Category Archives: Semantics

Carolyn Anderson Giving Talks at Two Upcoming Conferences

We’re pleased to share the news that Carolyn Anderson will be presenting work related to her first GP at two major upcoming conferences.

Carolyn will be presenting a talk titled “The Andative and Venitive Construction in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec” at the conference Multi-Verb Constructions: Semantic, Syntactic and Typological Perspectives (MVC2017) at Humboldt University in Berlin on December 7-8.

She will also be presenting a talk titled “The San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec Andative and Venitive” at this year’s meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), which (as always) will be held with the LSA (Salt Lake City; January 4-7).

Both talks will be presenting Carolyn’s original fieldwork on the syntax and semantics of the so-called ‘andative’ and ‘venitive’ makers in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, which forms a major part of her first GP (defended last semester).

Fieldwork on Brazilian Languages

Suzi Lima (2014 Umass PhD) has just come back from Rio, where she took a group of her University of Toronto undergraduate students for a (not-in-the-village) fieldwork course on Brazilian languages that she directed. On the first page of the group’s blog, Suzi writes: “Today we concluded our (intensive) course on fieldwork methods based on Brazilian languages. I would like to take a moment to say that this was a rewarding experience for me as an instructor for two reasons. First, because of the participation of four women who are leading research on indigenous languages and cultures to new and interesting directions and who are an example for other women: Anari (speaker of Patxohã), Francy (speaker of Nheengatu), Nelly (speaker of Marubo) and Sandra (speaker of Guarani Ñandeva). I was very honored to be able to work with them and learn more about them and their research. Second, because of our students from Canada  (Cal, Karoline, Natália, Tiffany, Vidhya) as well as my colleague Ivona and our teaching assistant Ohanna. This was the first fieldwork experience of the students and I was glad to be able to share their excitement, their engagement and their interest during the whole course.”

Welcome Emar Maier!

Emar Maier is visiting us this semester. You can find him in my (former) office (ILC N420). Emar is Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, affiliated with both the Philosophy and Linguistics Departments. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen (2006), held several postdoc positions, and led an ERC Starting Grant project. He is currently heading a NWO VIDI research project investigating the semantics of imagination and fiction. His research interests include narrative, quotation, indexicals, and attitudes. He publishes in linguistics journals (like Theoretical Linguistics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Journal of Child Language, Semantics and Pragmatics, Glossa) but also in neighboring fields (Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, among others). Emar’s ERC project “Between Direct and Indirect Discourse” (€ 677,000) led to a genuine shift in our way of thinking about reported speech, and combined insights into “the nature of reported speech with formal semantic rigor and linguistic data from child language, native signers, and Greek philology.” Here is an interview with Emar after he won the ERC grant. Emar’s current VIDI grant (€ 800,000) on the Language of Fiction and Imagination aims at “a cognitive/formal semantics of fiction that will shed new light on a wide variety of current debates about fiction, imagination, and narrative style.”

25 years of Natural Language Semantics

From Angelika Kratzer: This year marks the 25th anniversary of Natural Language Semantics. Irene Heim (1982 UMass PhD) and I have been the editors since then. We still meet – at a table, not on a screen – to discuss the papers that have been submitted. Natural Language Semantics was the brain child of Martin Scrivener, the Linguistics editor of what was then Kluwer Academic Publishers. Martin thought that the time had come for a journal to bring together syntactic work in the generative tradition and formal semantics work in the tradition of David Lewis and Richard Montague. From the very start, the journal attracted work on cross-linguistic semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. Early highlights include Mats Rooth’s and Roger Schwarzschild’s papers on focus interpretation and givenness, Veneeta Dayal’s paper on scope marking, Sigrid Beck’s paper on what is now called the “Beck Effect”, Lisa Matthewson’s seminal papers on wide-scope indefinites and on cross-linguistic variation in the expression of quantification, Polly Jacobson’s paper on paycheck pronouns, Lisa Green’s paper on aspectual “be” in African American English, Gennaro Chierchia’s and Sandra Chung’s papers on reference to kinds across languages, Dorit Abusch’s paper on the de re interpretation of the present tense, Mona Singh’s paper on non-culminating accomplishments, and Jo-Wang Lin’s paper on distributivity in Chinese, among many others. All papers are free for anyone to read, share, and annotate.

Peter Alrenga Joins UMass Linguistics as Visiting Faculty

Please join us in welcoming Peter Alrenga (http://www.peteralrenga.com/) to our department! Peter will be working with us this year as a Visiting Professor in Semantics.

Peter earned his PhD from UC Santa Cruz, with a dissertation advancing our understanding of scalar structure, the syntax/semantics of degree constructions, and the ways in which they relate to more general statements of similarity and difference.

Peter’s current research touches on a number of central areas in the field of formal semantics, particularly those related to gradability, scale structure, and degree constructions. He has done important work with Chris Kennedy and Jason Merchant on the nature of comparative clauses (a.k.a. “than-phrases”), the interpretation of quantifiers within them, and more broadly the nature of so-called “split scope” phenomena. More recently, he has been working on the semantics of the scalar operators “at most” and “at least”, their focus semantics, and their possible deep connections with disjunction.

In addition to teaching our undergraduate semantics course, Peter will be teaching the graduate proseminar in semantics this fall. Of course, students (especially semantics students) are strongly encouraged to go ahead and arrange meetings with Peter!

Jeremy Pasquereau successfully defends his dissertation

Jeremy Pasquereau successfully defended his dissertation “”Oui or non? Embedded Polar Response Particles involve ellipsis and contrast” on August 2nd.  Congratulations Jeremy!

Jeremy with Seth Cable, Vincent Homer, Alejandro Pérez Carballo and Lyn Frazier

Jeremy with Barbara Partee

Jeremy with Angelika Kratzer

Jeremy with Alejandro Pérez Carballo, Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt

Jeremy with cake

 

 

 

 

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.

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.”