WAGERS IN MASSACHUSETTS

Matt Wagers, who is on sabbatical, filed this report:

I went to UMass for the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting. There I gave a tutorial workshop with Kie Zuraw on building digital resources on under-resourced languages. Essentially, we used Kie’s workflow for building her Tagalog corpus from web text to put together a Chamorro corpus; and then we attempted to cross-validate it with the behavioral data that Sandy Chung, Manny Borja, and I have been collecting in the Marianas — subjective frequency ratings, listening times, etc. In attendance were alumni Ryan Bennett (Yale) and Abby Kaplan (Utah). The notes from the workshop are available here. The next day, current Ph.D. student Jason Ostrove opened the conference with his paper “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Abby gave a poster on “Paradigm (Non-)Uniformity of Continuously-Valued Features in an Exemplar Framework.” Former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth talked about acoustic cues in morphologically-distinct homophones. Other Santa Cruzans spotted at the conference include undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews and Shayne Sloggett, who are both now Ph.D. students at UMass. Shayne was one of the central student organizers of the conference.

I stuck around to plan some experiments on ambiguity resolution with Brian Dillon. I also gave a talk in their Psycholinguistics Workshop on the insertion of null pronouns in incremental structure building, using Chamorro data as the test case. Spotted roaming around the halls of the department’s new digs were Nick LeCara (M.A. 2010) and Wendell Kimper (Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-12).