Yusuke Yagi successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled Dynamics, Assertability, and Presuppositions in Japanese and English disjunctions on February 28th.
Congratulations, Yusuke!
Yusuke during the defense:
Dr. Yagi cutting his well earned cake:
Dr. Yagi with his committee:
The paper “Argument ellipsis as topic deletion” by our alumnus Teruyuki Mizuno (PhD 2023, now at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo) has just been published online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory ahead of the print version. Congratulations Teru! The paper can be accessed here.
Abstract: In recent syntactic literature, argument ellipsis has become a productive perspective of investigation for null arguments in natural language. Focusing on Japanese as the primary object of study, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of the underlying syntactic mechanism behind the derivation of argument ellipsis. The main empirical observation is that argument ellipsis and topicalization exhibit a striking parallelism with respect to the way they interact with wh-dependencies. Building on this observation, I argue that argument ellipsis is an instance of topic deletion, which involves movement of arguments to Spec,TopicP, and phonological deletion of the arguments under the identity of the topic in discourse. I show that the topic-deletion account of argument ellipsis offers a principled explanation for a variety of restrictions concerning what types of argument can or cannot undergo ellipsis. I also suggest that the proposed account enables a unified perspective on argument ellipsis and discourse pro-drop by analyzing them uniformly as instances of topic deletion, thereby shedding new light on the deep typological correlation that has been observed between them.
The 2025 edition of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America took place January 9-12 in Philadelphia. UConn linguistics was represented at the conference with talks by:
… a poster presentation by:
UConn linguistics was well represented at three sign language conferences in December, January, and February. At the 10th edition of the SIGN conference (SIGN10), which was held at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad & Tobago, December 9-10, we were represented with the following talks by:
At the 15th conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR 15), which was held at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, January 11-12, we were represented with the following talks by:
… and posters by:
And lastly, at the conference of the Association of College Educators – Deaf & Hard of Hearing (ACEDHH), which was held on January 30-February 1 in Washington DC, we were represented with a talk by:
Diane Lillo-Martin gave an invited talk on November 27th, 2024 at the Instituto Cervantes of Manchester titled: Bimodal Bilingualism: A Spoken Language and a Sign Language.
Harry van der Hulst gave an invited talk, titled “Transparency and opacity in vowel harmony“, at the OCP Workshop on Vowel Harmony, which took place on February 4th as part of the 22nd Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP22), which took place at the University of Amsterdam.
Željko Bošković gave two invited talks this week at the Leipzig University Institute of Linguistics:
The talks were titled:
Jarry Chia-Wei Chuang gave a talk, titled “Where are you from? The status of prenuclear glide in Mandarin”, at the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology, which took place at Rutgers University on November 1st-3rd.
The 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD49) is taking place on November 7-10th 2024. UConn linguistics is going to be well represented at the conference with a keynote talk by:
… talks by:
… and posters by:
In addition, Yixuan (Pepper) Yan was also awarded the Paula Menyuk Award for top-rated abstracts by student first authors. Congratulations!
Photo: UConn linguists and UConn-connected people at BUCLD following Diane Lillo-Martin’s keynote talk.
Magdalena Kaufmann gave two presentations entitled “Reaching the remote and the impossible” at the Semantics Workshop at UMass on October 18 and at the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop on October 28.