1) Peter Lasersohn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Peter Lasersohn is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught since 1996. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988, writing a dissertation on the semantics of plurality and collective predication under the supervision of David Dowty. His research over nearly four decades has addressed a wide range of topics in formal semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language, including plurality, the interpretation of coordinate structures, event-based semantics, semantic imprecision, presupposition, expressions of personal taste, compositionality, the semantics of common nouns, and many others.

Peter Lasersohn held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester before arriving at the University of Illinois. He is the author of three books: A Semantics for Groups and Events (Garland, 1990; reissued 2017 by Routledge); Plurality, Conjunction and Events (Kluwer, 1995; reissued 2010 by Springer); and Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics (Oxford University Press, 2017), and numerous shorter articles, notably including:

· Group Action and Spatio-Temporal Proximity, Linguistics and Philosophy 13.2.179–206 (1990)

· Pragmatic Halos, Language 75.3.522–551 (1999)

· Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste, Linguistics and Philosophy 28.6.643–686 (2005)

· The Temperature Paradox as Evidence for a Presuppositional Analysis of Definite Descriptions, Linguistic Inquiry 36.1.127–130 (2005)

· Contextualism and Compositionality, Linguistics and Philosophy 35.2.171–189 (2012)

· Common Nouns as Modally Non-Rigid Restricted Variables’, Linguistics and Philosophy 44.2.363–424 (2021)

 

2) Jennifer Sclafani (University of Massachusetts-Boston)

Jennifer Sclafani is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics and discourses analysis and conducts research on political discourse, language and gender, and the social dynamics of linguistic diversity in Greater Boston. After holding teaching positions at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), Hellenic American University (Athens), and the University of Vienna (Austria), she is thrilled to be working and teaching in her hometown. Dr. Sclafani’s current research explores the intersections of language, place, gender, culture, and public policy in the city of Boston; her current research explores discourse surrounding the opioid crisis, homelessness, and food insecurity in the local news and mayoral campaign discourse. She is the author of Talking Donald Trump (Routledge, 2017) and also currently working on a book titled Intercultural Communication: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Approach. 

 

Current Projects:

Policy Across Disciplines

Dr. Sclafani was awarded a Policy Across Disciplines Grant (with co-PI Peter Federman) to investigate the intersection of discourse, dialogue and public policy in Boston. In their research, they are exploring how the opioid epidemic and homelessness crises in Boston have been represented in the print and broadcast news media, and how the voices represented in the news are driving policy making surrounding addiction, mental health, affordable housing, and urban infrastructure in Boston. 

 

Voices of Boston

Dr. Sclafani developed a new graduate-level Sociolinguistic Research Methods course at UMass Boston, in which she and her students are collecting data in various neighborhoods of the Greater Boston area to explore multilingualism, language variation and change, and community orientations and attitudes toward their evolving neighborhoods across the city. Through ethnographic fieldwork, sociolinguistic surveys and interviews, and online and public discourse analysis, they are exploring questions such as:

• How does the multilingual linguistic landscape of Boston today reflect the social and immigration history of the city?
• What are the myths and realities of the “Boston accent”? How has the Boston dialect changed over time? What are the causes of these changes? 
• How is Boston constructed as a certain type of “place” to live, work, visit, and study in local/national/international media and in tourism discourse?
• What are residents’ understandings of and attitudes about the languages spoken in their communities and schools? 
• How do Bostonians view their own trajectories through the city’s past, present, and future? 

They are currently developing a website to share their research with the public and will be presenting some of their initial findings in a colloquium at AAAL in Denver in March 2025. 

 

The Justice Language Action Project

Dr. Sclafani created the Justice Language Action Project, a professional development workshop for pre- and in-service K-12 teachers in the Greater Boston area, in which educators learn about tools and educational applications of critical pedagogy and critical applied linguistics. During the workshop, teachers receive peer and instructor support as they create or refine social justice-themed curricular units grounded in a critical reflection on the power of language and culminate in collaborative digital projects that can be shared in their school communities. An overview and some outcomes and curricular units that resulted from the first iteration of the workshop can be found in her co-authored chapter (with P. Gounari, I. Fakhrutdinovoa, & V. Quintana-Sarria) in the new edited volume Inclusion in Linguistics from Oxford UP (2024, M. Bucholtz, A. Charity Hudley, and C. Mallinson, eds.)

 

3) Silvia Perez-Cortes (Rutgers University)

Dr. Silvia Perez-Cortes is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the department of World Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University, Camden. She holds a PhD in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition from Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2016), an MA in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2011), and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Philology from the University of Barcelona (2009). Dr. Perez-Cortes’ research interests lie in the areas of bilingual language acquisition and education in language contact situations. She is particularly interested in analyzing the grammatical development of heritage speakers (both children and adults) to explore how syntax and the lexicon are accessed and represented in the bilingual mind. Dr. Perez-Cortes is also involved in community engagement and is part of the clinical team of several grant-funded projects focused on fostering dual language education and heritage language literacy among Latino families. Her work in all these areas has been published in journals such as Language Learning, Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, Second Language Research and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

 

Her most recent investigations focus on the importance of analyzing intraspeaker variability to examine the extent to which linguistic experience shapes HL grammars. Currently, she is working on a project that explores the role of frequency (paradigmatic and lexical) on intergenerational language change and maintenance among Spanish-speaking communities in New Jersey.