Wataru Uegaki
Reader
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- 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
Wataru Uegaki is a Reader and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at University of Edinburgh in the Department of Linguistics and English Language within the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS).
He serves 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)
He completed his PhD at MIT Linguistics in 2015, and was previously at Leiden University.
He teaches semantics in various pre-honours, honours, and MSc courses within LEL. In his research, he investigates 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 his 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"
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Current PhD students supervised
- Esther Lam
- Zack Situ
- Fred Whibley
Past PhD students supervised
- Takanobu Nakamura (https://takanobunakamura.github.io/; currently at ILLC Amsterdam)
- Thomas Stephen (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/people/academic/profiles/stephen-thomas.html; currently at QMUL)
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.