Category: Student News

Alyssa Scarsciotti

Alumna Alyssa Scarsciotti (BA Linguistics, 2020) is embarking on a tour in Costa Rica for the Peace Corp, as part of the first cohort of volunteers to serve overseas after the pandemic. Her journey from Stevenson College to Latin America was featured in a recent news article. Alyssa credited many professors for transforming her academic journey,  including Linguistics faculty Pranav Anand, Jorge Hankamer, Junko Ito, Ivy Sichel, and Maziar Toosarvandani.

On May 19, Richard Bibbs was honored as this year’s recipient of the Jorge Hankamer Outstanding Graduate Instructor in Linguistics.  From the award citation:

This award, given to one graduate student TA each year, is named after Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, whose dedication to pedagogy within Linguistics and the University at large has been an inspiration to and cornerstone of our department for many years. In recognition of his numerous contributions to teaching, course design, and mentorship of his fellow TAs.

Richard Bibbs, Professor Ryan Bennett (Graduate Program Director), Professor Matt Wagers (Chair) (from left to right)

The outstanding research of several graduate students in Linguistics was recently recognized by the Humanities Division.

Fifth-year PhD students Jack Duff and Morwenna Hoeks were each awarded one-quarter Dissertation Completion Fellowships for the 2023-2024 academic year. Jack’s dissertation, “On the timing of pragmatic inferences in comprehension,” profiles how narrative conventions like prototypical cause-and-effect plot structure invite readers to draw inferences that go beyond what is said in a text and explores how the reader’s path to those inferences is mediated by the external pressure facing them as they read. Morwenna’s dissertation, “Alternatives in context: Investigations on the processing of focus,” uses the interpretation of focus—a grammatical device all languages have for highlighting important information—to build psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension and prediction.

In addition, the Humanities Institute (THI) awarded summer research fellowships to fourth-year PhD student Vishal Arvindam and second-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore. Vishal’s award will support travel to India this summer to perform fieldwork for his dissertation, “Processing of anti-local reflexives in Telugu.” Jonathan’s award will support his travel to Pakistan to perform fieldwork for a research project on nasalization in Punjabi and Mankiyali.

Andrew Kato (second from the right) with fellow presenters

Andrew Kato, a second-year undergraduate student in the Linguistics major, recently returned from the 17th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (April 21-23). He filed the following report with WHASC:

“With presenters from UMass Amherst, NYU, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Northeastern University, I ended up being the only one hailing from a university outside the New England area. Posters and oral presentations included topics such as Massachusetts regional dialects, compound verb constructions in Japanese, and spatiotemporal perception among Mandarin Chinese speakers. My talk was on gender-neutral logophoricity in discourse. External keynote speaker Professor Renée Blake of NYU spoke about Black embodied communication, and internal keynote speaker Professor Helena Aparicio spoke on recalibrating interpretations of vague predicates.”