The special issue of Language and Speech: Sociolectal and Dialectal Variation in Prosody co-edited by Meghan Armstrong-Abrami (UMass Hispanic Linguistics), Mara Breen (Mount Holyoke Psychology), Shelome Gooden (University of Pittsburgh Linguistics), Erez Levon (University of Bern, Professor of Sociolinguistics), and Kristine Yu (UMass Linguistics) has finally officially been released!

The special issue grew out of the Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody 4 (ETAP4) conference hosted at UMass in October 2018.

Linguistics faculty and undergraduate students were out in force representing the linguistics department at the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) Open House on Sunday October 23! The open house was an event held as part of Fall Visit days for prospective undergraduates.

The enthusiastic linguistics undergraduate students present to tell prospective students about the linguistics major were Emily Knick (Linguistics ’23), Levi Logan (Linguistics, Electrical Engineering ’25), and Olivia Nash (Chinese, Linguistics ’22). Also present were faculty members and undergraduate advisors Kristine Yu and Vincent Homer.

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!

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!

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!

Faculty member Brian Dillon presented a colloquium at University of Southern California linguistics on April 11, 2022 entitled “Constraining pronominal reference in real-time”.

Faculty member Ana Arregui presented a mini-course and a departmental colloquium at MIT linguistics on April 13-15, 2022. For more information, see the April 11th edition of MIT Linguistics’ newsletter, WHAMIT, copied below:

The mini-course:

TITLE: Has the future happened?

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.

Senior linguistics major Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao and junior linguistics major Dan DeGenaro presented talks on April 23, 2022 at the 16th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium.

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.