This highly competitive award provides a research-intensive semester to tenured faculty who have gone above-and-beyond in teaching and/or service. Kristine’s exceptional work as both our own Undergraduate Program Advisor and one of our Academic Advisors has more than earned her the teaching release that comes with this award.
It is our great pleasure to share the news that Linguistics Major Thomas Truong (Class of 2025) has been selected as one of this year’s Rising Researchers:
As explained at the link above, the Rising Researcher Award is a University-wide honor that “recognizes undergraduate students who excel in research, challenge their intellect, and exercise exceptional creativity.”
Thomas was selected for the award based upon his independent research into the semantics of the past-marker ‘da’ in Vietnamese, research which he presented at this summer’s CreteLing and DGfS Summer School at the University of Goettingen.
For more information about Thomas’s work and his experiences as a UMass Linguistics Major, please check out the profile below:
We are extremely happy to share the news that Joe Pater has been selected as one of the University’s Spotlight Scholars for Fall 2025!
The Spotlight Scholar program at UMass publicly acknowledges highly accomplished faculty and their professional achievements. Spotlight Scholars are exceptional faculty who exemplify the quality and commitment of the UMass Amherst faculty. For a list of this year’s Spotlight Scholars, please see the link below:
Joe’s selection as a Spotlight Scholar is based upon his long and deep line of research into models of language that synthesize methods and theories from Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science, most notably his extensive and varied investigations into the use of numerically weighted constraints for both the analysis of phonological systems and the development of computational models of human phonological learning.
Please join us in congratulating Joe on this wonderful achievement!
Please join us in congratulating UMass alum Andries Coetzee for being named the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
Professor Coetzee graduated the UMass Linguistics PhD program in 2004, and he joined the University of Michigan Department of Linguistics in the same year. From his own message on Facebook announcing this honor:
“As I start my 21st year as a professor at University of Michigan, it will be as the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics. Being named as a collegiate professor is a recognition that Michigan bestows on senior faculty for sustained contributions across all aspects of the profession. But here is what makes it particularly interesting and special: When awarded a collegiate professorship, you get to name it after a former Michigan faculty member. I chose Judy Irvine to name my professorship after. Judy is a leading thinker of 20th century linguistic anthropology. But more important to me personally, she has done significant work on the linguistic ecology of Africa, and has given African languages a prominent place at Michigan, in the US, and beyond. Judy has even done important work on South African languages. It is an honor to have her and my names connected for the rest of my career. I hope that I can continue Judy’s work of making Africa (and South Africa in particular) more visible and present on our campus and in US academia.”
Please join us in congratulating Professor Michael Becker for being named one of this year’s UMass STRIDE fellows (Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence).
This will actually be Michael’s fourth year as a STRIDE Fellow, working to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty recruitment.
Please join us in congratulating undergraduate Linguistics major Thomas Truong, who has received a competitive scholarship to attend this year’s DGfS Summer School at the University of Goettingen. All of Thomas’s airfare, lodging, and tuition will be covered by the grant. In addition, Thomas will be giving a student poster presentation of his research on the semantics of the Vietnamese tense/aspect particle “da”, which was conducted as part of an independent study course this year with Seth Cable.
Alongside the DGfS school, Thomas was also accepted to and will be attending this year’s Crete Summer School of Linguistics (a.k.a. ‘CreteLing’) in July.
We’re very happy to share the news that recent alum Shay Hucklebridge has received two highly competitive grants to support her fieldwork on the Dene languages of Northern Canada.
This summer, Shay will be conducting fieldwork on the Northern Dene languages of the Mackenzie Subgroup, including Tlicho Yatii, Sahtúgot’iné, K’ashógot’ine, and Shíhgot’ine. The project will be focusing upon the the languages’ future-marking morphology, and the possible variation in their semantics, as either temporal operators or modal operators.
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.
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.
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.
