Author: Adrian Stegovec

Roman Pasquill | New Student

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線路沿ひ　声や紅き葉　星に落つ

Beside the railbed
A weary voice – crimson leaf
Falls into the stars.

Salutations, I am Roman Pasquill, hailing from Schenectady on the Macquaa Kill. At Albany, where I spent my youth in university, I studied the art of linguistics and anthropology, before taking a tryst with the teaching of English as a second tongue. From there I found myself six years lost far-far east, in the land of the Ainu among the Japanese. The things that draw me to the puzzling patterns of language are the same that pull me to dance, to sing, to hear a bit of Pushkin in a baseball game. Perhaps this explains my particular fondness for the phonology of rhythm, pitch, and prosody – the music imbued in even the most mundane speech. Out in the world, you may find me at the piano, tuning a bike wheel, or casting a verse along old rails.

Ryuta Ono | New Student

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My name is Ryuta Ono. I was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and spent much of my time in Kyoto, where I completed both my B.A. and M.A. at Doshisha University. My interests lie in syntax, phonology, and the interface between the two. I am especially interested in agreement, case marking, prosody, ellipsis, dialectal variation, and minimalist theory.

Outside of linguistics, I enjoy watching old movies, listening to music (especially AOR, Bossa Nova, country music, and classic Japanese pop), reading novels, drinking beer, taking photos, and traveling, sometimes all at once.

Jaewon Oh | New Student

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Hi, my name is Jaewon Oh, and I am from Korea. I received both my BA and MA degrees from the Department of Linguistics at Seoul National University. My research interests lie in formal semantics and the interface between semantics and pragmatics. I am interested in topics such as modality, questions, conditionals, implicature, scalarity, and focus-alternatives. What motivates me most as a linguist is intriguing analogies and puzzles in distributional patterns and the way meaning is enriched beyond the literal meaning. Besides my academic life, I am a big fan of Moomin and love crocheting (For me, it’s a kind of meditation, an outlet of creativity, and a satisfying way to feel productive).

Eli Herbst | New Student

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Hi, my name is Eli Herbst. I am from Princeton, New Jersey. I got my BS in Mathematics, with a minor in Linguistics, from the University of Maryland in 2024. I discovered the field of linguistics when I took the introductory class at Maryland as an elective, and by the end of that semester I had already declared a Linguistics minor. I was fascinated to see that a lot of what I learned in mathematics could be applied to the study of language. I am very excited to continue pursuing linguistics at UConn!

My main research interest is first language acquisition, but I am also interested in semantics and syntax. I am currently working on a project inspecting the acquisition of relational nominals and their reciprocity.

Outside of academics, I enjoy games, puzzles, and sports.

UConn Linguistics at SuB

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Sinn und Bedeutung 30 will take place at Goethe University Frankfurt, September 23-27, 2024. UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference, with an invited talk by:

  • Magdalena Kaufmann. Perspectives on possibility modals

… and talks by:

  • Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai University). Temporal connectives and measure phrases in Japanese
  • Mingjiang Chen. A Causal Model Approach to the Agent Control Hypothesis
  • Yixuan Yan and Yitong Luo. Declarative but not inquisitive disjunctors derive conjunctive inference in child language: What to flatten?
  • Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu (PhD 2013, now at University of Toronto), Gabriela Bîlbîie, Mara Panaitescu, Anton Benz, and Andreea Nicolae.Comparing disjunction across polarities: The source of strong interpretations of negative disjunctive sentences in child language is scope, not strengthening
  • Yusuke Yagi (PhD 2025, now at Waseda University) and Ka-Fai Yip. Asymmetric reconstruction for binding but not for scope

    … and poster presentations by:

    • Jon Gajewski. A source-based ambiguity in the semantics of believe
    • Xuetong Yuan (PhD 2024, now at University of Chicago). Conditionality without if: conditional marking strategies in Mandarin

     

    Photo: Most of the UConn contingent at SuB 30.

     

    UConn Linguistics at GALA

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    The 17th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 17), was held September 11-13 in Tours, France, at the City of Creation and Innovation (MAME). UConn linguistics was well represented at the conference with talks by:

    • Elaine Grolla (PhD 2005, now at University of Sao Paolo), Kazuko Yatsushiro (PhD 1999, now at ZAS Berlin), Andreea Nicolae, Artemis Alexiadou, and Uli Sauerland. Resumption in matrix wh-questions
    • Yixuan Yan and Yitong Luo. Mandarin children interpret declarative but not interrogative disjunction as conjunction
    • André Eliatamby and Lyn Tieu (PhD 2013, now at University of Toronto). Investigating the interaction of definiteness and ad hoc implicatures in child language
    • William Snyder, Sahil Luthra, Nabin Koirala and Roeland Hancock. Passives, Raising, and the Experiencer Externalization Hypothesis
    • Chie Nakamura, Suzanne Flynn, Yoichi Miyamoto (PhD 1994, now at Osaka University), and Noriaki Yusa. Filler-gap Resolution in Cross-linguistic Wh-questions: L2 English and Lti Japanese

    … and posters by:

    • Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu. A Picture Selection Task for the Acquisition of Japanese Disjunction
    • Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Napoleon Katsos and Uli Sauerland. A cross-linguistic investigation of children’s negative indefinite production
    • Pravaal Yadav. Do children use the same grammar for comprehension and production? A study of long-distance questions in child-Hindi

     

    Lillo-Martin and Wang at X-PPL

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    Diane Lillo-Martin and Shuyan Wang will present a poster, titled “Children’s online processing of scalar implicatures”, at the 2025 edition of the conference on Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL 2025), hosted by the University of Zurich, September 1st-2nd 2015.

    Xu and Wang | Languages

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    Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University) and Shuyan Wang (PhD 2022, now a post-doc at UConn) have published an article in the journal Languages, titled “On the Acquisition of English Complex Predicates and Complex Word Formation: Revisiting the Parametric Approach”. Congratulations Ting and Shuyan!

    Abstract: Languages vary in their availability of productive endocentric bare-stem compounds (e.g., flower hat) and a range of complex predicates (separable verb-particles, double object datives, adjectival resultatives, put-locatives, make-causatives, and perceptual reports). To account for these cross-linguistic variations, two parameters have been proposed: the Compounding Parameter (TCP), which governs the formation of bare-stem compounds, separable verb-particles, and adjectival resultatives, and the Small Clause Parameter (SCP), which determines whether a verb can take a small clause complement. These parameters make testable predictions about children’s acquisition. If TCP and SCP are on the right track, we would expect correlations in the acquisition of structures governed by each parameter. This study examines these predictions by analyzing longitudinal corpora from 23 English-speaking children, assessing both the correlation between the acquisition of different structures and their acquisitional ordering. Our findings support both TCP and SCP, confirming that the acquisition of bare-stem compounds is closely associated with that of separable verb-particles, while the acquisition of (some) complex predicates is related. In addition, our results offer new insights into the potential triggers that children use to set each parameter. These findings contribute to our understanding of language variation and the role of parameter setting in first language acquisition.

    Kaufmanns | Invited talks in Tokyo and Sapporo

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    Magdalena Kaufmann and Stefan Kaufmann gave a series of invited talks in August:

    • Stefan Kaufmann gave two lectures on “Probabilistic Semantics for Modality and Conditionals” at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, on August 5 (co-hosted by Daisuke Bekki, Ikumi Imani, and UConn alum Teruyuki Mizuno, PhD 2023)
    • Magdalena Kaufmann and Stefan Kaufmann each gave a talk at a workshop on “Future Developments in Formal Semantics” at Sapporo City University, Sapporo, August 18-19:
      • Magdalena Kaufmann. Perspectives on Modals
      • Stefan Kaufmann. Import/Export and Other Conditional Invalidities