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.
My name is Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu, and I’m from Japan/Italy. I received my B.A. in Linguistics and Literature from Hokkaido University in Japan, writing my thesis on the syntax of yes-no questions and their answers. I’m interested in syntax, semantics, and language acquisition.
I like books (although I’m currently struggling to find any time to read) and watching soccer (especially Italian soccer). I’m very happy to be at UConn and look forward to what awaits.
I am Chen Qiushi (陳秋實). I come from Sichuan, China. I received my BA in Chinese Philology from Nankai University, and my MA in Chinese Language and Literature from Fudan University. I love language and linguistics because I find it fascinating to explore the diversity of languages and its underlying universals. Among all the subfields I am most interested in (generative) syntax, but I also believe that, in order to be a good linguist, one should have a sound understanding of each part of linguistics, not just of their area of specialization.
When I am not doing linguistics, I read literature (including poetry, stories, novels, and manga), I write poetry in both Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese, and I enjoy watching anime. I love and benefit from Yamada Naoko and Leo Tolstoy; I love but suffer from Shimura Takako and Anton Chekhov.
My name is Mingjiang Chen. I come from Wuxi, China, a city close to Shanghai. I received my B.A. and M.A. in Italian Language and Culture both from Shanghai International Studies University. I’m passionate about languages. I enjoy studying foreign languages and I’m proud of my mother tongues, Mandarin and Wuxi Wu dialect. I’m also fairly interested in Neuroscience, Logic, and Mathematics. Linguistics, being a highly interdisciplinary science, combines all these studies in one subject and attracted me immediately after I took an introductory course in Modern Linguistics during my first year of M.A. The first few projects that I have done are mostly on argument/event structure through studying various phenomena like verbal reduplication, agreement, and Case. Currently I’m more interested in fundamental problems like syntactic configuration, aiming to propose an alternative generative model for syntactic structures, using tools from algebra and category theory. In my free time I love trekking, observing nature, or simply doing nothing.
Željko Bošković will give a colloquium talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on 20th September 2021. The talk will be titled: “On the contextuality of the EPP, the Comp-trace effect, and multiple wh- and subject positions”.
Adrian Stegovec gave a colloquium talk at the Nanzan University Center for Linguistics on 12th September 2021. The talk was titled: “Syntactic person restrictions: Lessons from a generative typological approach”.
Magdalena & Stefan Kaufmann have been awarded an NSF grant for their project “Research on conditional and modal language” (09/01/2021 – 04/30/2024). Congratulations!
Abstract for the project:
“Language reflects and supports the ability to reason about the likelihood or goodness of unrealized possibilities–a critical capacity underlying practical decisions, scientific explanations, moral judgments, legal agreements, and attitudes like regret and relief. Conditional and modal expressions are ways to talk about what is, will be or would have been likely or preferable, and to flag contingencies and degrees of confidence. In English, such expressions (examples are ‘if-then’ sentences and auxiliaries like ‘must’ and ‘might’) have been extensively studied. However, languages other than English employ radically different ways to express similar notions, and much remains unknown about the cross-linguistic picture with regard to both the variety of expressive means and the uniformity of the underlying concepts. This project works towards filling that gap. Its linguistic goal is to elucidate how general concepts and cognitive abilities interact with the grammatical idiosyncrasies of different languages. Its wider applications include language teaching and artificial intelligence, where the ability to use and understand modals and conditionals correctly helps improve the quality of machine translation systems and human-computer interfaces.
The goal of this project is a detailed comparative study of the meaning and use of conditional and modal expressions in typologically unrelated languages. As a starting point, this work relies on the existing descriptive literature for important observations and data points. However, such descriptions are not typically geared towards a detailed cross-linguistic comparative study using the theoretical and methodological tools of contemporary formal semantics and pragmatics. One crucial part of this project, therefore, consists of a comprehensive survey and systematization of the results of prior research. The project builds on the survey results to develop theoretical analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons. The empirical base underlying the project’s theoretical work includes data reported in the literature, supplemented with introspective judgments by native speakers.”
Further information on the grant can be found here.
Emma Nguyen successfully defended her dissertation titled “The predictive power of lexical semantics on the acquisition of passive voice in young children” on July 27th.
Congratulations, Emma!
Dr. Nguyen with her committee:
The Eastern Generative Grammar (EGG) summer school is taking place online between 26th July-6th August. Adrian Stegovec will be teaching two courses at the summer school:
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!