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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

The party was attended by a wide variety of guests, including toddler Toma, shown below with parents faculty member Shota Momma and Ayaka Negishi.

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.

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)

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.