Current PhD student Andrew Lamont has will be taking up a position as a Lecturer (equivalent to North American Assistant Professor) at the University College London in the upcoming academic year. Congratulations Andrew!

Harmony Donald received her BA in Speech Pathology and Audiology from North Carolina A&T University in December 2021. She will be here for the spring semester participating in the Center for the Study of African American Language Pathways to the Pipeline Mentoring Program that Lisa Green has launched with Mary Andrianopoulos of Communication Disorders. This semester Harmony is taking ComDis 508 and sitting in on Lisa’s Ling 389 Introduction to AAE, and she will be attending the AAE grant meetings. Harmony has provided this greeting and photo. Welcome Harmony!

I am looking forward to meeting everyone in the department and learning more about UMass Amherst.

On Wednesday November 17th, Emily Brewster, Senior Editor and Editorial Ambassador for Merriam Webster, presented the 11th Freeman lecture: The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both. A video recording of the talk is now available, as is a written version. An abstract is below.

The Freeman lecture, established in 2004, brings to campus a linguist whose work is of interest to a population outside of linguistics and academia.  The Freeman lectures honor department founder Donald C. Freeman and his wife Margaret H. Freeman and their contributions to Linguistics at the UMass Amherst. A list of previous speakers can be found here: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/freeman-lecture.

The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both 

We’ll start with an exploration of what many readers expect of the dictionary and how that contrasts with what the aims of a dictionary’s creators are. To what degree is the dictionary’s perceived role as arbiter, as settler of arguments and justifier of claims, accurate? From there we’ll go on to look at the work of the lexicographer as practiced at Merriam-Webster: what are the criteria a word must meet to qualify for entry in a dictionary? What must the lexicographer consider in defining a word? The third part of the talk will address the impact of the Internet on both the dictionary’s role and on the lexicographer’s work.

On Wednesday November 17th at 4pm, in ILC S331, Emily Brewster, Senior Editor and Editorial Ambassador for Merriam Webster, will present the 11th Freeman lecture: The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both.

Brewster is a UMass Linguistics and Philosophy alumna (BA 1999), so it’s great to be able to welcome her back to campus for this event. Brewster is a frequent guest on NPR, and is one of the hosts of the NPR “Word Matters” podcast. The abstract is below.

The Freeman lecture, established in 2004, brings to campus a linguist whose work is of interest to a population outside of linguistics and academia.  The Freeman lectures honor department founder Donald C. Freeman and his wife Margaret H. Freeman and their contributions to Linguistics at the UMass Amherst. A list of previous speakers can be found here: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/freeman-lecture.

The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both 

We’ll start with an exploration of what many readers expect of the dictionary and how that contrasts with what the aims of a dictionary’s creators are. To what degree is the dictionary’s perceived role as arbiter, as settler of arguments and justifier of claims, accurate? From there we’ll go on to look at the work of the lexicographer as practiced at Merriam-Webster: what are the criteria a word must meet to qualify for entry in a dictionary? What must the lexicographer consider in defining a word? The third part of the talk will address the impact of the Internet on both the dictionary’s role and on the lexicographer’s work.

Kristine Yu presented an invited talk on “Building Phonological Trees” at the Eighteenth SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Phonology, Morphology, and Phonetics on August 5th 2021. An abstract is below.

Computational perspectives from string grammars have richly informed our understanding of phonological patterns in natural language in the past decade. However, a prevailing theoretical assumption of phonologists since the 1980s has been that phonological patterns and processes are computed on trees built with prosodic constituents such as syllables, feet, and prosodic words. This talk explores how perspectives from tree grammars can provide insight into our understanding of prosodic representations, including different ways in which tones can enter the grammar.

Magda Oiry has been selected as a UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellow for the 2021-22 academic year. Fellows provide feedback on ADVANCE programs, liaise with their units, and communicate the importance of faculty equity work across campus. 

Congratulations Magda!

The Franklin Institute Symposium “The Past, Present and Future of Formal Semantics”, in honor of Barbara Partee being awarded the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, was held on April 19th. Videos of the entire symposium are now available, including talks by Barbara, Gennaro Chierchia and Pauline Jakobson in the Part 1 video, and Florian Schwartz, Seth Cable and Christopher Potts in Part 2. (Thank you to Charles Yang for sharing the videos). Abstracts for the talks are available here.

Kristine Yu (PI) and Lisa Green, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami and Brendan O’Connor (co-PIs) have been awarded a 3-year research grant of $434,027 by the NSF. The grant, entitled Understanding variation in African American Language: Corpus and prosodic fieldwork perspectives, “will pioneer inclusive tools and methods capable of reaching a wide range of AAL speakers and communities, combining community-based prosodic fieldwork and large-scale, web-based corpus analysis.”

Congratulations Kristine, Lisa, Meghan and Brendan!

The Shoestring, a local web-based publication, put out the first edition of its Covid Tracker on Friday March 12th. Put together by Joe Pater, it provides weekly totals of new cases and per capita rates classified by the CDC metric for all the towns and cities in Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin counties based on MassDPH data. It will be updated every Friday by noon.