This year’s iteration of the Southern New England Workshop on Semantics (SNEWS) took place at MIT on November 23. You can find the program and abstracts here. Below is a list of presentations from UMass graduate students:

Shaunak Phadnis: Negative meaning without negation: Case of bara in Marathi

Jia Ren: The semantics of stressed `and’

Carla Spellerberg:  What’s inside a noun? Exploring nominal event arguments with skillful-type adjectives 

Alex Krauska joins our department this year as a post-doc. We asked her to tell us a little bit about herself:
“I am interested in psycho- and neuro-linguistics, morphosyntax, and acquired language disorders. I did my PhD at the University of Maryland, where I worked on bridging the gaps between morphosyntactic theory and models of language production. My dissertation, “A World Without Words: a non-lexicalist framework for psycho- and neuro-linguistics”, outlines the issues with models that rely on words or lemmas as a unit of language production, and describes a non-lexicalist, non-semiotic alternative. In my spare time, I play music, hike, and care for a variety of houseplants.”

A workshop in honor of Janet Dean Fodor was held at the start of this year’s Human Sentence Processing Conference (May 15), including participation by Lyn Frazier. Recordings of the workshop are available here.

Below is a picture of some past and current UMassers at this year’s Sinn und Bedeutung conference. For complete information about current students presenting at Sinn und Bedeutung, take a look at THIS POST.

Umass was well-represented in the 19th Conference on laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19), which took place in Seoul, June 27-29.

Posters:
Alessa Farinella and Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: The perception of tonal and perceptual cues to phrasing in Seoul Korean.
Cerys Hughes: Interaction of voicing cues in discrimination differences from preoduction.
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: Prosodically conditioned lenition, not voicing,
of lenis obstruents in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech.
Kristine Yu and Alessa Farinella: Variability in the prosodic realization of remote past in African American English.

Corpus Phon:
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee talk: Predictability and phonological context interact in conditioning the acoustic reduction of Seoul Korean lenis obstruents

Undergraduates William Kezerian, Lam An Wyner, Sandro Ansari, together with Kristine Yu presented a paper called “Ye Olde French: Effect of Old and Middle French on SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task Data” at The 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, in June 2024 in Mexico City. The paper developed from work carried out in Linguist 409: Introduction to Computational Linguistics. Congratulations!

Kristine Yu was an invited plenary speaker at Speech Prosody 2024 at Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands on July 5, 2024. She gave the talk: The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology ( talk slides and a related proceedings paper).

 Alessa Farinella and Kristine co-presented a poster called “Prosodic variability in marking remote past in African American English” (poster linked) (the proceedings paper is here).

Cerys Hughes made a presentation titled Modeling the nasal vowel inventories predicted by phonetic biases and learning at the Methoden und Ansätze moderner phonetischer Forschung (“Methods and approaches of modern phonetic research”) (seminar at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) Munich, Germany, July 3.

Cerys also had two papers at the Highlights in the Language Sciences conference, in Nijmegen July 8-11: “Modeling the nasal vowel inventories predicted by phonetic biases and learning” and “Gradient Word-Edge Statistics Influence Syllable Segmentation Judgements”.

Additionally, Cerys had a poster in LabPhon19 (see abstract here).

Three UMass profs joined the faculty at this year’s CreteLing summer school.
Rajesh Bhatt taught Intermediate Semantics, with Yael Sharvit.
Brian Dillon taught Experimental Syntax and Semantics: The view from Pronouns and Anaphora, with Elsi Kaiser.
Kyle Johnson taught Ellipsis, with David Pesetsky

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.”