Magda and Stefan Kaufmann’s paper “Iffy Endorsements” has been published online as an advance article in the Journal of Semantics.

Abstract: Theories of imperatives differ in how they aim to derive the distributional and functional properties of this clause type. One point of divergence is how to capture the fact that imperative utterances convey the speaker’s endorsement for the course of events described. Condoravdi & Lauer (2017) observe that conditionals with imperative consequents (conditionalized imperatives, CIs) are infelicitous as motivations of advice against doing something and take this as evidence for an analysis of imperatives as encoding speaker endorsement. We investigate CIs in further contexts and argue that their account in terms of preferential conflicts fails to capture the more general infelicity of CIs as motivations for or against doing something. We develop an alternative in which imperatives do not directly encode speaker preferences, but express modalized propositions and impose restrictions on the discourse structure (along the lines of Kaufmann, 2012). We show how this carries over to conditionalized imperatives to derive the behavior of CIs, and conclude with a discussion of more general problems regarding an implementation of conditional preferential commitments, an issue that can be avoided on our account of imperatives.

Hiromune Oda‘s paper Decomposing and deducing the Coordinate Structure Constraint has been published online in The Linguistic Review ahead of the print version (see short abstract below). Congratulations Hiro!

The article shows that the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) can be violated in a number of languages and establishes a novel cross-linguistic generalization regarding languages that allow violations of the CSC. A phase-based deduction of this generalization is then provided under a particular contextual approach to phases. In addition, based on the cross-linguistic data regarding violations of the CSC, it is argued that the CSC should be separated into two conditions: (i) the ban on extraction of a conjunct, and (ii) the ban on extraction out of a conjunct. This means that the whole coordinate structure (ConjP) as well as individual conjuncts are islands independently of each other. The article also addresses the long-standing debate regarding where in the grammar the CSC applies, arguing that the two different conditions that result from the separation of the traditional CSC ((i) and (ii) above) are deduced from different mechanisms in the architecture of the grammar: one is a purely syntactic condition, and the other is an interface condition.

Hiromune Oda’s article “Japanese free choice items as unconditionals” has just appeared as an online first article in Natural Language Semantics ahead of its print publication. Congratulations Hiro!

Diane Lillo-Martin and Jonathan Henner’s article on the “Acquisition of Sign Languages” has been published in this year’s volume of the Annual Review of Linguistics (Vol. 7:395-419).

A special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics in memory of Irit Meir was recently published, guest edited by Diane Lillo-Martin, Wendy Sandler, Marie Coppola, and Rose Stamp, who also wrote the introductory article “Irit Meir”.

The issue also contains the article “Person vs. locative agreement: Evidence from late learners and language emergence” by Lily Kwok (MA 2019), Stephanie Berk (PhD 2004), and Diane Lillo-Martin.

We are pleased to announce that the recently published Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics (De Gruyter Mouton 2020, edited by Wesley W. Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo) features two chapters by UConn faculty:

• “Formal treatments of tense and aspect” by Stefan Kaufmann (Chapter 7, pages 371-422)
• “Possibility and necessity in Japanese: Prioritizing, epistemic, and dynamic modality” by Magdalena Kaufmann and Sanae Tamura (Chapter 11, pages 537-586)

We are pleased to announce that “Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas”, a volume edited by Marie Coppola with Olivier Le Guen and Josefina Safar, is going to be published in November as part of DeGruyter’s Sign Language Typology Series.

“This volume is the first to bring together researchers studying a range of different types of emerging sign languages in the Americas, and their relationship to the gestures produced in the surrounding communities of hearing individuals.”