UConn linguistics at BCGL

The 16th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL16) is took place October 5th-6th. This year’s conference is devoted to the morphosyntax of speaker and hearer. UConn will be represented at the conference by:

  • Ka-Fai Yip and Xuetong Yuan. Jussive agreement with non-agreeing resumptive pronouns in Mandarin Chinese
  • Vicki Carstens. Bantu Plural Addressee Suffixes and Speech Act Projections
  • Duk-Ho An (PhD 2007, now at Konkuk University). Revisiting Sentence-Final Endings in Korean: Toward an (Un)markedness System

Qi Wu | New Student

Hello! My name is Wu Qi (u35 tɕʰɪ35, 吴琪). I grew up in Shenzhen, China, a southern coastal city where, since the last few decades, people from over the country have come with them their own dialects and traditions. Meanwhile, some part of me has been shaped by years in the north, as an undergrad studying English literature (Beijing & UK). Dealing with words created by people across different time and space calls up my enthusiasm for languages, and I went on finishing a Master’s degree in linguistics. Currently, as a PhD student, I am primarily interested in Syntax and its interface with Morphology and Pragmatics.

Besides academics, I play badminton, video games, and would like to go for trekking a little. I enjoy cooking and exploring into it, and I wish I could have some time for sketches and scribbles, movies and music. It’s such a pleasure to be able to join the department with all the wonderful people!

Tyler Poisson | New Student

Hi, I am Tyler Poisson. I am from Western Massachusetts. Prior to UConn, I studied Linguistics and Philosophy at UMass. Afterwards, I taught 4th grade in area public schools and ran child language experiments as a member of the Smith-UMass language acquisition group. Now, I am grateful to be a graduate student at UConn!

Some activities I enjoy outside of research include reading the independent press, using open-source software, listening to pre-2000s world music, and playing pick-up soccer.

Seungho Nam | New Student

Hi, I am Seungho Nam [nᵈam sɯŋʰo] from Seoul, Korea. I did my BA in Linguistics, Hispanic Linguistics, and Classical Latin, and my MA in Hispanic Linguistics, all at Seoul National University. My primary research interest is formal semantics, and I’m specifically interested in things like clause types, counterfactuality, modality, and tense. I wrote my MA thesis on counterfactual imperatives of Spanish and Korean.

I’m also interested in the historical linguistics of Romance languages (mostly Catalan, Spanish, and Latin), especially semantic changes, mood, and modality. Because of my experience as a Spanish teacher for about ten years, second and third language acquisition and translation are other topics that are inseparable from me.

Besides my academic interests, I love to translate, go grocery shopping, and spend some time alone. I’m also involved in the LGBT rights movement in my country as a member of the community (and here you see my interest in sociolinguistics, too).

Jiabao Fan | New Student

My name is Jiabao Fan and I come from mainland China. I received a master’s degree in Linguistics from Soochow University this July. My primary research interests are language acquisition, syntax, formal semantics, and sentence processing. I was first attracted to the theory of first language acquisition, and after I read more books about generative grammar, I found syntactic theory and formal semantics so elegant and charming. So, I come to UConn’s linguistic department to learn more about them.

 Besides my study, I love classical literature, Japanese anime (Volleyball Juvenile is my favorite), Nintendo video games and hiking.

Chia-Wei (Jarry) Chuang | New Student

I’m Jarry (Chia-Wei Chuang 莊家瑋), from Taipei, Taiwan. I just received my B.A. in English and Linguistics from National Chengchi University (2020-23). Currently, I serve as Student Director of Linguistic Society of Taiwan (LST) (2021-present).

My first love for linguistics is sound of language. I have conducted a great pool of studies on phonetics-phonology and morpho-phonology, paying attention to especially tonology, syllable structure, lenition, and non-native acquisition. Recently, I’ve expanded my research niche to formal syntax, syntax-phonology, and syntax-pragmatics interfaces. Left-periphery as well as tense-aspect-modality are also what I am interested in now.

My native languages are Mandarin Chinese and Southern Min. Aside from them, the languages that I study include Cantonese, Hakka, Vietnamese, and English. Exploring different languages always makes me enjoy a lot. Different as they are in form and meaning, they share the same system, which is the most exciting part for me.

In my leisure time, I love singing, chatting, cooking, shopping, and playing badminton. If you’re too, why not come along with me ([jarry.chaung@uconn.edu] [personal web]). I’ll be more than happy to have more friends with similar interests.

Lee Defense

Si Kai Lee successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled At the Edge of Contact, Insights from the Left Peripheries of Singlish on September 18th.

Congratulations, Si Kai!

Si Kai during the defense:

 

Dr. Lee with his committee after the successful defense:

 

Dr. Lee cutting his well earned cake:

 

UConn Linguistics at M100

MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy hosted a conference on phonology and morphology on September 8-10th to celebrate Morris Halle’s (1923–2018) centenary. UConn Linguistics was represented at the conference by the following presentations:

  • Shengyun Gu. A sketch of contrastive handshapes and their variants in Shanghai Sign Language
  • Hanyu Liu. Palatalization in Polish under the framework of feature geometry
  • Walter Shaw. Upward reanalyses of verbal morphology in Proto-Celtic
  • Andrea Calabrese. Remarks on Halle (2018)
  • Harry van der Hulst. The phonology of synthetic compounds
  • Andrea Calabrese & Laura Grestenberger. Accentuation and zero grade in the Vedic Sanskrit verbal system

The conference featured posters exclusively, and everyone can take a look at our posters through this link: http://m100.mit.edu/program.html

Carstens | Linguistic Inquiry

Vicki Carstens’s article “Nguni bare nouns: licensing without Case” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations, Vicki!

Abstract: Nguni bare or augmentless([–A]) nominals are licit only as strict negative dependents and wh-words. They may not appear in a preverbal subject position unless local to a negation-licensed [–A] complementizer of a subjunctive clause (Pietraszko 2021). This pattern motivates an analysis in terms of negative concord and a labeling theory approach to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) (Chomsky 2013): [–A] nouns have uninterpretable negation features that thwart agreement and labeling in [XP, YP] configurations (see also Bošković 2019, 2020 on uninterpretable features and labeling problems) unless valued by interpretable negation in a syntactic Agree relation (Zeijlstra 2008, Haegeman and Lohndal 2010, Penka 2011). A cluster of further distributional restrictions on [–A] nominals are predictable from an independently motivated Nguni clausal topography of focus (Carstens and Mletshe 2016), eliminating any role for abstract Case in explaining the facts, contra Halpert 2015 and Pietraszko 2021. The analysis is inspired by and extends to parallel restrictions in Romance languages previously attributed to the Empty Category Principle and the EPP (Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994, Déprez 2000, Landau 2007).