Beier Awarded NEH Prize

Congratulations to LSA member Christine Beier (University of California, Berkeley), who has received a 2022 Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). This grant will support her project entitled Transcription, Parsing, and Comparative Analysis of Tone in Iquito Texts.

According to the 2022 Grants and Awards press release from the NEH, this grant will support Beier's work on "research and writing of a book presenting a comparative analysis of grammatical descriptions of Iquito, an endangered Zaparoan language of the northern Peruvian Amazonia."

The NEH describes the Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship as a "joint initiative between NEH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support fieldwork and other activities relevant to recording, documenting, and archiving endangered languages, as well as the preparation of transcriptions, databases, grammars, and lexicons of languages that are in danger of being lost."

To read more on the 245 projects that the NEH has supported with 33.17 million dollars all over the United States click here. 

NSF Grant for Computational Linguistics

LSA Member Joe Pater, professor and chair of the linguistics department at UMass, and his colleague Gaja Jarosz, associate professor of linguistics, have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant on “Representing and learning stress: Grammatical constraints and neural networks” in the amount of $386,226. This three-year research grant will study the learnability of a wide range of word stress patterns, using two general approaches. The goal of the project will be to develop grammar and learning systems that can cope with a broader range of typological data than current models, and that can handle more details of individual languages. Read more from UMass.