Category Archives: Acquisition

Call for papers: Brazilian Linguistics Association 50th Anniversary

The Brazilian Linguistics Association (ABRALIN) is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2019 with a special event: ABRALIN50: abralin.org/abralin50. The event, which will host the 11th International Congress of ABRALIN, the 24th ABRALIN’s Institute and five satellite meetings will take place in beautiful Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, from May 02 to May 09, 2019.

The main objective of the 11th International Congress of ABRALIN is to address fundamental issues for Linguistics today, instigating debates that facilitate courses of actions in the area in face of the transformations in the contemporary world. Moreover, the event also aims to promote propositional dialogues between Linguistics and other areas of knowledge. Keynote speakers: Andries Coetzee, Daniel Everett, Dermeval da Hora, Eni Orlandi, Geoff Pullum, José Morais, Marcos Bagno, Maria Helena Mira Mateus, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Niebuhr, Roland Pfau, Tom Roeper, and Willem Adelaar.

Paper Submission Deadline: November 30th.

The ABRALIN‘s Institute, with a long tradition in the history of our Association, aims to contribute to the international colaboration and to the qualification in the area of Linguistics. The Institute will offer a selection of courses taught by renowned foreign and Brazilian specialists, promoting the discussion, the dissemination and the sharing of the most recent theoretical and methodological trends in the area of Linguistics. Lecturers: Andries Coetzee, Daniel Everett, Erez Levon, Geoff Pullum, Jean-Jacques Courtine, José Luiz Fiorin, José Morais, Marcos Bagno, Oliver Niebuhr, Roland Pfau, Tom Roeper, Willem Adelaar and Xinchun Wang, among others.

ABRALIN invites the academic community to celebrate its 50th anniversary in a stunning place: Maceió, Alagoas.

More information: https://www.abralin.org/abralin50/

UMass Linguistics at NELS 49 at Cornell, October 5-7, 2018

UMass Linguistics was well represented at NELS 49 at Cornell. Cutting and pasting from the NELS website, I find:

The Reversible Core of ObjExp, Location, and Govern-Type Verbs.
Michael Wilson.

Besides Exceptives.
Ekaterina Vostrikova.

Phase Sensitive Morphology and Dependent Case.
Kimberly Johnson.

Don’t give me that attitude! Anti-De Se and Feature Matching of German D-Pronouns.
Alexander Göbel.

A secondary crossover effect in Hindi and the typology of movement.
Rajesh Bhatt and Stefan Keine.

Complementizers in Laz are attitude sensitive.
Omer Demirok, Deniz Ozyildiz and Balkiz Ozturk.

Romanian loves Me: Clitic Clusters, Ethics & Cyclic AGREE.
Rudmila-Rodica Ivan.

UMass Alum Maria Gouskova was one of the invited speakers. There were enough of us to justify a group picture.

UMass Linguistics at CreteLing 2018: Part 3 [Distributed Group Photos]

There was frost outside this morning. So it might be a good time to think about summer. This summer the UMass Linguistics department was very well represented at the CreteLing 2018 summer school in Rethymnou, Crete. Since there are a lot of pictures, I’ll break them into three parts. The third part is distributed group photos. It was difficult to get everyone into one picture. So there are many pictures.

In the big group picture you can see Elena Benedicto, Rajesh Bhatt, Satoshi Tomioka, Kai von Fintel, Petr Kusliy, William Quirk, Bobby Tosswill, Ede Zimmerman [partially], Caroline Fery, Winnie Lechner, Katia Vostrikova, Zahra Mirrazi, Rodica Ivan, Leah Chapman, Kyle Johnson, and Deniz Özyildiz.

UMass Linguistics at CreteLing 2018 Part 2: [Extracurricular Activities]

Summer Dialect Research Project 2018

Four undergraduate students participated in the Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP) at UMass in June hosted by the Center for the Study of African American Language (CSAAL). The Center, directed by Lisa Green, fosters and integrates research on language in African American speech communities and applications of that research in different realms. Three students, Christian Muxica, Alexander Santos, and Emily Smith, are enrolled at UMass and majoring in linguistics. Janiya Gilbert is a sophomore at North Carolina A&T University in the animal science program and has interests in language-related and social justice fields. The participants gained research experiences in areas in the study of African American English (AAE), a linguistic variety spoken by some African Americans. They worked on their skills in linguistics while also building broader analytical, argumentation, and collaboration skills. They completed group critical review projects and individual research projects that required analysis of data sets from AAE. During the three-week program, participants attended lecture/discussion sessions with UMass faculty, researchers, and graduate students, who covered topics in syntax, phonology, acquisition, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing. Professors Joe Pater and Kristine Yu worked with the participants in interactive sessions on topics related to sound patterns of AAE, such as the production of word final -t/-d and prosodic properties of yes-no questions in the variety. Professors Tom Roeper and Brian Dillon shared research on topics in acquisition and language processing and linked that research to data in AAE. For instance, Professor Dillon made the connection between research on garden path sentences and subject relative constructions in AAE. In other sessions, researchers discussed ways in which work in linguistics relates to other disciplines. Dr. Barbara Pearson, former research associate at UMass, demonstrated how research used to develop assessments in communication disorders for children who speak all varieties English, including AAE, has drawn on linguistics. Computer science graduate student Su Lin Blodgett presented her research on natural language processing and AAE and Twitter. One participant summed up his experience in the program in the following way: “I really enjoyed these three weeks and got a lot out of our work and hope to shape my senior year linguistic work around some of this research and our projects.”