À la recherche du terps perdu

Terrapins become Ducks, Slugs, Tritons, Blue Hens and Minutemen.

For a long time, our students have been graduating in good time, five years. Sometimes, when we turn off the lights in 1108B, they move on so quickly that we haven't even time to say "Tell us about your new position." And half a semester later the thought that they have graduated and gotten a job startles us; we reopen the dissertation which, we imagined, was still in our hands, and check the website. What new posts have our alumni taken?

On July 10, 2024, Nika Jurov defended her dissertation on "Modeling adaptability mechanisms of speech perception," co-chaired by co-advisors Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi, together with Ellen Lau, former postdoc Thomas Schatz, and Jonathan Simon from Electrical Engineering. Now she is on a postdoctoral fellowship with Jochen Triesch at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, extending her own dissertation research and also studying mechanisms of attention in bat audition. Then after one year in Frankfurt, she will head far west to Eugene, Oregon, to be Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. We wave in celebration as our future Duck fledges!

Also in the Class of *24, Alex Krauska just started life as a Minuteman with a two-year postdoctoral research position in Linguistics at UMass Amherst. In June she defended "A world without words," which explores the consequences for psycho- and neurolinguistics of recognizing that phonological wordhood does not coincide with any syntactic or semantic unit. Supervised by Ellen Lau, the dissertation had a committee of Naomi Feldman, Bill Idsardi, Kate Mooney, Bob Slevc and Dave Embick from UPenn. At her new position, Alex will work mainly with Maryland alum Shota Momma *16, who is Assistant Professor of Linguistics there, alongside fellow alum Brian Dillon, on whom more later.

Tyler Knowlton, from the Class of *21, recently finished three years as a MindCORE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, working with John Trueswell, Anna Papafragou, and Florian Schwarz. Now he becomes a Blue Hen with a new postdoc just down the road at the University of Delaware with vision scientist Alon Hafri, leveraging what we know about vision and the conceptualization of events to get a grip on meaning in language. At Maryland Tyler was advised by advised by Jeff Lidz and Paul Pietroski, and wrote a dissertation on the "The psycho-logic of universal quantifiers," providing psycholinguistic evidence for the concepts expressed by "every" and "each". A journal article based on this work, "Psychological evidence for restricted quantification," in Natural Language Semantics, was recently selected by the Philosopher's Annual as one of the ten best articles in philosophy for 2023. 

Rachel Dudley *17 has been appointed Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at San Diego, joining former Maryland postdoc, Professor Ivano Caponigro, as a Triton. At Maryland Rachel was supervised by Valentine and Jeff, with an advising squad that also included Alexander and Meredith Rowe (now at Harvard). Her dissertation, "The role of input in discovering presuppositions triggers: Figuring out what everybody already knew", was about how children come to use know factively, understanding not only what mental state it labels, but that the interlocutors take it for granted that the content of that state is true. She then moved to Paris for a postdoc with Salvador Mascarenhas and Emmanuel Chemla in the Département d'Etudes Cognitives in the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and next to the Hungarian capital of Budapest for a postdoc with Ágnes Kovács and Ernő Téglás at Central European University  in its Department of Cognitive Science and Cognitive Development Center, looking at preverbal infants' reasoning with negation and disjunction.

Rachel is among eight 21st Century Terrapins to find her professional home at a university in California, joining Lisa Pearl *07 (Irvine), Matt Wagers *08 (Santa Cruz), Tim Hunter *10 (UCLA), Alexis Wellwood *14 (USC), Laurel Perkins *19 (UCLA), Rodrigo Ranero *21 (UCLA), and just this year...

Dustin Chacón *15! Dustin has been appointed Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, joining Matt Wagers *08 as a Banana Slug. At Maryland Dustin was supervised by Colin Phillips and wrote a dissertation on "Comparative Psychosyntax" with a committee of Colin, Ellen, Norbert and Howard. The dissertation explored the acquisition and processing of that-trace effects, resumptive pronouns, and wh-dependencies, arguing that "learnability concerns and sentence processing data can constrain the space of possible analyses of language differences." After graduating he spent a year as a Faculty Fellow at NYU, then three each as a Contract Assistant Professor at Minnesota and a Research Scientist in the Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. Then in 2023-2024 he was Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Georgia, before securing his new position at Santa Cruz.

Down in Los Angeles, USC Trojan Alexis Wellwood *14 herself passed a major milestone, being promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy, less than ten years after her filing her dissertation. Alexis arrived in College Park as a Baggett Fellow, mentored by Valentine Hacquard. Valentine remained her advisor, and supervised her dissertation on "Measuring Predicates", which developed a neo-Davidsonian and cross-categorial analysis of comparatives. At the same time Alexis worked on nearly every project in the department, adding Paul Pietroski, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Lidz, and Colin Phillips as what she calls "unofficial mentors."  

Likewise promoted was Brian Dillon from the Class of 2011, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brian arrived at Maryland in 2007 and left in 2011, with a dissertation on "Structured Access in Sentence Comprehension," supervised by Colin, with a committee of Norbert, Bill and Jeff. The thesis dealt with "the nature of memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension," focussing on reflexives and agreement. Immediately upon defending his dissertation, Brian was hired by UMass as Assistant Professor; he has been there since, and is now Full Professor.

Finally, Masaya Yoshida, from the Class of 2006, recently moved to Barcelona, where he is ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This big move to Catalonia comes after sixteen years as a Wildcat at Northwestern University, where he was Associate Professor of Linguistics. At Maryland, Masaya was advised by Colin and wrote a dissertation on "Constraints and mechanisms in long-distance dependency formation," demonstrating that even in a head-final language such as Japanese, "global constraints like island constraints are applied long before one decisive information such as verb heads and relative heads, are encountered."

Reading all this news, we can hear the engines of planes, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuate the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showing in perspective the deserted countryside through which an alum would be hurrying towards the nearest airport: the path that they follow being fixed forever in their memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar fluorescent lamp which echo still in their ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home, at UMD, to receive the congratulations of their past teachers and classmates.