Author: Adrian Stegovec

Maryam Rezaasa | New Student

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I am Maryam Rezaasa, born in the capital city of Iran, Tehran. I did my BA (2005-2011) in English Language Translation, and then my MA (2012-2014) in Linguistics at the University of Allameh Tabataba’i (Tehran, Iran), where I launched a couple of phonetic, phonological and morphological studies.

At the same time, throughout my studies, I was occupied supervising English language schools besides teaching General English, IELTS, and TOEFL there (in Iran and Turkey), as well as translating several books and doing simultaneous translation.

My research interest in linguistics broadly includes phonology, and more specifically, I am interested in phono-typological study of prosodic elements from both descriptive and comparative perspectives.

In my spare time, I usually enjoy shopping, cooking, and hanging out with the others, and I would be delighted to meet new people.

Zixi Liu | New Student

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I’m Zixi Liu. My hometown is Tianjin, China, a cozy coastal city. As an undergrad I studied English literature and German in Shanghai International Studies University. After that, I went for MA in linguistics at University College London. There I fell in love with syntax as well as built up a tolerance for rainy weathers. Whenever I’m not thinking about linguistics (or even when I am?) I’d like to go outdoors and explore a bit.

Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu | New Student

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My name is Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu, and I’m from Japan/Italy. I received my B.A. in Linguistics and Literature from Hokkaido University in Japan, writing my thesis on the syntax of yes-no questions and their answers. I’m interested in syntax, semantics, and language acquisition.

I like books (although I’m currently struggling to find any time to read) and watching soccer (especially Italian soccer). I’m very happy to be at UConn and look forward to what awaits.

Qiushi Chen | New Student

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I am Chen Qiushi (陳秋實). I come from Sichuan, China. I received my BA in Chinese Philology from Nankai University, and my MA in Chinese Language and Literature from Fudan University. I love language and linguistics because I find it fascinating to explore the diversity of languages and its underlying universals. Among all the subfields I am most interested in (generative) syntax, but I also believe that, in order to be a good linguist, one should have a sound understanding of each part of linguistics, not just of their area of specialization.

When I am not doing linguistics, I read literature (including poetry, stories, novels, and manga), I write poetry in both Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese, and I enjoy watching anime. I love and benefit from Yamada Naoko and Leo Tolstoy; I love but suffer from Shimura Takako and Anton Chekhov.

Mingjiang Chen | New Student

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My name is Mingjiang Chen. I come from Wuxi, China, a city close to Shanghai. I received my B.A. and M.A. in Italian Language and Culture both from Shanghai International Studies University. I’m passionate about languages. I enjoy studying foreign languages and I’m proud of my mother tongues, Mandarin and Wuxi Wu dialect. I’m also fairly interested in Neuroscience, Logic, and Mathematics. Linguistics, being a highly interdisciplinary science, combines all these studies in one subject and attracted me immediately after I took an introductory course in Modern Linguistics during my first year of M.A. The first few projects that I have done are mostly on argument/event structure through studying various phenomena like verbal reduplication, agreement, and Case. Currently I’m more interested in fundamental problems like syntactic configuration, aiming to propose an alternative generative model for syntactic structures, using tools from algebra and category theory. In my free time I love trekking, observing nature, or simply doing nothing.

UConn Linguistics at SLS

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The 16th annual Slavic Linguistics Society meeting (SLS) is being held virtually on September 3-5, hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UConn linguistics will be represented at the conference by the following talks:

  • Ivana Jovović. Explaining the effect of focus and size on cataphora

  • Penka Stateva (PhD 2002, now at University of Nova Gorica). Developmental aspects of Maximize Presupposition: a view from Slovenian (plenary talk)

  • Zheng Shen (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore). On CSC-violating movement in BCS

Magdalena & Stefan Kaufmann | NSF Grant

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Magdalena & Stefan Kaufmann have been awarded an NSF grant for their project “Research on conditional and modal language” (09/01/2021 – 04/30/2024). Congratulations!

Abstract for the project:

“Language reflects and supports the ability to reason about the likelihood or goodness of unrealized possibilities–a critical capacity underlying practical decisions, scientific explanations, moral judgments, legal agreements, and attitudes like regret and relief. Conditional and modal expressions are ways to talk about what is, will be or would have been likely or preferable, and to flag contingencies and degrees of confidence. In English, such expressions (examples are ‘if-then’ sentences and auxiliaries like ‘must’ and ‘might’) have been extensively studied. However, languages other than English employ radically different ways to express similar notions, and much remains unknown about the cross-linguistic picture with regard to both the variety of expressive means and the uniformity of the underlying concepts. This project works towards filling that gap. Its linguistic goal is to elucidate how general concepts and cognitive abilities interact with the grammatical idiosyncrasies of different languages. Its wider applications include language teaching and artificial intelligence, where the ability to use and understand modals and conditionals correctly helps improve the quality of machine translation systems and human-computer interfaces.

The goal of this project is a detailed comparative study of the meaning and use of conditional and modal expressions in typologically unrelated languages. As a starting point, this work relies on the existing descriptive literature for important observations and data points. However, such descriptions are not typically geared towards a detailed cross-linguistic comparative study using the theoretical and methodological tools of contemporary formal semantics and pragmatics. One crucial part of this project, therefore, consists of a comprehensive survey and systematization of the results of prior research. The project builds on the survey results to develop theoretical analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons. The empirical base underlying the project’s theoretical work includes data reported in the literature, supplemented with introspective judgments by native speakers.”

Further information on the grant can be found here.