Faruk Akkuş taught a course titled “Major Themes in Ergativity” in the online summer school in Iranian Linguistics organized by the University of Arizona on August 5-8, 2024.
UMass alumnus Zahra Mirrazi, currently a postdoc at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, also taught a course on “Toward a unified theory of indefinites”.
Alum Elliott Moreton (PhD 2002) and Joe Pater attended the “Expression, Language and Music 2” conference at the University of Connecticut on the weekend of Oct. 4, where they presented a poster on “Explicit and implicit reversal of musical and phonological stimuli”. Their co-authors on the poster also included Brandon Prickett (PhD 2021) and Lisa Sanders of UMass Psychological and Brain Sciences and Chris White of UMass Music and Dance, as well as Moreton’s UNC Chapel Hill colleague Katya Pertsova. Pater also contributed to the Friday evening music portion of the conference, playing a couple songs on acoustic guitar with Katie Franich of Harvard Linguistics on cello.
Angelica Hill presented joint work with Shota Momma (Negishi) “Priming Abstract Modal Mechanisms in Modals with Causatives” at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) at Ann Arbor, Highlights in the Language Sciences Conference at Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) in Rotterdam and The International Conference on Actionality, Tense Aspect, Modality/Evidentiality (CHRONOS) in Toulouse.
Jed Pizarro-Guevara’s paper on Tagalog’s restriction on A-bar extraction, co-authored with Matt Wagers, has appeared in Glossa. The link to the full paper is below:
Abstract.
A well-received generalization in Tagalog is that only the argument that is cross-referenced by voice is eligible for A-bar extraction. However, recent work has shown that agents that are not cross-referenced by voice are also eligible. We provide naturally occurring data, along with experimental evidence, consistent with this more permissive picture. Further, we present computational evidence that participants were treating agent-extractions not cross-referenced by voice categorically, that is, they were either accepting or rejecting them in any given trial. Thus, we identify a piece of grammatical knowledge (i.e., extraction) that is systematic within an individual speaker but varies unpredictably across a population of Tagalog speakers. In other words, our data reveal two separable types of Tagalog speakers vis-à-vis extraction. We propose that this is a form of grammar competition that arises via the idea that the agent-first bias affects how child learners parse input strings under noisy conditions during acquisition.
Cerys Hughes and Gaja Jarosz presented the poster “Pattern Structure Modulates Learning of Lexically Conditioned Morphology” at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2024) in Edinburgh, Scotland, September 5-7, 2024
Jed Sam Guevara was an invited speaker at 16th International Conference on Austronesian Languages (June 20-24), where he gave a plenary talk entitled “The state of the art in Philippine psycholinguistics.” Additionally, with Alessa Farinella, he visited the Linguistics Department at the University of the Philippines Diliman. At UP, Jed and Alessa ran a visual world experiment designed to investigate the extent to which Tagalog comprehenders leverage Principle A to guide their real-time interpretation of reflexives, and the extent to which their attention is mediated by the morphological/thematic similarity between DPs in working memory. Jed and Alessa also collaborated as part of the organizing team for the 31st annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, which took place here at UMass June 12-14.
The Linguistics Department has set up a page in memory of Shai Cohen here:
https://websites.umass.edu/linguist/in-memoriam-shai-cohen/
Friends and colleagues are invited to contribute. Here is the orinal post from the Linguistics Department commemorating Shai:
Graduate student Alessa Farinella gave an invited joint talk with Daniel Kaufman (Queens College, CUNY) entitled Tagalog prosody in the Austronesian context: word-level prominence, downstep, and the tune inventory on October 7, 2024. This talk was part of the Exploring Tagalog Linguistics talks in the Tagalog Lecture Series, hosted by the Batangas Tagalog initiative of Eva Huber and Dr. Aireen Barrios-Arnuco at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and De La Salle University (Philippines). The talk was over Zoom at 12:15-1:30pm CET, 6:15-7:30 pm PHT.
Alex Krauska joins our department this year as a post-doc. We asked her to tell us a little bit about herself:
“I am interested in psycho- and neuro-linguistics, morphosyntax, and acquired language disorders. I did my PhD at the University of Maryland, where I worked on bridging the gaps between morphosyntactic theory and models of language production. My dissertation, “A World Without Words: a non-lexicalist framework for psycho- and neuro-linguistics”, outlines the issues with models that rely on words or lemmas as a unit of language production, and describes a non-lexicalist, non-semiotic alternative. In my spare time, I play music, hike, and care for a variety of houseplants.”
A workshop in honor of Janet Dean Fodor was held at the start of this year’s Human Sentence Processing Conference (May 15), including participation by Lyn Frazier. Recordings of the workshop are available here.