Range in the use and realization of BIN in African American English has been published at Language and Speech online first! This work was done by faculty members Lisa Green and Kristine Yu, together with graduate students Anissa Neal and Ayana Whitmal, former Center for the Study of African American Language undergraduate RA Tamira Powe and Deniz Özy?ld?z (Ph.D. ’21, now at U. Konstanz).
This material was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant BCS-2042939, a UMass Amherst Faculty Research Grant/Healey Endowment Grant, a UMass Amherst Institute of Diversity Sciences Seed Grant, and the UMass Amherst Center for the Study of African American Language. 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 (or other funding sources).
Undergraduate linguistics major and experimental labs manager Emily Knick ’23 has been featured in the UMass news story Probing the Mysteries of Language, written by UMass Director of Research Communications, Lauren Rubenstein. The news story brings out Emily’s passion for linguistics research and discusses Emily’s honors thesis project on an in-progress sound change in Japanese plosives, which is being directed by faculty member John Kingston. Congratulations Emily!
Surrounded by phonetics recording equipment, Linguistics major Emily Knick ’23 contemplates the voice onset time of a Japanese plosive in Praat while ensconced in a nook of the linguistics department. Photo credit: John Solem
UMass linguists that presented at LabPhon 18 this past week (June 23-25, held virtually) included current graduate students Seung Suk (Josh) Lee, Cerys Hughes, and Alessa Farinella, and faculty member Kristine Yu. LabPhon is the biennial meeting of the Association of Laboratory Phonology
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee presented the poster Finding Accentual Phrases in a spontaneous speech corpus of Seoul Korean
Cerys Hughes, Seung Suk Lee, Alessa Farinella, and Kristine Yu presented the poster Phonetic implementation of phonologically different high tone plateaus in Luganda
UMass faculty and student alumni that presented include the following:
Ivy Hauser (PhD. 2019, now UT Arlington faculty) presented the poster Differential cue weighting in Mandarin sibilant merger
Sang-Im Lee-Kim (visiting faculty 2014-2015, now NYCU faculty) presented the poster Unmerging the sibilant merger during phonetic imitation
Anne Pycha (visiting faculty 2010-2012, now U. Wisconsin Milwaukee faculty) presented the poster Low density and clear speech make spoken words more memorable with Jae Yung Song and Tessa Culleton
2nd year graduate student Alessa Farinella has been awarded a Junior Fellowship in the Collaborative Research Centre “Prominence in Language” (CRC 1252, Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 1252) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). The “Prominence in Language” group includes more than 60 researchers collaborating on 20 different scientific projects investigating how prominence structures language with respect to prosody, morphosyntax and semantics, and text and discourse structure.
This summer, Farinella will be at the University of Cologne working within the research group focusing on prosodic prominence across the world’s languages, and her host will be Prof. Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. Farinella will be working on an individual project she proposed that investigates prosodic prominence in varieties of Indonesian through the alignment of manual gesture to speech. The project builds on Farinella’s previous work with her undergraduate research supervisor Daniel Kaufman (Queen’s College, CUNY, Endangered Language Alliance). You can get a glimpse of that work by watching the video recording of Kaufman and Farinella’s presentation at the 28th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 28) from May 2021! Congratulations Alessa!
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.
