Seth Cable will be the Chair of our Department starting on September 1st. Thank you Seth for taking on this position – we look forward to working with you in this new role.

The 31st meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association was held here at UMass Amherst June 12-13th, with the support of an NSF conference grant. Thank you to the organizers, Kristine Yu, Jed Guevara and Alessa Farinella for all their hard work, as well as to Narda Wakoluk for logistic support, and congratulations on such a successful meeting!

María Biezma, who holds a joint position between our department and Spanish and Portuguese Studies, has been awarded tenure and has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.

Congratulations María on this well-deserved recognition of your work!

Michael Wagner of McGill University will be presenting a talk on “Syntactic Alternative Projection” in our departmental colloquium series, Friday April 26th at 3:30 in ILC S11. All are welcome! An abstract follows

Abstract. Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and but also constrain scalar implicature, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions (building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Arstein (2002)). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.

The Board of Higher Education has approved a Computational Linguistics major that will be offered by our department, in collaboration with the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences. Current students will be able to transfer into the major in Fall of 2024, and it will be included in the common application in the Fall of 2025. The curriculum can be found here. Special thanks to Rajesh Bhatt and Kristine Yu for all of their work on this initiative, as well as our colleagues in CICS for their collaboration on it.

Update: We have temporarily taken this website off line. Please e-mail linguist@umass.edu with any questions.

Alum Irene Heim (PhD 1982) is the co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, for work she did here at UMass Amherst. As an article in the Daily Nous notes, this award is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel prize” of philosophy. Her co-recipient Hans Kamp also has a UMass connection: he was on the Philosophy faculty here from 1982 to 1984. They were given the award “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.” A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes on to explain:

Natural languages are highly context-dependent – how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.

Update: the colloquium scheduled for March 29 will now happen April 26th.

Michael Wagner of McGill University will be presenting a colloquium on “Syntactic Alternative Projection” on Friday April 26th at 3:30 in ILC S211. An abstract is below – all are welcome!

Abstract. Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and but also constrain scalar implicature, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions (building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Arstein (2002)). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.

Byron Ahn of Princeton University will present our first colloquium of the semester: “Towards Uncovering (Some) Intonational Meanings in Mainstream U.S. English” (abstract below), Friday Feb. 23 at 3:30 in ILC S211. All are welcome. A reception will follow in the department.

Abstract. While modulation of intonation is known to correspond to modulation of meaning —suggesting (something like) intonational morphemes— as a field this area is far less understood as compared to the meanings of segmental morphemes. One reason for this is that there are large questions that remain unanswered at many levels: including practical questions (how to annotate intonation), variationist ones (what sorts of mergers/splits/realizations vary and along what social variables), and formal ones (what sorts of allophony to expect), among others.

This talk will review ongoing collaborative research on U.S. English, dealing in semantic/pragmatic meanings of mirativity, previous beliefs (bias), and epistemic authority. I will detail some of the new ways we are tackling these sorts of questions, using a new intonational annotation tool (PoLaR) and robust and replicable analysis (machine learning), while still appealing to a phonological model for intonation (A-M theory) and grammatical architecture (the Y-model).

At the January meeting of the LSA in New York, Ana Arregui and Kyle Johnson were inducted as Fellows for their “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. Congratulations Ana and Kyle – the recognition is richly deserved!

Ana and Kyle join these other distinguished UMass faculty members as LSA Fellows (with year of induction):

Emmon Bach, 2006

Hagit Borer, 2014

Lyn Frazier, 2014

Lisa Green, 2016

Alice Harris, 2012

Angelika Kratzer, 2012

John J McCarthy, 2012

Barbara H Partee, 2006

Thomas Roeper, 2013

Elisabeth Selkirk, 2012