We will meet on Wednesday, October 28, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Seungho will first finish last week’s discussion of Onea et al. Then Seungho will present joint work with Heesun Yang. Title and abstract below.

Title: More puzzles on high negation and biased questions in two varieties of Korean

Abstract: This talk builds on our earlier attempt to account for an empirical contrast between two varieties of Korean: short-form negation can form positively biased polar questions in Southeastern Korean, but not in Central Korean. We first review Rett’s (2026) proposal that high negation is discourse-anaphoric to a salient proposition outside the utterance in which it occurs. We then present further empirical observations on the semantic and pragmatic differences between the constructions in question in the two Korean dialects. Particular attention will be paid to their information-sharing requirements and their uses in requesting confirmation versus conveying assertions. The discussion is exploratory and aims to clarify the empirical and theoretical questions that remain open.

We will meet on Wednesday, November 04, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Seungho will continue their discussion of their joint work.

Title: More puzzles on high negation and biased questions in two varieties of Korean

Abstract: This talk builds on our earlier attempt to account for an empirical contrast between two varieties of Korean: short-form negation can form positively biased polar questions in Southeastern Korean, but not in Central Korean. We first review Rett’s (2026) proposal that high negation is discourse-anaphoric to a salient proposition outside the utterance in which it occurs. We then present further empirical observations on the semantic and pragmatic differences between the constructions in question in the two Korean dialects. Particular attention will be paid to their information-sharing requirements and their uses in requesting confirmation versus conveying assertions. The discussion is exploratory and aims to clarify the empirical and theoretical questions that remain open.

The Meaning Group will meet on Wednesday, October 21, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Seungho will lead the discussion of the paper “On the role of verbal semantics in question embedding: the
case of to know” by Edgar Onea, Malte Zimmermann, and Lea Fricke (Linguistics and Philosophy, 2026).

The Meaning Group will meet on Wednesday, October 14, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Qi Wu will present her work, titled “Let’s work and see if SEE is TRY: Varieties and (de)composition of TRY in Mandarin”. Qi will present this work as a poster at NELS.

Peng Liu (doctoral student, University of Stuttgart) will give a talk titled Minimal sufficiency and scalar particles in German at LingLunch next Tuesday (October 13, 12:30-1:30). This is a collaborative study with Alexander Wimmer and Daniel Hole, to be presented at NELS next week.

The meeting will be held in person, in SHH 338.

Title: Minimal sufficiency and scalar particles in German

Abstract: Exclusive focus particles sometimes receive minimal sufficiency (MS) readings (Grosz 2012, Coppock & Lindahl 2014, Coppock & Beaver 2014, Liu 2016, 2017, Panizza & Sudo 2020). In German, such readings can arise with allein ‘alone’ in combination with schon ‘already’ and selbst ‘even’.

(1) a. QUD: Are antibiotics needed to cure this disease?
b. Selbst allein  schon    Baldrian_F hilft hier.
even    alone  already  valerian helps here
‘Even just valerian alone helps here.’

In (1b), valerian is presented as sufficient without excluding other effective treatments. The central question is how this reading arises despite the presence of an exclusive particle.

This talk explores a compositional account of minimal sufficiency. We distinguish local exclusivity, contributed by allein, from scalar lowness, contributed by schon. The particle selbst ‘even’ adds mirativity. We examine how these three operators combine to present a small resource as sufficient while leaving larger alternatives available.

On Wednesday, 10/07, 1:30pm, Professor Yurie Hara (Hokkaido University) will present the paper From LLM Errors to Linguistic Theory: Human Evaluation of Japanese Particle Predictions. This is joint work with Hoi Man Kevin Li and John S. Y. Lee of Hong Kong City University. Abstract attached. The paper will be presented at Linguistic Evidence 2026, to be held in Mannheim, Germany, October 15-16. Yurie Hara is visiting us at UConn during all of October and November.

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