Imagine being a uni middle manager, whose whole job rn is to work on "cost cutting measures", convincing lower tier employees that the university doesn't have money. It turns out that all along they have been working as a parrot for a galaxy brain consultancy
www.theferret.scot/consultancy-...
Malcolm Keating recently gave a fascinating talk in Edinburgh on Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. Turns out what Kumārila discussed in Vedic philosophy has a lot of resemblance to formal semantics.
Malcolm's blog post on compositionality according to Kumārila.
malcolmkeatingsite.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/p...
Wow I was really out of the loop. Excited for the new start of the OVA school!
ovaschool.github.io/clean-break/
I have been elected as a fellow of the Young Academy of Europe.
Within YAE, I'm excited to engage in discussions on policies on research funding for collaborative projects, and issues related to academic cultures, hiring practices and career progression across nations & disciplines.
yacadeuro.org
Özyıldız & Qing et al. “Operationalizing focus-sensitivity in a cross-linguistic context” is accepted by _Natural Language Semantics_ lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007...
Excerpt from Tobias Wolff's short story "The Rich Brother" --- What did you feel during the liturgy? a) Being b) Becoming c) Being and Becoming d) None of the above e) All of the above
Also how I sometimes feel when filling out a post-training survey form
Short short story "Problem" by Lydia Davis --- X is with Y, but living on money from Z. Y himself supports W, who lives with her child by V. V wants to move to Chicago but his child lives with W in New York. W cannot move because she is having a relationship with U, whose child also lives in New York, though with its mother, T. T takes money from U, W takes money from Y for herself and from V for their child, and X takes money from Z. X and Y have no children together. V sees his child rarely but provides for it. U lives with W’s child but does not provide for it.
How I sometimes feel reading a semantics paper.
When can I be like this?
Qing, Özyildiz, Romero & Uegaki will give a talk “Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?” at SALT @ Harvard
If you have a child above 8yo and looking for a fun (free!) activity during the Easter break. Come to our Drop-in activity "Let's Grow a Language" at the Scottish National Museum! www.edinburghscience.co.uk/event/lets-g...
New revised manuscript by MECORE members “When can non-veridical preferential attitude predicates take questions?” lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...
Very excited to be collaborating with @slab.org!!
Profile of Wataru's letterboxd account, with the following films as the four faves: "Sonatine", "Landscape in the mist", "Paris, Texas" and "Throne of Blood"
Please fellow me on letterboxd
letterboxd.com/wataruu/
any info on Sinn und Bedeutung this year? I heard that it would be held in a nice place, somewhere I would want to go to, but that's the only info I have (and that the conference will involve some semantics)
Let's play a game! A Sampha song or a semantics paper?
1. Whatever
2. Any
3. Only
4. Evidence
5. Always and only
6. Without
7. Answer
8. Maybe
9. Since
10. Yes, but...
Wondering about the threshold of language proficiency at which point listening to music with lyrics in that lang becomes distracting. I sometimes dream in English, but *still* listening to English songs isn't distracting when I work although listening to Japanese songs def is #linguistics
#linguistics Linguists, submit your work on clausal embedding to the MECORE workshop in Konstanz in June! linguistlist.org/issues/34-35... (Deadline: 15 Jan; Conf: 19-21 June)
We have exciting invited speakers!
- M. Maldonado
- P Portner
- T. Bondarenko
- K. Djärv
- J. Lecavelier & M. Zimmermann
I thought this kind of thing will go away when I become senior. Not really. Session chairs call names of other people who raise their hand in QA sessions; some of them struggle to name me when I raise my hand. Either they can't pronounce it or they just can't bother remembering it
Idk maybe because of how I look, some academics I meet for the 1st time at conferences (typically older generation) seem to struggle with some sort of cognitive dissonance when they interact with me. They just can't believe I teach and do research at a university or something
We also provide a new analysis of the semantic inferences associated with the "non-factive" type embedding strategy. It modifies the clause by introducing an additional linguistic production event systematically related to the main attitudinal event
We show that cases where interrogatives are embedded using the two strategies shed a new light on the puzzle in Turkish & Japanese: Factivity alternation is a subcase of a more general phenomenon where preds impose semantic restrictions on their arguments but not on adjuncts
New paper w/ @ozdeniz.bsky.social (to appear in Proc of SALT): psyarxiv.com/dbh4z/ There has been much attention on the phenomenon of "factivity alternation" in a number of langs ie. some clause-embedding predicates are interpreted factively wrt one embedding strategy but not in another.
Thanks this is a good shout! It won’t be appropriate for the modals paper I’m referencing, but it’ll be good for another project. The deadline is a bit tight though…😬
Our main goal is to showcase the dataset, and so there is no in-depth theoretical analysis. We are worried that many semantics or theoretical ling journals don't like a paper of this nature. Any recommendations? 3/3
We also include 4 case studies where we investigate various x-ling hypotheses about modals using the data (i) on force/flavor variability (ii) on impossibility/non-necessity (iii) on the morphological encoding of modal strengths and (iv) on how future contributes to modality. 2/3
Q to Linguists (and esp semanticists): Which journal should we submit this to? We have a paper that describes a dataset of modal semantics in 24 languages. The meat of the paper is a description of the dataset (the data collection method; design/format of the dataset etc). 1/3
Reviewer invitations for SALT34 have been sent to those who reviewed for SALT33. If you did not receive an invitation and would like to be considered for inclusion on the program committee as a reviewer, please fill out this form: forms.office.com/r/D6dCqAFa1t.
Ok first post here. Started taking a BSL course (thanks Edinburgh Linguistics), and the joy I am experiencing is immense. It's comparable to the joy I felt when I was 12, when I first started learning English
