Linguistics Faculty

Faruk Akkuş works at the intersection of theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, with a focus on endangered languages.

Ana Arregui's research interests are in natural language semantics. She has worked on topics such as modality, tense, aspect, pronouns and indefinites. She is also very interested in issues related to the psycholinguistic processing of meaning.

Michael Becker is a phonologist who specializes in the phonological organization of the lexicon. In his experimental work, he studies how speakers find patterns in their real words and use them to treat words that they haven't heard before.

Rajesh Bhatt's research interests involve the syntax-semantics interface, the comparative syntax of Modern Indo-Aryan languages, and Tree Adjoining Grammars.

María’s research focuses on how meanings are assembled, and on how structure and context conditions the pragmatic inferences that are made.

Professor Seth Cable specializes in the interface between formal semantic theory and field research, also known as 'semantic fieldwork'. This work aims to both deepen our documentation and analytic understanding of particular understudied languages, as well as to broaden our understanding of the ways in which linguistic meaning varies across human languages. He received a PhD in linguistics from MIT in 2007, an MS in mathematical logic from the University of Amsterdam in 2002, and a BA in linguistics and philosophy from Rutgers College in 2001.

Brian Dillon specializes in psycholinguistics, the study of how adults and children understand, produce, and acquire language. In particular, his research seeks to understand how adult native speakers of a language make use of their cognitive resources, such as attention or memory, when interpreting language.

Katrin works in the areas of computational semantics and lexical semantics. She is affiliated with both Linguistics and CICS.

Lisa Green is the founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Language at UMass Amherst. Green’s research investigates variation within and across varieties of English, with a focus on African American English (AAE).

Professor Homer specializes in formal semantics; his interests also include formal syntax and pragmatics. He received a PhD in linguistics from UCLA in 2011 and an MA in philosophy from the University of Tours in 2000.

Gaja Jarosz works in the areas of phonological theory, computational linguistics, and language learning and development. Her research seeks to better understand how natural language sound systems and their acquisition by children can be formally and computationally characterized.

Kyle Johnson's specialization is in syntactic theory. 

Kingston's specialization is phonetics and its relationship to phonology. His research since coming to the University of Massachusetts has focused primarily on how listeners perceive speech and how that behavior influences synchronic phonological representations and processes as well as sound change.

Beccy Lewis' research interests include theoretical syntax and its interface with morphology and semantics, variation in British English and generative typology. She received her PhD from The University of Connecticut in 2024. Her dissertation is a typological investigation into the expression of nominal plurality, with a particular focus on heterogenous plurals (e.g. associative plurals). She received an MPhil from The University of Cambridge in 2018 and a BA from The University of York in 2017.

Shota Momma specializes in psycholinguistics, syntax, and the intersection between the two. His current research focuses on how people assemble sentence structures for speaking comparing English and his native language, Japanese. He teaches psycholinguistics courses, research methods/statistics courses, and occasionally syntax courses.

Magda Oiry specializes in syntax and language acquisition and the grammar of French.

Professor Pater specializes in phonology and language acquisition. His current research focuses on the use of weighted constraints for the modeling of phonology and its learning.

Kristine Yu's research focuses on tone and intonation, from the speech signal on up to grammar and human language processing.