Wataru Uegaki
Lecturer

- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Tel: 0131 651 1839
- Email: w.uegaki@ed.ac.uk
- Web: http://www.wataruuegaki.com
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.10, Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Availability
Please email me to schedule an appointment.
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.
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 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.
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Learnability and constraints on the semantics of clause-embedding predicates
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (E-pub ahead of print) -
The informativeness/complexity trade-off in the domain of Boolean connectives
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)
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
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
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
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
The existential/uniqueness presupposition of wh-complements projects from the answers
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)
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)
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)
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
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
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
The distributive ignorance puzzle
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
Do modals take propositions or sets of propositions? Evidence from Japanese `darou'
(21 pages)
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)
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)