Tag Archives: Phonology

Joe Pater Selected as a 2025 Spotlight Scholar

We are extremely happy to share the news that Joe Pater has been selected as one of the University’s Spotlight Scholars for Fall 2025!

The Spotlight Scholar program at UMass publicly acknowledges highly accomplished faculty and their professional achievements. Spotlight Scholars are exceptional faculty who exemplify the quality and commitment of the UMass Amherst faculty. For a list of this year’s Spotlight Scholars, please see the link below:

– https://www.umass.edu/gateway/research/stories/spotlight-scholars

Joe’s selection as a Spotlight Scholar is based upon his long and deep line of research into models of language that synthesize methods and theories from Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science, most notably his extensive and varied investigations into the use of numerically weighted constraints for both the analysis of phonological systems and the development of computational models of human phonological learning. 

Please join us in congratulating Joe on this wonderful achievement!

UMass linguists and alumni at AMP 2024

This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) will be hosted by Rutgers University November 1–3. The Annual Meetings on Phonology began as Phonology 2013 here at UMass.

Andrew Lamont (PhD 2022) will give a keynote address: Optimality Theory with lexical insertion is not computable. Abstract: This talk examines the computational consequences of introducing lexical insertion, i.e., the ability to copy morphemes or insert them from the lexicon, as an operation into Optimality Theory. I demonstrate that this operation makes OT not computable: in other words, it is impossible to determine the output of a given input in a finite amount of time. This result is derived by modeling the Post Correspondence Problem in an OT grammar that uses only representations and mechanisms attested in the literature.

Presentations from current students, faculty, and alumni included:

  • Claire Moore-Cantwell (PhD 2016): Balancing type and token frequency matching with lexically indexed constraints
  • Ali Nirheche: Variable Assimilation of the Definite Article l- in Moroccan Arabic
  • Seung Suk Lee, Joe Pater, & Brandon Prickett (PhD 2021): Representing and learning stress in a MaxEnt framework

“Phonetic knowledge” (1994) appears in Best in Language III

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From John Kingston

Thanks to Seth, I learned that a paper Randy Diehl and I had published in Language in 1994, “Phonetic knowledge,” had been chosen for inclusion in the third collection of Best in Language for the period 1986-2106. Here’s a link to the collection:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/best-language-volume-iii

The criteria for inclusion are that the paper be “influential, controversial, or otherwise interesting.” You decide which criteria our paper met.

Now I have to get to work to produce another.

NSF grant awarded to support the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America

Our colleague, Emiliana Cruz, of the Anthropology Department, and I are very happy to announce that the National Science Foundation has approved funding for the third conference on Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America. The conference will be held here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in October, 2018. Besides plenary and contributed addresses and poster sessions, the conference will include two round tables, one devoted to discussing effective techniques for fostering collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, and the other to discussing how to translate linguistic descriptions into useful pedagogical materials to be used in the indigenous communities. A call for papers will be sent out in October, 2017; abstracts will be due 1 March 2018; and decisions about acceptance will be made by a scientific committee by 1 May 2018. (John Kingston)

(This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (NSF BCS-1746391). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)