Željko Bošković gave two invited talks this week at the Leipzig University Institute of Linguistics:
The talks were titled:
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.
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.
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.
Yixuan (Pepper) Yan presented joint work with Yitong Luo at the N∅thing is Logical (∅NihiL) seminar organized by the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam. The talk, given on October 1st 2024, was titled“Do children know that PolQs are not AltQs? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese”.
Hi! My name is Jiayi Zhou (周佳旖). I’m from Shaoxing, China, a place famous for its wine, novelists, activists, rivers, and bridges. I grew up surrounded by stories, spoken aloud, written in books, or just soaked in wine. I’ve especially benefited from linguistic stories in Hangzhou (2017–2021), Osaka (2019), and Utrecht (2022–2024), and I’m eager to explore more in syntax and semantics. I’m also very curious about language evolution, multimodal linguistics, and anthropological linguistics. It’s often more about the specific topic and the people involved in the project, rather than the subfield itself.
I’m very excited to start new stories and learn more about linguistics as a PhD student at UConn, in Storrs. My ambition at this stage is to become a better thinker, though this often leaves me feeling anxious about finding my place in the “wild” life, outside academia. Is a better thinker always a better person? I’m aiming toward the way of becoming a better person though. It’s a great pleasure to have linguistics as my lens—whether a pair of glasses, a window, or a prism. Still, I sometimes struggle with having too much linguistics (or some scientific mindset) in my daily life. Anyway, thank you for reading these naive thoughts! I will probably change my metaphor and weave my stories as time goes on!
Hi, I’m Heesun Yang. I am from Seoul, Korea. I received my BA in English Literature & Linguistics, and MA in English Linguistics at Dongguk University. My interest in linguistics began during my undergraduate studies when I first encountered tree structures. I was fascinated by how sentences could be analyzed this way, and this has driven me to pursue linguistics ever since. Currently, I am primarily interested in Syntax and its interface with Semantics.
Besides my academics, I enjoy cooking, shopping, and spending time with family and friends. I get especially energetic when the weather is nice and I love taking a walk on beautiful days.
I am excited to be a graduate student at UConn and looking forward to my time here!
My name is Hiroaki Teraoka and I am from Japan. I did my BA and MA both in Kyoto University. Although my BA program was English literature, I was not so interested in literature (and as a result, I repeated a year). Rather, I was fascinated by the grammar of the English language and how it had changed over the time. Thus, I started studying linguistics.
I am now interested in syntax. More precisely, I study a framework called “labeling algorithm”.
Since I came to UCONN, I started enjoying working out in the gym (there is a gym in the Storrs campus). Other than working out in the gym, I enjoy reading Noam Chomsky’s works on linguistics, of all of which I like Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory the best, since it is very long and full of interesting ideas which can still be used today. My second favorite book by Chomsky is Lectures on Government and Binding, for more or less the same reasons. Apart from these, I enjoy a Japanese smartphone game called Fate Grand Order, on which I spend a reasonable amount of money and people around me sometimes tell me off for this habit of mine.