Category Archives: Newsletter

UMass reunion in Tokyo

The 2017 joint meeting of MAPLL (Mental Architecture for Processing and Learning of Language) and TCP (Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics) ended earlier today. Here is what we heard from our contacts in Tokyo: “This weekend at MAPLL-TCP 2017 held in Tokyo, several UMass related scholars played an essential role for the success of the conference.  Emmanuel Chemla (semantics guru, 2014) and Florian Schwarz (2009 UMass PhD) were invited speakers. Yurie Hara (visitor, 2006-2007) and Shigeto Kawahara (2007 UMass PhD) were organizing committee members. Shigeto additionally gave a talk on the project to apply phonetic skills to help ALS patients.” In the picture from left to right: Yurie, Shigeto and his daughter, who “was not the happiest at that moment”, Florian, and Emmanuel.

John McCarthy appointed Acting Provost

John McCarthy has been appointed Acting Provost of our University! Congratulations John from all of us! See below for John’s recent e-mail on the subject, and follow this link for the campus news release.

Dear Colleagues,

As you may have seen on the campus’s homepage, Chancellor Subbaswamy has appointed me to be Acting (later Interim) Provost. I am very grateful to the Chancellor for the trust he has placed in me to lead Academic Affairs during this important time in our campus’s history.

Having joined the faculty in 1985, I have spent nearly my entire academic career and well over half my life as a member of our community. During that time, I have witnessed much change, but I have never been as hopeful about the future of our institution as I am now. Chancellor Subbaswamy’s leadership has put us on a path to excellence in teaching, research, service to the Commonwealth, inclusiveness, and climate. I am committed to the goals he has set for us.

My journey into academic administration went by way of the Faculty Senate, which I first joined in 1989. This experience has given me a deep appreciation for shared governance. We are, collectively, collaborators in leading Academic Affairs, a responsibility that we share with the staff and students as well. I welcome your thoughts on where we are doing well and where we can improve. Feel free to speak to me as I travel around campus, or email me at jmccarthy@provost.umass.edu.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working closely with Provost Newman on the transition. I am very grateful to her for this support and for her leadership over the past three years.

John McCarthy
Acting Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Distinguished Professor

A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson

As a surprise to celebrate our colleague and teacher Kyle Johnson on his birthday (rumored to be an odd birthday), alums Nicholas LaCara, Keir Moulton, and Anne-Michelle Tessier have just unveiled A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson, a volume of 43 papers that “celebrates Kyle Johnson’s contribution to linguistics. Written by Johnson’s colleagues and former students, the papers touch upon topics that have defined Johnson’s career, including verb movement, ellipsis, gapping, Germanic, extraposition, quantifiers and determiners, object positions, among others.”

Congratulations from all of us, Kyle, and many happy returns!

 

Investigating meaning in the Kiowa language

Andrew McKenzie (2012 UMass PhD, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas) has been awarded a 3-year NSF (National Science Foundation) grant for “Investigations in the Semantics of Kiowa, a Native American Language of Oklahoma.” Below is an excerpt from the abstract from the grant description, as published by NSF. It’s a model for making clear how theoretical research in semantics can be combined with work that can have a huge impact on Native American communities.

Photo: Marianne McKenzie

“Led by a linguist who is also a tribal member, this project will conduct an in-depth investigation into Kiowa semantics. Semantics forms a crucial component of language, but linguists have not thoroughly documented any language’s semantics with depth and precision, because the theoretical framework to do so was only recently developed. This project will apply this framework of language documentation, in order to uncover the semantics of phenomena crucial to the Kiowa language. The investigators will elicit language judgments from native speakers of the language, which can tease apart subtle aspects of meaning that are often impossible for speakers to define with words. The project will also record and examine new texts that document naturalistic language use, especially in cultural domains under-represented by currently available Kiowa texts. Kiowa grammar includes multiple areas of interest to formal semantics, such as evidentiality, modality, incorporation, quantification, and degree, all of which are also important areas for learners to acquire. This project will result in a reference grammar and teaching materials that will greatly aid these programs by covering the areas in semantics that remain poorly understood by teachers and researchers. This reference grammar will also serve as a manual for researchers of other Native American languages, especially those who are not trained in this research framework. This study will offer new insight for researchers on dozens of phenomena that occur in many languages besides Kiowa. In doing so, it will re-emphasize the longstanding contribution of Native American languages to linguistics, a scientific understanding of what is possible in human language, and thus a deeper understanding of what is possible in the human mind.”

Lisa Green at LSA gatherings in Kentucky and Salt Lake City

The LSA (Linguistic Society of America) has just announced that Lisa Green will be one of the plenary speakers at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the society in Salt Lake City. This month, Lisa is also teaching a 4-week class at the 2017 LSA Summer Institute at the University of Kentucky. The topic of her class is: African American English: Recalcitrant Myths and Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Here is the course description from the summer school’s website:

Photo by John Solem

“African American English (AAE) is still the most widely studied variety of American English. Over the years, different phenomena, ranging from linguistic to sociopolitical, have played major roles in ensuring that the linguistic variety maintains its position in the forefront in discussions of varieties of American English. Important phenomena related to the linguistic system remain understudied or not studied at all despite the focus on the variety. In this course, we consider the study of AAE over the past sixty years and raise questions about the extent to which views about it and approaches to the study of the variety have developed and changed. Starting from the 1960s, we consider major issues that guided research on AAE in each decade, and we explain how some of these issues have resurfaced over the years, propelling AAE into a category of hot topics in the media, such as AAE in classrooms and courtrooms. Consider AAE and mathematics in Orr’s 1987 Twice as Less: Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science and subsequent reports of similar issues in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. In this age of big data and large corpora, AAE is becoming more visible in child language databases, for instance, and the massive Twitter data help to bring AAE into discussions about technology and natural language processing.”

“Significant strides have been made in research on the linguistic structure of the variety; however, even in some linguistics arenas, AAE is still discussed from the perspective of two or three features that distinguish it from general American English. Such an approach to the study of the variety leads observers to conclude that, as it turns out, there is virtually nothing in AAE that does not occur in other varieties of English and continue to perpetuate the recalcitrant myth that it is essential for all “features” of AAE to differ from features in “standard” English to be AAE. In this course, we address empirical and theoretical data in reevaluating these myths, claims, and characterizations of AAE that force us to answer the question: What precisely is AAE, and how do we avoid the many pitfalls in the literature on characterizations of it? It is from this angle that we consider topics in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of AAE in discourse structures and complex clauses, such as negation, questions, and complements.”

Brian Dillon Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure

It is our great pleasure to share the news that the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees has just officially awarded tenure to Professor Brian Dillon, and that the Chancellor has just officially approved his promotion to Associate Professor.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Dillon on this extraordinary achievement, and in expressing our appreciation for all his exemplary contributions to our field!

Veena Dwivedi appointed Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

As of July 1st, Veena Dwivedi (1994 UMass PhD) is (Full) Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brock University in Canada. In the Dwivedi Brain and Language lab, Veena and her team “integrate sophisticated linguistic theory with the latest advances in neuroscientific methods in order to build a model of sentence comprehension that can more accurately predict how language is processed in real-time. We are concerned with the computation of meaning, and how this computation is affected by both linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., emotion, attention, working memory) systems in the brain. We are currently developing a model which tests how and when grammatical structure plays a role in sentence comprehension.”

Nancy Clarke and Alicia LeClair at the Guatemala Field Station

Alums Nancy Clarke (BA, ’16)  and Alicia LeClair (BA, ’17) attended the 2017 Field School directed by Masha Polinsky at the Guatemala Field Station of the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. The field station is located close to Sololá and Lake Atitlán in the western highlands of Guatemala. Several Mayan languages are spoken in the area. In collaboration with the NGO Wuqu’ Kawoq, the Field School offered beginner and continuing two-week immersion classes in Kaqchikel. Both classes were taught by experienced Kaqchikel teachers who planned the lessons, provided one-one-one help, and provided language learning materials. Following the two-week classes, University of Maryland linguistics faculty provided mentoring for collecting language data from native Kaqchikel speakers. During the trip, students stayed with local families to gain a better insight into everyday Guatemalan life. Additionally, on the weekends, students and faculty took field trips to sites where Wuqu’ Kawoq is working and assisted with their projects. Source: University of Maryland Language Science Center. You can find out more about the 2017 Field School from their blog.