Magdalena Kaufmann and Kavya Krishnan (cognitive science major) have obtained a Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Research Experience (SHARE) grant for their project “How to reason in Nepali” to investigate Nepali conditionals in Spring 2022.
Interview with Linguistics and Philosophy major in UConn Magazine
An interview with Adrienne Bruce, a Linguistics and Philosophy major, has appeared in UConn Magazine. Adrienne is spending this semester at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, on a Gilman Scholarship for undergraduate studies abroad from the U.S. State Department. The full interview can be read here: “Speaking the Language”.
UConn Linguistics at LENLS
The Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 18 (LENLS18) annual workshop took place online on November 13-15, 2021 as one of the workshops of the JSAI International Symposia on AI sponsored by the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). UConn linguistics was represented at the conference with talks by:
- Muyi Yang. Sensitive to future: the case of Japanese nara-conditionals
- Shun Ihara and Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai University). The Duality of Negative Attitudes in Japanese Conditionals
UConn Linguistics at ICFL
The 9th International Conference on Formal Linguistics (ICFL-9) was held in Shanghai (in hybrid mode) on November 5-7, 2021. UConn linguistics was represented at the conference with talks by:
- Shengyun Gu. A typology of person agreement in Shanghai Sign Language: morphophonological accounts
- Zheng Shen. (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore). Coordinate Structure Constraint Violating Movement and Closest Conjunct Agreement
- Zheng Shen and Meghan Lim. Extraction from definite, indefinite, and superlative NPs: An experimental approach
UConn Linguistics at BUCLD
The 46th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD46) was held virtually from 4th-7th November 2021. UConn linguistics was represented at the conference with talks by:
- Corina Goodwin, Janina Piotroski, Diane Lillo-Martin. Hearing and deaf ASL-English bilinguals show typical early bilingual development.
- Elaine Grolla (PhD 2005, now at Universidade de São Paulo). Syntactic constraints and medial wh-questions in child Brazilian Portuguese.
- Kazuko Yatsushiro (PhD 1999, now at ZAS Berlin), Chiara Dal Farra, Aurore Gonzalez, Johannes Hein, Silvia Silleresi, Alicia Avellana, Aijun Huang, Johnson Ilori, G. Gayathri, Maria Guasti, Uli Sauerland and Lilla Pintér. The Comparative-Superlative Generalization in child language.
Goodwin & Coppola in UConn Today
A recent publication by Corina Goodwin and Marie Coppola in the journal Child Development (“Language not auditory experience is related to parent-reported executive functioning in preschool-aged deaf and hard-of-hearing children”) was featured in UConn Today.
The article, titled “To Young Brains, Language Is Language, Whether Signed or Spoken” can be read here.
Magda Kaufmann at TerraLing Workshop
On October 23rd, Magda Kaufmann was one of the invited speakers at the TerraLing Workshop 2021. Her talk was entitled “Obviating Differences”.
UConn Linguists at NELS
A number of UConn linguists will be presenting at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 52), which will be held online from October 29 to 31, 2021, hosted by the Rutgers University Department of Linguistics.
Diane Lillo-Martin will be one of the invited speakers and talks will be given by:
- Yuya Noguchi. On a correlation between focus and island sensitivity in Japanese elliptical constructions
- Gísli Rúnar Harðarson (PhD 2017, now at University of Iceland). Converging syntactic and phonological domains
- Pasha Koval and Jon Sprouse. Relative Clause Extraposition in Russian is created by syntactic movement
With poster presentations by:
- Ivana Jovović. Competing pronouns in Serbo-Croatian
- Pasha Koval. On Multiple Sluicing and Coordination of Unlikes in Russian
- Zheng Shen (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore) and Meghan Lim. Extraction from definite, indefinite, and superlative NPs: An experimental approach
William Snyder | Tsing Hua University Colloquium
William Snyder will be giving a colloquium talk at Tsing Hua University on 29th October 2021. The talk will be titled “Evidence from child language acquisition for a parametric model of syntax”
Abstract:
In this talk I will present three case-studies, each based on longitudinal records of children’s spontaneous speech, that illustrate what happens when a child’s syntax undergoes a change. The first case-study, examining the acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining prepositional questions in the speech of children acquiring English or Spanish, shows (first) that children may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before they even attempt to ask a prepositional question; and (second) that at some point, abruptly, children begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle combinations occurs almost exactly when that child begins producing novel noun-noun compounds. I will argue that these findings, taken together, strongly favor a parametric approach to cross-linguistic variation in syntax. I will argue further that the findings have implications for the format of parameters, and for the process by which children set them.
Information on how to attend the talk virtually can be found here.
Stefan Kaufmann | Algorithmic Arts & Humanities Colloquium
Stefan Kaufmann will be speaking at the Algorithmic Arts & Humanities colloquium at the UConn Humanities Institute on October 21, 2021 at 12:30pm in HBL 4-209. The event will be livestreamed and you can attend in person. Here is the link for more information: https://humanities.uconn.edu/2021/10/11/dhms-presents-algorithmic-arts-humanities-at-uconn/