The 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is taking place January 6th-9th in Washington, DC and virtually. UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference with talks by:

• Si Kai Lee. Movement is Exhausting: Optional wh-fronting in Singlish is not free (in-person)
• Muyi Yang. The closeness constraint on focus association and the syntax of Q-particles (hybrid)

… and poster presentations by:

• Yusuke Yagi. Strawson Semantic Value: An explanation for the definite reading in ellipsis (in-person)
• Pasha Koval and Jon Sprouse. Relative Clause Extraposition in Russian is created by syntactic movement (in-person)
• Ari Goertzel. The Properties of the -o clitic in Mandinka (online)
• Shengyun Gu. Combined methods are informative: weak hand spread in Shanghai Sign Language (online)
• Ivana Jovović. On Discourse Licensing of Coindexed Pronouns in Slavic (online)
• Hiroaki Saito. Losing a subject, keeping an indirect object
• Nick Huang (postdoc 2019-2021, now at the National University of Singapore) and Yu’an Yang. How do learners know attitude verbs select what in wh-in situ languages? (online)
• Zheng Shen (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore) and Meghan Lim. Extraction from definite, indefinite, and superlative NPs: An experimental approach

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/