Author Archives: Brian Dillon

Anderson defends thesis on 6/25

Carolyn Anderson will be defending her dissertation on 6/25 at 1PM. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Shifting the Perspectival Landscape: Methods for Encoding, Identifying, and Selecting Perspectives.’ In her thesis, Carolyn explores formal, computational, and experimental models of perspective representation and processing.

Please join us, virtually, to hear Carolyn present her thesis work! Her dissertation defense will be hosted over Zoom, and we ask that people register for this meeting in advance at the link below. See you there

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsc-uqqDopHt0bBz5HWn27VHkfMpNyrsOy

Cycle Linguists webchat launches

Mara Breen (Mt. Holyoke) and Brian Dillon (UMass Linguistics) are hosting the first ever Cycle Linguists web chat on 6/22. The Cycle Linguists is an occasional psycholinguistics oriented webchat in the Virtual CUNY style. The first webchat will feature Yujing Huang and Fernanda Ferreira, presenting a talk entitled “Lingering misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Incorrect syntactic representations or fallible memory processes?’ with after-talk discussion led by Maayan Keshev (Tel Aviv) and Patrick Sturt (Edinburgh). To register, click here: https://bit.ly/3cIeRZa , and for more announcements, follow @cyclinglings on Twitter!

This is an experimental webchat, but is hopefully the first in a series. Mara and Brian would be very happy for any local volunteers who would like to get involved in hosting or organizing the webchats! Please get in touch if you are interested.

Hammerly to UMN / UBC

Congratulations to Christopher Hammerly, who has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota and has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. This fall he’s off to MN to continue his research on Ojibwe, and then will begin at UBC in the summer of 2021. Have fun Chris, and best of luck in the next stage of your career!

Keshev and Pizarro-Guevara to UMass

We’re very lucky to welcome two post-doctoral scholars to the department in the upcoming academic year!

Maayan Keshev (Ph.D. 2020) is coming to us from Tel-Aviv University, where she is currently a student in Aya Metzler-Asscher’s lab. Maayan is a psycholinguist with special expertise in real-time sentence processing in Hebrew. She has worked on processing filler-gap and presumptive pronoun dependencies, probabilistic noisy-channel processing, and verbal and reflexive agreement, with a special focus on Hebrew. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to do post-doctoral research at UMass Amherst, where she will focus on developing her skills in eye-tracking and sentence processing.

Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara (Ph.D. 2020) is currently finishing his dissertation in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, where he is working with Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung. Jed is a psycholinguist and experimental syntactician, with a focus on Austronesian languages (Tagalog and Dabaw Bisaya). He has particular expertise in field psycholinguistics, research that balances traditional, community-oriented fieldwork with real-time processing methodologies from experimental psycholinguistics. Using this approach, he has worked on processing relative clauses in Tagalog, the impact of Austronesian voice on real-time dependency formation, individual variation in the grammars of extraction in Austronesian, and the role of animacy in real-time comprehension in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. At UMass, he will be working on eye-tracking in the visual world and the processing of pronouns in English and Tagalog.

A huge welcome to both Maayan and Jed: We’re looking forward to seeing you before long!

Bhatia to CU Rajasthan; Hauser to UT Arlington!

Congratulations are in order for Sakshi Bhatia and Ivy Hauser, who have both accepted tenure-track assistant professor positions!

Sakshi will be an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Central University of Rajasthan, and she is getting started right away.

Ivy will start in the fall as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington.

Huge congratulations are due to both Sakshi and Ivy, who arrived to UMass in the same PhD cohort. So it’s a special joy to get to make this double announcement. We’re proud of you both: Best of luck in the next phase of your careers!

UMass Linguistics at WCCFL 2020

UMass Linguists past and present are descending on the University of British Columbia this weekend for the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics!

Our very own Meg Grant (Ph.D. 2013) is giving an invited plenary talk entitled Processing polysemy: expanding the empirical domain. In addition, undergraduate alumnus Gillian Gallagher (BA, 2005) is also giving an invited plenary talk entitled Synchronic knowledge of phonetically unnatural classes. 

Other UMass talks include:

How to value gender: lexicon, agree and feature transmission under ellipsis – Ivona Kucerova (McMaster), Cassandra Chapman (U Toronto) & Keir Moulton (U Toronto)

(Bound) pronouns in competition: Evidence from Romanian production
Rodica Ivan & Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)

And of course, it needs to be said: Anne-Michelle Tessier (Ph.D. 2006) is co-organizing the conference, so big thanks to Anne-Michelle and her co-organizers for all the hard work they put into making this conference happen at a difficult time. We’re proud of our students and alumni and the interesting work they do. Have fun everyone!

Bui takes position at Hoa Sen University!

Congratulations are in order for Thuy Bui (2019), who has accepted a lecturer position (equivalent to tenure-track Assistant Professor) at Hoa Sen University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  Thuy will be teaching syntax, semantics, and experimental linguistics for their BA and MA students in Linguistics. We wish you lots of success, Thuy, we’re proud of you!

Neal presents at the Institute of the Diversity Sciences Research Group

On 11/14, 2nd year Ph.D. student Anissa Neal gave a talk at the Institute of the Diversity Sciences Research group entitled “Down the Garden Path: Processing in African American English,” in which she talked about contact subject relatives in African American English, and talked about speakers of AAE seem to be able to exploit this unique feature of their grammar to minimize processing difficulty in garden path sentences. In her presentation, she represented linguistics to a broader audience on our campus, and rumor has it that she managed to convince some folks in the audience that linguistics is, indeed, pretty cool. Way to go, Anissa!

Shota Momma to give colloquium to UCI Language Science

Shota Momma is traveling to UC Irvine to give a colloquium in the brand-new department of Language Science there on 11/18. The title of his colloquium is ‘Structure Building in Speaking,’ and the abstract can be found below. Bon voyage, Shota!

Abstract:

Speakers build syntactic structure so they can avoid producing ungrammatical sentences too frequently. But how speakers do so remains poorly understood. In this talk, I discuss our recent series of studies on how speakers encode structural representations, such as argument structures, filler-gap dependencies, and coreference relations, as they construct sentences. Building on experimental results, I introduce a preliminary model of structure building in speaking, which I argue can also be used to capture syntactic processes in comprehension. This model of a shared structure-building mechanism for both comprehension and production aims to contribute to the broader goal of understanding the relationship between syntactic knowledge and syntactic processes.