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.
UConn Linguists at NELS
The 53rd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society is taking place 12-14th of January, at University of Göttingen (https://nels53.uni-goettingen.de), and UConn Linguistics will be well represented, with main session talks by…
- Linghui Eva Gan. Perspective Blend and Indexical Shift in Hong Kong Sign Language
- Miloje Despić (PhD 2011, now at Cornell) & Michael David Hamilton. Consequences of Labeling for Morphophonology: v*P Labeling, Feature Interaction, & Direct-Inverse Systems
- Paula Fenger (PhD 2020, now at Leipzig University) & Philipp Weisser. Matching locality domains across modules: A case study from Sinhala
- Gísli Rúnar Harðarson (PhD 2017, now University of Iceland) & Cherlon Ussery. I’ll Give You that Interpretation If You Give Me the Right Configuration: Accounting for the Gradience of Inverse Scope in Insular Scandinavian
- Hiromune Oda (PhD 2021, now at University of Tokyo). Definite articles need not project DP: A more fine-grained NP/DP-language distinction
- Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai University). Anaphoric interpretations of the nominal use of Japanese classifier phrases
… and poster presentations by…
- Robin Jenkins. Accusative case in Turkish & Uyghur and the articulation of the verbal field
- Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University), William Snyder, and Stella Christie. Investigating children’s understanding of Mandarin you ‘again’ with goal-PPs
- Paula Fenger. Words (a)cross domains: lessons from Japanese verbs
Yang Defense
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:
UConn linguists at Amsterdam Colloquium
The 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium is taking place 19–21 December, 2022, and UConn linguistics will be represented there by the following presentations:
- Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University), William Snyder and Stella Christie. Mandarin-speaking children’s understanding of you ‘again’ with goal-PPs (lightning talk/poster)
- Yuya Noguchi. Non-past directives in Japanese (lightning talk/poster)
East Asian Sign Linguistics
The volume East Asian Sign Linguistics, edited by Kazumi Matsuoka (1998 PhD, now Keio University, Japan), Onno Crasborn and Marie Coppola, has been published by De Gruyter Mouton as part of their Sign Language Typology series. The volume is also available online. The volume also contains the following chapters written by UConn linguists:
- Shengyun Gu. Phonological processes in complex word formation in Shanghai Sign Language
- Kazumi Matsuoka. Uiko Yano and Kazumi Maegawa. Epistemic modal verbs and negation in Japanese Sign Language
Congratulations!
Laura Conway Palumbo
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
Lee | Glossa
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.
International Conference on Tense and Aspect in Conditionals
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:
- Stefan Kaufmann. Shifty if’s iffy shifts (invited)
- Teruyuki Mizuno. Strategies for Anderson conditionals: their implications to the typology of O- and X-markings
Conditional Thought and Talk workshop
The Suppositional Language project is holding a two-day workshop on Conditional Thought and Talk on October 21-22.
Magdalena Kaufmann | MIT Linguistics Colloquium
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”.