Category Archives: Newsletter

UMass Linguists at the LSA Annual Meeting

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Our department was extremely well represented at this year’s Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, held in Salt Lake City Jan. 5-7 2018. Highlights included the plenary address by Lisa Green (introduced by outgoing LSA president Alice Harris), and the first meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, organized by Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater. Rajesh Bhatt deserves special thanks for all his work as program co-chair. The photo shows just some of the current students and faculty, and alums. (Can anyone name them all? Comments open below.) The talks and posters delivered by current members of the department, including many students, are listed below (student presentations are asterisked).

*Carolyn Jane Anderson (University of Massachusetts Amherst): The San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec andative and venitive

*John Duff (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Alice Harris (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Udi and the location of Caucasian Albanian agreement clitics

*Alexander Goebel (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Lyn Frazier (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Investigating the parallelism requirement of too

Lisa Green (University of Massachusetts Amherst), “African American English and Fifty Years of Research: Variation, Development, and Implications for the Pipelines”

*Coral Hughto (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Investigating the consequences of iterated learning in phonological typology

*Kimberly Johnson (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Expletive voice: another look at the Creek causative

*Andrew Lamont (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Subsequential steps to unbounded tonal plateauing

Joe Pater (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Lisa Sanders (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Evan Hare (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Claire Moore-Cantwell (Simon Fraser University): ERP signatures of implicit and explicit phonological learning

*Brandon Prickett (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Similarity-based phonological generalization

Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Bart Hollebrandse (University of Groningen), Ana Perez (University of Toronto), Angeliek van Hout (University of Groningen), Petra Schulz (Goethe University Frankfurt), Anca Sevcenco (University of Bucharest): Avoidance by children as evidence of self-embedding recursion

*Katerina A. Tetzloff (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Analyzing surface unnaturalness and opacity in phonetically natural steps: final devoicing and vowel lengthening in Friulian

Barbara Partee honorary doctorate video now available

A video of the awarding of Barbara Partee’s University of Amsterdam honorary doctorate is now available on-line. The profile video, which was shot here in Amherst in the fall, and was shown in the ceremony, is available here.

Barbara sent along this description of the video:

The first few minutes show the processional in to the aula of the university, and I’m near the front of the procession (my white hair is clearly visible – my honorary ‘promotor’ Sonja Smets and I are the 3rd couple in the procession. You can see me recognizing and saying hi to Jennifer Spenader and Emar Maier, who are standing at their seats near the front on the left.

‘My part’ of the ceremony runs from minute 57 to the 1:22 mark. It starts with the nice 4 1/2 minute video they made when they visited Amherst in November. A lot of it is at 50 Hobart Lane, where they conducted the actual interview. At school you catch snippets of our ‘math lab’, including a shot of Zahra at the blackboard, and a snippet of Carolyn Anderson’s presentation in semantics workshop that day, and shots walking around campus. The video is followed by the award of the degree, including a short speech about me by Sonja Smets (co-authored with Martin Stokhof), and a thank-you speech by me recounting parts of the history of formal semantics in Amsterdam, and my connections with the university and with the Netherlands.

Angelika Fest 2018

Here is the first general announcement of the range of activities being organized in celebration of Angelika Kratzer on the occasion of her retirement from the Linguistics Department at UMass Amherst and of her 70th birthday. There will be two days of Festivities (March 9-10), a FestSite (with greetings, photos, reminiscences, squibs, whatever), a Festschrift, and a FestFund. Please get in touch with one or both of us — Lisa Green and Lisa Selkirk — if you have questions about the Festivities on March 9-10 or about submitting material to the FestSite.

Lisa Green and Lisa Selkirk

(Both Lisas are @umass.edu. One is lgreen, the other selkirk).

“Moving Linguists” in the Hot Chocolate Run

Members of the UMass Linguistics community continued our tradition of participating in the Hot Chocolate Run in Northampton on Sunday December 3rd. The event is a benefit for Safe Passage, an organization “dedicated to creating a world free of domestic violence and relationship abuse” (it’s not too late to donate – find “give” under the “fundraise” menu at the link above). The Moving Linguists included Sakshi Bhatia, Hazel Cable, Seth Cable, Summer Cable, Ivy Hauser, Jyoti Iyer, Gaja Jarosz, Magda Oiry, Marie Oiry-Pater, Zeke Oiry-Pater, Joe Pater, Matt Snover, and Hannah Young. Thanks to Magda, Sakshi, Summer and Seth for photos.

Pater’s “Substance Matters: a reply to Jardine 2016” to appear in Phonology

Joe Pater’s paper “Substance Matters: a reply to Jardine 2016” will appear in Phonology in early 2018. The final manuscript version is here: https://works.bepress.com/joe_pater/34/. Public comments on an earlier version can be found here: https://websites.umass.edu/phonolist/2016/04/15/pater-2016-substance-matters-a-reply-to-jardine-2016/.

Upcoming Computational Linguistics Community Events

Please join us for two upcoming CLC events!

  • Students in Cognitive Modeling (Ling 692c) present their final projects
    • Dec 8, 9-10am in ILC N400 (Psycholinguistics Workshop)
    • Students will give 5 minute presentations about their final class projects involving computational modeling of some psycholinguistic task or phenomenon
  • Students in Intro NLP (CS 585) give poster presentations of their final projects
    • Dec 12, 3:30-5pm (session 1) and 5-6:30 (session 2), in CS room 150/151
    • See description below from Brendan O’Connor

CS 585 Poster Sessions

Come check out 80+ poster presentations for natural language processing class projects this semester!  A sampling of topics include:
 – Movie revenue prediction using plot summary analysis
 – Irony detection in English tweets
 – Determining toxicity in social discussions
 – Cross-lingual transfer learning for Hindi part-of-speech tagging
There will be two sessions, both in CS room 150/151:
  – Session 1: 3:30-5:00
  – Session 2: 5:00-6:30
There will be different posters at each session, so come early and often!

Valentine Hacquard colloquium Friday Dec. 8th at 3:30

Valentine Hacquard of the University of Maryland will be presenting “Learning what ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean”, Friday December 8th at 3:30 in ILC N400. All are welcome – a reception will follow.

Abstract. The way languages across the world express modality shows both variation and convergence. In some languages, like English, the same modal words (e.g., must) can express different flavors of modality: “Jo must eat fish”, for instance, can express a likelihood that Jo is a fish eater (‘epistemic’ necessity) or an obligation Jo has to eat fish (‘deontic’ necessity). In other languages, modals are strictly monosemous. How do children figure out the modals of their language? What expectations, if any, do they bring to this learning problem? This talk focuses on English-learning children, and asks how they figure out that their modals can be used to express different flavors, what in their linguistic experience might give away modal polysemy, and what linguistic biases might guide this acquisition process.