Hiromune Oda successfully defended his dissertation titled “A more fine-grained distinction of NP/DP-languages and parameters in minimalism” on December 9th.
Congratulations, Hiro!
Hiro before his defense:
Dr. Oda with his well earned cake:
(photos: Yoshiki Fujiwara)
Hiromune Oda‘s paper Decomposing and deducing the Coordinate Structure Constraint has been published online in The Linguistic Review ahead of the print version (see short abstract below). Congratulations Hiro!
The article shows that the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) can be violated in a number of languages and establishes a novel cross-linguistic generalization regarding languages that allow violations of the CSC. A phase-based deduction of this generalization is then provided under a particular contextual approach to phases. In addition, based on the cross-linguistic data regarding violations of the CSC, it is argued that the CSC should be separated into two conditions: (i) the ban on extraction of a conjunct, and (ii) the ban on extraction out of a conjunct. This means that the whole coordinate structure (ConjP) as well as individual conjuncts are islands independently of each other. The article also addresses the long-standing debate regarding where in the grammar the CSC applies, arguing that the two different conditions that result from the separation of the traditional CSC ((i) and (ii) above) are deduced from different mechanisms in the architecture of the grammar: one is a purely syntactic condition, and the other is an interface condition.
Magdalena Kaufmann and Kavya Krishnan (cognitive science major) have obtained a Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Research Experience (SHARE) grant for their project “How to reason in Nepali” to investigate Nepali conditionals in Spring 2022.
An interview with Adrienne Bruce, a Linguistics and Philosophy major, has appeared in UConn Magazine. Adrienne is spending this semester at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, on a Gilman Scholarship for undergraduate studies abroad from the U.S. State Department. The full interview can be read here: “Speaking the Language”.
William Snyder will be giving a colloquium talk at Tsing Hua University on 29th October 2021. The talk will be titled “Evidence from child language acquisition for a parametric model of syntax”
Abstract:
In this talk I will present three case-studies, each based on longitudinal records of children’s spontaneous speech, that illustrate what happens when a child’s syntax undergoes a change. The first case-study, examining the acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining prepositional questions in the speech of children acquiring English or Spanish, shows (first) that children may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before they even attempt to ask a prepositional question; and (second) that at some point, abruptly, children begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle combinations occurs almost exactly when that child begins producing novel noun-noun compounds. I will argue that these findings, taken together, strongly favor a parametric approach to cross-linguistic variation in syntax. I will argue further that the findings have implications for the format of parameters, and for the process by which children set them.
Information on how to attend the talk virtually can be found here.
Stefan Kaufmann will be speaking at the Algorithmic Arts & Humanities colloquium at the UConn Humanities Institute on October 21, 2021 at 12:30pm in HBL 4-209. The event will be livestreamed and you can attend in person. Here is the link for more information: https://humanities.uconn.edu/2021/10/11/dhms-presents-algorithmic-arts-humanities-at-uconn/
My name is Pravaal Yadav and I am from a small town in India called Jhansi. I did my BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Delhi and The English and Foreign Languages University, respectively. Later, I got interested in Linguistics and did a second MA program in Linguistics from the University of Delhi. My primary interest lies in syntax and I am currently interested in agreement patterns in Indo-Aryan languages.
In my spare time, I like to travel, read Urdu poetry, watch movies, and listen to music.
My name is Walter Shaw. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania and received my B.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University in the Spring of 2021. During my time there I took courses outside my major in psychology, history, and Russian. Within linguistics I especially enjoyed Romance Linguistics, Historical, and Syntax. My theoretical interests are primarily in Morphology and Syntax. I’ve always loved learning and exploring different disciplines and am looking forward to continuing that here at UConn!
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.
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.