The 8th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+8) took place on March 4–5, 2023, hosted by Harvard University. UConn linguistics was represented by:
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:
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.
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.
… and poster presentations by…
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:
The 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium is taking place 19–21 December, 2022, and UConn linguistics will be represented there by the following presentations:
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:
Congratulations!