Below is a picture of some past and current UMassers at this year’s Sinn und Bedeutung conference. For complete information about current students presenting at Sinn und Bedeutung, take a look at THIS POST.

Umass was well-represented in the 19th Conference on laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19), which took place in Seoul, June 27-29.

Posters:
Alessa Farinella and Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: The perception of tonal and perceptual cues to phrasing in Seoul Korean.
Cerys Hughes: Interaction of voicing cues in discrimination differences from preoduction.
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: Prosodically conditioned lenition, not voicing,
of lenis obstruents in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech.
Kristine Yu and Alessa Farinella: Variability in the prosodic realization of remote past in African American English.

Corpus Phon:
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee talk: Predictability and phonological context interact in conditioning the acoustic reduction of Seoul Korean lenis obstruents

Undergraduates William Kezerian, Lam An Wyner, Sandro Ansari, together with Kristine Yu presented a paper called “Ye Olde French: Effect of Old and Middle French on SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task Data” at The 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, in June 2024 in Mexico City. The paper developed from work carried out in Linguist 409: Introduction to Computational Linguistics. Congratulations!

Kristine Yu was an invited plenary speaker at Speech Prosody 2024 at Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands on July 5, 2024. She gave the talk: The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology ( talk slides and a related proceedings paper).

 Alessa Farinella and Kristine co-presented a poster called “Prosodic variability in marking remote past in African American English” (poster linked) (the proceedings paper is here).

Cerys Hughes made a presentation titled Modeling the nasal vowel inventories predicted by phonetic biases and learning at the Methoden und Ansätze moderner phonetischer Forschung (“Methods and approaches of modern phonetic research”) (seminar at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) Munich, Germany, July 3.

Cerys also had two papers at the Highlights in the Language Sciences conference, in Nijmegen July 8-11: “Modeling the nasal vowel inventories predicted by phonetic biases and learning” and “Gradient Word-Edge Statistics Influence Syllable Segmentation Judgements”.

Additionally, Cerys had a poster in LabPhon19 (see abstract here).

Three UMass profs joined the faculty at this year’s CreteLing summer school.
Rajesh Bhatt taught Intermediate Semantics, with Yael Sharvit.
Brian Dillon taught Experimental Syntax and Semantics: The view from Pronouns and Anaphora, with Elsi Kaiser.
Kyle Johnson taught Ellipsis, with David Pesetsky

We are devastated by the news that our alum Shai Cohen (PhD 2009) passed away after a long struggle with cancer.

Shai was already an accomplished semanticist when he entered our PhD program. He stood out among his fellow students, who sought out his opinion and advice on academic and other intellectual matters. Shai’s dissertation was an ambitious enterprise at the interface of semantics and pragmatics. Following a common methodology in linguistics, he used a small and apparently insignificant phenomenon as a window into much bigger theoretical questions. He investigated the semantics and pragmatics of additive particles (like the English word “too” and its kin) to gain insights, not only into the kinds of requirements backgrounded meaning components (“presuppositions”) impose on the common ground of a discourse, but also into the way presuppositions interact with other meaning components. Through the window of additive particles, Shai tackled the toughest and most sophisticated puzzles in the theory of presuppositions, digging deeper into the puzzles raised by those particles than anybody had before him. Shai did not only easily master the formal aspects of the proposals he was making, he also had the ability to find and construct subtle and intriguing new data that led to genuine progress.

Shai was a popular teacher for introductory undergraduate linguistics classes at UMass. His teaching evaluations were among the best we get for those classes, which many students only take because they have to take a class requiring analytic reasoning. More than one student commented that Shai was one of the best instructors they had ever had. They loved his concern for them and adored his dry sense of humor.

Shai enjoyed doing semantics and loved being part of the linguistics community at UMass. One of his best forums was Semantics Reading Group, where students, visitors and special guests would drink, commiserate and try to understand semantics papers. From the onset, Shai was a mainstay of this event: always apologizing for somehow managing to be on time, unfailingly polite in his appreciation of the snacks on offer, devastatingly self-deprecating, whipsmart and yet appreciative of everyone’s ideas.He was always up for a chat, for a movie screening, for an occasional dinner with friends. Amherst was his home all throughout graduate school. It remained cherished in his heart ever since.

Throughout the UMass years and beyond, Shai remained a constant point of reference for so many of his fellow students, who feel very lucky to have been his friends. It was impossible not to love Shai: he was terrifyingly smart, but also extremely humble; he had a sharp, dry, sense of humor, and was at the same time kind and caring. Classmates and friends affectionately called Shai ‘the Master’, and a true one, he was: not only because he was generous in sharing intellectual insight—always in a sharp but gentle way; always with a funny and surprising twist—but also, and mostly, because he enjoyed showing us how to look at things differently: a treasured lesson that Shai left for us is that hope can come from understanding that possibilities are boundless, and reality is what one makes of it.

The department is in the process of setting up an In Memoriam page for Shai, where everyone who knew him can share their personal memories of him.

Beccy Lewis joins us this year as a Visiting Lecturer in Syntax.

We asked her to tell us a bit about herself:

“I am interested in comparative syntax and its interface with morphology and semantics. My dissertation (University of Connecticut, 2024) is an examination of the morphological expression of heterogeneous plurals (i.e. associative, similative and approximative plurals) cross-linguistically. I am particularly interested in languages that use regular plural morphology as (or as part of) a heterogeneous plural, and show that this (partial) homophony is tied to syntactic constraints on locality and differences in nominal functional structure cross-linguistically. Thus, I argue that what looks like a morphological phenomenon (the same morpheme expressing two different meanings) is in fact syntactic in nature.  

I am also interested in variation in British English, having worked on do-ellipsis (e.g., John has bought a magazine and Mary has done too) and singular ‘us’ (i.e., the first person plural pronoun ‘us’ with first person singular reference).

In my spare time I read too many books, buy too many plants or upcycle old furniture.”

The third Annual Conference of the Philosophy of Language Association will take place on September 20-21 at UMass. The invited speakers are Angelika Kratzer and Dilip Ninan. You will find the conference information and program here:

https://philevents.org/event/show/119886