Stefan Kaufmann gave a talk on his paper “How Fake is Fake Past?” in the “Construction of Meaning” series at Stanford University on May 19, 2022.
Other News
Stefan Kaufmann | UCHI Fellow
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”.
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!
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.
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.
UConn Linguists at PLC
The 46th annual Penn Linguistics Conference will take place virtually on March 18-20, 2022 and UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference with presentations by:
- Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai University). “Parts” of fractions: A cross-linguistic study (POSTER)
- Tarcisio Dias. Local wh-subjects under Brazilian Portuguese nunca ellipsis (POSTER)
- Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu. Against low negation in Japanese questions
- Beccy Lewis. There are two derivations for associative plural (APL) constructions
- Hiroaki Saito (Mie University/UConn). On the apparent complementizer in Japanese
- Yusuke Yagi & Xuetong Yuan. Stronger Additivity Derives Concessivity
- Koji Shimamura (PhD 2018, now at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies). The Syntax and Semantics of SAY in the Quotative Complement in Japanese
UConn Linguists at DGfS
The 44th Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) was held online on February 23rd-25th, hosted by the University of Tübingen. UConn linguists gave talks at two of the DGfS thematic workshops:
Vicki Carstens gave an invited talk at the workshop on Long Distance Dependencies and the structure of embedded clauses in African Languages, titled: Addressee Agreement in Bantu and Speech Act Projections
Adrian Stegovec gave a talk at the workshop on Optionality and non-optionality of syntactic movement, titled: The third way: Optional object reordering as ambiguous labeling resolution.