Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Diane Lillo-Martin will serve as the Department Head of Linguistics effective July 1. Diane is a renowned scholar, a pioneer in the study of sign languages and a fellow of the Linguistics Society of America. The department is grateful that a proven academic leader like Diane has volunteered to guide us through these times. Thank you, Diane!

The members of the UConn Department of Linguistics are sad to share that David Michaels, Professor Emeritus, has died.

David was a kind, generous, intelligent, and humble man. He was one of the early members of the Department, starting as an instructor in 1968 until his retirement in 1997, and served as Department Head for many years, from 1976 to 1992. David shaped the Department and nurtured it, and his influence is felt throughout it to this day. There is no doubt that we would not be what we are without the effort and support of David Michaels.

Our hearts are with Gerda Walz-Michaels and the rest of the Michaels family at this time.

Obituary:

https://www.fhwebsites.net/ctf/obituary/David-Michaels

 

We are pleased to announce the recipients of our first annual Alumni Research Awards.  Through this program the department awards up to $1000 annually to graduate students to support research projects.  These awards were made possible through the generous donations of alumni from our Ph.D. program.  This year’s awards go to:

Sarah Asinari & Si Kai Lee, “Verbal Agreement Patterns in Qaraqalpaq”

Shengyun Gu, “Weak hand spread in the prosody of Shanghai Sign Language”

We are very sad to relate the news that Sam Epstein died on November 29, 2019 at his home.  Epstein was the Marilyn J. Shatz Collegiate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1987, writing a thesis titled, “Empty Categories and Their Antecedents.”  Epstein went on to become one of the most influential figures in modern syntactic theory. He produced a number of ground-breaking works which are considered to be classics of the field. This for example holds for his 1999 paper “Un-principled Syntax: The Derivation of Syntactic Relations”. C-command has always been considered to be one of the most fundamental syntactic relations. Until that paper, no one really knew why, which left the whole field in a rather uncomfortable position: there was an ever present relation that fundamentally affected almost all syntactic phenomena and we did not understand why that was the case. In the paper in question, Epstein proposed an amazingly elegant and simple deduction of c-command which also explained why c-command is so pervasive. It was, and still is, an example of syntactic theorizing at its best. That paper and Epstein’s work more generally (e.g., books A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations and Derivations in Minimalism) led to a fundamental change in the syntactic theory, with derivationality and derivational mechanisms being emphasized over representational mechanisms. The field simply would not have been the same without Epstein.

https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/news-events/all-news/search-news/in-memory-of-samuel-david-epstein.html

https://obits.mlive.com/obituaries/annarbor/obituary.aspx?n=samuel-david-epstein&pid=194764409

Nick Huang is here as a visiting researcher, supported by a two-year fellowship from the National University of Singapore. At UConn, he will be working with Jon Sprouse. Nick received his PhD from the University of Maryland earlier this year. His interests are in cross-linguistic variation and learning, and he has worked on topics such as locality, modality, and linguistic illusions.