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.
This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) will be hosted by Rutgers University November 1–3. The Annual Meetings on Phonology began as Phonology 2013 here at UMass.
Andrew Lamont (PhD 2022) will give a keynote address: Optimality Theory with lexical insertion is not computable. Abstract: This talk examines the computational consequences of introducing lexical insertion, i.e., the ability to copy morphemes or insert them from the lexicon, as an operation into Optimality Theory. I demonstrate that this operation makes OT not computable: in other words, it is impossible to determine the output of a given input in a finite amount of time. This result is derived by modeling the Post Correspondence Problem in an OT grammar that uses only representations and mechanisms attested in the literature.
Presentations from current students, faculty, and alumni included:
Shota Momma gave a colloquium at the University of Michigan on October 15. The title of his talk was “Building sentence structures in speaking”. More information here.
The UMass Linguistics Department was well represented at both this year’s NELS, held at Yale University on October 17-18, 2024.
Presentations from the current members of the department included:
A talk by Eva Neu “Inflectional morphology in the Turkish verbal domain: Allomorphy, hybridity and change” (handout), and another talk by Beccy Lewis “An implicational hierarchy on the exponence of heterogeneous plurals” (handout).
Moreover, UMass linguists also presented three posters.
Satoru Ozaki: Conditional wh-questions with VP Ellipsis
Mariam Asatryan, Faruk Akkuş and Rajesh Bhatt: Hyperagreement in Alashkert Armenian (poster)
Faruk Akkuş: Locating code-switching in the grammar: Role of postsyntax and morphological wordhood (handout)
Presentations by former members of our department included a talk by Amy Rose Deal (with Zachary O’Hagan) titled “Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity“, and a poster by Yuyang Liu titled “Mandarin Chinese ma: Q morpheme, SA intensifier, or PQP?”.
Noa Bassel‘s paper “Verum, focus and certainty” has recently appeared in the proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 33.
UMass graduate students Yi-Shih Helen Chen and Roger Cheng-yen Liu made presentations at this year’s AFLA conference, held at UMass June 12-14.
Yi-Shih Helen Chen: Existential Verb Heza and the Non-Classical Existential Constructions in Takbanuaz Bunun
Roger Cheng-yen Liu: Intonational Elements and Alignment in Bunun Dialects
Katrin Erk, currently Professor at UT Austin, will be starting a joint position in Linguistics and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass in September 2025. She is a computational linguist, with a specialization in computational semantics. We are excited about the new dimensions in teaching and research Katrin will bring to our faculty, and look forward to welcoming her to our community next fall.
Faruk Akkuş has recently delivered four invited talks at multiple venues:
On September 6, 2024, he gave a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland titled “On the (non)-relation between C and T”.
On September 11, 2024, he delivered a guest lecture virtually at Advanced Syntax Seminar: Turkic Syntax taught by Travis Major at USC. The talk was titled “Some remarks on Turkish causatives and beyond”
This past week, Faruk gave two talks in Paris:
The first one was in the Affixation in Afroasiatic workshop held at CNRS & Paris 8 and Paris Nanterre, titled “Locating code-switching in the grammar: Insights from Semitic”.
On October 7, he gave a colloquium talk at the Paris8-CNRS titled “What can causatives teach us about the semantic denotations and morphology of passives?”