Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer

Jeff Runner to become Dean at Rochester


Jeff Runner (1995 UMass PhD) has been named the new Dean of the College in Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester. Here is how he describes his vision for his new role:  “What makes the College so special is our emphasis on integrating academic and co-curricular experiences to allow students to develop into the thinkers and leaders of tomorrow. I’m interested in enriching students’ classroom experience by increasing opportunities for independent research, community-based learning, and international experience. Diversity and inclusion is a center piece in my vision for the College. We have a growing multicultural campus community—a kind of microcosm of the world outside the College—which can help both domestic and international students to learn to adapt to a multicultural world. I plan to continue to create opportunities for students from all different backgrounds to succeed in the College, to have opportunities to learn—from each other, from our faculty, from the Rochester community, and from the world—and to grow into critical thinkers who can contribute to the larger community in many ways.” Source: University of Rochester Newscenter.

Fifteen UMass Semanticists at SALT

This year’s SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27) was held at the University of Maryland. Fifteen current and former UMass students and faculty gave talks, presented posters, or just were there to support their own students. At the banquet everyone posed for a group picture. First row (from left to right): Angelika Kratzer, Maribel Romero, Chris Baron. Second row: Paul Portner, Florian Schwarz, Valentine Hacquard (2006-2007 Barbara Hall Partee Visiting Professor), María Biezma, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Deniz Özy?ld?z, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten, Bernhard Schwarz, and Marcin Morzycki. Last row: Daniel Altshuler, Kyle Rawlins, and Satoshi Tomioka.

Keynote address at WCCFL 35: Keir Moulton

Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser University, 2009 UMass PhD) gave a keynote address at WCCFL 35 (West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics) this weekend at the University of Calgary. Keir presented joint work with his colleague Chung-hye Han and the SFU Experimental Syntax Lab in a talk entitled “A Defence of C-Command.” Here are the slides for his lecture.

As reported earlier, also on the program were Troy Messick, current UMass graduate students Brandon Pricket, Ethan Poole, Jon Ander Mendia, Yangsook Park, and Hsin-Lun Huang, last semester’s visitor Marlijn Meijer, alums Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill University, 2006 UMass PhD) and Elan Dresher (University of Toronto, 1978 UMass PhD), and Rafael Nonato from Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

Alicia LeClair at Cornell Undergraduate Colloquium

Alicia LeClair will present the results of her research with Lisa Green at the 11th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC 11). The topic of her paper is: Development of Past Tense Marking in Child African American English. Alicia’s paper was selected as one of only five full-length student papers (as opposed to the more common posters) to be presented at the conference. Alicia writes:

“I will forever be grateful for all of the opportunities I have had with research experiences in the Linguistics Department here at UMass. I am especially excited to be presenting research from this past summer and this current semester with Lisa Green and the Center for the Study of African American Language. Child African American English Acquisition is an important topic of study and with Lisa’s help I have been able to create a body of work about past tense acquisition by 4- to 6-year-old AAE speakers that brings up possibilities for future more specific research within the AAE past tense acquisition path. It has been a rewarding, but at times difficult, challenge to understand the systems of AAE and how it maps out in child speech, but throughout this experience, I believe I have grown as a critical thinker, researcher, and student. Thank you again, UMass Ling!”

UMass Semanticists at TOM 10

The 10th instantiation of TOM (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal Semantics Workshop) took place last weekend in Toronto. Alums Junko Shimoyama and Luis Alonso-Ovalle were the two invited speakers. Junko presented joint work with alum Keir Moulton on Japanese internally-headed relative clauses. Luis gave a joint paper (with Henrison Hsieh) on the ability/involuntary action inflection of Tagalog verbs.  Here is a group picture that also includes Toronto semanticists and alums Suzi Lima and Youri Zabbal.

Why is this linguist #talmabout Twitter?

The Spring 2017 version of the UMass Magazine reports on Lisa Green’s collaborative case study of dialect in Twitter conversations among African Americans (with Brendan O’Connor and Su Lin Wang Blodgett from the College of Information and Computer Sciences). “Twitter gives us real, live data about the way people actually talk,” she says. “It’s exciting for linguists because we know all languages change, but now we can actually see change in progress and map it geographically.” The magazine also features a video of Lisa.

Conti Fellowship for Lisa Green

Lisa Green has won one of this year’s Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship awards. The Conti Faculty Fellowship allows faculty members to pursue their research for a full year without any other duties. Fellows are chosen based on their record of “outstanding accomplishments in research and creative activity and on their potential for continued excellence, particularly with regard to the project that would be undertaken during the Fellowship period.” Congratulations, Lisa!

Lisa writes “I will spend the fellowship year completing African American English Through the Years: Getting at the Core Grammar, under contract by Cambridge University Press. The book will serve as a reference source for data on AAE, and it will be the only reference for some topics. It is in line with my previous research in that it shows how general linguistic principles can be applied in describing AAE structures, presents linguistic description informed by general linguistic theory, and underscores the practical application of research on AAE.”

 

Special Colloquium with Hans Kamp: Now on April 21

Hans Kamp  (Stuttgart/University of Texas at Austin) will present his forthcoming work (for a David Kaplan volume) on definites in a special colloquium on Friday, April 21, from 3:00 to 6:00 pm in N400. The colloquium is part of Daniel Altshuler’s seminar. Here is a link to the paper Hans will talk about. Please don’t distribute it without permission. There will be a dinner at Barbara’s place afterwards. She will send out more info (including an RSVP) later this week.

Hans Kamp is the founder of Discourse Representation Theory. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Discourse Representation Theory: “In the early 1980s, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) was introduced by Hans Kamp as a theoretical framework for dealing with issues in the semantics and pragmatics of anaphora and tense (Kamp 1981); a very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim (1982). The distinctive features of DRT […] are that it is a mentalist and representationalist theory of interpretation, and that it is a theory of the interpretation not only of individual sentences but of discourse, as well. In these respects DRT made a clear break with classical formal semantics, which during the 1970s had emanated from Montague’s pioneering work […], but in other respects it continued the tradition, e.g., in its use of model-theoretical tools.”

Una Stojnic in Semantics Seminar

Una Stojnic will present her joint work on pronouns (with Matthew Stone and Ernie Lepore) in Daniel Altshuler’s seminar this week (Monday from 2:30 pm to 5:15 pm in N458). Here is a draft of the paper. Please don’t distribute it without permission.  There will be a reception (with some fruits, chocolates and beverages) after her talk.

Una is a Bersoff Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in Philosophy at NYU, and a Research Fellow in philosophy at the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. She mainly works in philosophy of language, formal semantics and pragmatics of natural languages and philosophical logic.

From her website: “My research aims at understanding and modeling language and linguistic communication. This situates my work within a network of traditional questions in philosophy of language, as well as within a set of empirical questions in linguistics and cognitive sciences. My most recent work concerns the interplay between context-change and context-sensitivity, and the way in which the mechanisms of information structure and discourse coherence affect the resolution of semantic ambiguities.”