Author Archives: Joseph Pater

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).

 

Bhatt in Bucharest

Rajesh Bhatt and Léa Nash (Paris 7) will be giving mini-courses this weekend [September 27 & 28] at the University of Bucharest, Romania.
Rajesh’s course will be on relative clauses, with a focus on their joint work on Georgian rom-relatives. Léa’s course will be on unergatives.
These mini-courses are part of a lecture series organized by Professor Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin [Paris 7, http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Gens/Dobrovie-Sorin]. Their local hosts at the University of Bucharest are Profs. Alexandra Cornilescu and Ion Giurgea.

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.