Emily Elfner has accepted a tenure-track position at York University in Toronto. She writes: “Starting this summer, I will join the Linguistics Program at York University in Toronto as an assistant professor. As part of a relatively small program, I’m looking forward to making contributions in teaching and curriculum design, as well as continuing to pursue my research program on the prosody of understudied and endangered languages in one of Canada’s most linguistically diverse cities.” Congratulations, Emily!
Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer
Andrew McKenzie Colloquium on March 24
Andrew McKenzie (2012 UMass PhD) will give the Department Colloquium on March 24 at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title of Andrew’s talk is:
Sources of intensionality in Kiowa noun incorporation and English synthetic compounds.
Here is the abstract for the talk.
Andrew McKenzie is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and an Affiliate Professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas. He specializes in Formal Semantics and Linguistic Fieldwork, with a focus on Native American languages, in particular Kiowa.
Andrew’s talk will be followed by a reception in the department with wine, cheese, and cookies. We’ll go out for dinner afterwards with whoever wants to come along. I will send around a sign-up sheet.
Andrew will also give a more informal talk on Switch Reference on Thursday, March 23 at 5:00 PM (room to be announced – if in doubt, go wherever Carolyn, Kimberly, or Leah go). And there will be plenty of time for individual appointments with Andrew (watch out for another sign-up sheet).
UMass Semanticists on Modality Across Categories
An edited volume on Modality Across Categories has just appeared with Oxford University Press. Nine UMass alums and former faculty members are among the editors, authors, and co-authors of the 13 chapters of the book: Ana Arregui (2005 PhD), Luis Alonso-Ovalle (2006 PhD), Paula Menéndez-Benito (2005 PhD), Junko Shimoyama (2001 PhD), Hotze Rullmann (1995 PhD), Kai von Fintel (1994 PhD), Aynat Rubinstein (2012 PhD), Ilaria Frana (2010 PhD), and Lisa Matthewson (now at UBC). From the publisher’s description: “This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted.”
Alice Harris on Multiple Exponence
Alice’s book on Multiple Exponence came out with Oxford University Press at the end of January. From the publisher’s description: “Multiple (or extended) exponence is the occurrence of multiple realizations of a single morphosemantic feature, bundle of features, or derivational category within a word. This book provides data and direction to the discussion of ME, which has gone in a variety of directions and suffers from lack of evidence. Alice Harris addresses the question of why ME is of interest to linguists and traces the discussion of this concept in the linguistic literature. The four most commonly encountered types of ME are characterized, with copious examples from a broad variety of languages; these types form the basis for discussion of the processing of ME, the acquisition of ME, the historical development of ME, and analysis of ME. The book addresses some of the most important questions involving ME, including why it exists at all.”
Ilaria Frana on Concealed Questions
Ilaria Frana’s book on Concealed Questions has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book grew out of Ilaria’s 2010 UMass dissertation. From the publisher’s description: “This book presents a novel analysis of concealed-question constructions, reports of a mental attitude in which part of a sentence looks like a nominal complement (e.g. Eve’s phone number in Adam knows Eve’s phone number), but is interpreted as an indirect question (Adam knows what Eve’s phone number is). Such constructions are puzzling in that they raise the question of how their meaning derives from their constituent parts. In particular, how a nominal complement (Eve’s phone number), normally used to refer to an entity (e.g. Eve’s actual phone number in Adam dialled Eve’s phone number) ends up with a question-like meaning.”
UMass Ranked #3 in the World in Linguistics
UMass Amherst is ranked #3 in Linguistics after MIT and Harvard University in the most recent (2017) QS World University Rankings (subject areas). The other Linguistics departments in the top ten are (in that order) University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Peking University & University of Hong Kong (tied for 10th place). We came out #7 in 2016, and #10 in 2015. Our current 3rd place in Linguistics is all the more remarkable, given that UMass Amherst overall is ranked #251, while both MIT and Harvard are ranked #1 and #3 respectively. The overall prestige of a university enters prominently into those rankings, so UMass Linguistics has to be VERY good all by itself to make it to place 3. I participated in the QS rankings for this year, and the questions I had to answer were all about the best Linguistics departments (other than my own) that spontaneously came to mind for particular geographical areas. Here is a description of the methodology used by QS World University Rankings.
Rajesh Bhatt at GLOW in Asia
Picture: Mitcho Erlewine
Rajesh Bhatt was an invited speaker at the 11th GLOW (Generative Linguists of the Old World) in Asia conference, which was held from 20 to 22 February at the National University of Singapore. GLOW in Asia is a biannual conference held in different Asian cities. Rajesh presented a paper based on joint work with Vincent Homer on positive polarity verbs and positive polarity indefinites in Hindi-Urdu.
The 2017 David Lewis Lecture
From Angelika Kratzer: I feel so honored and happy to be giving the 2017 David Lewis Lecture in Princeton. David Lewis was the most important influence on me as I was mapping out the path I wanted to take as a linguist and semanticist. Mysteriously, the handwriting on the poster is Lewis’s very own handwriting.
David Lewis’s General Semantics (Synthese 22, 1970) was the work that turned me into a semanticist. I was introduced to the article in a Konstanz seminar with Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. I still consider General Semantics the most important milestone in the history of formal semantics for natural languages. In that paper, Lewis teaches us how to connect formal semantics to Chomsky’s Aspects model, for example: “I have foremost in mind a sort of simplified Aspects-model grammar (Chomsky, 1965), but I have said nothing to eliminate various alternatives.” Lewis shows how an insightful theory of semantics and pragmatics can be brought together with an explanatory theory of syntax of the kind Chomsky pioneered. General Semantics is, I believe, the first work that presents a compositional theory of meaning that unifies the perspectives of generative syntax with those of formal logic and analytic philosophy. I think David Lewis’s work was a factor in putting an end to the ‘Linguistics Wars’. It made clear that formal semantics (and pragmatics) and syntactic theory in the spirit of Chomsky could travel together peacefully.
Lewis’s Adverbs of Quantification was a major inspiration for Irene Heim’s and my dissertations. It is the source of the idea that indefinites introduce variables that can be unselectively bound by independent sentential operators and contains the seeds of the restrictor view of if-clauses. Current pragmatic theory would not be what it is today without Convention and Scorekeeping in a Language Game: Contemporary game-theoretical pragmatics, theories of presupposition accommodation, the idea of scoreboards keeping track of salient features of discourse, and context-dependent theories of relative modality all have their roots in those two works. What made Lewis’s ideas so powerful was that they were launched in beautiful prose and with minimal technical machinery. This is why they could so easily cross disciplinary borders.
Hampshire Gazette reports on John Rickford’s Freeman lecture
Today’s Hampshire Gazette has a long report on last Friday’s Freeman lecture by John Rickford: “Justice for Jeantel (and Trayvon): Fighting Dialect Prejudice in Courtrooms and Beyond.”
Excerpt from the article by Michael Majchrowicz: “Jeantel’s testimony was crucial to the prosecution, according to Stanford linguistics expert John Rickford, because it was as close as jurors were going to get to ever actually hearing from Martin. The then -19-year-old’s testimony became a lightning rod for ridicule and harassment because of the way she spoke. Critics called her testimony unintelligible. Others said the hard-to-understand testimony was indicative of a lack of intelligence and that she lacked credibility as a witness. Rickford told an auditorium of roughly 200 attendees Friday at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Freeman Lecture for Linguistics that these criticisms shone a light on a major problem of the criminal justice system: Perpetuating prejudice against African-American English dialects.”
Crete Summer School in Linguistics
This summer you will have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a Linguistics Summer School on a Greek island. There will be introductory and advanced courses in Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, and Phonology, as well as workshops on Trends in Semantics and on Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations. Instructors include our own Rajesh Bhatt, who will teach an introduction to Semantics, and Kai von Fintel (MIT, 1994 UMass PhD), who will teach an advanced course on Modals and Conditionals. The organizers tried to keep tuition as low as possible (I assume all faculty will teach for free). If you are a student and apply early (April 10), tuition is only 200 Euros for two weeks. Accommodation in dorms is also available. The price for accommodation is 100 Euros per person in a shared room for 15 days (no, it’s NOT per day, it’s for the whole period). There is no meal plan, but the organizers inform me that you can eat proper meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) for 20-30 Euros per day, even less for souvlaki, which is about 3 euros per portion. The organizers also inform me that they are trying to get as many scholarships as possible to encourage students from far away to attend.