Željko Bošković gave two invited talks this week at the Leipzig University Institute of Linguistics:
The talks were titled:
Jarry Chia-Wei Chuang gave a talk, titled “Where are you from? The status of prenuclear glide in Mandarin”, at the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology, which took place at Rutgers University on November 1st-3rd.
The 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD49) is taking place on November 7-10th 2024. UConn linguistics is going to be well represented at the conference with a keynote talk by:
… talks by:
… and posters by:
In addition, Yixuan (Pepper) Yan was also awarded the Paula Menyuk Award for top-rated abstracts by student first authors. Congratulations!
Magdalena Kaufmann gave two presentations entitled “Reaching the remote and the impossible” at the Semantics Workshop at UMass on October 18 and at the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop on October 28.
Penelope Daniel’s article “Evidence for a VP-internal analysis of postverbal arguments in an SOVX language” has just appeared in Volume 9 of Glossa. The paper can be accessed online here. Congratulations Penelope!
Abstract: Mande languages are known for their typologically unusual SOVX word order, in which the subject and direct object precede the verb, while adjuncts and other complements must follow it. Koopman (1992) argues for Bambara that this unique word order arises when the direct object obligatorily raises to a preverbal position for Case, while any other postverbal elements surface in their base-generated position within the VP. However, Nikitina (2019) proposes for Wan that postverbal elements are located in a high, clause-adjoined position. This paper presents syntactic evidence from Mandinka in support of the former analysis of postverbal indirect objects. In particular, I provide word order, pronominalization, and binding facts that show that postverbal indirect objects must be located in a low, VP-internal position, which is incompatible with a clausal-adjunction analysis.
The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony co-edited by Nancy A. Ritter and Harry van der Hulst has just been published in ebook form by Oxford University Press and will be published as a physical volume in January.
This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically ‘unbounded’ character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inventories, the interaction of vowel harmony and morphological structure, and locality. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of the various theoretical accounts of the phenomenon, as well as bringing in insights from language acquisition and psycholinguistics, while Part IV focuses on the historical life cycle of vowel harmony, looking at topics such as phonetic factors and the effect of language contact. The final part contains 31 chapters that present data and analysis of vowel harmony across all major language families as well as several isolates, constituting the broadest coverage of the phenomenon to date.
The volume also contains the following chapters written by UConn linguists:
Mingjiang Chen’s article “A decomposition analysis of Agents” has just appeared in Volume 9 of Glossa. The paper can be accessed online here. Congratulations Mingjiang!
Abstract: Agents and Causers are standardly analyzed as external arguments introduced by v or Voice. According to this approach, the two arguments are independent and unrelated. However, evidence from the distribution patterns of various adjuncts (nonarguments) in change-of-state verbs suggests that the verbal structure provided by the standard analysis is not fine-grained enough and requires revision. To address this issue, I propose decomposing the Agent-introducing head (v or Voice) into Voice and Appl. Specifically, I suggest that Voice introduces Causers, while Appl introduces Affectees. Both arguments are atomic and primitive, meaning that they cannot be further divided and are capable of combining with each other to form other types of arguments. I argue that Agents are derived through movement from Spec, ApplP to Spec, VoiceP, and are therefore composite, consisting of both Causers and Affectees. This decomposition analysis offers a new perspective on the Animacy Restriction observed in aspectual si constructions and ditransitive alternations. Compared to the standard analysis, it accurately predicts that Agents alternate with Causers and Affectees. Additionally, it naturally extends to unergatives.
… talks by:
… and poster presentations by:
Xuetong Yuan successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled Conditions on Conditionals: Evaluativity, Discourse Sensitivity, and Conditionals without if on September 27th.
Since then, Xuetong has been busy moving to Chicago, where she will be a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago she is also joining another recent UConn linguistics alum and classmate, Si Kai Lee, who recently started his position as a postdoctoral syntax instructor there.
Congratulations, Xuetong! And belated congratulations to Si Kai!
Xuetong during the defense with her advisor, Magda Kaufmann:
Dr. Yuan cutting her well earned cake:
Robin Jenkins’ article “Scrambling, Specificity Effects, and Phasal Variation in Turkish and Uyghur” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations Robin!
Abstract: This article develops a new approach to specificity effects based on comparing differential object marking (DOM) in Turkish with a novel DOM paradigm observed in Uyghur. Based on this, I argue that specificity does not always correlate with VP-externality (Diesing 1992, i.a.) but rather with whether the object has moved to a particular structural position. Further, I show the variation observed between the two DOM paradigms can be captured as a result of a difference between the languages’ middle-field phase boundary. Several additional contrasts between the two languages are traced back to this difference in phase boundaries, which is also situated within a broader pattern of typological variation.