Author Archives: Brian Dillon

Neal receives NSF GRFP

First year Linguistics Ph.D. student Anissa Neal has been awarded a highly competitive NSF GRFP Fellowship. Anissa is interested in syntax, African American English, and psycholinguistics, with a special interest in filler-gap processing, island constraints, and zero conditionals. This fellowship will support her exciting, interdisciplinary research program. Congratulations, Anissa!

Hammerly published in Cognitive Psychology

Chris Hammerly’s paper “The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence” (co-authors Brian Dillon and Adrian Staub) has been accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology (pre-print available at: https://psyarxiv.com/6f34y/). In this paper, Chris re-examines and challenges the grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction. The grammaticality asymmetry refers to the finding that ungrammatical agreement dependencies may be ‘rescued’ by syntactically inaccessible noun phrases that have the right phi-features, even though those same noun phrases do not seem to interfere with normal, grammatical agreement dependencies. Congratulations, Chris!

Sakshi Bhatia at IIT Delhi

Sakshi Bhatia spent the summer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, running experiments investigating the production of subject and object agreement in Hindi. Professor Samar Husain (IIT Delhi) welcomed her to the university and to his psycholinguistics lab at IIT Delhi. Together Sakshi and Samar have begun to investigate local coherence effects and center-embedding in Hindi. On her way back, Sakshi stopped at the Second Potsdam Summer School for Statistical Methods in Linguistics. (Questions concerning linear mixed effects models should be directed her way 😉 ). Congratulations, Sakshi!

Sakshi Bhatia (far left) along with researchers at IIT Delhi.

Rodica Ivan at the University of Bucharest

Rodica Ivan has been conducting language production experiments on site in Romania. Researchers at the University of Bucharest’s English Department welcomed her to the university, where she has been studying Romanian speakers’ choices of referring expression in reflexive and non-reflexive sentence contexts. Along the way, she learned some interesting new things about the subtle ways in which different dialects of Romanian vary in how they express reflexivity. Rodica’s next steps involve looking at the comprehension of pronouns and reflexives in Romanian. Congratulations, Rodica!

Rodica at the University, with Professor Octavian Roske, head of the English Department in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Letters

NSF DDRI Grant for Rodica Ivan

Rodica Ivan has been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant titled “Reinterpreting Condition B: An Investigation of Pronominal Reference in Romanian.” Rodica’s project investigates the production and comprehension of Romanian pronouns that appear to violate Principle B of the Binding Theory. This award will support her while she carries out this work on site at the University of Bucharest. Congratulations, Rodica!

UMass Linguists at the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA 5)

The UMass Linguistics crew was out in force at the recent Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages conference (TripleA 5), which was held on June 27-29 in Konstanz, Germany. Talks given included:

Rajesh Bhatt: Deconstructing Correlatives: Individuals and Properties — the case
of Georgian ‘rom’ relatives (Invited talk presenting joint work with LĂ©a Nash)

Thuy Bui & Rodica Ivan: Vietnamese Anaphora: Binding Principles and the Lack Thereof.

Zahra Mirrazi & Rodica Ivan: Farsi Fake Indexicals: Reconciling Kratzer (2009) and Wurmbrand (2017).

 

Alex Goebel gives invited colloquium in Cologne

Alex Goebel gave an invited colloquium at the University of Cologne. Alex’s talk was titled “Contrasting Additives: On Obligatoriness, Coherence and the QUD.” But he didn’t stop there! On July 9th he gave a talk at the Workshop on At-issueness, Scope, and Coherence in Cologne, entitled “Exploring the connection between QUDs and Discourse Structure”, and another talk on July 13th at the 2nd International Conference on Prominence in Language called “Pronouns at the right frontier: Discourse structure affects accessibility of final appositives.”

Andrews receives Graduate School Dissertation Research Grant

Congratulations are in order for Caroline Andrews, who was just awarded a Graduate School Dissertation Research Grant! Caroline’s dissertation project examines how we represent and access syntactic representations in short-term and long-term memory. The research grant will help support the experimental component of her thesis. Congratulations, Caroline!

Andrews and Dillon teach data analysis workshop

Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon will teach an ISSR methods workshop entitled “Analyzing Categorical Data” on June 7th and June 8th. They will focus on advanced methods for analyzing categorical data, with a special focus on ordinal regression. In addition, they will cover intermediate topics in R such as organizing analysis workflow with the ‘tidyverse’ package, and project management using the Open Science Framework. For more information, see:

Link to more information

Registration is now open!