Akihiko Arano successfully defended his doctoral dissertation a while ago on April 30th. The dissertation was titled Expanding the scope of scrambling.
Congratulations, Aki!
While the traditional cutting of the defense cake was not possible due to the event being fully online, we hope Dr. Arano instead enjoyed a well-earned Japanese treat of his liking.
Adrian Stegovec gave an invited talk, titled On the correlation between pronoun type and person restrictions at the Bielefeld-Leiden Comparative Syntax Conference 2025 (BieLeiCos) which took place on May 22nd-23rd at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Željko Bošković is this year’s Edward C. Marth Mentorship Award Recipient! This award is given to recognize extraordinary mentoring of graduate students. The selection committee noted that Željko’s “dedication to graduate students is legendary.”
As part of receiving this award, Željko was invited to give a presentation at the Ph.D. Commencement exercises held on May 12. He urged the graduates to use their intellectual responsibilities to “be bold” and speak up for justice.
More about Željko’s award can be found on p. 38 of the Commencement Program which can be found here.
The 61st annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) took place at the University of Chicago on May 9-11, and UConn linguistics was represented at the conference with talks by:
… and poster presentations by:
Photo: Most of the UConn Linguistics contingent at CLS 61 (Heesun, Lydia, Adrian, and Qiushi).
The 42nd meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43), hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle, took place on April 25-27, 2025. UConn was represented at the conference with a talk by:
… and posters by:
Pictured: The UConn linguistics contingent at WCCFL (Yoshiki, Si Kai, and Eva).
The 14th Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL-14) took place in March 18-20th, hosted by the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. UConn linguistics represented at the conference with poster presentations by:
… and a talk by:
The 47th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium will take place in Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen on March 25-28th, 2025. UConn linguistics will be represented at the conference with a “long talk” (one of only six 45 minute talks) by:
… a “short talk” (25 minutes) by:
… and posters by:
Photo: Most of the UConn contingent at GLOW (Qiushi, Yixuan, and Mingjiang):
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: