Amanda Doucette, a recent graduate of our undergraduate program, will be starting a PhD at McGill University in the fall. Congratulations Amanda!
Author Archives: Joseph Pater
Hughto takes a position as a data engineer
Coral Hughto has been working since September as a Data Engineer at Assurance, a company in Seattle that provides a platform for buying insurance. Congratulations Coral!
Partee awarded Benjamin Franklin medal
Barbara Partee has been awarded the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. The award statement from https://www.fi.edu/laureates/barbara-partee is copied below. Here is an excerpt from the Award’s “about” page:
Through its Awards Program, The Franklin Institute seeks to provide public recognition and encouragement of excellence in science and technology. The list of Franklin Institute laureates reads like a “Who’s Who” in the history of 19th, 20th, and 21st century science, including Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Rudolf Diesel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Frank Lloyd Wright…
This richly deserved award is a great testament to Barbara’s impact on the field, and we could add, our department and University. Since the area of the award is Computer and Cognitive Science, it’s worth noting that we owe much of our University’s current strength in Cognitive Science to Barbara, who with Michael Arbib of Computer Science co-directed the initiative that obtained the two rounds of Sloan Foundation funding that involved multiple faculty members and sowed the seeds for the development of this interdisciplinary area.
Congratulations Barbara!
Citation: For her foundational contributions that synthesize insights from linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology to understand how words and sentences combine to express meaning in human language.
A teacher, scholar, and thinker as original and wide-ranging as Barbara Partee is rare. Currently professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Partee is one of the pioneers of the burgeoning field of linguistics, a field that has had broad impacts on everything from psychology to artificial intelligence. In particular, Partee has been instrumental in forging new connections between formal logic and natural language. Language is ultimately a code, encoded by a speaker to be interpreted by a listener. Partee applies concepts in logic and semantics to untangle that code. Her work opened a new field of linguistics—she is considered the founder of formal semantics. Partee’s contributions to understanding language, in a way that envelops linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology, have been key shaping concepts in computer science and cognitive science.
Prickett in Phonology
Brandon Prickett has just published “Learning biases in opaque interactions” in the latest issue of Phonology. Congratulations Brandon!
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675719000320
Abstract
This study uses an artificial language learning experiment and computational modelling to test Kiparsky’s claims about Maximal Utilisation and Transparency biases in phonological acquisition. A Maximal Utilisation bias would prefer phonological patterns in which all rules are maximally utilised, and a Transparency bias would prefer patterns that are not opaque. Results from the experiment suggest that these biases affect the learnability of specific parts of a language, with Maximal Utilisation affecting the acquisition of individual rules, and Transparency affecting the acquisition of rule orderings. Two models were used to simulate the experiment: an expectation-driven Harmonic Serialism learner and a sequence-to-sequence neural network. The results from these simulations show that both models’ learning is affected by these biases, suggesting that the biases emerge from the learning process rather than any explicit structure built into the model.
TESOL certificate to launch in spring 2020
The Linguistics Department, in collaboration with the ESL Program and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures now offers a 15-credit Certificate in Teaching English as a Second or Other Language. A full description with requirements can be found at this web page: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/certificate-teaching-english-second-or-other-language. In Spring 2020, two new courses, LINGUIST 330 The Structure of English for Language Teaching and LLC 320 Foundations of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages will be offered online, at no extra cost to UMass Amherst undergraduates.
This Certificate is intended to provide students with the foundation in linguistics and language teaching that they need to succeed as an English language teacher. It can serve as preparation for teaching English abroad, or for teaching outside the public school system here in the US (it does not provide certification or licensure for teaching in the K-12 context).
UMass Linguistics top 3 for third year in a row
The QS world rankings by subject have again placed UMass Linguistics in the top three, at number two in 2019. We are the only department besides #1 MIT to have been in the top three for the last three years; this year the University of Maryland has replaced Harvard at #3. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2019/linguistics.
Bhatt in Bucharest
Abralin 50th Anniversary
The 50th anniversary of Abralin, the Brazilian linguistics society met May 1-9 in Maceio Brazil with courses, workshops, keynote lectures and 2000 participants. UMass participants included: Andries Coetzee, Tom Roeper, Suzi Lima and Umass Visitors: Sabrina Lopez, Marcus Maia
Andries Coetzee gave a Keynote lecture on “Individual vs. Community Variation in Phonetics and Phonology”
Tom Roeper gave a Keynote lecture on: “The connection between Recursion and Mathematics and its prospects in pedagogy ” And he gave a course on using acquisitiion materials in schools together with Marcus Maia.
Suzi Lima (with Tonjes Veenstra) held a session on “Complexity in indigenous languages” which illustrated embedding in half a dozen languages and several language families.
In addition: Noam Chomsky, Geoff Pullum, and Dan Everett among others gave Keynote lextures–there were large crowds and some spirited discussion about recursion in indigenous languages (between Dan Everett and Tom Roeper).
In addition, there was a special session on Linguistics and Resistance in which the rise of fascism and connections to universities was discussed and action urged. This occurred in response to attacks by President Bolsanaro on the universities and the announced 1/3 cutbacks on public universities, with potential immediate impact on a number of participants. There was a political demonstration and chants of “Lula Livre” (freedom for Lula) and people were very glad to hear of 800 universities (led by Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge) who expressed support for Philosophy and Sociology depts. in Brazil which had been directly attacked.
Michael Becker takes the reins of UMLAUT
From Joe Pater
As of the next issue, our new faculty member Michael Becker will be assembling our blog posts into our *weekly* newsletter. The publication schedule has been erratic lately due to it having been in the hands of your often distracted Department Chair. Even if my failures often led to guilt, I enjoyed reading the departmental news as I put UMLAUT together, and look forward to doing so in the future.