Author: Stefan Kaufmann

Talk of interest on 10/13: Peng Liu

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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.

Meeting on 10/07: Yurie Hara

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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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Meeting on 09/23: Yusuke Yagi again

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We will meet on Wednesday, 09/23, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Yusuke Yagi will present more of his work:

Scope of wh-questions in Japanese

Abstract: Abstract: This is a sequel to the talk last week, but I shift the attention to questions. I discuss two phenomena: (i) the observation made by Lasnik and Saito on scope reconstruction of scrambled wh-phrases and a Condition C effect; (ii) the wh-island and superiority effects. Though the topic might sound quite syntactic, I will try to argue that they tell us a lot about semantics as well.

Meeting on 09/16: Yusuke Yagi

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We will meet on Wednesday, 09/16, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Yusuke Yagi will present his work:

Alternatives and Dynamics of Japanese Universal Quantification

Abstract: This talk will examine the interpretation(s) of indeterminate universal quantification in Japanese, arguing for the augmentation of Alternative Semantics and Dynamics Semantics. A discussion follows about whether the augmentation is an `overkill’ — is it a technical redundancy, or is it something we need to accept?