Semantics | UMLAUT, the newsletter of UMass Linguistics

UMass Amherst is well known for integrating formal semantic theory into generative linguistic research. Natural language semantics seeks to understand the nature of how linguistic meaning is cognitively represented, and how those representations are productively computed. It is therefore studied here as a sub-branch of the larger discipline of cognitive science, a perspective that fosters leading research into the interactions and interfaces with syntax, morphology, and phonology (especially prosody). At this exciting moment in the discipline, our program emphasizes the essential cross-disciplinarity of semantic research, drawing upon work in such diverse areas as philosophy, logic, psychology, language documentation, and other areas of linguistic theory. As a branch of cognitive science, semantic theory is studied here through a variety of empirical methods, including traditional judgment tasks, laboratory experiments, psycholinguistic studies, computational modeling, and fieldwork. Our faculty have broad expertise in a variety of languages and language families, including Romance, South Asian languages, and North American indigenous languages. In addition, our program has a well established tradition of faculty and students carrying out in-depth, theoretically-informed semantic fieldwork on a wide variety of understudied and endangered languages, especially languages indigenous to the Americas, Asia, and Africa, as well as signed languages.

Faculty

Ana Arregui ana@linguist.umass.edu	🙂	Research interests: Semantics
Maria Biezma maria.biezma@umass.edu		Research interests: Pragmatics, semantics, psycholinguistics
Seth Cable scable@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Fieldwork, Semantics, Syntax, Na-Dene Languages
Vincent Homer vincent.homer@gmail.com		Research interests: Syntax, Syntax-Semantics Interface
Angelika Kratzer(Emerita) kratzer@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Semantics, Syntax/Semantics Interface
Barbara Partee (Emerita) partee@linguist.umass.edu		Research interests: Semantics, History of Formal Semantics

Graduate students

Mariam Asatryan masatryan@umass.edu	Research interests: Semantics	Year started: 2019
Angelica Hill amhill@umass.edu	Research interests: formal semantics; a cross-linguistic approach to tense and aspect	Year started: 2020
Anissa Neal anneal@umass.edu	Research interests: Psycholinguistics, syntax, syntax-semantics interface	Year started: 2018
Eva Neu eneu@umass.edu	Research interests: Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of language	Year started: 2021
Jonathan Pesetsky jpesetsky@umass.edu	Research interests: Semantics	Year started: 2018
Yixiao Song yixiaosong@umass.edu	Research interests: Computational Linguistics and Semantics	Year started: 2019