Omri Doron joins us this year as a visiting lecturer. His main interests are in semantics. Below are a picture and quote from his website. In addition to linguistics, Omri reports enjoying grilling things, playing pickle-ball and reading “Lonesome Dove”. Welcome to the Department!

I work mostly on semantics and its interfaces with pragmatics, syntax and morphology. Topics I’ve written about include presupposition accommodation, number marking, relevance, and genericity. I think that my main research motivation is identifying the fundamental processes involved in our knowledge of language. 

https://omridoron.com

Brian Smith (PhD 2015) has taken a position as Principal Solutions Architect (GenAI) at iMerit. Congratulations Brian!

Welcome to Iva Kovač and Xevi Pujol Molist who are visiting the Department this Fall.You can find more about their interests from their websites listed below:

The University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics volume 42 is now available on-line from UMass Libraries. This volume consists of two issues in celebration of our department’s 50th anniversary. The first is a collection of new scholarly works by alumni of our PhD program, and the second is a set of historical reflections. Links to the issues, and a list of the contents, follow.

UMOP 42: Papers in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of UMass Linguistics

Amalia Gnanadesikan “Gemination and palatization in Dhivehi”
Helen Goodluck “Considering the evidence, no firm conclusion can be reached: The interpretation of adjunct PRO”
Maria Gouskova & Suzy Ahn “Sublexical phonotactics and English comparatives”
Min-Joo Kim “Licensing ACC-marked external possession in Korea”
Yoshihisa Kitagawa “Local prominence in micro information packaging”
Andrew Lamont “Optimality Theory with lexical insertion is not computable
Elliott Moreton “The Tom Swift illusion”

UMOP 42: Historical reflections in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of UMass Linguistics

Timothy R. Austin “The Graduate Student Senate, The Graduate Linguistic Student Association, and The University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics”
Donald C. Freeman “Linguistics at UMass Amherst: Ends and beginnings”
Joe Pater “The second quarter century of UMass Linguistics: A brief overview and a web page archive”
Anne-Michelle Tessier “South College: A fond roast of a UMass Linguistics icon”

We are happy to introduce you to our incoming class!

Yifan Hu

Hello! My name is Yifan Hu. I completed my MA in Linguistics last year at University College London, where I focused — and plan to continue focusing — on phonology, phonetics and computational linguistics, particularly where these areas intersect. I work primarily on English, Mandarin and Spanish, and I’m always open to new languages. 

As some of you might have seen during the Open House, I am the long-haired person who’s sometimes a little too easy to spot in the crowd. I enjoy getting plenty of sleep; and outside of that, I regularly do some indoor workouts with Apple Fitness, occasionally go swimming, and (very) rarely play tennis — I used to play it every week, but I guess I need some recovery training now.

Anbu Vajuravel

My name is Anbu and I grew up in Singapore speaking English and Tamil. I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at UCLA. After completing my degree, I decided that I’d had enough of that and wanted to use my math skills in something else, namely linguistics. I’m interested in syntax-semantics (especially that of South Asian languages) as well as computational studies of syntax and language acquisition. When I’m not doing linguistics you might find me wishing I’d gotten into Singapore’s indie rock scene earlier in my life and playing or making what my friend describes as “5 dollar indie games.”

Kevin Morand

Hi! My name is Kevin (he/him) and I’m originally from France. Before joining UMass, I lived in Chile and South Korea, working as a post-doc in mathematical physics, before recently defecting to linguistics. My main topics of interests are those that reveal the underlying logicality of language; these include the study of classifiers, modality, quantification and part-whole structures.

Outside of linguistics, I enjoy listening to music (especially 60’s British pop) and sometimes playing some (I once ended up as the singer of a Korean ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band’ for a year—despite not really liking their music. We had to disband eventually when one of the members joined a cult). I also enjoy reading (especially North and South American literature), watching movies, stand-up comedy, playing board games and walking in nature.

Gabriel Correa

Hi all, I’m Gabriel (he/him)! I’m originally from Brazil and just finished my undergrad at UChicago. My main research interest is in theoretical syntax, and I’ve been particularly interested in phenomena such as clitic doubling and null subjects within an information-structural framework. I’ve worked quite a bit on Blackfoot and Brazilian Portuguese in undergrad, so I’m very much looking forward to working across different languages during my time at UMass. Outside of linguistics, I love movies (I’ve even done a stint as a film projectionist in Chicago!), live theater, and crocheting.

We’re delighted to share the news that Dr. Magda Oiry has been selected to serve as one of this year’s UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellows.

As an ADVANCE Faculty Fellow, Magda will “provide recommendations and feedback about priorities to the UMass ADVANCE leadership team and liaise with their departments to promote ADVANCE programs and tools,” including informing ADVANCE about successful equity and inclusion initiatives in Linguistics. 

Magda previously served as an ADVANCE Faculty Fellow in 2023-2024, and was succeeded in our department by Professor Rajesh Bhatt in 2024-2025.

Please join us in congratulating Magda, as well as thanking Rajesh for his service in the past year!

The paper “Type and token frequency jointly drive learning of morphology” co-authored by seven UMass Linguistics members and graduates (Gaja Jarosz, Cerys Hughes, Andrew Lamont, Brandon Prickett, Maggie Baird, Seoyoung Kim & Max Nelson) has been published in the Journal of Memory and Language: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2025.104666

Faruk was a keynote speaker at the 4th North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics (NACIL 4), held at University of Toronto Mississauga on May 23-25, 2025.

Faruk’s talk was titled “The case for case features in syntax and morphology”, which puts forth a theory in which syntactic operations are sensitive to decomposed binary feature bundles that replace the traditional case labels such as “Nominative”, “Ergative”.

Faruk taught a compact-course of three lectures on his upcoming book Case and the Syntax of Argument Indexation at the Linguistics department at the University of Potsdam between June 2-5.

Faruk also delivered a colloquium talk at University of Leipzig on June 6 titled “Lessons from Complementizer Agreement in Arabic Varieties“.

Here are some social pictures from Faruk’s visit: