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

Please email me to schedule an appointment.

Biography

Background

I am a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Lecturer (~ North American Assistant Professor) in Semantics at University of Edinburgh in the Department of Linguistics and English Language within the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS).

I serve as the (co-)PI of the following two collaborative research projects:

AHRC/DFG project: MECORE: A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions in clausal embedding (2021-2024)
UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: Logic in Semantic Universals (2022-2025)

I completed my PhD at MIT Linguistics in 2015, and was previously at Leiden University. My pronouns are he/him.

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

Esther Lam
Takanobu Nakamura
Thomas Stephen

Research

Research summary

I am a researcher in 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 regularities. My AHRC/DFG project investigates how meanings of clause-embedding predicates (such as believe, know, surprise and wonder in English) are related to regularities about the types of complement clauses they can combine with, building on cross-linguistic data collection and experimentation.

In addition, I am interested in cross-linguistic generalisations in the lexical semantics of logical vocabularies. In my project funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, my team and I will investigate how we can explain such generalisations in terms of what we know about grammar and cognition, by bringing together insights from formal linguistics and evolutionary linguistics.

Publications

Learnability and constraints on the semantics of clause-embedding predicates 17 Jun 2022
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (E-pub ahead of print)
The informativeness/complexity trade-off in the domain of Boolean connectives 4 Feb 2022 In: Linguistic Inquiry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00461
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Correction to: The existential/uniqueness presupposition of wh-complements projects from the answers (Linguistics and Philosophy, (2021), 44, 4, (911-951), 10.1007/s10988-020-09309-4) (1 page) Feb 2022 In: Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 45, pp. 199
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09341-y
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Comment/debate (Published)
The doubt-whether puzzle 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7ryzu
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Accepted/In press)
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)

View all 28 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 19 Aug, 2022