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:
Hiroaki Saito successfully defended his dissertation Ways of Saying – Synchronically and Diachronically on February 13th.
Congratulations, Hiro!
Picture: Dr. Saito after his successful defense with his committee (Željko Bošković, Magda Kaufmann, Ian Roberts, Susi Wurmbrand) and some of the audience.
Stefan Kaufmann presented his work on “Talking about time and possibility” as a fellow’s talk at the UConn Humanities Institute on February 1, 2023.
Muyi Yang successfully defended her dissertation Varieties of conditionals as definite descriptions on December 15th.
Congratulations, Muyi!
Muyi defending:
Dr. Yang with her committee:
Dr. Yang with her well-earned cake:
With sadness, we share the news that Laura Conway Palumbo, Ph.D. 1997, has died. Laura’s dissertation, Excavating Semantics, examined the theory and acquisition of discourse-bound pronouns, developing ideas of dynamic binding. She was an active member of the department and contributed to it in very many ways.
The following link contains her obituary, photos, and information
Si Kai Lee’s article “On agreement-drop in Singlish: topics never agree” has just appeared in Volume 7 of Glossa, as part of the GLOWing papers 2021 collection of selected papers from the 44th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium. The paper can be accessed online here. Congratulations Si Kai!
Abstract: This paper examines the distribution and properties of agreement-drop constructions in Singlish, which are distinguished by the absence of overt subject agreement morphology. I demonstrate that these constructions are distinct from their minimally different fully-agreeing counterparts in that they (i) bleed object topicalisation, (ii) block the extraction of adjuncts which are lower in the structure, (iii) are scopally frozen, (iv) are unable to be embedded under regret-class predicates, and (v) impose a specificity condition on their subjects. I argue that these properties rule out prior characterisations of the alternation as the output of free variation in the PF. On the basis that agreement-drop constructions in Singlish consistently parallels topicalisation structures cross-linguistically, I sketch a syntactic account that unifies the two constructions within the syntax.
UConn linguistics will be represented with two presentations at the International Conference on Tense and Aspect in Conditionals at INALCO, Paris, November 2-4, 2022:
The Suppositional Language project is holding a two-day workshop on Conditional Thought and Talk on October 21-22.
Magdalena Kaufmann gave a talk at MIT as part of their Linguistics Colloquium series on October 14th, 2022. Her talk was titled “How to be impossible or remote”.
Stefan Kaufmann will speak as part of a forum at the Converging on Causal Ontology Analysis (COCOA) zoominar on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. The information about the talk is below:
Was I speaking before I spoke?
Some English expressions let us characterize states of affairs in terms of subsequent courses of events, even if the latter do not come to pass. Well-known examples of this are “counterfactual” before-clauses (‘The police defused the bomb before it exploded’) and progressives (‘Mary was drawing a circle when she ran out of ink’). Numerous proposals have been made to capture the modal component of each of these constructions, such as Beaver and Condoravdi (2003) for before and Landman (1992) for the progressive. Both refer to possible worlds and processes or events, but ultimately rely on notions that are less well understood (reasonably probable worlds; continuation branches of events). The connection to conditionals (‘If the police hadn’t defused the bomb, it would have exploded’; ‘If she hadn’t run out of ink, she would have drawn a circle’) looms large but is not explored in detail.
Assuming that causal models are a useful tool for modeling (the relevant kind of) counterfactual reasoning, what might they tell us about the relationship between before-clauses, progressives and counterfactual conditionals? Are events crucially involved, and if so, how should they be represented in the causal model? A close look at all three constructions reveals striking similarities, but also stark differences. The similarities suggest to me that pretty much the same kind of causal reasoning is involved in before-clauses and progressives. The differences suggest that the notion of “event” that figures in the analysis of the progressive is not as useful in before-clauses. It turns out that the causal structure is useful precisely for abstracting away from other particulars of the events.