Author: Adrian Stegovec

UConn Linguists at Jabberwocky Words In Linguistics

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The Jabberwocky Words In Linguistics workshop took place online on February 11th-12th hosted by UMass, Amherst. UConn was represented by the following invited talks:

  • Emma Nguyen (PhD 2021, now at University of California, Irvine). Getting Passive by Extending Classes: A Novel Verb-Learning Study with Adults and Children
  • Lyn Tieu (PhD 2013, Western Sydney University). Using nonce words to investigate the morphology of comparison
  • Letitia Naigles (UConn Department of Psychological Sciences). What Nonsense? Not at all! Nonsense Word Studies Reveal both Strengths and Challenges in the Linguistic Representations of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

    Tu+7 at UConn

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    We are pleased to announce that UConn Linguistics will be hosting the Seventh Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, otherwise known as TU+7, on February 18th-19th!

    The program, abstracts, and information on registration can be found at: https://sites.google.com/uconn.edu/tu7

    Please join us this year by registering by February 16th in order to receive updates and Zoom links for some fantastic talks!

    UConn linguists in Tu+6 proceedings

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    The Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic, which contains peer-reviewed papers based on presentations given at the Tu+6 conference, has just been published. The volume contains three papers from current UConn students:

    • Sarah Jane Asinari and Si Kai Lee. Variable Conjunct Agreement in Qaraqalpaq
    • Robin Jenkins. Specificity Effects and Object Movement In Turkish and Uyghur
    • Rebecca Lewis. Associative Plurality and the DP/NP typology

    UConn Linguists at the LSA Annual Meeting

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    The 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is taking place January 6th-9th in Washington, DC and virtually. UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference with talks by:

    • Si Kai Lee. Movement is Exhausting: Optional wh-fronting in Singlish is not free (in-person)
    • Muyi Yang. The closeness constraint on focus association and the syntax of Q-particles (hybrid)

     

    … and poster presentations by:

    • Yusuke Yagi. Strawson Semantic Value: An explanation for the definite reading in ellipsis (in-person)
    • Pasha Koval and Jon Sprouse. Relative Clause Extraposition in Russian is created by syntactic movement (in-person)
    • Ari Goertzel. The Properties of the -o clitic in Mandinka (online)
    • Shengyun Gu. Combined methods are informative: weak hand spread in Shanghai Sign Language (online)
    • Ivana Jovović. On Discourse Licensing of Coindexed Pronouns in Slavic (online)
    • Hiroaki Saito. Losing a subject, keeping an indirect object
    • Nick Huang (postdoc 2019-2021, now at the National University of Singapore) and Yu’an Yang. How do learners know attitude verbs select what in wh-in situ languages? (online)
    • Zheng Shen (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore) and Meghan Lim. Extraction from definite, indefinite, and superlative NPs: An experimental approach

      Magda & Stefan Kaufmann | Article in Journal of Semantics

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      Magda and Stefan Kaufmann’s paper “Iffy Endorsements” has been published online as an advance article in the Journal of Semantics.

      Abstract: Theories of imperatives differ in how they aim to derive the distributional and functional properties of this clause type. One point of divergence is how to capture the fact that imperative utterances convey the speaker’s endorsement for the course of events described. Condoravdi & Lauer (2017) observe that conditionals with imperative consequents (conditionalized imperatives, CIs) are infelicitous as motivations of advice against doing something and take this as evidence for an analysis of imperatives as encoding speaker endorsement. We investigate CIs in further contexts and argue that their account in terms of preferential conflicts fails to capture the more general infelicity of CIs as motivations for or against doing something. We develop an alternative in which imperatives do not directly encode speaker preferences, but express modalized propositions and impose restrictions on the discourse structure (along the lines of Kaufmann, 2012). We show how this carries over to conditionalized imperatives to derive the behavior of CIs, and conclude with a discussion of more general problems regarding an implementation of conditional preferential commitments, an issue that can be avoided on our account of imperatives.