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

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“.

Our very own undergraduate majors Maxine Gemeinhardt (Linguistics, ’25), and Evan Owens (Linguistics and Portuguese, ’25) are winners of the campus-wide Why Do I Learn Languages essay contest! Congratulations Maxine and Evan!!

Maxine and Evan will be panelists at the Why do I learn Languages Essay Contest Winners panel, Friday March 28, 10-11 in the Bromery Center for the Arts Lobby as part of HFA Days.

Here is the full information about their panel:

Friday March 28, 10:00-11:00 “Why do I Learn Languages?” Essay Contest Winners

Bromery Center for the Arts Lobby

Undergraduate Panel Moderated by Professor Ela Gezen, German – Languages Literatures and Cultures, and Professor Teresa Ramsby, Classics. 

Join us to hear about different language-learning journeys on our campus! The recent winners of the campus-wide, short-essay contest read their winning contributions, share their experiences, and reflect on the impact of multilingualism and language learning in their lives.

Two guest lectures by SAM HELLMUTH, University of York

When and where?
March 3: 1.15-2.15
March 5: 12.45-2.15
The lectures will be held over Zoom, with a meeting in N458. Please contact Faruk Akkuş for further information.

Talk by AMY ROSE DEAL, UC Berkeley

Where and when?
March 5: 2.30-4 N458
Title: Case sensitivity reflects case structure: agreement, extraction, and clitics

February 28 2025
Or and any and modals and quantifiers

Friday 21 2025
Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation

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

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the HFA Committee on AI and Emerging Technology, I’d like to invite you to a couple of upcoming events that aim to foster discussions about AI in CHFA. The meetings are open to all, and we encourage members of other colleges to join us. The talks will be 10 minutes with 5 minutes of discussion each, and then we will have 15 minutes of general discussion, followed by another half hour for informal smaller conversations. We hope these meetings will help to facilitate further conversations and future initiatives in research and teaching.

Because space is somewhat limited, we are asking participants to register in advance – please see the links below.

Best,

Joe Pater.

AI & Emerging Technology Lightning Talks 

The HFA Committee on AI and Emerging Technology will host two series of lightning talks, open to all, in which faculty will share their perspectives and research projects. 

Session 1: Friday, February 28, 11am-12:30pm, Room ILC N400. Please register to attend.  

Brian Dillon, Linguistics, “Do LLMs and humans process language in similar ways?” 

Sonja Drimmer, History of Art & Architecture. “Computer Vision and the AI Grift in Public Education” 

Chris White, Music and Dance, “Music’s challenge for AI, and AI’s Challenge for Music” 
 

Session 2: Thursday, March 13, 12-1:30pm, Tower Room, South College. Please register to attend.   

Eleonore Neufeld, Philosophy, “The Role of AI in the Philosophy of Mind: A Primer” 

Virginia Partridge, Center for Data Science, and Joe Pater, Linguistics, “AI-assisted Analysis of Phonological Variation in English” 

Emiliano Ricciardi, Music and Dance “Computational Parsing of Renaissance Poetry and Music.”