Category Archives: Uncategorized

Biondo, Vespignani and Dillon to appear in Frontiers in Psychology

Former visiting scholar Nicoletta Biondo (BCBL) has been published in Frontiers in Psychology, along with co-authors Francesco Vespignani and Brian Dillon. Her paper, entitled Attachment and concord of temporal adverbs: evidence from eye movements, uses eye-tracking-while-reading to evaluate the degree to which syntactic and semantic cues guide the interpretation of deictic temporal adverbs like last week in incremental syntactic processing. She shows that readers are immediately sensitive to syntactic structure in resolving the attachment site of adverbial phrases. Congratulations, Nicoletta!

Publication of UMOP 40: The Leader of the Pack: A Festschrift in Honor of Peggy Speas

The GLSA is happy to announce the publication of UMOP 40: The Leader of the Pack: A Festschrift in Honor of Peggy Speas edited by Rodica Ivan.

This volume, UMOP 40, includes a collection of papers by students, former students and colleagues, in honor of the ever wonderful Peggy Speas. We are forever in Peggy’s debt for inspiring all this wonderful work in so many different areas of Linguistics over the years. This list of papers, including contributions in Syntax, Semantics, Phonology, Morphology and Language Processing, is only a small sample of all of the brilliant work Peggy advised, inspired, and improved. Contents: Verbal Classifiers in Sign Languages. . . Agreement vs AGREE? (Elena E. Benedicto), The semantics of the future in Navajo (Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten), Class Structure: Verb Classes as Argument Structure in Cherokee (Leah Chapman), Parasynthetic verbs: The Missing Category (Eva J. Daussà), Indexiphors: Notes on embedded indexicals, shifty agreement, and logophoricity (Amy Rose Deal), How Do Children Deal with Shifted Indexicals? (Jill de Villiers, Ann Nordmeyer & Tom Roeper), Valence Shifting Operations in Navajo (Theodore Fernald & Ellavina Perkins), A note on the prosody and interpretation of final phrases (Lyn Frazier & Charles Clifton Jr.), Who knows what and how? New Evidence about the Acquisition of Evidentials in Tibetan (Jay L. Garfield & Jill de Villiers), Pseudo-pronouns, Honorifics, and Generic Terms in Dhivehi (Amalia E. Gnanadesikan), Negative Inversion and Conditionals in African American English (Lisa Green), What ‘other people’ mean to ‘us’ (Christopher Hammerly), Multiple Exponence and Fission: Number in Muskogee Creek (Kimberly Johnson), To give someone their innocence again (Kyle Johnson), A phonological analysis of verb agreement in sign languages (Noriko Kawasaki), Point of View and the Behavior of Korean Demonstratives (Min-Joo Kim), On the limited set of evidential types (Andrew McKenzie), Dependencies are all alike; every illusion is illusory in its own way (Shayne Sloggett, Caroline Andrews & Brian Dillon), When is Positing Covert Ergative Case Justified? (Ellen Woolford) Peggy, thank you for being such an amazing researcher, teacher, friend and overall incredible human being. Thank you for all the light you bring into our hearts and minds.

The volume is available for purchase hot off the press at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1729697488

UMass at Chicago Linguistics Society meeting

University of Chicago hosted its annual Chicago Linguistics Society meeting April 26-8, and UMass was well represented. Former, present and future members of the UMass department were there:

Present students and faculty:

Peter Alrenga gave “Emphatic vs Exclusive Modification by ‘single’: A Unified Approach”

Rong Yin and Jeremy Hartman gave “Perspectives under Ellipsis.”

Michael Wilson gave “The Dative Illusion as an Argument for Lexicalist Argument Structure”

Former Students:

Jesse Harris (with Natasha Korotkova) gave: “Preference for single events guides perception in Russian: A phoneme restoration study”

Marcin Morzycki gave the invited talk: “Semantic Viruses and Multiple Superlatives”

Future Student:

Jonathan Pesetsky (with Saúl Fernández) gave: “Suppose Epistemic Contradictions Might Not Be Contradictions “

UMass at FASAL 8, Wichita State University, March 31, April 1, 2018

FASAL 8 [https://sites.google.com/view/fasal8/home] was held at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, on March 31 and April 1, 2018.

Sakshi Bhatia gave a talk on `Forgetting effects in Hindi” with Samar Husain [IIT Delhi].

Rajesh Bhatt gave a talk on “A secondary crossover effect in Hindi-Urdu” with Stefan Keine [USC].

 

Caroline Andrews in Syntax Workshop, March 30, 2.30pm

Caroline Andrews led the discussion for Colin Philips colloquium talk on March 30 in the syntax workshop that immediately preceded the colloquium.

Title: Speaking, understanding, and grammar

Abstract:
We speak and understand the same language, but it’s generally assumed that language production and comprehension are subserved by separate cognitive systems. So they must presumably draw on a third, task-neutral cognitive system (“grammar”). For this reason, comprehension-production differences are a thorn in the side of anybody who might want to collapse grammar and language processing mechanisms (i.e., me!).  In this talk I will explore two linguistic domains from the perspective of comprehension and production. In the case of syntactic categories, I will show that the same underlying mechanisms can have rather  different surface effects in comprehension and production. In the case of argument role information, I will show an apparent conflict between comprehension and production. In production, argument role information tightly governs the time course of speech planning. But in comprehension, initial prediction mechanisms seem to be blind to argument role information. I argue that both the similarities and contrasts can be captured under a view in which the same cognitive architecture is accessed based on different information, i.e., sounds for comprehension, messages for production. I will discuss the relation between this and other ways of thinking about comprehension-production relations, drawing on a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

If anyone wanted to glance at some papers, the links to the ones he recommended are here:

Kimberly Johnson in Syntax Workshop, Friday, March 23, 2.30pm

Kimberly Johnson will speak in the Syntax Workshop on Friday March 23 at 2.30pm.

Title: Muskogee Creek: A Case of Too Many Options

Abstract: Muskogee Creek has a case system that is unusual in two ways. First, there are two cases, /-t/ which marks only subjects, and /-n/ which marks all non-subject nominals including adjunct-like nominals such as temporal adverbs and locations. Second, case is largely, but not entirely optional. This talk presents a formal analysis that attempts to capture the wide distribution of non-subject case, as well as to constrain optionality. I show that presence-absence of case is structurally constrained along two lines, and argue that both point to a Dependent Case analysis.