On Monday May 2, 2022, linguistics major undergraduates Marc Capizzi, Dan DeGenaro, Emily Knick, Thomas Morton, Hannah Parrott, and Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao presented talks on their research at our 1st Annual Undergraduate Research Talks!
Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, Emily Knick, Hannah Parrott, Dan DeGenaro, Marc Capizzi, and Thomas Morton (left to right) right before the talks started.
Their talks were entitled (in the order presented):
Examining the perceived meanings of African American English Dialect Aspectual Markers Dan DeGenaro
Probabilistic Listener: A Case of Reflexive ziji “self”: Ambiguity Resolution in Mandarin Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao
Vocal Development on Testosterone-based HRT Marc Capizzi
Prevoicing Loss and the [voice] Contrast in the Production of Tokyo Japanese Plosives Emily Knick
Children’s Acquisition of Extraposed Sentences Hannah Parrott
The Cat’s (and) Dog’s Bear: Children’s Planning of Conjoined and Embedded Recursive Possessives Thomas Morton
Thank you to the presenters for their stimulating talks and also to the lively audience, both in person and over Zoom!
A close-up! Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, Emily Knick, Hannah Parrott, Dan DeGenaro, Marc Capizzi, and Thomas Morton (left to right) right before the talks started.
Faculty member Brian Dillon presented a colloquium at University of Southern California linguistics on April 11, 2022 entitled “Constraining pronominal reference in real-time”.
We usually make the assumption that, contrary to the past, the future has not happened yet. There is something intuitive about this, and the intuition is reflected in various ways in the semantic literature that deals with the interpretation of future markers in language. How exactly this intuition should be taken to affect the interpretation of future markers is not a straight-forward question. Indeed, whether is not a straightforward question either. The goal of this mini-course will be to review some of the arguments in this literature and try to walk away with a clear(er) sense of which aspects of the discussion are relevant for a natural language semanticist.
The colloquium:
Title: Revisiting indexical pronouns
Abstract: In this talk I will focus on some ‘deviant’ interpretations of indexical pronouns, discussing cases of descriptive indexicals noted by Nunberg (1993) as well as impersonal you. My goal is to explore parallelisms in reference to individuals across possible worlds as well as across situations within the same world. My hypothesis is that we can learn something about ‘deviant’ indexicals if we allow for similar modes of identification across and within possible worlds.
Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao presents her talk “Probabilistic Listener: A Case of Reflexive ziji “self” Ambiguity Resolution in Mandarin” at CULC 16. Here’s her slide showing the math underlying the Rational Speech Act Model.Dan DeGenaro presents his talk “Examining the Perceived Meaning of African American English Dialect Aspectual Markers” at CULC 16. Here’s his slide on research questions.
Zhao presented her honors thesis work supervised by our faculty member Brian Dillon (with committee member Ming Xiang (University of Chicago)), “Probabilistic Listener: A Case of Reflexive ziji “self” Ambiguity Resolution in Mandarin”. DeGenaro presented ongoing research entitled “Examining the Perceived Meaning of African American English Dialect Aspectual Marker”—work inspired by our faculty member Lisa Green’s Introduction to African American English course and advised by Green.
Faculty member Kristine Yu presented a keynote talk entitled “Tones: where are they all coming from?!” which considered the diversity of ways tones can be introduced in the grammar as a starting point for considering the grammatical source of the seemingly obligatory high tone on remote past stressed “BIN” in African American English. The talk emerged from work on the NSF grant on African American English held by Yu, Green, and colleagues Meghan Armstrong-Abrami and Brendan O’Connor.
Another shot from Zhao’s talk.Another shot from DeGenaro’s talk.
Graduate students Seung Suk (Josh) Lee, Alessa Farinella, and Cerys Hughes presented joint work with faculty member Kristine Yu on Monday, December 6 at the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI). The talk was entitled Phonetic implementation of phonologically different high tone plateaus in Luganda and based on work made possible by UMass alumnus Scott Myers (University of Texas at Austin), who shared Luganda data from his 2018 study with Lena Fainleib and Lisa Selkirk. A video of the talk will be available on the conference YouTube channel soon and a link to the video will be added here.
Graduate students Alessa Farinella, Seung Suk (Josh) Lee ,and Cerys Hughes (from left to right) getting ready to present virtually at the University of Southern Denmark.
Has it really been Fall 2014 since the last edition of the famous UMass Linguistics apple tasting party?? On Sunday October 24, faculty members Brian Dillon and Rajesh Bhatt revived the tradition of our annual departmental apple tasting party.
Front page of apple menu and tasting notes, with QR code to scan for full menu
Heirloom apples from Scott Farm Orchard in Dummerston, VT included the spread shown below, clockwise from pale apples with red blush at head of table closest: Winter Banana, Zabergau Reinette, Reinette Clochard, Hudson Golden Gem, Sheep’s Nose, Black Oxford, Lady Apple, Knobbed Russett, Esospus Spitzenburg, Roxbury Russett, Ananas Reinette, Orleans Reinette, Gravenstein, D’Arcy Spice. Apples were also sourced from UMass’s own Cold Spring Orchard in Belchertown (e.g., the big Hudson Golden Gems spilling onto the table).
Some of the heirloom apples included in the tasting.
Still more heirloom apples awaited outside, including world-famous baking apples Belle de Boskoop (strudel) and Calville Blanc d’Hiver (tarte tatin), as well as venerable local favorites Macoun and McIntosh, among others.
The outside spread, photo courtesy of Gaja Jarosz
Brian and Rajesh kept busy slicing up apples and bread and cheese and opening bottles of cider in the kitchen, popping out to serve the delectable treats (see Brian serving up his favorite Ananas Reinette below) alongside helpers postdoctoral scholar Maayan Keshev, graduate student Duygu Göksu, faculty member Kristine Yu, and Keshev’s Fudge, who helped clean up (see image below).
Brian serves up his favorite heirloom apple variety, Ananas Reinette
Fudge hoovers up a piece of Hudson Golden Gem that fell on the floor
In addition to the bountiful apple, cider, cheese and bread spread, Rajesh hosted a “identify the mystery fruit” contest, which was won by graduate student Mariam Asatryan and faculty member Kyle Johnson, who were awarded with bottles of (hard) cider.
Rajesh showcases mystery fruit
The party was attended by a wide variety of guests, including toddler Toma, shown below with parents faculty member Shota Momma and Ayaka Negishi.
2nd year graduate student Alessa Farinella presented joint work with faculty members Kristine Yu and Lisa Green and collaborator Alejna Brugos (Boston University) at the annual sociolinguistics conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49 on October 21, 2021, hosted by UT Austin. Alessa pre-recorded the talk, entitled Biases from MAE-ToBI intonational transcription conventions in the intonational analysis of African American English, which you can watch at the departmental YouTube Channel or from the embedded link directly below.
This material was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant BCS-2042939. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
On October 17, 2021, linguistics undergraduate students Chini Lahoti, Emily Knick, Larry Lyu, and May Lucas (shown from left to right in photo above) served as student ambassadors at the College of Humanities and Fine Arts’ Open House for Fall Visit Day. Our students talked to prospective UMass undergraduates and their family about doing linguistics at UMass.
Program for National Tsing Hua University Workshop on Prosodic and Metrical Phonology, June 24, 2020, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Faculty member Kristine Yu presented at the Tsinghua University Workshop on Prosodic and Metrical Phonology 2020 on June 24, 2020 to help kick off the 35th anniversary celebration of the founding of the linguistics program at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Due to COVID-19, this was perhaps the first in-person linguistics workshop/conference in the region in many months.
Yu has been on sabbatical for Spring 2020 as a visiting scholar at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at neighboring National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) since the end of January 2020, sponsored by Sang-Im Lee-Kim via a grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST, Taiwan equivalent of National Science foundation in US). She has formed a number of new collaborations:
With Sang-Im Lee-Kim (NCTU): work on perception of Mandarin tones produced by Korean L2 learners of Mandarin
With Ho-hsien Pan (NCTU) and Grace Kuo (National Taiwan University): corpus work on syntax-prosody interface issues in Taiwanese Southern Min tone sandhi
With Yu-An Lu (NCTU): work on the phonetics of Formosan languages for the Handbook of Formosan Languages
More generally, a new consortium of scholars working on the phonetics and phonology of Formosan languages, including Chenhao Chiu (National Taiwan University), Hui-Chuang Huang (Academia Sinica), Grace Kuo (National Taiwan University), Siusuat Lau (National Tsing Hua University), and Yu-An Lu (NCTU)
NCTU colleagues: Yu-An Lu, Sang-Im Lee-Kim, Carlos Gussenhoven, Ho-hsien Pan
She also participated in a graduate seminar on prosody offered by visiting scholar Carlos Gussenhoven, which provided inspiration for the talk presented at the Tsing Hua workshop, and participated in various ways in departmental life, including offering a tutorial on Generalized Additive Mixed Models as part of the NCTU Phon Brown Bag series.
Faculty member Kristine Yu will be on sabbatical and conducting research supported by a grant from Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology during the Spring 2020 semester. She’ll be hosted by and collaborating with faculty at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, including Sang-Im Lee-Kim (Lecturer at UMass, 2014-2015) and Ho-hsien Pan.
