We’re delighted to share the news that Kimberly Johnson’s application for an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant will be officially recommended for funding by the NSF Linguistics Program.
Kimberly’s project will be focused on the documentation and analysis of the complex tense system of Mvskoke (Creek), investigating three phenomena central to current debates surrounding cross-linguistic variation in tense semantics: (i) graded tense, (ii) tense & evidentiality, and (iii) nominal tense. In addition to advancing our theoretical understanding of these three interlocking phenomena, Kimberly’s project will contribute significantly to the documentation of this highly endangered language, producing in particular a rich corpus of dialogs between Mvskoke elders and between elders and learners.
Barbara Partee will be giving a streamed public lecture as part of the project described below on Wednesday, May 13, at 7pm Brazilian time, 6pm EDT. The topic is “Formal semantics and pragmatics: Origins, issues, impact.” The link to the live transmission is https://youtu.be/h8x-5eEyDjc. (On the YouTube site that the link takes you to, you can comment and ask questions, and see other people’s comments and questions. The moderators will pick a selection of questions to ask in the discussion period.)
The Brazilian Linguistic Association (abralin.org), in a joint project with the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (ciplnet.com), the Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (mundoalfal.org), the Sociedad Argentina de Estudios Lingüísticos (sael.com.ar) and the Linguistic Society of America (linguisticsociety.org) is organizing a virtual event: Abralin ao Vivo – Linguists Online. The event is designed to give students and researchers free access to state-of-the-art discussions on the most diverse topics related to the study of human language during this difficult quarantine period.
For more information about Abralin ao Vivo – Linguists Online, please visit: abral.in/aovivo. For updates on the event’s programme, follow Abralin at abral.in/insta. All the lectures are also available on Abralin’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/abralin.
Lila Gleitman (University of Pennsylvania) and Barbara H Partee (University of Massachusetts Amherst) will present “Symmetry and Symmetrical Predicates” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday April 24.
Congratulations are in order for Carolyn Anderson, who has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Wellesley College in the Department of Computer Science. She’ll begin in the Fall of 2021. Best of luck at Wellesley, Carolyn! We’re proud of you and we look forward to seeing what you get up to out there.
Annika Andersson, Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, will present “Cross-linguistic influence on processing of fine-grained placement verb semantics as recorded by ERPs and appropriateness ratings” and talk about some of her research with second language learners on Wednesday March 18th 12:00 in ILC N400. An Abstract follows.
Abstract
Second language (L2) learners typically experience challenges when semantics differ across source and target languages, and often display CLI in speech production and behavioral comprehension studies (e.g., Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008). However, in studies using ERPs, CLI has rarely been reported, probably because these studies typically examine the processing of gross semantic violations (e.g., Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). We explored how English and German learners of Swedish process fine-grained L2 verb semantics that are either shared or not shared with their first language. Three Swedish placement verbs (sätta ‘set’, ställa ‘stand’, lägga ‘lay’), obligatory for describing placement on a surface with support from below (Viberg 1998) were examined. In difference to Swedish, English has one general placement verb (put), whereas German has specific verbs similar to Swedish (Narasimhan et al., 2012). In contrast to previous ERP studies of semantic processing qualitative differences in semantic processing were related to non-native processing. However, more interestingly neurophysiological processing of fine-grained semantics was strongly related to CLI both offline and online.
We’re extremely proud to share the news that on January 31st, 2020, Petr Kusliy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “The Emptiness of the Present: Fronting Constructions as a Window to the Semantics of Tense.” Petr’s dissertation is the first to offer an in-depth study of the semantics of tense within fronted constituents, the features of which are argued to show that (among many other things) (i) English present tense can receive a ‘vacuous’ interpretation, and (ii) subordinate CPs when combining with attitude verbs have a semantics similar to that of weak indefinites.
The attached photo shows Petr triumphantly raising the departmental fish, alongside committee members Rajesh Bhatt, Barbara Partee, Kyle Johnson, Seth Cable (chair), and Alejandro Pérez Carballo.
Barbara Partee has been awarded the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. The award statement from https://www.fi.edu/laureates/barbara-partee is copied below. Here is an excerpt from the Award’s “about” page:
Through its Awards Program, The Franklin Institute seeks to provide public recognition and encouragement of excellence in science and technology. The list of Franklin Institute laureates reads like a “Who’s Who” in the history of 19th, 20th, and 21st century science, including Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Rudolf Diesel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Frank Lloyd Wright…
This richly deserved award is a great testament to Barbara’s impact on the field, and we could add, our department and University. Since the area of the award is Computer and Cognitive Science, it’s worth noting that we owe much of our University’s current strength in Cognitive Science to Barbara, who with Michael Arbib of Computer Science co-directed the initiative that obtained the two rounds of Sloan Foundation funding that involved multiple faculty members and sowed the seeds for the development of this interdisciplinary area.
Congratulations Barbara!
Citation: For her foundational contributions that synthesize insights from linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology to understand how words and sentences combine to express meaning in human language.
A teacher, scholar, and thinker as original and wide-ranging as Barbara Partee is rare. Currently professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Partee is one of the pioneers of the burgeoning field of linguistics, a field that has had broad impacts on everything from psychology to artificial intelligence. In particular, Partee has been instrumental in forging new connections between formal logic and natural language. Language is ultimately a code, encoded by a speaker to be interpreted by a listener. Partee applies concepts in logic and semantics to untangle that code. Her work opened a new field of linguistics—she is considered the founder of formal semantics. Partee’s contributions to understanding language, in a way that envelops linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology, have been key shaping concepts in computer science and cognitive science.
UMass is hosting “Sensus: Constructing meaning in Romance” on April 18-19, 2020. This is a conference on the formal semantics and pragmatics of Romance languages.
Areas: theoretical semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces with other domains, experimental methodologies, fieldwork, the study of variation and computational approaches
Venue: Integrative Learning Center at UMass Amherst (the ILC is a fully accessible building)
A paper by Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt has appeared in the Winter 2019 issue (27.4) of Natural Language Semantics. The title of the paper is “Licensing of PPI indefinites pseudoscope?”
An abstract follows:
Positive Polarity indefinites (PPI indefinites), such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, using novel data from Hindi-Urdu and English, that pseudoscope is not sufficient, and that it is the syntactic position of PPI indefinites at LF, rather than their actual scope, which is relevant for licensing. These facts support a unified view of PPI indefinites as generalized quantifiers, and disfavor analyses where they are, or can be, interpreted as choice function variables.
