Maggie Baird, a current PhD candidate finishing up her dissertation, has started a position as a Content Analyst at ServiceNow. She is on the Operational, Analytics, Linguists and Labellers team working with data for GenAI and LLMs. Congratulations Maggie!

Chloe Ostiguy, who received her BA in Linguistics this year, has accepted a four-year PhD position in English Linguistics at Ghent University. The PhD project deals with the perception of accents by L2 listeners, and is led by Ellen Simon, who visited UMass in 2006-2007.

Anne-Michelle Tessier has shared the slides for her wonderful presentation at our department’s 50th Anniversary celebration. You can access them at this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cz6KGzh115iYDaMSRTB6j-wqXR_NaR-a/view

Thank you so much Anne-Michelle!

Postscript: I (JP) shared these slides with Jason Moralee, Associate Dean in CHFA, and he sent me the photo at the very bottom of the post, which shows the inside of the GLSA thesis vault. This was taken by Lynne Latham prior to the renovation.

Kaden Holladay successfully defended his PhD dissertation on August 8! His dissertation “ `You’ will always have ‘me’,” explains the typology of person distinctions in the World’s languages with a novel semantics of second person, and a syntax that builds the meanings of pronouns from simple primitive features. Kaden will be joining the linguistics department at Western Washington University next month. 

This is a slightly revised version of a letter sent August 18th to Provost Maryanne Reed, President Gordon Gee, and the Board of Governors, at West Virginia University

We, the undersigned faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, write with the deepest concern about the recommendation to close the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at your University. If acted upon, this will have the effect of depriving future students at WVU of a fundamental educational opportunity, the ability to experience the world using a language other than English. This will not only diminish their ability to understand the broader world, but it will also diminish their future career prospects. Furthermore, the loss of Linguistics at WVU will mean the loss of an important bridge from the Humanities to STEM. We note that just one day after this possible cut was announced, an announcement of a major NSF grant to two of your Linguistics faculty members, Jonah Katz and Sergio Robles-Puente, appeared in the WVU College of Arts and Sciences News and Events.

We understand that you are in a financial crisis, but we urge you to seek alternative ways of dealing with it. It is hard to imagine that WVU will be able to recover if it abandons this core part of its mission, both in terms of its ability to recruit students, and in terms of its reputation as the flagship public university of West Virginia.

Faruk Akkus, Assistant Professor

Ana Arregui, Professor

Michael Becker, Associate Professor

Rajesh Bhatt, Professor

María Biezma, Assistant Professor

Seth Cable, Professor

Lyn Frazier, Professor Emerita

Lisa Green, Distinguished University Professor

Alice Harris, Professor Emerita

Vincent Homer, Associate Professor

Gaja Jarosz, Professor

Kyle Johnson, Professor

John Kingston, Professor

Angelika Kratzer, Profesor Emerita

John McCarthy, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus and Provost Emeritus

Shota Momma, Professor

Barbara Partee, Professor Emerita

Joe Pater, Professor and Department Chair

Thomas Roeper, Professor

Elisabeth Selkirk, Professor Emerita

Margaret Speas, Professor Emerita

Kristine Yu, Associate Professor

Shota Momma has received a three-year NSF research grant on “Structure Building in Language Production” (total costs $450K). This grant will allow Shota to conduct comparative studies on English and Japanese sentence production, which will help to develop a cross-linguistically valid formal theory of how speakers compose sentences. Congratulations Shota!

An NSF conference grant has been awarded to grad student Alessa Farinella, postdoc Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara, and faculty member Kristine Yu (the PI for the grant). It will provide funding for a special session “Prosodic and psycholinguistic connections in verb initial languages” to be held during the annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA).   The conference will be held at UMass Amherst June 11-14, 2024. The special session is designed to bring together researchers who work on prosody and psycholinguistics in verb-initial languages in the Austronesian and other language families to help advance theoretical work by creating a space for scholars who do not normally collaborate to share ideas and perspectives. The special session aims to foster discussion of the commonalities in the comprehension and production of verb-initial languages and the prosody of verb-initial languages.

Lisa Green has been chosen to receive the 2023 Ubora Award, which will be presented to her at a ceremony as the Springfield Museum in September. This award recognizes her scientific achievements, her outreach to the Greater Springfield community as a linguist, as well as her other service to that community. Congratulations Lisa!

Biographies of past recipients can be found here: https://springfieldmuseums.org/ubora/ubora-award-winners/.

The Ubora Award is presented by the African Hall Subcommittee to an African American adult who has demonstrated a commitment to the Greater Springfield area and exhibited excellence in the fields of community service, education, science, humanities or the arts. The Swahili word ubora means “excellence.”

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of our department’s founding on the weekend right after the LSA Institute, July 15-16, and are looking forward with great anticipation to reconnecting with so many of our alumni and other friends and colleagues. The program of events is now available here: https://websites.umass.edu/umassling50/schedule/. There are many ways to be involved in this celebration, whether or not you can be with us in person – please consult the website for further details, and email umassling50@umass.edu with any questions. If you are just deciding to participate in-person and haven’t registered, it’s definitely not too late. We are aiming to be inclusive, and hope information has reached everyone who might like to participate in a timely fashion, though we already know that we haven’t always succeeded.