Category Archives: Semantics

UMass linguists at NELS

UMass was well represented at the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) at MIT, Oct 25-27. Current students, faculty, and alumni gave presentations:

  • Stefan Keine (PhD 2016) gave a keynote presentation on “Feature gluttony in the syntax of hierarchy effects”
  • Christopher Hammerly presented “Obviative agreement, word order, and the ?/? divide”
  • Jérémy Pasquereau (PhD 2018), Brian Dillon & Lyn Frazier presented “Quantification At a Distance and grammatical illusions”
  • Ethan Poole (PhD 2017) presented “Interpreting movement across phase boundaries”
  • Amy Rose Deal (PhD 2010) presented “Interaction, satisfaction, and the PCC”
  • Shay Hucklebridge (current student) presented “Quantified nouns in Tlicho Yatil relative clauses”
  • Bernhard Schwarz (PhD 2000) presented “Which questions, uniqueness, and answer hood: evidence from disjunction” with Michaela Socolof and Aron Hirsch.

 

Cable at Berkeley

Seth Cable gave a colloquium talk last Monday, October 21 at UC Berkeley, titled “Two Paths to Habituality: Tlingit Habitual Mode and English Simple Verbs”. Various folks have asked to send along their hellos to the department, including: Amy Rose Deal (of course), Larry Hyman, Peter Jenks, Keith Johnson, and Ken Wexler.

UMass at NWAV 48

UMass linguistics has been at NWAV 48 at the University of Oregon this weekend!

Faculty members Lisa Green, Kristine Yu, grad students Ayana Whitmal, Anissa Neal, and Deniz Özy?ld?z, and collaborator Alejna Brugos from Boston University presented
a talk: The prosody and meaning of BIN constructions in African American English.

Our Fulbright scholar Kamil Kazmierski from Adam Mickiewicz University presented two posters: one with his collaborator Michaela Hejná from Aarhus University on preaspiration in American English, as well as another one with his university colleague Krzysztof Urbanek on Variability in word-final /r/-vocalization in Providence: Evidence from Crimetown.

Here’s Kamil and his collaborator Michaela.

Our recent PhD recipient Tracy Conner, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara, co-organized A workshop for inclusion in sociocultural linguistics with her UC Santa Barbara colleagues.

And alum Elliot Moreton (Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) gave a talk on Abstract factors in English diphthong raising in a Mississippi dialect.

Barbara at Penn Oct 18

Barbara will give a talk at the next  ILST Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday October 18th at 1:30pm in Room 401B of 3401 Walnut St. (ILST = the Integrated Language Science and Technology initiative). Anyone in the Philly area is welcome.

The talk is related to her history of formal semantics project. The title is “Psychologism and Anti-Psychologism in Semantics: Changing Notions of Semantic Competence”.

Coppock colloquium Friday Sep 27 at 3:30

Elizabeth Coppock, Boston University, will present “Universals in Superlative Semantics” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Fri. 9/27. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Abstract: This talk reports on the results of a broad cross-linguistic study on the semantics of quantity words such as ‘many’ in the superlative (e.g. ‘most’). While some languages use such a form to express both a relative reading (as in ‘Gloria has visited the most continents’) and a proportional reading (as in ‘Gloria has visited most continents’), the vast majority do not allow the latter, though all allow the former. Absolute readings for the superlatives of ordinary gradable adjectives, in contrast, are universal. I propose an explanation for this cross-linguistic generalization, centered around two core assumptions: quantity words denote gradable predicates of degrees, while proportional readings involve a comparison class of individuals. Proportional readings, I suggest, arise in rare cases when the former assumption is violated.

Barbara (and others) in Moscow

from Barbara Partee

I gave a series of five lectures in the 3rd Annual Fall School for Formal Syntax and Formal Semantics at HSE (the Higher School for Economics) in Moscow, September 1-7. The series was “The History of Formal Semantics”. The five lectures were (1) The history of formal semantics: founding revolutions; (2) History of the syntax-semantics interface; (3) The starring role of quantification in the history of formal semantics; (4) History of the semantics of arguments and adjuncts; (5) Lexical Semantics in Formal Semantics: History and Challenges.

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Day 2, including changing of the guard with David Pesetsky. 

 

Other lecturers in the Fall School were David Pesetsky, Tatiana Philippova, Pavel Caha, Natalia Slioussar, Yasutada Sudo, and Daniele Panizza. We all enjoyed going to some of each other’s lectures, too, and the students were very lively and engaged. It was a good week! Afterwards, Volodja and I spent several days visiting friends in Moscow, capping it off with dinner with Katia Vostrikova and Petr Kusliy and his family on our last evening – that was also great.

Katia, Petr, and Petr’s wife Anya.

Poole and Keine to UCLA

Ethan Poole (PhD 2017) has just started a position as Assistant Professor at UCLA, and Stefan Keine (PhD 2016) will also join UCLA as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. Congratulations Ethan and Stefan!

Note: This will make four UMass Linguistics alumni on the UCLA faculty – the others are Claire Moore-Cantwell (PhD 2016) and Jesse Harris (PhD 2012).

UMass at SALT 29 @ UCLA

The 29th annual meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory took place on May 17-19 at the University of California, Los Angeles. UMass was represented by a number of talks and posters from current and previous UMass affiliates, as captured by the picture below (Facebook credit: Ilaria Frana):

(from left to right: Amanda Rysling; Stephanie Rich; Katia Vostrikova; Jesse Harris; Ilaria Frana; Paula Menendez-Benito; Bernhard Schwarz; Luiz Alonso-Ovalle; Maribel Romero; Alex Göbel; Ethan Poole; Yael Sharvit; Kyle Johnson)