Other News

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:

Saito Defense

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.