UConn Linguistics at JK

The 30th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, organized by Simon Fraser University, will take place on March 11-13, 2023. UConn will be well represented at the conference

… with talks by:

  • Yuya Noguchi. On the directive interpretation of non-past sentences in Japanese
  • Qiushi Chen. Deriving Mizenkei in Old Japanese Verbal Morphology
  • Eri Tanaka, Masako Maeda, and Yoichi Miyamoto (PhD 1994, now at Osaka University). On negative island effects and exhaustification with adjunct nani-o in Japanese

… and posters by:

  • Yusuke Yagi and Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai U). Crossover Effects with Set indices: Evidence from Japanese Scrambling
  • Masako Maeda and Yoichi Miyamoto. Scope Properties of Parasitic Gaps in Adjunct Control in Japanese
  • Koji Shimamura (PhD 2018, now at Kanazawa Gakuin U, Kobe City U of Foreign Studies) and Takayuki Akimoto. Accusative Case without Agree
  • Toshiko Oda (PhD 2008, now at Tokyo Keizai U) and Alexander Wimmer. Japanese if-adversatives

ECO5 at UConn

ECO-5 is an annual gathering of linguistics graduate students from five East Coast universities (UMass, MIT, Harvard, UConn, and UMD), and this year it is hosted by UConn Linguistics, taking place on February 25th. UConn Linguistics will also be represented at ECO-5 by:

  • Beccy Lewis. A deficient indexical in British English
  • Thanos Iliadis. The distribution of Modern Greek idhios

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.