We’re elated to share the (belated) news that, earlier this past summer, Jia Ren was awarded ‘Best Talk’ at the student session of this year’s European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI). Jia’s talk, “Weak Reciprocity Without the Cumulative Operator” was based upon her first Generals Paper.

(Belated) Congratulations, Jia!

The UMass Linguistics Department was well represented at both this year’s SuB and AMLaP!

At Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB), held at Ruhr University Bochum, PhD student Mariam Asatryan presented a poster featuring her Generals Paper research on “Perfective in Eastern Armenian”. In addition, there were posters and talks by UMass alums and past visitors, including Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Bernhard Schwarz, Adina Camelia Bleotu, Jesse Harris, Carolyn Anderson, Chris Davis, Zahra Mirrazi, Daniel Altshuler, Jon Ander Mendia, Maribel Romero, Deniz Ozyildiz, and Rodica Ivan. And, at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), held at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brian, and Language in San Sebastian, there were presentations by PhD students Mariam Asatryan, Özge Bakay, and Eva Neu.

Congratulations to all!

We’re extremely delighted to share the news that Shay Hucklebridge successfully defended her dissertation on Wednesday, July 12th. Titled “Associative Plurals”, her dissertation puts forth a novel semantic and syntactic analysis of so-called ‘associative plurals’, one that captures a variety of their cross-linguistically robust interactions with other grammatical constructions.

Pictured above (along with the dissertation fish), her committee consisted of Seth Cable (Chair), Ana Arregui, Rajesh Bhatt, Gennaro Chierchia, and Maya Eddon (Philosophy, Outside Member).

In the fall, Shay will begin a prestigious SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she will be working on language revitalization projects and on the semantics of future marking in the Dene languages of the Canadian Subarctic.

Congratulations, Shay!!

This year’s West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41) featured a great many talks and posters by both students and faculty from UMass, both current and former.

In alphabetical order, this work included:

Rajesh Bhatt, Arka Banerjee, and Kousani Banerjee, “Egocentric Questions in Bangla: Rhetorical or Information-Seeking, but Always Surprising”

Seth Cable and James Crippen, “Stative Marking in Tlingit: Evidence for the Complexity of States”

Amy Rose Deal and Justin Royer, “Mayan Animacy Heirarchy Effects: A Dynamic Interaction Approach”

Angelica Hill, “What About ‘About To’? A Semantic Proposal for Proximate Future Constructions”

Rodica Ivan and Ion Giurgea “Two Types of Anaphoric Relations in Pronouns Consequences for their Syntactic Analysis”

Jon Ander Mendia “Between Aspect and Modality: The ‘Soler+Infinitive’ Periphrasis in Spanish”

Zahra Mirrazi, “Choice Functions and Binder Roof Constraint”

Zahra Mirrazi and Michela Ippolito, “Modal Past as Past: Evidence from non-SOT Languages”

Marcin Morzycki and Starr Sandoval “Propositional How and Implicit Modality”

Deniz Ozyildiz, Maribel Romero, Ciyang Qing, Floris Roelofsen, Wataru Uegaki, “Immobile Remnants of Japanese Why-Stripping”

Paul Portner and Xiang Li, “Overt Deixis and Null Anaphor in Uyghur Attitude Reports”

Brandon Prickett, “Explaining Sour Grapes Harmony’s Unattestedness with Agent-Based Modeling”

Please join us in congratulating Polina Kasyanova, who has just been awarded a Predissertation Research Grant from the UMass Graduate School.

This funding will support Polina’s continued research on incorporation in Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages such as Chukchi and Itelmen. In particular, it will fund an extended research visit to Harvard University, where Polina will be able to collaborate with scholars like Jonathan Bobaljik and his students, as well as conduct research on written sources available at Widener Library.

Congratulations, Polina!

UMass was well represented at this year’s Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 2023), held April 28-30 at McGill University.

Work by current and former UMass folks included:

• Seth Cable and James Crippen, “Stative Marking in Tlingit: Evidence for the Complexity of States”
• Amy Rose Deal and Justin Royer, “Mayan Animacy Restrictions and Dynamic Interaction”
• Emily Elfner, “Re-Examining Default-to-Opposite Stress in Kwak’wala”
• Suzi Lima & Pedro Mateo Pedro, “Itzaj is a Classifier-for-Numerals Language”
• Andrew McKenzie, “Polysynthesis and the Division of Labor in Grammar”
• Rose Underhill, Anne Bertrand, and Terrance Gatchalian, “A Typology of Roots in Ktunaxa”