Wataru Uegaki

Lecturer

Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Street: Room 2.10, Dugald Stewart Building
City: 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AD

Office hours: 10-11am Monday. Please feel free to drop by my office at any other time or contact me by email to schedule a meeting.

Biography

Background

2016-2019: Assistant Professor, Leiden University
2015-2016: Postdoctoral Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Keio University (Tokyo) & Institut Jean Nicod (Paris)
2015: PhD, MIT Linguistics

Responsibilities & affiliations

editorial board member, Semantics & Pragmatics
review board member, Snippets
steering committee member, Logic and Engineering in Natural Language Semantics (LENLS).

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

Contributor to pre-honours "Linguistics and English Language 1B" (6 hours)
Honours "Current Issues in Semantics and Pragmatics" (co-taught with Rob Truswell)

Postgraduate teaching

MSc "Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics"

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Takanobu Nakamura

I am a researcher of formal semantics and pragmatics. That is, I study how humans draw various inferences from conversations in natural language, and I try to understand systems governing such human behaviors using theoretical tools made available by linguistics, logic and cognitive science.

Specifically, I am interested in the relationship between word meanings and grammatical rules. My MIT PhD dissertation "Interpreting questions under attitudes" addresses a family of puzzles concerning how the meanings of the so-called propositional attitude verbs (such as "believe", "know", "surprise" and "wonder") are related to the types of complement clauses they can combine with (for example, whether the verb can combine with a question or not).

Current research interests

I am interested in the distinction between ‘logical’ words (such as "every" and "or") and ‘non-logical’ words (such as "walk" and "bird"). Is there a fundamental distinction between how these two kinds of word meanings are represented in our mind? I try to address this question by investigating the manifestation of this distinction in syntax-semantics interface (i.e., the relationship between meaning and grammar) and cross-linguistic universals in word meanings (i.e., what kind of common properties hold for word meanings across languages).

Research activities

View all 19 activities on Research Explorer

Publications

Question marker drop in Japanese and Generalized Factivity (6 pages) Jun 2019 In: ICU Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 7, pp. 57-62
Contribution to journal › Article (Published)
The 'hope-wh' puzzle 23 Oct 2019 In: Natural Language Semantics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-019-09156-5
Contribution to journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
The semantics of question-embedding predicates (17 pages) Jan 2019 In: Language and Linguistics Compass, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1-17
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12308
Contribution to journal › Article (Published)
Distributive ignorance inferences with wonder and believe 27 Sep 2018 In: Semantics and Pragmatics
Contribution to journal › Article (Accepted/In press)
Do modals take propositions or sets of propositions? Evidence from Japanese `darou' (21 pages) 20 May 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4427
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
The distributive ignorance puzzle 3 Oct 2018
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
Japanese alternative questions and a unified in-situ semantics for ka 3 Oct 2018
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle `ka' in indefinites, questions and disjunctions (45 pages) 26 Jan 2018 In: Glossa, vol. 3, pp. 1-45
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.238
Contribution to journal › Article (Published)
On the projection of the presupposition of embedded questions (20 pages) 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4411
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
Predicates of relevance and theories of question embedding (8 pages) 29 Apr 2017 In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 547-554
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffx008
Contribution to journal › Article (Published)
The anti-rogativity of non-veridical preferential predicates 2017
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
Content nouns and the semantics of question-embedding (38 pages) Nov 2016 In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 623-660
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffv009
Contribution to journal › Article (Published)
Japanese alternative questions are disjunctions of polar questions 1 Jun 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2423
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)
Cross-linguistic variation in the derivation of alternative questions : Japanese and beyond (24 pages) 30 Oct 2014
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (Published)
Predicting the distribution of exhaustive inference in a QUD model (12 pages) 2014
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution (Published)

View all 21 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 18 Nov, 2019