Joe Pater recently published a blog post on AI music generation, available at the below link. It includes examples of music generated by current platforms, and some discussion of potential societal impacts and ethical issues.

Joe Pater appeared on the “Fabulous 413”, a show on NEPM/NPR 88.5FM that celebrates life in Western Massachusetts, on Friday Jan. 24. His appearance was in advance of his band’s show at the Rendezvous in Turner’s Falls (and includes two Dérailleurs songs played acoustically), but much of the conversation ended up being about linguistics (e.g. what is computational phonology?). The show is now available to stream on-line, including as a podcast.

https://www.nepm.org/podcast/the-fabulous-413

Several members of the UMass Linguistics Department participated in this year’s annual meeting of the LSA, which took place in Philadelphia January 9-12: https://www.lsadc.org/2025-linguistic_society_america_annual-meeting. Below is a list, with co-authors.

Faruk Akkuş: Locating code-switching in the grammar: Role of morphological wordhood  (Poster Session 1)

Faruk Akkuş & David Embick: Agreement/clitic movement ≠ agreement affix/clitic (Poster Session 1)

Mariam Asatryan, Rajesh Bhatt & Faruk Akkuş: Hyperagreement in Alashkert Armenian (Poster Session 2)

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Deborah Foucault & Tom Roeper: Romanian-English bilingual adults are more recursive with adjectives in Romanian L1 than English L2 (Session: Bilingualism)

Erine-Caitlin Desir (organized session: Black is the New Black: respecting variation in AAL)

Alessa Farinella & Sun-Ah Jun: Accentual phrases in Tagalog intonation and their loose relation to word prosody (Session: Prosody)

Deborah Foucault, Shalaleh Javadi & Tom Roper: To perform(ative) or not to perform(ative): that is the Question! Children successfully navigate complex Speech Acts within narratives (Session: Language Acquisition 1)

Eva Neu, Rajesh Bhatt & Shaunak Phadnis: Degrees of animacy and felicity in Hindi ditransitives: a corpus study (Poster Session 2)

Eva Neu, Maayan Keshev & Brian Dillon: Encoding syntactic positions in working memory: a computational approach (Session: Psycholinguistics 1)

Suet-Ying Lam‘s article Pronoun interpretation is more subject-biased than expected by the Bayesian Model, co-authored with Heeju Hwang, has appeared in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on November 15 2024.

Abstract. A Bayesian Model proposed by Kehler et al. ([2008]. Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25(1), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffm018) suggests that pronoun production and interpretation are driven by a different set of factors following the Bayes’ rule. Evidence suggests that the Bayesian Model makes better predictions on pronoun interpretation compared to other models that assume that pronoun production and interpretation are influenced by the same set of factors. Yet, it remains unclear precisely to what extent the Bayesian Model can capture this relationship. The current study examines the validity of the Bayesian Model by comparing its performance across three different contexts using a variety of evaluation methods. Our results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model’s performance varied across contexts and consistently underestimated the subject bias in interpretation. We suggest that the underestimation is likely because the subject bias in pronoun production is not sufficient to account for the subject bias in actual interpretation, contra to the assumption of the Bayesian Model. We discuss potential sources of the additional subject bias in interpretation.

In their meeting December 18th, the UMass Board of Trustees appointed Seth Cable to the Edward Sapir Professorship in Linguistics. This named Chair had previously been held by Emmon Bach.

The 24th Amsterdam Colloquium takes place on December 18-20, with participation of members of the UMass community. The program can be found here.

Angelika Kratzer will give the Beth Lecture (“Possible worlds in a polyphony of meanings”) and Eleonore Neufeld will give a plenary lecture (“Giving generic language another thought”).

Angelica Hill will make a presentations “A case for an anchored CAUSE” and Andrea Mattichio will make two presentations, one as sole author “Neg-raising interacts with implicatures: the case of doubt” and one co-authored with Maik Thalmann (University of Göttingen) “On being certain that presuppositions don’t project universally”.

Faruk Akkuş gave one talk at University of Toronto on December 6, 2024 titled “(Dis)connecting C and T”, and another colloquium talk at University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) on December 12, 2024 titled “The case for case features in syntax and morphology”.

Kyle Johnson will give a talk at Aarhus University on December 9. The title of his talk is “On making pronouns and reflexives compete“. Kyle’s presentation will be one in a series of two lectures, with the other lecture offered by Douglas Saddy: “Quandaries – grammar and uncertainty”.

Eva Neu will give a talk at the Department of Linguistics at Yale this Friday (December 6). The title is “Variable linking in argument structure”.