Thomas Truong '25

Linguistics and Philosophy
Commonwealth Honors College

Orlando, Florida

What drew you to this field of study? 

There is a special kind of beauty in the world. If you’ve ever enjoyed the rhythm of a song or the perfect symmetry of a flower, then you know the sort of beauty I am talking about. Some things are beautiful because of their structure—the form and shape they have. 

Like music and flowers, I find beauty in the form and shape of language. Even though you and I speak every day, there is hidden structure in the way we produce and process the sounds that we make and the meanings we convey. That is what drew me to linguistics—uncovering beauty. 

For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in philosophy and math. These interests came together in my freshman year at UMass, when I took two classes—Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics and Philosophy of Language—that showed me how we can study and formalize language with mathematical tools like a physicist models physical systems. I was left with the urge to continue learning the tools used to study language, but even more, [I wanted] to refine and develop new ones. 

What I find incredible is the ability we have to transmit our thoughts and mental states to the people around us by making sounds with our mouths or signs with our hands. How is it that we can endow words with meaning? What even is meaning? I believe that an important part of linguistics is understanding the relationship between language, the real world, and our mental representations.

How do you conduct your research? 

In general, semantics research is interested in what a language user needs to know in order to understand the meaning of a sentence. I can utter a sentence that you have probably never heard before: 

The purple kangaroo sauntered from the salon back to her home until the sun came up. 

And yet, you are able to understand the meaning of the sentence. What did you need to know to get to that meaning? You know the meaning of each individual word and the rules for combining these simple parts into complex expressions. Using tools from math and logic, semanticists seek to design a theory that models this system of rules and explains how people can compute the meaning of sentences we have never heard before. Then we test our theories on empirical data to see if our models make the right predictions. 

My research focuses on cross-linguistics semantics—investigating other languages to discover how they contribute to our knowledge of linguistic theory. My current work explores tense and aspect, the way that languages express time and temporal relationships. In English, present tense and past tense are distinguished by changing the ending of the verb; as in “Kai smokes” versus “Kai smoked.” However, other languages, such as Vietnamese, do not change the verb to express this difference. Research in this area has shown that there are surprising similarities in the formal structure of tense across seemingly different languages.

What do you see as the impact—or potential impact—of your work? 

My research explores what is universal across all languages and the ways in which they vary. Ultimately, we seek to understand how theory can predict and explain the variation that we observe. In this way, research on understudied languages such as Vietnamese is incredibly important to linguistic theory. By studying these languages, we can uncover surprising similarities or expand the data that the theory needs to cover. 

More broadly, however, I believe that work in semantics is important beyond the study of language itself. Situating linguistics as a cognitive science means that theoretical linguistics is attempting to uncover the mental structures that make up the areas of cognition responsible for language and understand how we acquire these structures.

How does your faculty mentor support your research? 

My research on Vietnamese tense and aspect came out of an independent study with Professor Seth Cable, an incredible mentor and person. Not only is he a brilliant linguist, he is a phenomenal communicator and teacher. He has taught me how to communicate research clearly and has mentored me through the entire process of conducting cross-linguistic research, organizing data, and writing a structured argument. He has always encouraged me to present my work and has guided me through the process of writing abstracts and creating posters. He is beyond generous with his time, always willing to meet and work with me despite his many duties as a professor, and recently, department chair. Beyond that, none of what I have done would be possible without Professor Cable. I believe that any good ideas in my work came directly from conversations with him and the other amazing linguists at UMass. They have taught me how to approach problems and to be precise and detailed.  

What do you find most exciting about your research? 

The possibility of discovering something novel is both exciting and anguishing. I recall many nights thinking about linguistics puzzles and struggling to wrap my head around some idea. Many times, I had ideas that were never borne out and had to be thrown away. But when the pieces of the puzzle begin fitting together, no matter how incremental that progress is, that feeling makes all the anguish worth it. Linguistics research is also very unique. There is an enormous number of languages, with variation in every direction. It is an understatement to say that linguistics has too much data. At the same time, some of the data that linguists work with is simple yet incredibly insightful. I think that it is amazing that little bits of data that all of us have access to can push forward an entire discipline.

What are you most proud of? 

I came to UMass with curiosity and a love for learning. I wanted to learn about anything and everything that I encountered. And of course, there was too much to read and too little time. I am most proud that I have been able to carry forward the desires I had in my first year and that I wasn’t discouraged by the mountain of things there are to learn, or the even greater space of things that we don’t know. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to do research, which has fueled and expanded my desire to learn. 

How has your research enhanced your overall educational experience at UMass? 

The intellectual environment in the UMass Department of Linguistics has made my education at UMass worth the world. The linguistics professors and graduate students here have always been patient and encouraging in discussing research with me. Working on research has helped me move from being a student to feeling integrated in the academic community as a contributor. I am incredibly grateful for the kindness and motivation that the Department of Linguistics has given me.

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