, projects, and collaborations’, ‘Where do we stand?’, and ‘Building bridges to society.’

Jeremy Pasquereau (Ph.D. UMass, 2017) gave an invited presentation in the Special Session Semantics of understudied languages and semantic fieldwork entitled ‘Semantic elicitation in the field: From finding consultants to interpreting results‘. Jeremy was given a video introduction by Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer. There was also a roundtable discussion for this special session led by Seth Cable, Suzi Lima, Lisa Matthewson and Reginald Duah.

In addition, UMass students and alumni also gave a number of presentations at the main session and the special sessions, including:

‘Modalized normality in pictorial narratives‘ by Dorit Abush and Mats Rooth

‘A unique operator for verbal pluractionality and numeral distributivity‘, Jeremy Pasquereau

‘Licensing by modification: Existential reading of bare plurals‘, Zahra Mirrazi

‘Two types of habituals: Kiowa ingredients of a modular imperfective‘, Andrew McKenzie