Congratulations to Stefan Kaufmann, who has been named a faculty fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) for 2022-2023 to work on the project “What was, what will be, and what would have been”.
Author: Adrian Stegovec
Incoming graduate class of 2022
Our department is pleased to announce the incoming graduate class of 2022:
- Sharmin Ahmadi
- Thanos Illiadis
- Hanyu Liu
- Shangyan Pan
- Aarón Sánchez
- Yixuan Yan
Welcome!
UConn Linguistics at CLS
The 58th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) is taking place in-person on April 22-24, and UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference with talks by:
- Linghui Eva Gan. Question Answer Pairs in Hong Kong Sign Language
- Penelope Daniel. Deriving Interpretive Effects of Spanish DOM
- Xuetong Yuan. Establishing Discourse Relations: Two Contrastive Markers in Mandarin
- Tarcisio Dias. Hyper-Raising and the Voiding of Freezing Effects
- Nicolaus Schrum and Jon Sprouse. The Sustained Anterior Negativity as a Diagnostic for Movement in How-Come Questions
… and poster presentations by:
- Robin Jenkins. Covert Raising & Finite ECM in Turkish, Uyghur, & Japanese
- Si Kai Lee. On Syntactic Tenselessness in Singlish: Evidence from Eventivity
- Kazuya Kudo and Koji Shimamura (PhD 2018, now at Kanazawa Gakuin University & Kobe City University of Foreign Studies). On the Adjectivalizer -si in the Reduplicated & Deverbal Adjectives in Japanese
- Beccy Lewis. A New Analysis of Associative Plurals: Evidence from Slavic languages
Wang Defense
Shuyan Wang successfully defended her dissertation: Scalar implicatures in child language: The role of processing capacities on April 15th.
Congratulations, Shuyan!
Audience at the defense:
Dr. Wang with her committee:
Magdalena Kaufmann | CUNY Linguistics Colloquium
Magdalena Kaufmann gave a talk at CUNY as part of their Linguistics Colloquium series on April 7th, 2022. Her talk was titled “Practically out of control”.
Van der Hulst | AAUP Career Award
Harry van der Hulst has been awarded the 2022 Excellence in Research & Creativity Career Award from the UConn-AAUP, one of only two recipients in the university. The recipients were chosen by the UConn-AAUP Excellence Awards Committee from a pool of excellent candidates. The intention of the awards is to showcase academic excellence at UConn.
A virtual ZOOM ceremony to honor Professor van der Hulst, and other UConn-AAUP award recipients, will take place on Monday, April 25th at 12:00pm. Any and all who wish to attend are welcome and are asked to email Barbara Kratochvil to receive the ZOOM link.
UConn Linguists at ACAL
The 53nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) will take place virtually on April 7-9, hosted by The Department of Linguistics at the University of California San Diego, and UConn linguistics will be represented at the conference with talks by:
- Vicki Carstens and Peter Muriungi. Addressee Agreement in Kiitharaka and Speech Act Projection Theory
- Penelope Daniel. Deriving SOVX word order in Mandinka
- Vicki Carstens. Preverbal subjects and labeling in Nguni
Wang, Kido & Snyder | Language Acquisition
The article “Acquisition of English adjectival resultatives: Support for the Compounding Parameter” by Shuyan Wang, Yasuhito Kido (visiting scholar 2017-2018), and William Snyder has just appeared as an online first article ahead of its print publication in Language Acquisition. Congratulations!
Abstract: Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations (“particles”) and adjectival resultatives (“ARs”). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter (“TCP”). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has acquired ARs or particles will also permit “creative” bare-stem, endocentric compounding. Existing support comes from children acquiring Japanese and English. Yet the same evidence introduces two new puzzles: (i) why is compounding acquired roughly a year earlier in English than in Japanese?; and (ii) in English, why is compounding always acquired at the same time as (and never substantially prior to) particles? Here, we argue that both puzzles can be explained if we allow the trigger for a single parameter-setting (e.g., [+TCP]) to be completely different for children acquiring different languages. Specifically, the trigger for [+TCP] (and hence, ARs) in English is proposed to be particles, which are unavailable in Japanese. Two novel predictions are tested and supported: (i) the frequency will be higher for particles than for any (other) potential trigger in child-directed English or Japanese; and (ii) children acquiring English (unlike Japanese) will have reliably adult-like comprehension of ARs by the age of 3 years.
Adrian Stegovec | Yale Linguistics Colloquium
Adrian Stegovec gave a talk at Yale as part of their Linguistics Colloquium series on March 28th, 2022. His talk was titled “Location is everything: A typological gap in person restrictions and its support for a positional analysis”. More information on the talk can be found here.
Van der Hulst | The Oxford History of Phonology
The Oxford History of Phonology co-edited by B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst has just been published in ebook form by Oxford University Press and will be published as a physical volume on March 24th.
This 900-page book provides a history of phonology with contributions of 35 authors, covering phonology in Ancient India, Japan and Korea, the Greek and Roman traditions, the role of early writing systems as evidencing phonological structure and then focussing on the start of crucial developments in the nineteens and early twentieth centry, following by theories and school in later times up to the present time.
The volume also contains the following chapters written by UConn linguists:
- Harry van der Hulst. The (early) history of sign language phonology
- Nancy A. Ritter. Government Phonology in historical perspective
- Andrea Calabrese. Historical notes on constraint-and-repair approaches