And peterson left the department and students

xiii

A History of the UMass Linguistics Department to 1999

One of the lessons that emerged from the formation and growth of this department is that it is easier to build a first-rate department from scratch than to try to turn a middling department into a top one. Overcoming the status quo is never easy; but when there is no status quo to overcome, then if you can get a good bunch of people together and give them the support they need to get going, and if everything clicks, then there's no limit to what you can do. And some of the early decisions in how to proceed helped make things "click". Don and Dick Demers were here first, and Don then recruited some outstanding junior people to help get things up and running: foremost among the new young faculty were Adrian Akmajian and Frank Heny, who put enormous amounts of effort into developing both the undergraduate and the graduate curriculum. They accomplished a great deal very quickly; and that made it easier for them to convince their "senior" recruits that this hitherto unknown place, "in the shadow of MIT", really did have the potential to become a top department.

When I was being recruited in 1971, my colleagues at UCLA were quite surprised that I should imagine that this place had a chance of becoming anything. "Ask Don", they said, "how he expects to build a top department so close to MIT." I asked Don, and his reply was "Look up and down the whole East Coast, and tell me whether there shouldn't

All of these features of the department were in place when I arrived in 1972, and all have remained great strengths. The department is its people, and there have always been great people here, and a remarkable degree of collegiality which is palpable even to visitors, who often remark on it. Good and dedicated faculty attract good graduate students, and good graduate students attract good faculty. And a well-functioning department can attract and keep wonderful secretaries who then make possible a

Barbara H.Partee xv

Part III, Recent History, 1988 - 1999, is new for this occasion. It is more informal in style because it was written for "us", rather than for an outside review team. And it is also a bit vaguer in terms of specific dates for specific changes, because I am writing it in Leipzig where I don't have drawers full of administrative folders to consult. I'm getting Lynne to help me fill in the most important specifics, and otherwise leaving it slightly vague.

These three main sections are followed by two supplementary sections. Section 4 is a brief history of space and facilities in the department, and Section 5 is a personal reflection on some of the inevitably painful aspects of the transition the department went through in the first few years of its existence.

The biggest omission from this document is mention of individual students and their roles in the history of the department. As we were reminded at the reunion, there have been different "cohorts" with different vivid "characters" at different times, groups that got involved in particular lines of research together, or in putting on a NELS (Peter Sells and Charlie Jones really knew how to make a NELS party happen, and there were two other great NELSes here as well) or a workshop. Groups that gave a real boost to GLSA, and the cohort that sponsored a series of GLSA auctions (of everything from autographed manuscripts to breakfast in bed) that were hilarious as well as fund-raising. And there have been different department sports. In the very beginning, Dick Demers used to lead departmental cross-country skiing days in the Pelham hills, ending with pizza in his living room in Echo Hill. When Mike Flynn was here we played some football and a lot of softball, usually against Philosophy. There have been periods of basketball, and for many years there was always volleyball at department picnics if they were at 50 Hobart Lane, and there still sometimes is. Soccer has been the sport of choice for so long now that the current students were surprised to see the softball pictures from the 70's at the reunion. But these are just tips of some icebergs; I realized that I couldn't tell about individual students or groups of students without making this into a book. But I also haven't tried to talk about individual faculty, except with respect to recruitment or certain historical events. What I have tried to do, just to provide memory-triggers and landmarks, is to fill in snapshots of what faculty were here at various points and of who the entering classes of students were at the same points. Just looking at the names will probably call up all kinds of memories for those who were here in the various periods, and be a story in itself for anyone who didn’t already know how many of the wonderful linguists (or ex-linguists) in the world today were students here or have been part of our faculty at one time or another. (Our undergraduate students are unfortunately not discussed or listed here at all; that omission needs to be corrected in future histories.)

It did not occur to me to put "acknowledgements footnotes" into the earlier program review documents, and it is too late now to try to reconstruct all the help I had. But let me at least take this as a moment of special thanks and appreciation to the wonderful departmental secretaries this department has been blessed with from the beginning. Without Marty, then Sally, then Lynne, then Lynne and Kathy, no department head, no Personnel Committee chair, no Graduate Program director, no departmental committee, and no one preparing for a departmental program review could have begun to

Kathy Adamczyk started as a part-time Cognitive Science secretary in 1980, funded by the interdepartmental Sloan Grant in Cognitive Science. Kathy was “housed” in Linguistics, because the other participating departments, initially just COINS [now Computer Science, then Computer and Information Science] and then COINS and Psychology, recognized how badly Linguistics needed a second secretary and how difficult it is in the Humanities to get one, since we generally have far too little soft money and our Dean also never has enough resources to meet all the recognized needs. Kathy remained on “soft money” as long as the Sloan Grants lasted, then had additional appointments funded in part by the three cooperating Deans for the Cognitive Science Program and in part by grants which Lyn Frazier and I had in the 1980’s. Finally after a great deal of effort a regular position was given to the department for her, and she became a state funded employee in July 88.

So Lynne has been here now for more than 20 years and Kathy close to 20; the

Those pages are reproduced verbatim below. I will only add to them a series of "faculty snapshots", illustrating the high turnover that parts of our faculty went through during those years, and lists of the entering classes during those years. I append those to the end of this section.

A Brief History of the Department of Linguistics

A number of additional appointments had been made during his initial period: Adrian Akmajian (1970), Frank Heny (1970), David Vetter (1970). The first Ph.D. was completed in September 1970, by Gary Bevington, who was appointed on a one-year basis.

The second phase began with departmental status and a commitment from the administration to support the development of the department. (It was also at this time that Freeman secured approval and backing for hosting the 1974 Linguistics Institute of the Linguistic Society of America here, see below). The plan was to continue to rely heavily on junior appointments but to begin a search for one or two senior faculty members. Two Assistant Professors, Jim Heringer and Tom Peterson, were appointed in 1971. This search for senior additions culminated in two appointments: Barbara Hall Partee and Samuel Jay Keyser, who joined the department in 1972, the former with a joint appointment in Philosophy and Linguistics, the latter agreeing to take over the headship, Freeman having agreed to serve as Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Fine Arts under Jeremiah Allen. (In 1976 he was made Adjunct Professor of Linguistics.) The appointment of Partee coincided with the appointment of Terence Parsons in the Department of Philosophy. Largely because of the efforts of Heny, who played a major role in shaping the department, strong connections had been established with Philosophy (as well as other departments). The appointment of Partee and Parsons continued this direction. A number of candidates for the Ph.D. had joined the program in 1971, but 1972 was the first year in which the present rate of admissions was reached (i.e. six or seven admissions per year, special students excluded).

During the summer of 1974, the Department and the University hosted the Golden Anniversary Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, with Keyser and Freeman as Co-directors and Bach as Associate Director. The Institute was, in our opinion, one of the most successful of recent years. About 600 students and scholars from all over the world participated. Among the activities were a series of Golden Anniversary lectures by internationally known scholars held in connection with the summer meeting of the LSA.

In 1975, Bach (having resigned his Hampshire position) took on full-time duties in the department and two new appointments were made: Alan Prince and Edwin Williams. At this point, although a number of changes occurred, the basic present personnel of the department was established. During the academic year 1976-77, Bach and Partee were on leave at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and two visitors (Roger Higgins and Robin Cooper) took their place. During this year, Keyser accepted an appointment at M.I.T., and Bach agreed to take on the headship on his return. During this year also two appointments were made (to start in 1978): Richard Kayne and Jean-Roger Vergnaud and two visiting appointments were made for the current year: Daniel Kahn and Wendy Wilkins. The Department is currently engaged in a search for a person either to fill the gaps in diachronic studies which arose when first Demers and then Keyser left the department, or to enhance the psycholinguistic part of the program, which has grown considerably under the leadership of Roeper.

During Keyser’s stay, the Department was the home for Linguistic Inquiry under Keyser’s editorship. Partee was editor of the ‘squibs’ section for two years, at present Prince and Williams are doing this job. Students have been active in putting together the ‘semi-publication’ University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers, of which the twenty third issue is about to appear.

A number of grants have been given to individuals in the department: Partee and Parsons, Keyser, Prince and Roeper. During the 1974 Institute, Partee organized and conducted an MSSB workshop on problems of non-extensional languages and during the past summer Williams organized and conducted a workshop on discourse grammar.

Student entering classes: 1969: Gary Bevington, Linda Thomas

1971: Robin Cooper, George Horn, Cathy Lee, Jeannine Langdoc

1976: Wynn Chao, Panit Chotibut, Paloma Garcia-Bellido, Marianne Phinney, Janet Randall, Mark Stein, Deirdre Wheeler

1977: Lisa Crawford, Elisabet Engdahl, Irene Heim, Jonathan Mitchell, Mary Sparkes, Lori Taft, Martha Young (Martha Wright)

By the 1987-88, the number of regular faculty had grown from 9 to 10 with the addition of Angelika Kratzer in a new semantics position, and the regular faculty that year were Bach, Frazier, Higgins, Kratzer, McCarthy, Partee, Pesetsky, Roeper, Selkirk, Williams. The overlap between 1979-80 and 1987-88 is 7 of the 9/10. Major changes: Prince left in 1984, McCarthy came in 1985. Vergnaud was on the faculty from 1978 to 1982; Pesetsky was hired in 1983, and stayed until 1989.

Entering classes 1978-88: 1978: Yasuaki Abe, Toni Borowsky, Davida Charney, Shinsho Miyara, Mats Rooth

1983: Stephen Berman, T. Daniel Seely, Gautam Sengupta, Tong Shen, Karina Wilkinson

1984: John Boyd, Joyce McDonough, Bozena Rozwadowska, Xiaoping Teng, Michiko Terada, Anne Vainikka, Gert Webelhuth, Alessandro Zucchi

Barbara H.Partee xxiii

position in syntax. The review committee supported our assessment of that need, and we were able to hire Peggy Speas in 1989 and John Kingston in 1990. Another item for discussion in the 1988 review was the possibility of adding a "straight" linguistics undergraduate major to supplement our 7 joint majors, since the long-discussed possibility of a 5-College linguistics B.A. program had clearly died by then. But on that item there was less consensus about whether we could do it with our faculty size without cutting into the quality of our Ph.D. program, something we would not want to risk. So that change did not come about until ten years later.

[Note added 1999: Although we did not publicize it in official documents, the two student representatives had full voting rights on the Personnel Committee as well as in department meeting. That continued until the university expressly and explicitly prohibited it on the advice of University Counsel (for fear of lawsuits by faculty denied tenure or promotion, given the wording of official personnel policy.) Students continued thereafter to participate in Personnel Committee but as non-voting members. Also note that the present paid "GLSA Manager" position was in 1988 still an unpaid "treasurer" position.]

In addition to providing a forum for discussion of graduate student concerns, the GLSA sponsors colloquia, which generally meet on a weekly basis and feature speakers from both within the department (both students and faculty) and from outside. [1999 note: the number of student volunteers for colloquium presentations had already dwindled greatly by 1988, and the ratio of outside to inside speakers had climbed close to its present very high level. Colloquia remained weekly until just a few years ago.]

(ii) The Theses service: since 1977 all doctoral dissertations written in the department (including those completed before 1977) have been duplicated and bound by the GLSA and made available to the linguistic community. Orders were first taken at the November 1977 NELS meeting and thousands of copies of theses have been purchased since. All the theses ever written in the department are available through the GLSA.

(iii) NELS volumes: for the first several years of the existence of NELS (North Eastern Linguistics Society), whichever institution hosted the annual fall NELS meeting was also responsible for publishing the proceedings. In 1980 the UMass GLSA was invited to take over the production and sale of all subsequent NELS volumes, which it has done ever since.

During the last years, our Ph.D. program has undergone a number of changes. The Ph.D. program used to be a four-year program. We now consider it a five-year program. The change seemed desirable for several reasons:

(i) the rapid increase of "standard knowledge" in all subdisciplines of linguistics,

The First Year curriculum in 1988 (normally expected of all students):

Fall:

Spring:

LING 604, Syntactic Theory (3 credits)

The Second Year in 1988:

A normal course load in the second year (and thereafter) is 9 credits per semester. Students are expected to take LING 605, Language Change and Language Typology, in the fall. Apart from that, students may choose any suitable courses offered in the department or in other departments. We offer three courses that are especially geared toward second-year students:

Barbara H.Partee xxvii

Our Ph.D. program is in the midst of a modest growth period right now, from a nominally 4-year program with an entering class size average of 7 (30-35 students in residence at a time) to a nominally 5-year Ph.D. program with an average entering class of 8 (anticipating about 40 students in residence at a time.) No further growth in the program is presently contemplated, though once we succeed in making the two new faculty appointments we need, we may feel ready for slight further growth. But financial aid demands and the narrow job market for Ph.D.'s are more of a limiting factor than the number of faculty, so no major changes in size are foreseen or desired.

Beyond 101 and 201 we have a range of more advanced undergraduate courses that have roles to play both as service courses for other majors and in our own broad selection of joint majors. We don't have a straight undergraduate linguistics major, for the historical reason that in the early 1970's when the program was being designed, a majority of us felt that linguistics was still an inherently interdisciplinary field, and that it was a mistake to encourage students to specialize in it too soon. A majority of us would now defend the value of permitting such an option, and there has been under development for several years a proposal for a 5-College B.A. Program in Linguistics, designed to be accessible to students in any of the 5 colleges in the area (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mt. Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts). It might be desirable to develop a straight Linguistics major at the University.

Our more advanced undergraduate offerings not only prepare our majors and contribute to related majors, but have turned out to be one of the vehicles by which undergraduates in this very large university can have an experience which is more common at the best smaller schools, namely small classes with exceptionally talented fellow students, challenging material, and a dedicated teacher. Our advanced undergraduate courses have the reputation of being very hard but very good, and we certainly find that the students who sign up for them are almost without exception extremely bright, hard-working, and highly motivated, while very diverse in their backgrounds and other interests. We have thus come to see the upper end of our undergraduate program as fulfilling a mission akin to that of the University Honors program, a mission quite different from the broad service and general education mission of our introductory courses, and one for which small classes are part of the attraction and not a sign of underenrollment. [1999 note: That's what we tried to convince ourselves and the administration of, at least. But the next paragraph was later in the same report.]

The School of Communications and Cognitive Science (formerly School of Language and Communication) at Hampshire College is very strong in undergraduate linguistics. Smith College is strong in psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. We have strong ties with both these institutions, somewhat weaker ones with Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College. The Five College Linguistics Group as an entity has become quite inactive except for publishing an annual listing of Linguistics courses available at the five colleges. Individual ties and communication remain good, and undergraduate students cross-register with some frequency. Plans for a Five College major in Linguistics have made no visible progress in over eight years.

[1999 note: 5-college cooperation was stronger in the 1970s and early 1980s than it was later, for several reasons. Elizabeth Bruss at Amherst College was an active advocate of 5-College cooperation and helped work with Five Colleges, Inc., to make things happen - 5-college colloquia, discussions of plans for a major, occasional conferences, and other activities. There were a number of energetic and outreach-oriented linguists at Hampshire College, and Murray Kitely in Philosophy at Smith College was always ready to be involved. The cooperation with Smith College became even stronger when Jill and Peter de Villiers moved there. Mt. Holyoke was only marginally involved but friendly. But the plans for the 5-College major moved very slowly. Alan Prince and Liz Bruss were in charge, and plans reached the stage of several serious drafts. But one drag was the knowledge that a major roadblock loomed ahead: Amherst College has always been extremely reluctant to approve any major for it students which is dependent on a critical mass of courses taught outside Amherst College, particularly at the University. (And this major would certainly require a substantial number of courses to be taken at UMass.) Then Liz Bruss died suddenly, very young, and after that the proposed major was clearly doomed, because without a committed, energetic, and forceful advocate at Amherst, it was known to be a hopeless cause. And the hole left by Liz's loss, plus the increasing growth and self-sufficiency of our department, gradually led to the replacement of general 5-College linguistics activity by specific loci of cooperation, such as cooperation between Roeper and de Villiers, and considerable involvement of Hampshire College faculty in the Cognitive Science projects funded by Sloan Foundation grants in the late 1970's and early 80’s and continued in various lower-key forms since then. The Five College environment continues to be a great advantage for all the institutions, and there are vital specific cooperative activities and numerous specific cases of cross-institutional shared advising of students.]

Our Ph.D.'s have an excellent record of placement in leading universities in the U.S. and abroad as well as in research and technology industries, and our undergraduates have generally gone on to success in graduate school and/or careers.

Department faculty have received a variety of research and training grants from a variety of sources. Recent grants include:

Less recent but very important were two major interdisciplinary Sloan grants for the development of Cognitive Science. First was a Sloan Foundation grant on Language and Information Processing to a team from Linguistics and Computer Science, 1978-80. That was followed by a Sloan Foundation Grant in Cognitive Science to an expanded team from Linguistics, Computer Science, and Psychology, 1980-85.

It was the Sloan Grant that first supported the new secretarial position filled by Kathy Adamczyk as a Cognitive Science secretary, housed in Linguistics but serving the interdisciplinary grant activities. After the ending of the Sloan grants, Kathy was supported in Linguistics in part by Partee's SDF grant and in part by Lyn Frazier's psycholinguistics grants; and after that, we went through several nervous years in which we had to persuade three Deans to jointly continue to support Kathy's position, until finally we were able to get approval to make the position permanent.

Johnson in 1993. Hagit left in 1997, and a syntax search has finally been approved for next year. In semantics, Emmon retired in 1992 and since then it has been virtually impossible to have any team-taught seminars or other "extra" offerings in semantics or across its various interfaces. Partee began a de facto permanent arrangement of spending one semester per year in Moscow starting in 1996-97. Semantics visitors Orin Percus in 1997-98 and Yael Sharvit in 1998-99 helped to fill the gap, and Lisa Matthewson will join the department as a regular faculty member in semantics, with strength in field linguistics, in the fall of 1999.

Perhaps the biggest change in the last ten years was the addition of John Kingston in phonetics and the phonetics-phonology interface in 1990. Along with the new phonetics lab, research grants, and the integration of phonetics into the Psycholinguistics Training Grant, the addition of Kingston also led to the reworking of the curriculum to make phonetics an integral part of training in phonology and to recognize phonology-related phonetics as a new specialty of the department on a par with the five previously recognized. Further strengthening of phonology is coming with our recruitment of Joe Pater to start in the fall of 1999; his areas are phonological theory and first and second language acquisition.

When Kingston arrived and phonetics was added to the program, the first year course plan was revised to put in more of a "menu". In place of a fixed set of four courses in the second semester and one obligatory "foundation" course in the fall of the second year, students now have a "three out of four" choice in the period including the second semester of the first year and all of the second year. Comparing to the program in effect at the end of the Middle Years, the first semester is unchanged, but in the second

xxxii History of the UMass Linguistics Dept

LING 614 Introduction to Phonetic Theory

The Generals paper policy did not need to be changed to accommodate phonetics, since it had already been changed to "any two distinct fields". It just needed to be agreed that phonetics was henceforth to be counted as a distinct field, which was indeed agreed.