Other News

van der Hulst festschrift & NAPhCxii workshop

Harry van der Hulst was honored with a festschrift and special satellite workshop organized by Nancy Ritter at the Twelfth North American Phonology Conference (NAPhCxii), held at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, May 14, 2023.

Harry also gave an invited presentation at the main conference titled What can stress tell us about the structure of synthetic compounds?

 

Presentations by current/former UConn affiliates included:

At the satellite workshop:

Aida Talic (PhD 2017, now at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Phases and accent assignment domains

Alexandre Vaxman (PhD 2016, now at University of Tours). Interaction of phonological and diacritic weight in hybrid accent systems

Rachel Channon. A new feature type: Functional features in sign languages

At the main conference:

Shengyun Gu, Diane Lillo-Martin and Deborah Chen Pichler (PhD 2001, now at Gallaudet). Phonological Development in ASL-Signing Children: Pseudosign Repetition

 

Photo: UConn affiliates at the workshop in person.

Front row: Shengyun Gu, Deborah Chen Pichler

Back row: Aida Talic, Alexandre Vaxman, Nancy Ritter, Harry van der Hulst, Diane Lillo-Martin

Mayfest 2023: Howard’s Beginning

This year’s UMD Linguistics Department’s annual ‘Mayfest’ workshop is dedicated to Howard Lasnik on the occasion of his retirement. The program includes many of his UConn students and colleagues giving presentations honoring Howard’s long and illustrious career:

  • Željko Bošković. On subject positions, the EPP, and contextuality of syntax
  • Keiko Murasugi. Parameterization in Labeling: Evidence from Language Acquisition
  • Adolfo Ausín. The (lack of) structure of Phrasal Compounds
  • Mamoru Saito. In defense of covert wh-movement (after 40 years)
Fifty Years of Linguistics at UConn
Photo from Fifty Years of Linguistics at UConn

 

Fujiwara & Shimada | Language Acquisition

The article “Acquisition of overt and covert and: support for the semantic subset principle” by Yoshiki Fujiwara and Hiroyuki Shimada has just appeared as an online first article ahead of its print publication in Language Acquisition. Congratulations!

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children’s consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives; the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with disjunctive interpretations in these sentences and assign conjunctive interpretations. The results of our experiment however show that Japanese children can access the disjunctive interpretations when conjunctions are elided. This finding supports the idea that children are guided by the Semantic Subset Principle when determining the default value of any parameter associated with a logical connective.

Mizuno Defense

Teruyuki Mizuno successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled Counterfactual expressions: an investigation into their structures and meanings on Thursday, February 16.

Congratulations, Teru!

 

Teru getting ready for the defense:

 

Dr. Mizuno with his committee:

 

Dr. Mizuno with his well-earned cake: