The New Directions Fund aims to enable important new lines of research and creative work with high potential for impact. There are three competition tracks:

• Track A: Proof of Concept awards support researchers pursuing a new line of research or collaborative partnership to help them be competitive for external funding.
• Track B: Limited External Grant Opportunity (LEGO) awards support particularly innovative and impactful research, writing, and/or creative work in fields where external funding is scarce.
• Track C: NEW: Racial & Social Justice Research awards supports research on the underpinnings of, consequences of, and/or solutions to address systemic, institutional, and structural racism and injustice.

New Direction Proof of Concept awards are not intended to support research closely related to past work but rather to support exploratory work enabling a new line of research. This new line of research may be facilitated in part by new collaborative partnerships. Research may be basic or applied but should hold potential for future external funding.
New Direction Limited External Grant Opportunity (LEGO) awards also support new directions in faculty research, writing, and/or creative work but for fields with limited access to external funding. Proposed research should advance the body of knowledge and/or build UMD’s reputation in scientific and scholarly communities through a seminal publication, monograph, or other recognized means of discipline impact. Follow-up proposals to obtain external funding are not required though still encouraged.
NEW: Racial & Social Justice awards The Division of Research is inviting proposals relating to the underpinnings of, consequences of, and/or solutions to address systemic, institutional, and structural racism, racial and social in/justice, and other related areas. Please note that anything in Track C could fit into Tracks A & B but does not have to.

Examples of eligible projects in each of the above tracks include:
● Projects that obtain pilot data, demonstrate the feasibility of an approach or method, or contribute to the development of a prototype.
● Unique opportunities to conduct field work or research at an archive or special collection.
● Projects leading to seminal work intended for publication with an academic press.
● The development and execution of particularly innovative creative work that will be exhibited or performed in nationally or internationally known venues.
● Projects that examine the underpinnings and structures of systemic racial and social inequity and injustice, or lead to/inform antiracist policy, advocacy, education,
programming, and/or community organizing initiatives.

Support Provided:
New Directions funds can be requested at one of two levels:

● Level 1: $10,000 – $25,000 per award.
● Level 2: $25,001 – $50,000 per award.

Cost Share:
● VPR will fund 50% of the requested amount;

● The benefiting Unit(s) contribute the remaining 50% of requested funds.

Eligibility Criteria:
● Both tenured/tenure-track and professional track faculty (assistant research scientist or higher) whose full-time, home position is at UMD are eligible to apply.

● Track B only: No disciplines automatically qualify for Track B. Proposal should briefly detail the funding landscape and demonstrate the scarcity of external research funding opportunities for their discipline (and why New Directions funding is critical for the proposed effort). Contact the Research Development Office with questions.
● Faculty may only submit one New Directions proposal (as PI or co-PI) in a
given competition cycle.
● Faculty chosen as the principal investigator for past New Directions awards (or the
predecessor program “Tier 1” awards) within the last ten (10) years are not eligible to
compete to be principal investigator for New Directions awards.

 Award Fund Use:
Award funds may be applied to a range of cost categories, including but not limited to:

● Collection of pilot data required for agency/private proposal submission;
● Coordination of new multidisciplinary activities that will lead to development of
a proposal for external funding;
● Graduate student support to conduct proposed research;
● Hosting of conferences which bring visibility and expertise to UMD;
● Travel of UMD personnel to conduct research and/or to disseminate research;
● Research supplies;
● Faculty summer salary – Applicants should be prepared to justify why this summer
salary is vitally important.
● Track B only: Teaching release time (requires department chair authorization). Note that these New Directions Funds do not buy out faculty salaries directly but rather are intended to be used by departments to cover the costs of bringing on a replacement instructor.
● Funds must be spent within one calendar year of receipt of funds; if the work proposed
will require a longer period of performance, the application should state this and
provide justification.

Review Criteria and Process:
All proposals will be evaluated in accordance with the following criteria; limited review

feedback will be provided to all applicants. Proposals will be assigned reviewers that may or may not have direct expertise in your area of research, so writing for a broad technical audience is crucial.
● Technical approach: Does the project develop or employ novel concepts, approaches, methodologies, tools, or technologies? (Proposals should make clear the current state of the art.) Are the conceptual framework, design, methods, and analyses adequately developed, well-integrated, well-reasoned, and appropriate to the aims of the project? Do proposed outcomes represent a new paradigm for concepts in this area of research?
● Societal relevance: What are the potential implications of this research for society? Does this study address a problem with regional, national, or global significance? Does the proposed project align with strategic goals of the department, college, or UMD?
● Alignment with the goals of the New Directions Fund award tracks:

• Tracks A and B: Does the proposal make clear how the proposed project would be a new direction of investigation for the faculty involved? Could the work be conducted without New Directions Fund support? Would it facilitate a new collaborative partnership? (Preferred but not required).
• Track B only: Does the proposal make a compelling case that, while work would be significant to the field, external funding sources are severely limited?
• Track C: Does the proposed research have the potential to lead to innovations, policy changes, or recommendations to address systemic, institutional, or structural racism; and/or transformative and/or healing impact on communities affected by racism/racial trauma? Proposals that focus on local challenges and impact Prince George’s County, the State of Maryland, or the DMV region are encouraged.

● Likely project outcomes: The proposal should clearly articulate significance or
expected impact on both the faculty member’s professional development and the larger relevant discipline. Is the effort likely to catalyze new lines of research for the PI or inspire follow-on work by others in the field? Will this effort lead to new lasting
technical capacity at the University that could enable new lines of research for others in the future? Does the proposal include robust plans to share and disseminate results through multiple platforms to various audiences? Is the project likely to result in new scholarly recognition and/or visibility for the University?

• Track A only: Do the investigators present reasonable plans to garner extramural support from specific funding agencies? Proposal should demonstrate why the proposed scope of work will improve the proposer’s ability to secure external funding, and should include a detailed plan for obtaining future support (ideally with more than one external funding program identified).

Application Process and Materials:
In addition to completing the electronic submission form, all application materials must be uploaded in one PDF file and must be submitted electronically by 11:59pm ET on the deadline date. The electronic submission form can be found at https://umd.infoready4.com/.

Application materials include:
● Universal Funding Form with department/college signatures affirming willingness to support 50% of the request.

● Project Narrative: not to exceed three single-spaced pages (plus up to one additional page of figures if needed), with one-inch margins and at least 11-point font, detailing:

• Project background and objectives (including ties to previous faculty research);
• Innovation and impact (including alignment with organizational priorities);
• Approach and research plan (listing specific tasks);
• Strategies to leverage award, optimize outcomes, and increase impact; and
• High level implementation timeline.
• Proposals should be written for a non-specialist reviewer.

● References (does not count against the page limit)
● Budget and Justification: Budget and justification should demonstrate that you have
thought through all aspects of your project and the costs associated with them.
Include any other sources of funding that will be supporting the project (if applicable)
and whether those funds are committed or pending.

• Justification should include details of unspent start-up, gift, or retention funding.

● Biosketch or CV for the submitting principal investigator and for any co-investigators if applicable (up to two pages each).

The InfoReady online submission form will also request:

• Title,
• co-investigator information (names, titles, affiliations and emails), and
• project summary (suggested length: 150 words max).

Expectations of Applicants and Awardees:
● An annual progress report must be completed for two (2) consecutive years.

● Within two years of award, at least one of the following deliverables should be
completed: a related research proposal submitted to an external funding agency, written publication submitted to a journal or book publisher, book contract secured, and/or creative work exhibited or performed.
If these expectations are not met, the faculty member’s department may not be eligible for New Directions funds for one year.

Support for research on constraints on movement, and on exceptive constructions.

Congratulations to Adam Liter and to Maria Polinsky, whose work has earned new support from the National Science Foundation. Adam has received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for work with his supervisor, Jeff Lidz, on “Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle, and the nature of constraints on phrase movement.” Masha is the recipient of a Collaborative Research Award on “Variation in exceptive structures,” on how languages express thoughts like ‘everybody laughed except you,' a project on which Hisao Kurokami has already begun to work. See the abstracts below.

Adam Liter and Jeffrey Lidz, BCS #2116270, Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle, and the nature of constraints on phrase movement

In general, it is possible to form a question by 'moving' a wh-phrase like "who” or "which boy" out of a seemingly arbitrary number of clauses, as in "Who did Allie say that Amy saw?", "Who did Alicia hear that Allie said that Amy saw?", and so on. In these questions, "who" is the logical object of "saw" yet appears at the beginning of the sentence. However, there are certain syntactic environments, commonly called 'islands,' in which question formation is not possible. A question like "Who did the book by delight everyone?"--whose intended meaning is 'who is the person such that the book by that person delighted everyone'--sounds unnatural to speakers of English, suggesting that it is not a possible question despite having a reasonable meaning. Some linguists have claimed that these constraints disappear when the offending structure is elided, such as in a sentence like "Amy said that the book by someone delighted everyone, but I don't remember who". Such sentences sound a bit more natural to speakers of English, but their status isn't entirely clear. This dissertation project will advance linguistic theory by using recent experimental techniques to ascertain whether such sentences are grammatical. In advancing the field, this project will also support education and diversity by training an undergraduate research assistant in these experimental techniques, scientific thinking, and statistical analysis.

Using behavioral methods, this doctoral dissertation project probes the link between speakers' reported judgments and their sensitivity to structure in questions with and without ellipsis. The goal is to determine whether the same principles apply to dependencies involving ellipsis as those that do not, with the longer term goal of identifying the computational principles governing syntactic locality. More generally, the project addresses the consequences of mismatches between reported acceptability and subliminal sensitivity to structure in acceptability judgments.

Maria Polinsky, BCS #2116344, Variation in exceptive structures

All languages are able to express universal statements, even though we realize that they are seldom literally true. Consequently, languages also have means of expressing exceptions to such generalizations, via exceptive constructions. English examples include "Everybody but Sandy laughed" and "Everybody laughed except Sandy". Linguistic means of expressing exclusion have received modest attention from philosophers of language and semanticists, whose focus has been primarily on English. Beyond that small body of work, little is known about exceptive constructions across the world's languages: how they are built, what their distribution is within individual languages and across languages, and how they compare to other constructions expressing comparison or contrast. This research project fills this gap as the first cross-linguistic investigation of lexical, morphological, and syntactic properties of the construction. Understanding exceptive constructions allows linguists to create better theories of language structure and to predict the range of variation in natural languages; it helps computer scientists build better parsing models; it gives language educators new dimensions that should be emphasized in language teaching, and it provides cultural anthropologists with additional tools to study societal (dis)similarities in the concept of exclusion. 

This research project employs methodologies from linguistic typology, theoretical syntax, and formal semantics to carry out in-depth investigations of exceptive constructions in a wide range of the world's languages. The project aims for maximum linguistic coverage by using sampling techniques of modern linguistic typology. Theoretically, the project addresses a range of questions that arise from the empirical findings. In particular, it analyzes the contrast between free and connected exceptives, phrasal and clausal exceptives, and coordinated and subordinated exceptives. The project develops diagnostics that reliably identify the different types of exceptives and identifies independent linguistic properties that correlate with these different types of exceptives in a language. Therefore, it allows researchers to predict the type of exceptive constructions in an individual language. Beyond developing a picture of exceptive structure cross-linguistically, the project has notable implications for current theories of ellipsis. The project provides data on low-resource and endangered languages and highlights the importance of linguistic diversity for a complete understanding of the human language system.

Last year, the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities created a COVID Relief Fund to help support TTK faculty in completing scholarly and creative projects. This special purpose fund will continue through spring 2022 to help assistant professors and associate professors who have had limited access to materials and other resources they need for projects that are important for tenure and promotion purposes. 

Funds up to $1,000 will be awarded to TTK faculty who can demonstrate a need for funds due to COVID. The project funded must advance faculty’s promotion and tenure goals. Priority will be given to assistant professors but associate professors are eligible as well. Funds must be expended by the end of the 2022 calendar year.

Examples of acceptable requests are: costs for digitization of materials from an out-of-state library or archive; hiring research assistants or archivists at an hourly rate to obtain research materials from an out-of-state museum; postage and shipping to receive materials to your home. Travel is now eligible, provided that it is necessary and essential to completing the research that was stalled due to COVID. Travel must also fit current UMD travel restrictions. This special purpose fund will not support teaching releases, summer salary, or stipends or cash support for any other reasons.

Required Documents:

1. ARHU Research COVID Relief Fund Application Form: online application form

2. Project Description (two-page maximum, single-spaced with one-inch margins, at least 11-point font): Detail the project’s objectives and how it will meet tenure/promotion goals. Address how COVID has affected the completion of the project. Then explain how the funds will eliminate the barrier. 

3. Budget and Justification (two pages maximum): Provide an itemized budget and justify each expenditure. 

4. You must include documentation (web info or email) from sources outside of UMD confirming proposed costs associated with the project. 

Submission Process:

Complete the application form and upload all required documents via the online application found here. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

Award Expectations:

Awardees will work with their department budget manager to arrange for payment of itemized costs or reimbursements.

A report (two-page maximum) will be required within a year of award date and should summarize use of funds and how they helped achieve tenure/promotion goals. All awarded funds must be spent by the end of 2022. Funds not spent will be returned to the college. Successful applicants will receive additional guidance in their notification letter.