This Wednesday (2/10), Jed Pizarro-Guevara will be giving a talk in the Ling Lang Lunch seminar series at Brown University’s Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences department. Jed will give a talk entitled Processing (a)symmetries in relative clauses: Tagalog as a case study.
Jed’s talk will be hosted virtually on Zoom on Wednesday 2/10 at 12PM EST: You can access the talk here!
The Université du Québec à Montréal is hosting the 51st annual meeting of the Northeastern Linguistics Society this week(end), 11/6 – 11/8. There’s a great slate of events lined up, including a whole bunch of interesting talks and a range of social events (including a trivia social on Friday evening!).
Information about registration can be found here. Registration is on a sliding scale: Give what you can!
UMass linguists past and present are presenting at the conference, including:
Learning and the typology of word order: a model of the Final-over-Final Condition by Shay Hucklebridge
Numeral Any: In Favor of Viability by Jonathan Palucci and Luis Alonso-Ovalle
Binding through Agree in Turkish by Lefteris Paparounas and Faruk Akku?
3-on-3 restrictions and PCC typology by Amy Rose Deal
A set-based representation of Person features: consequences for AGREE by Christopher Hammerly
Verb Height indeed determines prosodic phrasing: evidence from Iron Ossetic by Lena Borise and David Erschler
Partially activated morpheme boundaries in Japanese surnames by Yu Tanaka and Shigeto Kawahara
See you there!
The 45th Annual Boston University Child Language Development conference will take place virtually 11/6 to 11/8. The conference is FREE to student participants, and $60 for non-student participants: You can register here.
The full conference schedule is here. The conference will feature keynote presentations from Michael Frank and Adele Goldberg. In addition, a number of UMass students, alumni, professors and LARC members are presenting work there, including:
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
The first ever Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference took place virtually from 9/16-9/18. Hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-organized by Florian Schwarz and Anna Papafragou, ELM is a ‘conference … dedicated to the experimental study of linguistic meaning broadly construed, with a focus on theoretical issues in semantics and pragmatics, their interplay with other components of the grammar, their relation to language processing and acquisition, as well as their connections to human cognition and computation.’ If you’d like to be kept in the loop about this conference and the growing community around it, please consider joining their mailing list.
The full schedule can be found here.
UMass students and alumni were well represented among the presenters, including:
Suzi Lima (Ph.D. 2014, currently University of Toronto) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘Defining atoms: a view from Brazilian languages‘
Maribel Romero (Ph.D., 1998, current University of Konstanz) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘OR NOT alternative questions, focus and discourse structure‘
and
Alexander Gobel, ‘The Common Ground is not enough: Why Focus-sensitivity matters for Presupposition triggers‘
Nadine Bade and Florian Schwarz, ‘New data on the nature of competition between indefinites and definites‘
Anissa Neal and Brian Dillon, ‘Definitely islands?‘
Carolyn Anderson, ‘Coming in, or going out? Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence‘
The first South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and processing of Language (SAFAL-1) was held virtually at the University of Potsdam from 8/31 – 9/2. It was a satellite workshop to AMLaP 2020, and it was a workshop that ‘aims to provide a platform to exchange research on sentence processing, verbal semantics, computational modeling, corpus-based psycholinguistics, neurobiology of language, and child language acquisition, among others, in the context of the subcontinent’s linguistic landscape.’ Like AMLaP, it was free to attend: The schedule is here.
UMass linguists and psycholinguists were well represented among the speakers at the workshop, including…
Rajesh Bhatt gave a keynote talk on Wednesday 9/2 at 9:00AM Eastern time
Sakshi Bhatia and Brian Dillon gave a talk on Wednesday 9/2 entitled ‘Agreement processing in Hindi’ at 10:05 Eastern time.
Dustin Chacon, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon and Alec Marantz presented a poster entitled ‘The time course of Hindi agreement in the cognitive neuroscience of language’, on Wednesday 9/2.
Sudha Arunachalam, Sakshi Bhatia, and Kamal Choudhary lead a roundtable panel discussion to close the conference on Wednesday 9/2, at 11:45AM eastern time.
Potsdam University is hosting the 2020 Architectures and Mechanisms in Language Processing (AMLaP) conference virtually next week (registration is free!) and a number of UMass psycholinguists, past and present, are presenting! Although we’re very sad to not see our friends and colleagues in person in Berlin this year, the virtual format does mean that we can connect with our extended UMass family and hear about what they’re up to, even without traveling to Berlin.
AMLaP will take place September 3rd through 5th. The full schedule can be found here. Posters on September 3rd will be presented from 10- 11:30AM Pioneer Valley time, posters on September 4th will be presented from 8- 9:30AM Pioneer Valley time and posters on September 5th will presented from 4- 5:30 AM Pioneer Valley time.
Here’s the roll call of work by our UMass psycholinguist family at AMLaP… don’t miss it!
Yujing Huang and Fernanda Ferreira present their talk, Lingering misinterpretation of garden-path sentences and structural representation, on September 4th at 10AM – 10:30AM Pioneer Valley time.
Poster #163 (September 3rd): Degrees of reanalysis in pragmatically and syntactically motivated dependencies by Maayan Keshev and Aya Meltzer-Asscher
Poster #215 (September 3rd): Do Bare Noun Intervenors Attract Less? Evidence from Agreement Attraction in Romanian by Adina Camelia Bleotu and Brian Dillon
Poster #248 (September 3rd): Polarity Illusions are Quantifier Illusions by Wesley Orth, Masaya Yoshida, and Shayne Sloggett
Poster #276 (September 3rd): Thematic roles’ alignment with grammatical functions facilitates sentence processing by Michael Wilson and Brian Dillon
Poster #320 (September 3rd): Semantic commitment and lexical underspecification in the Maze by John Duff, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Amanda Rysling
Poster #87 (September 4th): The effect of morphological identity and voice mismatch in VP ellipsis by Jesse Harris and Adrian Brasoveanu
Poster #95 (September 5th): Missing-verb illusion in Turkish center-embeddings? An investigation of case interference and phrase lengths by Özge Bakay and Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz
Poster #162 (September 5th): Agreement attraction in reflexive pronouns depends on subject-verb agreement by Maayan Keshev and Aya Meltzer-Asscher
Poster #193 (September 5th): Investigating phonotactic illusions with an auditory lexical decision task by Bethany Dickerson
Poster #243 (September 5th): Active antecedent search triggered by cataphors persists past the subject: evidence from Norwegian and English by Anna Giskes and Dave Kush
Poster #288 (September 5th): Untangling neural responses to implicit phrasing and meter in children’s poetry by Ahren Fitzroy and Mara Breen
Poster #289 (September 5th): Scratching your tête over code switched idioms: Evidence from eye movement measures of reading by Marco S. G. Senaldi, Junyan Wei, Jason Gullifer and Debra Titone
Rodica Ivan will be defending her dissertation entitled ‘Talking about (her)self: Ambiguity Avoidance and Principle B, A Theoretical and Psycholinguistic Investigation of Romanian Pronouns’ on August 17th, at 10AM. In her thesis, Rodica explores the consequences that a close investigation of the Romanian pronominal system has for theories of binding and coreference, and investigates these issues psycholinguistically through a series of experiments on the comprehension and production of Romanian pronouns.
Please join us, virtually, to hear Rodica present her thesis! We ask that people register for this virtual Zoom defense in advance at the link below:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdOmgpjIiGdxk2BQUVtqqvTL_EP25BTRE
Alex Goebel successfully defended his dissertation last week, July 24. Alex’s dissertation is entitled ‘Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers and Focus-sensitivity.’ In his thesis, Alex argues that there are two distinct types of presupposition triggers, which check context differently.
Chris Hammerly will be defending his dissertation on August 3rd at 1PM. Chris’ dissertation is entitled ‘Person-based Prominence in Ojibwe.’ In his thesis, Chris explores the syntax and semantics of obviation and person, with a focus on Border Lakes Ojibwe. He also takes up an experimental psycholinguistic investigation of how obviation information is used during real-time sentence processing in Ojibwe.
Please join us, virtually, to hear Chris present his thesis! As ever, the defense will be hosted over Zoom, and we ask that people register for this meeting in advance at the link below!
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUsf-GrrDosGtD1eRlfy9Iw5fFcUzvwViQ0