We are delighted to welcome Faruk Akku? to UMass Linguistics. He will be starting as Assistant Professor in Fall of 2021. He is currently finishing up his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He describes his research interests as follows (https://web.sas.upenn.edu/akkusf/):
“My work is at the intersection of theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, with a focus on endangered and un(der)studied languages. I study cross-dialectal variation in sentence structure, building primarily on data collected through fieldwork on un(der)documented languages. I specialize in Arabic dialects—particularly the so-called peripheral varieties, Turkish, Mutki Zazaki and Cherokee.”
Tal Linzen, Johns Hopkins University, will present “What inductive biases enable human-like syntactic generalization?” in the Linguistics zolloquium series at 3:30 Friday April 17. An abstract follows. All are welcome! The Zoom link has already beensent out on department mailing lists. If you did not receive it and would like attend, please email Brian Dillon for the link.
Abstract
Humans apply their knowledge of syntax in a systematic way to constructions that are rare or absent in their linguistic input. This observation, traditionally discussed under the banner of the poverty of the stimulus, has motivated the assumption that humans are innately endowed with inductive biases that make crucial reference to syntactic structure. The recent applied success of deep learning systems that are not designed on the basis of such biases may appear to call this assumption into question; in practice, however, such engineering success speaks to this question in an indirect way at best, as engineering benchmarks do not test whether the system in fact generalizes as humans do. In this talk, I will use established psycholinguistic paradigms to examine the syntactic generalization capabilities of contemporary neural network architectures. Focusing on the classic cases of English subject-verb agreement and auxiliary fronting in English question formation, I will demonstrate how neural networks with and without explicit syntactic structure can be used to test for the necessity and sufficiency of structural inductive biases, and will present experiments indicating that human-like generalization requires stronger inductive biases than those expressed in standard neural network architectures.
The 2021 Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute will be hosted at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The Institute will run from June 14 to July 9 in the Summer of 2021, and will provide 4 week and 2 week courses in a wide gamut of topics in linguistics. Each 90 minute class will meet twice a week. We anticipate that classes will have between 10 and 30 students in them.
The courses are arranged into three levels: introductory courses (100-level), intermediate (200-level), and advanced (300-level). The introductory courses are aimed at students who have had no, or negligible, exposure to the subject being taught, and the intermediate level courses are intended for students who have had one course in the area. These courses are all 4 weeks long. Advanced courses are in specialized topics and can be taken by students at any level, but the presumption will be that students have enough background in the relevant areas to follow high level material. The Institute’s theme is : Linguistics as cognitive science: universality and variation. The 300 level courses are chosen with that theme in mind.
If you would like to teach a course at the Summer Institute, please email a course proposal to us at lsa-call@umass.edu by May 1, 2020. We won’t have room for all of the courses pitched to us. We will let you know if we can accommodate your course by June 1, 2020. For the instructors of the accepted courses, the Institute will cover the costs of travel, University housing and will provide a small honorarium. Proposals to co-teach are welcome and we expect to be able to cover travel costs for all course instructors (the honorarium will be divided among the instructors).
In your course proposal provide us with the following information:
The target audience.
A Short course description (500 word limit).
A Brief outline of motivation for the course (200 word limit).
An Outline of course topics (or readings), i.e., a sense of its syllabus.
Whether it is a 2 week or 4 week course.
If applicable, the relevance of the course to the Institute’s theme
The course title and instructor(s).
Try to not overlap with courses that have already been planned. You will find these described in the “planned curriculum” page which can be accessed through the menu above.
From Sarah Gibbons, of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts:
Set to take place on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus from March 19 through 21, the 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference seemed doomed in the face of mounting concerns and decisions to cancel events and transition to remote working and learning in response to the spread of COVID-19. Determined to carry forward with decades of interdisciplinary scholarly tradition and connection, UMass Amherst community members worked fast beginning on March 8 to transition the conference, also known as CUNY 2020, completely online.
Associate Professor Brian Dillon (top left) and other participants of CUNY 2020.
Led by Brian Dillon, associate professor in the UMass Amherst Department of Linguistics, a 24-person team of UMass and Five College faculty members, graduate students, and CUNY community members from other institutions worked quickly to cancel on-site arrangements, communicate with attendees and speakers, organize video and webinar technology, and move the conference online in ten days. No small feat, as the team had been planning the physical conference since the summer of 2018. “Our decision to cancel had the full support of the Provost and event services, and this support was critical in allowing to cancel as early as we did,” said Dillon.
Dillon, who hasn’t missed a CUNY conference since 2006, emphasized that this feat was “very definitely” a team effort. “One person whose work should be especially recognized is Jon Burnsky. Jon is a PhD student in Psychological and Brain Sciences here, and he is our official CUNY Graduate RA. He did a lot of work to set up live-streaming for the physical conference; his work laid the groundwork for our virtual conference. We were able to virtualize so quickly because of the work he had put in ahead of time,” said Dillon.
The online format added an unexpected tone of lightheartedness and relief to many experiencing serious disruption in their lives. “I was surprised at how connected this allowed us to feel,” recalls Dillon. “This allowed us to feel like we were making connections and giving a sense of community and normalcy in difficult times.” “It was also just plain fun in ways I hadn’t expected,” he said, feeling at times like he and the co-organizers were “thrown into the role of radio show host, rather than organizers of an academic conference. We would banter, crack jokes, take questions from the audience during downtime. It allowed for a sense of levity that I think some participants appreciated at this moment.”
People from 44 countries participated in CUNY 2020. “The top four were the USA, Germany, the UK, and China,” said Dillon. “The large Chinese participation is notable because of the 12-hour time difference. Chinese colleagues reported staying up late into the night to catch talks.”
One conference attendee and session chair, Colin Phillips, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland and Director of the Maryland Language Science Center, called Dillon’s leadership of CUNY 2020, “an incredible success.”
“The conference normally draws 200-300 in-person attendees,” said Phillips. “There was a broad concern that few people would want to participate in the remote format. In contrast, over 1,000 people took part over the course of the 3 days, with peak participation of 300-350 simultaneous participants in some sessions.” According to Phillips, about 20 people at the University of Maryland participated in a virtual watch party and communicated through the remote workplace communication tool, Slack. Because of this, Phillips explained, “the conference even helped us feel more connected locally. We heard of various other similar activities at other institutions.”
Reflecting on the unique and challenging circumstances facing universities during the COVID-19 crisis, Phillips went on to say, “The past couple of weeks have seen unprecedented changes in how universities operate. It seems like everything is changing from day to day. Brian and the UMass team made people feel that they were connected, despite the upheaval. But they also made people feel like they were witnessing something special that they hadn’t seen before. This conference has built up a strong following in its 33 years. Many people, myself included, have attended almost all of them. At this point I think there’s little doubt that this was the most memorable of them all.”
The CUNY conference, which was originally founded at the City University of New York Graduate Center by Janet Dean Fodor, is a major event in the psycholinguistics subfield of linguistics (it is now primarily hosted by other institutions, but retains the name). It is highly interdisciplinary, with strong contributions from researchers in Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Education, and Philosophy. “It is one of the central North American venues for researchers interested in psycholinguistics,” explains Dillon, “it is well attended by both linguists and by psychologists, and creates lots of productive interdisciplinary cross-talk.”
“UMass Amherst is a special place to host CUNY for many reasons,” said Dillon. “First, we have a very strong tradition in psycholinguistics. Our community goes back to the late 70’s and early 80’s, lead by researchers in psychology (Chuck Clifton Jr., Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek, and Jerry Myers), and in linguistics (Lyn Frazier, Tom Roeper).” The UMass Amherst linguistics department, ranked No. 2 worldwide, is known for having a strong psycholinguistics program, and, “hosting CUNY further increases our community’s visibility,” said Dillon.
The UMass Amherst community has been involved with the CUNY conference since the beginning, but this is the first year that the campus has hosted since 1993. “Back then,” remarks Dillon, “incidentally, our conference coincided with a famous blizzard that stranded many people and prevented them from coming to the conference.”
Annika Andersson, Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, will present “Cross-linguistic influence on processing of fine-grained placement verb semantics as recorded by ERPs and appropriateness ratings” and talk about some of her research with second language learners on Wednesday March 18th 12:00 in ILC N400. An Abstract follows.
Abstract
Second language (L2) learners typically experience challenges when semantics differ across source and target languages, and often display CLI in speech production and behavioral comprehension studies (e.g., Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008). However, in studies using ERPs, CLI has rarely been reported, probably because these studies typically examine the processing of gross semantic violations (e.g., Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). We explored how English and German learners of Swedish process fine-grained L2 verb semantics that are either shared or not shared with their first language. Three Swedish placement verbs (sätta ‘set’, ställa ‘stand’, lägga ‘lay’), obligatory for describing placement on a surface with support from below (Viberg 1998) were examined. In difference to Swedish, English has one general placement verb (put), whereas German has specific verbs similar to Swedish (Narasimhan et al., 2012). In contrast to previous ERP studies of semantic processing qualitative differences in semantic processing were related to non-native processing. However, more interestingly neurophysiological processing of fine-grained semantics was strongly related to CLI both offline and online.
Matthew Tyler, Yale University, will present “Internal arguments disguised as external arguments: Lessons from an active alignment system” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday March 6. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
Active alignment describes a morphological alignment pattern where the lone argument of an intransitive verb is marked sometimes like the subject of a transitive verb, and sometimes like the object. Many generative accounts of active alignment hold that this morphological distinction is rooted in the syntactic distinction between external arguments, merged as the specifier of a functional head Voice (or v), and internal arguments, merged as an argument of the lexical verb. However, on the basis of novel fieldwork with Choctaw, a language with an active agreement system, I show that an argument’s morphological marking must be dissociated from its syntactic position: the marking that is characteristic of canonical external arguments is, exceptionally, found with certain internal arguments too. Nevertheless, I show that these internal arguments receive their exceptional marking only if they can form an uninterrupted syntactic (i.e. Agree/case-assignment) relation with the Voice head.
The implications of these findings are twofold. Firstly, active alignment is argued to be a consequence of Voice forming a syntactic relation with some arguments and not with others, rather than a direct consequence of the differing syntactic positions of internal vs. external arguments. This provides a new way of understanding lexical and configurational exceptions to the dominant alignment pattern of a language. Secondly, by studying the particular circumstances under which internal arguments receive exceptional marking, I argue that the agreement/case-assignment properties of a single Voice head can vary contextually according to the syntactic material in its immediate neighborhood, including the lexical root and other functional heads. This brings the agreement/case-assignment properties of functional heads in line with how we often think about their morphological properties: that is, they can have default and contextually-conditioned variants.
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho), National University of Singapore, will present “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” (joint work with Cheryl Lim) in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 28. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
Many Austronesian languages exhibit an extraction restriction whereby only one particular DP — the “pivot” argument, the choice of which is re?ected by morphology on the verb — can be A’-extracted. We show that such extraction restrictions can vary between di?erent A’-constructions in Bikol: local clefting is limited to the pivot, whereas topicalization can target pivots and non-pivot agents, but not other non-pivot DPs. Following the phase-theoretic, locality-based approach to such extraction asymmetries in related Austronesian languages, we propose that clefting and topicalization di?er in the featural speci?cations of their probes, but must always attract their closest matching goal. Evidence for this approach comes from interactions between clefting, topicalization, and hanging topic left dislocation in long-distance con?gurations. Such data motivates the view that the classic Austronesian pivot-only extraction restriction is best characterized in terms of syntactic locality, rather than as a restriction on the grammatical function or morphological case of movement targets.
Faruk Akku?, University of Pennsylvania, will present Lessons from “make” causatives in Sason Arabic in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 21. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract This talk investigates the syntax of an indirect causative construction embedded under the verb “make” in Sason Arabic, with a focus on the syntax of the embedded structure, and the syntactic and semantic status of the implicit embedded agent. I demonstrate that this construction embeds both an active and passive VoiceP despite the absence of any morphological reflex. I also contend that the implicit agent in the active complement of “make” may be introduced (i) as a full DP in Spec,VoiceP, being subject to Romance ECM-type restrictions, and thus providing striking evidence of A’-movement feeding licensing relationships, or (ii) as a free variable à la Heim (1982) generated on the Voice head itself. The latter possibility raises implications regarding licensing, suggesting that licensing of a thematic object is dissociated from the projection of a specifier
Tom Roeper delivered a talk on “Multiple Grammars and Minimal Interfaces” at University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, on January 24th.
There is a particularly lively and sophisticated group of scholars studying Information Structure and Syntax in L2 and code-switching under the leadership of Luiz Lopez.
Anne-Michelle Tessier, University of British Columbia, will present “Learning morpho-phonology with Gradient Symbolic Representations: Stages and errors in the acquisition of French liaison” at 2:30pm Tuesday February 18 2020, in N458. Abstract
Things will turn decidedly more festive at 3:15, when we will celebrate Anne-Michelle’s book “Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar“. Light refreshments will be served, to be followed by dinner at Michael Becker’s house.
