Our friend and colleague, Lyn Frazier, will retire from her position as Professor of Linguistics at the end of AY 2017-18. Her marvelous career will be celebrated at Lynschrift18, on May 19 and 20, 2018. Some of her many students, collaborators, and friends from around the world will be attending. We hope you can join us. If you haven’t yet indicated that you will, please let the organizers know by sending an email to lynschrift18@gmail.com.
Lyn, as you know, arrived at UMass in 1978 with a new explicit theory of how people parse sentences. In collaboration with her Psychology colleague, the late Keith Rayner, she introduced a new technique – eyetracking while reading sentences – to psycholinguistics, and provided crucial evidence about her theoretical claims. In the years since then, she has continued to provide new insights and new experimental evidence about the processing of sentences with long-distance dependencies, the role of prosody in sentence processing, the interpretation of sentences with ellipsis, the role of information structure in processing, and various aspects of the semantics and pragmatics of sentences.
She has collaborated closely with colleagues at UMass and other universities and research institutes in the US and around the world, earning their respect and admiration. Her research career is surely not over. Her status as Professor Emerita will give her the opportunity to think deeply about a variety of new aspects of language processing. But for now, it is time to celebrate what Lyn has accomplished to date. We will all have a stimulating two days of talks and posters and a delightful reunion of many of Lyn’s dear friends, colleagues, and students.
For more information, send an email to lynschrift18@gmail.com, or contact any of the organizers: Brian Dillon, Chuck Clifton, and Adrian Staub