written by Runyi Yao (University of Oxford), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

With support from the Philological Society’s Travel Bursary, I presented my poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 28 (SuB 28, https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/sub28/) at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany from 5^th–8^thSeptember 2023. SuB is a world-leading conference in semantics. The Travel Bursary allowed me to attend this conference, share and discuss my research with other linguists.

In my poster, I presented our study on clause-internal coherence (in collaboration with Prof Matt Husband & Prof Daniel Altshuler). Most studies of discourse coherence focus on relations like Result (cause-effect) and Explanation (effect-cause) that are established between two discourse units whose size is at least a single clause. Such relationships may, however, also be clause internal. We investigate clause-internal coherence triggered by resultative adjectives in examples like The broken window got struck with a stone ⇝ ‘the window was broken because of the stone.’ Based on the results of two comprehension tasks, we propose that topichood, signaled by definiteness and subjecthood, permits and constrains plausible causal inferences clause-internally. This analysis suggests a tighter relationship between (morpho)syntax and coherence than is currently assumed. The full version of this study will appear in Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung 28, with a preprint available on LingBuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007850.

Presenting at SuB 28 was a great opportunity for me to receive feedback and comments on this coherence study, an integral part of my DPhil project. The insights that I gained from the conference contribute significantly to the advancement of my DPhil studies. This opportunity also enables me to learn about others’ work, network with colleagues from around the world and receive general advice on career development.

I am grateful to the Philological Society for providing me with a travel bursary to participate in SuB 28, a wonderful conference.