Wataru Uegaki

Lecturer

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

Street: [I am currently working from home]
Room 2.10, Dugald Stewart Building
City: 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AD

Please email me to schedule an appointment.

Biography

Background

I am a Lecturer in Semantics at in the Department of Linguistics and English Language (LEL) within the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS). I also serve as the leader of the NWO international collaboration project '’Searching for semantic universals in the modal domain’’. I completed my PhD at MIT Linguistics in 2015, and was previously at Leiden University.

I teach semantics in various pre-honours, honours, and MSc courses within LEL. In my research, I investigate issues in natural language semantics and pragmatics, as well as in syntax-semantics interface. Please click on the Research tab below to learn more about my research.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

Course Organiser, pre-honours "Linguistics and English Language 1B"
Contributor, "Linguistics and English Language 2A" (semantics block)

Postgraduate teaching

MSc "Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics" (not offered in 2020-21)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Takanobu Nakamura

Research

Research summary

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).

Publications

Searching for a universal constraint on the possible denotations of clause-embedding predicates 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v30i0.4834
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
Non-local use of the Japanese excessiveness marker sugi and syntax-semantics interface 2021
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published)
The existential/uniqueness presupposition of wh-complements projects from the answers 8 Sep 2020 In: Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. n/a, pp. 1-41
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-020-09309-4
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
The *hope-wh puzzle (34 pages) Dec 2019 In: Natural Language Semantics, vol. 27, pp. 323-356
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-019-09156-5
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Question marker drop in Japanese and Generalized Factivity (6 pages) Jun 2019 In: ICU Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 7, pp. 57-62
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
The semantics of question-embedding predicates (17 pages) Jan 2019 In: Language and Linguistics Compass, vol. 13, pp. 1-17
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12308
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Distributive ignorance inferences with wonder and believe 2019 In: Semantics and Pragmatics, vol. 12, pp. 1-60
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.5
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Japanese alternative questions and a unified in-situ semantics for ka 3 Oct 2018
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
The distributive ignorance puzzle 3 Oct 2018
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
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
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle `ka' in indefinites, questions and disjunctions (45 pages) 26 Jan 2018 In: Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, vol. 3, pp. 1-45
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.238
Research output: 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
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
Predicates of relevance and theories of question embedding (8 pages) 29 Apr 2017 In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 34, pp. 547-554
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffx008
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
The anti-rogativity of non-veridical preferential predicates 2017
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
Content nouns and the semantics of question-embedding (38 pages) Nov 2016 In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 33, pp. 623-660
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffv009
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)

View all 24 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 22 Sep, 2021