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UMass Linguistics at Tu+10

Various UMass linguists participated the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10), held at USC on March 1-2, 2025. 

Özge Bakay and Faruk Akkuş gave a talk titled An experimental investigation of conjunct agreement in Turkish.

Duygu Demiray gave a poster (with Matthew Wagers (UC Santa Cruz)) titled Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ.

UMass alum Deniz Özyıldız (Konstanz University) was a keynote speaker and delivered a talk titled “De diye“.

Visiting our department: Lulu Guo

Lulu Guo is visiting our department this semester (Spring 2025). You can reach Lulu here: luluguo”AT”umass.edu and lulu.guo”AT”qmul.ac.edu. Below is some information about Lulu’s research interests, as well as a link to the Department Visitors’ page:
https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/visiting-scholars

“Hello, everyone! My name is Lulu Guo and I am a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. I am currently working on the omission patterns of (Chinese) interrogative sentences. Specifically, I am trying to answer the following questions: why do certain disjunctive questions (without an overt disjunction) have different derivational mechanisms across conjuncts? Why does adding a disjunction lead to different omission patterns? And how do prosodic deletion and constituent ellipsis team up (or clash) in this whole process? Outside of academia, I enjoy going to woods, parks, museums, and various fairs. Looking forward to meeting you all!”
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/people/research-students/profiles/guo.html

Visiting our department: Farah Adeeba

Farah Adeeba is beginning her one-year visit to our department. Below is a small description of Farah’s research interests. You can reach Farah here: fadeeba’at’umass.edu

I am interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech Processing, and AI for low-resource languages. I did my PhD in Speech and Language Technology. In my research career, I have worked on speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speaker identification, and meeting summarization. As a Fulbright postdoc at UMass Amherst, my research explores English vs. Urdu prompt analysis, zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and the structural and semantic analysis of Roman Urdu prompts. I am also working on the development and evaluation of Urdu LLMs, with an emphasis on trustworthiness and multilingual AI. In my spare time, I enjoy music and reading books.

Visiting our department: Lucas Eberle

Here is some information about Lucas Eberle (he/him), a visitor in our Department until July 2025. You can reach Lucas here: lpereiraeber’at’umass.edu, and on the visitors’s page on the department website: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/visiting-scholars

Hello all! My research focuses on Brazilian Portuguese morphophonology. I’m particularly interested in vowel alternations in the verbal paradigms, and I use the MaxEnt framework for my analysis. I have been doing some computational stuff too. I look forward to engaging with fellow department members on these topics and exploring new ideas together. I’ll be around until the end of July. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about my work (Brazilian Portuguese is fun, I promise).

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Faruk Akkuş gives three talks in Germany

On 1/21, Faruk gave a colloquium talk at the Oberseminar English Linguistics at the University of Göttingen. The talk was titled “Causatives as a window into the semantic denotations and morphology of passives”.

Faruk was a speaker at the workshop “Cause(e/r): The Interplay between Event Structure and Argument Realization”, held at University of Cologne on 1/23 – 1/24. His presentation was titled “Implications of causatives for the semantic denotations and morphology of passives”

Faruk’s final colloquium talk was at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf on 1/28, titled “Properties of trilingual word-internal code-switching”