Željko Bošković will be giving an invited talk on the 24th January 2020 at the University of Leiden as part of the Workshop in honor of the defense of Anastasiia Ionova. The talk will be titled On wh and subject positions.
Other News
Sad news: Samuel David Epstein
We are very sad to relate the news that Sam Epstein died on November 29, 2019 at his home. Epstein was the Marilyn J. Shatz Collegiate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1987, writing a thesis titled, “Empty Categories and Their Antecedents.” Epstein went on to become one of the most influential figures in modern syntactic theory. He produced a number of ground-breaking works which are considered to be classics of the field. This for example holds for his 1999 paper “Un-principled Syntax: The Derivation of Syntactic Relations”. C-command has always been considered to be one of the most fundamental syntactic relations. Until that paper, no one really knew why, which left the whole field in a rather uncomfortable position: there was an ever present relation that fundamentally affected almost all syntactic phenomena and we did not understand why that was the case. In the paper in question, Epstein proposed an amazingly elegant and simple deduction of c-command which also explained why c-command is so pervasive. It was, and still is, an example of syntactic theorizing at its best. That paper and Epstein’s work more generally (e.g., books A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations and Derivations in Minimalism) led to a fundamental change in the syntactic theory, with derivationality and derivational mechanisms being emphasized over representational mechanisms. The field simply would not have been the same without Epstein.
https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/news-events/all-news/search-news/in-memory-of-samuel-david-epstein.html
https://obits.mlive.com/obituaries/annarbor/obituary.aspx?n=samuel-david-epstein&pid=194764409
Coppola | Best Paper in Language Award
A paper co-authored by Marie Coppola, “The noun-verb distinction in established and emergent sign systems” (Language 95, no. 2 (2019): 230-267), has won this year’s Best Paper in Language Award.
Congratulations to Marie and her co-authors: Natasha Abner, Molly Flaherty, Katelyn Stangl, Diane Brentari, and Susan Goldin-Meadow!
Abstract: In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan homesigns. We show that a distinction between nouns and verbs is marked (by utterance position and movement size) and thus present in all groups–even homesigners, who have invented their systems without a conventional language model. However, there is also evidence of emerging crosslinguistic variation in whether a base hand is used to mark the noun-verb contrast. Finally, variation in how movement repetition and base hand are used across Nicaraguan groups offers insight into the pressures that influence the development of a linguistic system. Specifically, early signers of NSL use movement repetition and base hand in ways similar to homesigners but different from signers who entered the NSL community more recently, suggesting that intergenerational transmission to new learners (not just sharing a language with a community) plays a key role in the development of these devices. These results bear not only on the importance of the noun-verb distinction in human communication, but also on how this distinction emerges and develops in a new (sign) language.
Visitor | Nick Huang
Nick Huang is here as a visiting researcher, supported by a two-year fellowship from the National University of Singapore. At UConn, he will be working with Jon Sprouse. Nick received his PhD from the University of Maryland earlier this year. His interests are in cross-linguistic variation and learning, and he has worked on topics such as locality, modality, and linguistic illusions.
Syntax job at UConn!
We are pleased to announce that the Department of Linguistics is hiring a syntactician at the rank of Associate or Full Professor. More information and the link for applications is available at: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo?joblist—529-14939