Irene Heim (MIT, UMass PhD 1982) and Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart) will be jointly awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on November 11 2024. The prize has been awarded “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language”. The ceremony will include presentations by Irene Heim and Hans Kamp, as well as Barbara Partee, Craige Roberts (UMass PhD 1987), Reinhard Muskens and Anders Schoubye (see titles and abstracts: program).

        

Barbara Partee and Craige Roberts (OSU, UMass PhD 1987) will make invited presentations at the University of Stockholm on November 13. Additionally, they will meet up with alumni Robin Cooper (PhD 1975) and Elisabet Engdahl (PhD 1980).

Barbara Partee: “Ideas and Controversies in the History of Formal Semantics”
Craige Roberts: “Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics”.

Members of our department are making poster presentations at this year’s BU Conference on Language Development (November 7-10): Deborah Foucault, Angelica Hill and Tom Roeper. You can find the website here: BUCLD 49.

Romanian-English bilingual adults are more recursive with adjectives in L1 than in L2 (Deborah Foucault, Tom Roeper and Adina Camelia Bleotu)

We investigate experimentally how bilingual adults (Romanian L1-English L2) interpret recursive adjectivemodified sequences in contexts involving (sub)set contrasts in both languages (”flori mici roşii”, lit. ‘flowers small red’ in Romanian L1, red small flowers in English L2). We ask whether the UG Recursive Set-Subset Ordering (RSSO) Constraint is observed equally in Romanian L1 and English L2, such that the adjective closer to the noun picks the set and the adjective further away picks the subset. We consider two theories: a full access to UG theory of bilingualism predicts that bilinguals should observe RSSO in both L1 and L2, a theory of transfer predicts bilinguals should struggle more with recursion in L2 English since Romanian L1 uses a mirror adjectival order of English L1. We find that bilinguals are recursive in both languages, but less so in L2, where RSSO seems to interact with language-specific differences (word order, (in)flexible cognitive AORs).

Children’s acquisition of circumstantial modals: Do they know where necessity can come from?
Chui Yi Lee and Angelica Hill

Already 3 y.o. children produce deontic necessity modals, e.g., has to. However, although children use them, it’s not clear whether they fully know what they mean. Adult speakers know necessity can originate from an external source or from within the subject to achieve some goal, yet prefer to interpret deontic necessity as originating from an external source. We are curious about the following question(1) Are L1 English-acquiring children are sensitive to the source of necessity when interpreting ”has to”, and(2) if so, do they also show an external necessity preference as English speaking adults do? We tested 3-8 y.o.children (n=28; Mage=5;05; SD=1;03) and adults (n=15) in a between-subject picture selection task. Our results support previous work suggesting that although children produce deontic modals, they struggle to understand their meaning. Yet our results offer novel insight into how children struggle to understand has to, one factor being the source of necessity.

The Department of Linguistics is now offering a Linguistics and Data Science Certificate. This is a 5 course undergraduate certificate that provides a foundation in linguistics, quantitative methods and programming, and builds on it within the study of human language and language technology. Students develop programing skills, understanding of basic formal foundations (e.g. formal language theory and probability theory), and applications in language technology and in the study of human linguistic knowledge. The full curriculum is below.

As the first programming course, students can also elect to take Ling 190D Data Science for Linguistics, which is being offered online in the Fall and Spring of the 24-25 academic year.

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Curriculum for Data Science and Linguistics Certificate

The first two courses to be completed are an introduction to Linguistics, and an introduction to programming

1. Linguist 201: How Language Works: Introduction to Linguistic Theory

2. One of CICS 108, 110, or COMPSCI119

CICS/STATISTC 108: Foundations of Data Science CICS 110: Foundations of Programming
COMPSCI 119: Introduction to Programming with Python

Information on these introductory programming courses can be found at: https://www.cics.umass.edu/content/intro-programming.

Ling 201 and the programming course are prerequisites for Ling 409, which is itself a prerequisite for Ling 429

3. LINGUIST 409 Introduction to Computational Linguistics

4. LINGUIST 429H Advanced Computational Linguistics

5. An elective in quantitative linguistics or in statistics. One of the following courses, or another course at the 300-level or above approved by the Certificate director:

ANTHRO 281 Statistics in Anthropology Using R

PSYCH 240 Statistics in Psychology

STAT 240 Introduction to Statistics

LING 394 Language and Cognition

LING 412 Language processing and the brain

LING 414 Introduction to phonetics for linguists

The Five Colleges Prosody Community meeting will take place this Friday (November 8) 12-2pm in ILC N400.  The meeting is convened by  Meghan Armstrong (Spanish and Portuguese, UMass Amherst), Mara Breen (Psych/Education, Mt. Holyoke), Heather Pon-Barry (Computer Science, Mt. Holyoke), and Kristine Yu (Linguistics, UMass Amherst). The plan is meet/greet and also have 5 minute lightning talks from people who would like to tell us about what they are up to in research. 

If you would like to attend,  please fill out this linked Google form. Contact Kristine Yu if you are not affiliated with UMass and would like to be added to the ling-prosody mailing list.

Noa Bassel’s 2024 PhD dissertation “Complex Anaphors” is now available here.

Abstract. Complex anaphors such as English x-self exhibit at least three levels of cross-linguistic regularities. On the morphological level, they show a typical construction that combines a distinct pronominal element with a morpheme of a predictable etymological source (a body part terms or an emphatic element). On the syntactic level, the distribution of anaphors is complementarity with pronouns in some but not all environments. On the conceptual level, complex anaphors share their semantic function with a class of other elements – (simple anaphors, reflexive verbs) and are often used themselves as intensifiers (as in, ‘The queen HERSELF came to our party’). This thesis asks what ties these properties together and offers an minimalist analysis.

Didier Demolin of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle will give a talk on 08 Nov 3:30 PM in ILC N400. The title is “Phonetics and phonology of prenasalized consonants in Mbugu.” 

Kyle Johnson presents joint work with Brian Dillon at MIT LingLUnch on October 31. The title is “Presupposing Principle A”.

The Linguistics Colloquium this Friday November 1st will be given by Keir Moulton (University of Toronto). Time and place: 3.30pm in ILC S211. Title and abstract below.

Clausal prolepsis, Islands, and the D/C connection
In clausal prolepsis constructions, a clause is doubled by a pronoun or demonstrative (1).
1.    a.   I love it that there’s cookies after the colloq.
         b.   That’s great that you are coming to semantics reading group.
Once correctly separated from expletive constructions (Ruys 2010), prolepsis constructions pose a puzzle because one argument slot is expressed twice. In joint work with Wesley Orth (UofT), we revive a Rosenbaum-style account in which prolepsis constructions are generated as DP constituents (Sudhoff 1996, Angelopoulos 2023), where the determiner it selects CP. We will present new experimental evidence that clarifies the island status of clausal prolepsis (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Postal and Pullum 1988). Prolepsis constructions are more opaque for wh-movement than ‘bare’ CPs, but less opaque than complex NPs. We argue that this follows on our account and not on competitor accounts (Angelopoulos 2023, Longenbaugh 2019). Further evidence for the analysis comes from close examination of cases like (1b) where the proleptic element is a demonstrative. I will end with a discussion of why (certain) CPs participate in prolepsis, focusing on debates about the nominal nature of C across languages.