Bruce Hayes will give a colloquium talk on March 28 at 3.30 in ILC S211. The title of the talk is: A wug-test of Catalan consonant alternations (joint work with Kevin Liang and Victoria Mateu). See abstract and details here.

Glow 47 takes place in Frankfurt and Götttingen on March 25-28. The program includes presentations by two current UMass graduate students and two current visitors:

Satoru Osaki: Conditional wh-questions with VP-ellipsis

Carla Spellerberg (with Carolin Reinert): On nominal event arguments: experimental evidence for a meaning-based perspective

Noa Bassel: Unifying English PPs

Lulu Guo: Right-node Raising and Chinese A-not-A Questions

The program also includes presentations from numerous UMass alumni and past visitors:

Carolyn Anderson (with Hangyeol Park and Yoolim Kim): Perspective Shift with Korean Motion Verbs

Elena Benedicto: Head movement and the interpretation of Agents in Motion Predicates in ASL

Adina Camelia Bleoutu (with Gabriela Bîlbîie, Anton Benz and Lyn Tieu): Agreement with singular disjuncts in adult and child language: A grammatical lacuna or a meaning-driven process?

Zahra Mirrazi: What is Mood about?

Zahra Mirrazi and Ethan Poole: Syntactic Variables and Crossover

Maribel Romero: The verbal TAM paradigm: the role of Mood

Joey Sabbagh will make a presentation at the Syntax Workshop on March 27.

Mary El Vaughan, an undergraduate student in our department, will be presenting her research at the 9th Annual Undergraduate Linguistics Research Symposium in Berkeley on April 5th. The title of her talk is “From clippings to discourse markers: Lexicalizations of online shortenings”.

Delattre and Freeman’s (1968) “A dialect study of American r’s by x-ray motion picture” is a groundbreaking phonetics study that documents variation in the articulation of American English “r”; now famously, the tongue can be either bunched or retroflexed. I asked Don about how this collaboration arose, and he shared these recollections. (Joe Pater).

Pierre Delattre was one of my many mentors, for all of whom I am very grateful. I arrived at my first job as the English-language person at UC Santa Barbara, only to realize that although I’d had a fair amount of graduate coursework in EL (Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, History and Structure of English) in the course of my English (not linguistics; very few existed then [1965]) Ph.D., I really had had no systematic training in linguistics. Pierre ran a big phonetics lab at UCSB and I just went over there and worked with him. He was very kind and generous with his time and ideas, and without my asking put my name as joint author on the paper I had worked on that came out of that lab. He encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) one of the summer-study grants that the UC system had for young faculty, which sent me to UCLA for the 1966 summer Linguistic Institute where I encountered Noam. Noam, in turn, after the summer was over, encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) an NSF fellowship to go to MIT for a year. When I got it, everyone in English was much chuffed at the fact that the National *Science* Foundation had awarded a postdoc to an assistant professor of *English*, but I, even then being aware of the clout Noam had in the fellowship world, wasn’t. I knew it was more about Noam than about me. At MIT I worked mostly with Morris Halle, who in turn recommended me first for my UMass job in English, and then when they were thinking of letting me start a linguistics department (there was a moribund program in place), intervened in my behalf for that as well and gave me a ton of invaluable advice in the early going. So my early career was sort of a handoff-handoff-handoff. But it all started with Pierre, really. He had a very nice house in a fancy part of Santa Barbara (Hope Ranch, down by the ocean), and I played tennis with him on his court there. Not long after I left he dropped dead on that court at age 67 while playing with his family. Amazing guy.

Katrin Erk, our new colleague jointly appointed with CICS, and Joe Pater have been awarded grants from the new HFA/CICS Collaborative Seed Fund. Katrin’s project is a collaboration with Brendan O’Connor of CICS is entitled “Computationally analyzing centuries of U.S. legal argumentation in linguistic and historical context”. Joe’s collaboration with Virginia Partridge of the CICS Center for Data Science is on “AI-assisted analysis of phonological variation in English”.

Congratulations Katrin, Joe, Brendan and Virginia!

Members of the Linguistics Department were thrilled to get the news that Andy Barto has received the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, along with his graduate student and collaborator Richard Sutton, now at the University of Alberta. He won this “Nobel Prize in Computing” for “developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of a branch of artificial intelligence known as reinforcement learning (RL)”, as stated in the announcement from the Manning College of Information and Computing Sciences, where Andy is Professor Emeritus.

Barbara Partee remembers Andy as a “cherished colleague in what was originally the COINS department (Computer and Information Science), going back to the late 1970s, even before he became partly “ours” by marrying Peggy Speas”. Joe Pater notes that “Andy was a great colleague to have in CICA as our department was building new ties to his and as my own research was becoming more computational. He was always generous with his time, and full of great insight and advice”. Peggy had this to say about her husband’s award:

It should be emphasized that 1) Computing pioneer Alan Turing was hounded literally to death because of bigotry toward his sexual orientation, of the sort that is once again raising its ugly head in the US and 2) Andy’s work was basic research whose practical applications did not emerge until decades after the original research. It was funded by federal grants, and was precisely the sort of research that the current admin wants to cease funding.

Kristine Yu, Charlotte Kaiser, Alessa Farinella, Seung Suk Lee will present a paper at the conference “Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World”. The conference is held on March 13-14 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.

The title of the paper is: Cross-linguistic evidence for prosodic domains: are tones “different”?

We will be having our first Spring semester Five Colleges Prosody Community get-together this Friday, March 7, 11:30-1pm at UMass in the linguistics department, ILC N400.  We will have lunch available, probably starting around 11:15 or so. Everyone is very welcome to come by! If anyone wants to get on our mailing list, please contact me, Kristine Yu.

On the agenda we have the following:
Mara Breen (MHC) will present a study exploring how children’s prosody when reading The Cat in the Hat out loud predicts their phonological awareness and reading comprehension skills. This work will be presented at the 2025 Human Sentence Processing Conference at the University of Maryland.
Katerina Drakoulaki (MHC) will present current work with the Springfield Museums as an example of a successful scientific partnership that facilitates research participation for participants who are widely diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, and linguistic background.
Kristine Yu (UMass) will present some current work with Charlotte Kaiser, Alessa Farinella, and Seung Suk (Josh) Lee on cross-linguistic evidence for prosodic domains that will be presented at Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World at the Arctic University of Norway Trømso.

March 7 2025
 I’ve elided more of this title than you would have done:  variable extraction out of do-ellipsis supports full phase ellipsis

https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/events/colloquium-rebecca-lewis-umass-amhert