Suzi Lima (2014 Umass PhD) has just come back from Rio, where she took a group of her University of Toronto undergraduate students for a (not-in-the-village) fieldwork course on Brazilian languages that she directed. On the first page of the group’s blog, Suzi writes: “Today we concluded our (intensive) course on fieldwork methods based on Brazilian languages. I would like to take a moment to say that this was a rewarding experience for me as an instructor for two reasons. First, because of the participation of four women who are leading research on indigenous languages and cultures to new and interesting directions and who are an example for other women: Anari (speaker of Patxohã), Francy (speaker of Nheengatu), Nelly (speaker of Marubo) and Sandra (speaker of Guarani Ñandeva). I was very honored to be able to work with them and learn more about them and their research. Second, because of our students from Canada (Cal, Karoline, Natália, Tiffany, Vidhya) as well as my colleague Ivona and our teaching assistant Ohanna. This was the first fieldwork experience of the students and I was glad to be able to share their excitement, their engagement and their interest during the whole course.”
Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer
Welcome Emar Maier!
Emar Maier is visiting us this semester. You can find him in my (former) office (ILC N420). Emar is Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, affiliated with both the Philosophy and Linguistics Departments. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen (2006), held several postdoc positions, and led an ERC Starting Grant project. He is currently heading a NWO VIDI research project investigating the semantics of imagination and fiction. His research interests include narrative, quotation, indexicals, and attitudes. He publishes in linguistics journals (like Theoretical Linguistics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Journal of Child Language, Semantics and Pragmatics, Glossa) but also in neighboring fields (Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, among others). Emar’s ERC project “Between Direct and Indirect Discourse” (€ 677,000) led to a genuine shift in our way of thinking about reported speech, and combined insights into “the nature of reported speech with formal semantic rigor and linguistic data from child language, native signers, and Greek philology.” Here is an interview with Emar after he won the ERC grant. Emar’s current VIDI grant (€ 800,000) on the Language of Fiction and Imagination aims at “a cognitive/formal semantics of fiction that will shed new light on a wide variety of current debates about fiction, imagination, and narrative style.”
25 years of Natural Language Semantics
From Angelika Kratzer: This year marks the 25th anniversary of Natural Language Semantics. Irene Heim (1982 UMass PhD) and I have been the editors since then. We still meet – at a table, not on a screen – to discuss the papers that have been submitted. Natural Language Semantics was the brain child of Martin Scrivener, the Linguistics editor of what was then Kluwer Academic Publishers. Martin thought that the time had come for a journal to bring together syntactic work in the generative tradition and formal semantics work in the tradition of David Lewis and Richard Montague. From the very start, the journal attracted work on cross-linguistic semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. Early highlights include Mats Rooth’s and Roger Schwarzschild’s papers on focus interpretation and givenness, Veneeta Dayal’s paper on scope marking, Sigrid Beck’s paper on what is now called the “Beck Effect”, Lisa Matthewson’s seminal papers on wide-scope indefinites and on cross-linguistic variation in the expression of quantification, Polly Jacobson’s paper on paycheck pronouns, Lisa Green’s paper on aspectual “be” in African American English, Gennaro Chierchia’s and Sandra Chung’s papers on reference to kinds across languages, Dorit Abusch’s paper on the de re interpretation of the present tense, Mona Singh’s paper on non-culminating accomplishments, and Jo-Wang Lin’s paper on distributivity in Chinese, among many others. All papers are free for anyone to read, share, and annotate.
UMass reunion in Tokyo
The 2017 joint meeting of MAPLL (Mental Architecture for Processing and Learning of Language) and TCP (Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics) ended earlier today. Here is what we heard from our contacts in Tokyo: “This weekend at MAPLL-TCP 2017 held in Tokyo, several UMass related scholars played an essential role for the success of the conference. Emmanuel Chemla (semantics guru, 2014) and Florian Schwarz (2009 UMass PhD) were invited speakers. Yurie Hara (visitor, 2006-2007) and Shigeto Kawahara (2007 UMass PhD) were organizing committee members. Shigeto additionally gave a talk on the project to apply phonetic skills to help ALS patients.” In the picture from left to right: Yurie, Shigeto and his daughter, who “was not the happiest at that moment”, Florian, and Emmanuel.
A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson
As a surprise to celebrate our colleague and teacher Kyle Johnson on his birthday (rumored to be an odd birthday), alums Nicholas LaCara, Keir Moulton, and Anne-Michelle Tessier have just unveiled A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson, a volume of 43 papers that “celebrates Kyle Johnson’s contribution to linguistics. Written by Johnson’s colleagues and former students, the papers touch upon topics that have defined Johnson’s career, including verb movement, ellipsis, gapping, Germanic, extraposition, quantifiers and determiners, object positions, among others.”
Congratulations from all of us, Kyle, and many happy returns!
Investigating meaning in the Kiowa language
Andrew McKenzie (2012 UMass PhD, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas) has been awarded a 3-year NSF (National Science Foundation) grant for “Investigations in the Semantics of Kiowa, a Native American Language of Oklahoma.” Below is an excerpt from the abstract from the grant description, as published by NSF. It’s a model for making clear how theoretical research in semantics can be combined with work that can have a huge impact on Native American communities.
Photo: Marianne McKenzie
“Led by a linguist who is also a tribal member, this project will conduct an in-depth investigation into Kiowa semantics. Semantics forms a crucial component of language, but linguists have not thoroughly documented any language’s semantics with depth and precision, because the theoretical framework to do so was only recently developed. This project will apply this framework of language documentation, in order to uncover the semantics of phenomena crucial to the Kiowa language. The investigators will elicit language judgments from native speakers of the language, which can tease apart subtle aspects of meaning that are often impossible for speakers to define with words. The project will also record and examine new texts that document naturalistic language use, especially in cultural domains under-represented by currently available Kiowa texts. Kiowa grammar includes multiple areas of interest to formal semantics, such as evidentiality, modality, incorporation, quantification, and degree, all of which are also important areas for learners to acquire. This project will result in a reference grammar and teaching materials that will greatly aid these programs by covering the areas in semantics that remain poorly understood by teachers and researchers. This reference grammar will also serve as a manual for researchers of other Native American languages, especially those who are not trained in this research framework. This study will offer new insight for researchers on dozens of phenomena that occur in many languages besides Kiowa. In doing so, it will re-emphasize the longstanding contribution of Native American languages to linguistics, a scientific understanding of what is possible in human language, and thus a deeper understanding of what is possible in the human mind.”
Lisa Green at LSA gatherings in Kentucky and Salt Lake City
The LSA (Linguistic Society of America) has just announced that Lisa Green will be one of the plenary speakers at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the society in Salt Lake City. This month, Lisa is also teaching a 4-week class at the 2017 LSA Summer Institute at the University of Kentucky. The topic of her class is: African American English: Recalcitrant Myths and Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Here is the course description from the summer school’s website:
Photo by John Solem
“African American English (AAE) is still the most widely studied variety of American English. Over the years, different phenomena, ranging from linguistic to sociopolitical, have played major roles in ensuring that the linguistic variety maintains its position in the forefront in discussions of varieties of American English. Important phenomena related to the linguistic system remain understudied or not studied at all despite the focus on the variety. In this course, we consider the study of AAE over the past sixty years and raise questions about the extent to which views about it and approaches to the study of the variety have developed and changed. Starting from the 1960s, we consider major issues that guided research on AAE in each decade, and we explain how some of these issues have resurfaced over the years, propelling AAE into a category of hot topics in the media, such as AAE in classrooms and courtrooms. Consider AAE and mathematics in Orr’s 1987 Twice as Less: Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science and subsequent reports of similar issues in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. In this age of big data and large corpora, AAE is becoming more visible in child language databases, for instance, and the massive Twitter data help to bring AAE into discussions about technology and natural language processing.”
“Significant strides have been made in research on the linguistic structure of the variety; however, even in some linguistics arenas, AAE is still discussed from the perspective of two or three features that distinguish it from general American English. Such an approach to the study of the variety leads observers to conclude that, as it turns out, there is virtually nothing in AAE that does not occur in other varieties of English and continue to perpetuate the recalcitrant myth that it is essential for all “features” of AAE to differ from features in “standard” English to be AAE. In this course, we address empirical and theoretical data in reevaluating these myths, claims, and characterizations of AAE that force us to answer the question: What precisely is AAE, and how do we avoid the many pitfalls in the literature on characterizations of it? It is from this angle that we consider topics in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of AAE in discourse structures and complex clauses, such as negation, questions, and complements.”
Veena Dwivedi appointed Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
As of July 1st, Veena Dwivedi (1994 UMass PhD) is (Full) Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brock University in Canada. In the Dwivedi Brain and Language lab, Veena and her team “integrate sophisticated linguistic theory with the latest advances in neuroscientific methods in order to build a model of sentence comprehension that can more accurately predict how language is processed in real-time. We are concerned with the computation of meaning, and how this computation is affected by both linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., emotion, attention, working memory) systems in the brain. We are currently developing a model which tests how and when grammatical structure plays a role in sentence comprehension.”
Nancy Clarke and Alicia LeClair at the Guatemala Field Station
Alums Nancy Clarke (BA, ’16) and Alicia LeClair (BA, ’17) attended the 2017 Field School directed by Masha Polinsky at the Guatemala Field Station of the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. The field station is located close to Sololá and Lake Atitlán in the western highlands of Guatemala. Several Mayan languages are spoken in the area. In collaboration with the NGO Wuqu’ Kawoq, the Field School offered beginner and continuing two-week immersion classes in Kaqchikel. Both classes were taught by experienced Kaqchikel teachers who planned the lessons, provided one-one-one help, and provided language learning materials. Following the two-week classes, University of Maryland linguistics faculty provided mentoring for collecting language data from native Kaqchikel speakers. During the trip, students stayed with local families to gain a better insight into everyday Guatemalan life. Additionally, on the weekends, students and faculty took field trips to sites where Wuqu’ Kawoq is working and assisted with their projects. Source: University of Maryland Language Science Center. You can find out more about the 2017 Field School from their blog.
Paula Menéndez Benito to Tübingen
Paula Menéndez Benito (2005 UMass PhD) writes that the paperwork for her tenured position at the University of Tübingen, one of Germany’s designated Universities of Excellence, has just come through. Paula will be joining one of the most lively and high-powered semantics scenes in Europe. Interdisciplinary semantic research in Tübingen is fed by several departments and a collaborative research center on the Constitution of Meaning directed by Sigrid Beck. Paula is currently a visiting professor in Göttingen. From September 2014 to September 2016, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Her Marie Curie project investigated the expression of modality in the determiner domain. Continuing this research agenda, Paula’s current work “aims to situate modal determiners in a typology of modal expressions by undertaking a systematic comparison between determiner and verbal modality.”