Anne Vainikka Thomas passed away on June 11th. We have posted the obituary here, and a memorial written by Tom Roeper here. A guest book can be found here. Anne received her PhD from our department in 1989 with a dissertation on “Deriving Syntactic Representations In Finnish,” which was way ahead of its time. Here is a link to a scanned version of the dissertation that Anne had made available. In the 2015 video below, Anne talks about her intellectual trajectory as a syntactician, about writing her dissertation at a time when derivations had no place in current Syntactic Theory, about her advisors and mentors Roger Higgins, Edwin Williams, and Tom Roeper, and about more recent developments in the area of Finnish Syntax.
Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer
Lisa Green will be the 2018 Randolph Quirk Fellow
Lisa Green will be the 2018 Randolph Quirk Fellow at Queen Mary University of London from April 30 to May 4. She will lead three work shops on Tense and Aspect, the Left Periphery, and Language Development in African English, and deliver a public lecture on African American English and Sounding Black.
Semantics 2018: Looking Ahead
You are cordially invited to this free workshop on Saturday, March 10 (ILC S211). No registration is required. The workshop is part of the March 9 & 10 Angelika Fest (check here for updates or download a detailed program with abstracts from here or here. It will be a fast-paced, forward looking, celebration of Semantics, not a retrospective or homage. It’s not your usual workshop: Most talks will be Lightning Talks (5 minutes) or Flash Talks (10 or 15 minutes) with slides to be presented in a single stream for each session. With this talk format, traditional discussion sessions make little sense. The talks are meant to inspire small-group face-to-face discussions over coffee, lunch, and beyond, and curiosity to know more about the topic. Presenters might have supporting materials on their personal websites.
Is there a Future for Semantics? Semantics in the Age of Alpha Zero
| 9:00 to 10:30 | Moderator: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Noah Constant (Google Research), Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins) Discussions over Coffee until 10:30 |
Foundations, Interfaces, Universals, Variation
| 10:30 to 2:30 | Moderators: Valentine Hacquard (Maryland), Hadas Kotek (NYU), Craige Roberts (NYU) |
| Luis Alonso-Ovalle & Aron Hirsch (McGill): Strong “Only”.
Roger Schwarzschild (MIT): Focus. Caroline Féry (Frankfurt): Focus and Intonation in French versus German. Ana Arregui (Ottawa): Exploring the Conditional Mood. Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): Semantic Typology. Ilaria Frana (Kore University of Enna) & Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser): Concealed Propositions. Paula Menéndez-Benito (Tübingen) & Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser): Reasoning and Evidence: Sources and Direction. Discussions over Coffee until 12:00 Aynat Rubinstein (Hebrew University) & Paul Portner (Georgetown): Discernible but not Obvious: Varieties of Epistemic Adjectives. Sarah Murray (Cornell): Logical Connectives in Natural Languages. Min-Joo Kim (Texas Tech): Relative Clauses & Demonstratives. Suzi Lima (Toronto) & Susan Rothstein (Bar Ilan): A Typology of the Count/Mass Distinction in Brazil: Some Methodological Remarks. Junko Shimoyama & Bernhard Schwarz (McGill): A Note on ‘Such That’ Relatives. Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt): Extensions in Semantics. Sandro Zucchi (Milan): McGee’s Counterexample to Modus Ponens & Minimal Change Theories of Counterfactuals. Discussions over Lunch (not provided) until 2:00 Session on Sign Languages (2:00 to 2:30): Kate Davidson (Harvard) & Sandro Zucchi (Milan). Natural Language in Signing Modes. Visual and Tactile Sign Languages. |
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Semantics for the Next Generation
| 2:30 to 3:00 | Moderator: Shai Cohen (Emory)
Suzi Lima (Toronto): Teaching Semantics in the Field. Andrew McKenzie (Kansas): The Flipped Semantics Classroom. |
Building Bridges within the Cognitive Sciences
| 3:00 to 4:30 | Moderator: Orin Percus (Nantes) |
| Kai von Fintel (MIT): Bridges to Philosophy.
Jonathan Phillips (Harvard Psychology): Bridges to Moral Psychology, Cognitive Development. Florian Schwarz (Penn): Bridges to the Psychology of Language. Discussions over Coffee until 4:30 |
Building Bridges within the Humanities
| 4:30 to 5:00 | Moderator: Alexander Williams (Maryland)
Daniel Altshuler (Hampshire College): Building Bridges with Literary Scholars, Filmmakers, Poets, and Artists. |
Building Bridges to Society
| 5:00 to 6:00 | Moderator: Satoshi Tomioka (Delaware) |
| Andrew McKenzie (Kansas): Deixis in the Operating Room.
Aynat Rubinstein (Hebrew University): Semantics and Time Travel. Christopher Davis (University of the Ryukyus): Language Documentation, Theory-Inspired Fieldwork, Giving Back to the Community. Michael Terry (University of North Carolina): the Cognitive Load of Dialect Switching. |
Suzi Lima Organized Workshop on Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Suzi Lima (2014 UMass PhD) organized the 1st Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Indigenous Languages of Latin America Workshop (TOMILLA) yesterday at the University of Toronto. TOMILLA is a forum for researchers (including graduate and undergraduate students) to present their work on languages spoken in Latin America.
Lisa Selkirk at UC Santa Cruz
Source: SPOT website
Lisa Selkirk gave an invited talk on Syntactic Constituency Spell-Out through Match Constraints at SPOT (Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory) at UC Santa Cruz this weekend. The workshop was organized by alums Junko Ito and Armin Mester (both 1986 UMass PhDs) and was part of their research project “aiming to create a computational platform that generates prosodic candidate sets from syntactic structure.” The workshop also included a talk on Incorporation, Focus, and the Phonology of Ellipsis in Irish, where Emily Elfner (2012 UMass PhD) was one of the co-authors. From the workshop description: “The syntax-prosody interface is the study of how syntactic (grammatical) structures are mapped onto the prosodic structures in different languages. Several strands of work in prosodic theory have recently converged on a number of common themes, from different directions, broadly couched in Optimality Theory. Selkirk (2011) has developed a vastly simplified approach to the syntax-prosody mapping which distinguishes only three levels (word, phrase, and clause), and syntactic constituents are systematically made to correspond to phonological domains (“Match Theory”). In an independent line of research, a long string of papers reaching back into the 1980s has convincingly demonstrated that recursive structures are by no means an exclusive property of syntax, but also play a crucial role in phonology. One of the hallmarks of Match Theory is the idea that the main force interfering with syntax-prosody isomorphism is not some kind of non-isomorphic mapping algorithm flattening out the structure, as first contemplated in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 372) and more fully worked out in later proposals, such as the edge-based theory built on one-sided alignment. It is rather the effect of genuine phonological wellformedness constraints on prosodic structure.”
UMass Alums in Tokyo and Berlin
From Angelika Kratzer: Three UMass Alums were in Tokyo last week, presenting papers on Concealed Propositions (Ilaria Frana & Keir Moulton), Slurs (Chris Davis), and CHARACTER Assassination (Craige Roberts) at LENSL 14 (Logic & Engineering of Natural Language Semantics). I did the best I could to get pictures of everyone, but was only partly successful. Even though Craige gave an invited talk, she was only spotted from a roof top in a group of six, and Keir Moulton didn’t go to Tokyo at all, but gave an invited talk on Nouny Propositions at the Berlin SelectionFest instead.
Left top: Ilaria in front, and Chris behind her on the left. Left bottom: Craige spotted from a Tokyo roof top. Right top: Chris. Right bottom: Ilaria (without Keir) talking on Concealed Propositions.
Meredith Landman on Variables in Natural Language
Ever since Quine’s “On What There Is”, discussions of the types of variables in natural languages have occupied a special place in semantics. According to Quine, “to be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” After eleven years in the archives, Meredith Landman’s landmark 2006 dissertation on Variables in Natural Language has now been made publicly available on ScholarWorks. Landman’s dissertation argues for severe type restrictions for object language variables in natural languages, targeting pro-forms of various kinds, elided constituents, and traces of movement. 
In his 1984 UMass dissertation Gennaro Chierchia had already proposed the ‘No Functor Anaphora Constraint’, which says that ‘functors’ (e.g. determiners, connectives, prepositions) do not enter anaphoric relationships. Landman’s dissertation goes further in arguing for a constraint that affects all object language variables and also rules out properties as possible values for them. Her ‘No Higher Types Variable Constraint’ (NHTV) restricts object language variables to the semantic type e of individuals. Landman explores the consequences of the NHTV for the values of overt pro-forms like such or do so, as well as for gaps of A’-movement and for NP and VP ellipsis. Since the NHTV bars higher type variables in all of those cases, languages might have to use strategies like overt pro-forms or partial or total syntactic reconstruction of the antecedent to interpret certain types of movement gaps and elided constituents. The NHTV thus validates previous work arguing for syntactic reconstruction and against the use of higher-type variables (e.g. Romero 1998 and Fox 1999, 2000), as well as work arguing for treating ellipsis as involving deletion of syntactic structure. The topic of the type of traces has most recently been taken up again in Ethan Poole’s 2017 UMass dissertation, which contributes important new evidence confirming that the type of traces should indeed be restricted to type e. (This post was crafted in collaboration with Meredith Landman, who also provided the pictures).
Honorary Degree for Barbara Partee
From UvA news: On January 8, the University of Amsterdam will award an honorary degree to Barbara for her contribution to the development of formal semantics in natural language. “Partee played a crucial role in the development of formal semantics of natural language. Partee’s influence in this domain of linguistics continues to be considerable. Formal semantics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the intersection of various disciplines. Initial ideas that were essential to the development of formal semantics were developed by logicians and philosophers, especially Richard Montague and David Lewis. Partee, a linguist trained in the tradition of transformational generative grammar (she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Noam Chomsky), was the first linguist to realise the importance of these ideas for the development of semantics within linguistic theory. Not only did she strongly promote the acceptance of formal semantics within linguistics and work to foster the cooperation of logicians, philosophers, and linguists, but also made many substantial contributions to the development of this domain. For example, Partee compiled the first series of articles, including her own, written by logicians and linguists about Montague Grammar, the leading model for formal semantics in the 1970s.” This is Barbara’s fifth honorary doctorate: she is already holding honorary degrees from Swarthmore College, Charles University in Prague, Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Chicago.
Lisa Green at the Arctic University of Norway
Lisa Green was an invited speaker at the Workshop on Structural and Developmental Aspects of Bidialectalism in Tromsø, Norway. Her session chair was alum Andrew Weir from NTNU in Trondheim (2014 UMass PhD). Lisa talked about Variation and Development: The Question about Bidialectalism and Co-Existent Systems in African American. From the abstract for her talk:
“One view of African American English (AAE) is that it is a variety that consists of two components, one that reflects the properties of general American English and an African American component that is the locus of properties that distinguish AAE from other varieties of English (Labov 1998). The general English component is a complete grammar, but the African American component is an additive. The implicit assumption that accompanies the dual components view of AAE is that speakers of AAE are bidialectal. In the first part of the paper, I explain the pitfalls of a dual components approach to the study of AAE, especially the types of predictions it makes about the status of AAE speakers as bidialectal and as codeswitchers between AAE and general American English. In the second part of the paper, I explore claims about dual components and bidialectalism from the perspective of data from the tense/aspect system of AAE. I discuss patterns in the development of the copula system and morphological marking of verbs in third person singular contexts, which raise questions about the development of variation within the AAE system, on the one hand, and shared properties with other varieties of English on the other.”
UMass Linguists in Iceland
From Angelika Kratzer: The 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society took place at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik this year. Alum Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson was one of the organizers. Ten current or former UMass linguists presented papers and posters for three days. Here is a link to the full program with abstracts, slides or handouts for each talk. On the first picture collage below are: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, myself, Cherlon Ussery, co-organizer and former UMass visitor Matthew Whelpton, Petr Kusliy, Ethan Poole, Stefan Keine, and Kyle Rawlins. On the second picture collage are: Erika Mayer, Bernhard Schwarz, Jon Ander Mendia, and Andrew Weir.
