Wataru Uegaki
wataruu.bsky.social
Wataru Uegaki
@wataruu.bsky.social
Semanticist. Traveller. Reader (actual job title).

@Edinburgh

http://www.wataruuegaki.com/
Imagine being a uni middle manager, whose whole job rn is to work on "cost cutting measures", convincing lower tier employees that the university doesn't have money. It turns out that all along they have been working as a parrot for a galaxy brain consultancy

www.theferret.scot/consultancy-...
‘Nousferatu’: the notorious consultancy advising Edinburgh uni amid 'huge' cuts
Scotland’s largest university has turned to Nous Group at the same time as it is making savings that could lead to nearly 2,000 job losses. Staff say they were misled about the extent of its work.
www.theferret.scot
December 1, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Malcolm Keating recently gave a fascinating talk in Edinburgh on Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. Turns out what Kumārila discussed in Vedic philosophy has a lot of resemblance to formal semantics.

Malcolm's blog post on compositionality according to Kumārila.

malcolmkeatingsite.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/p...
November 24, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Wow I was really out of the loop. Excited for the new start of the OVA school!

ovaschool.github.io/clean-break/
A clean break
This post was originally posted on eggschool.org on October 13, 2025 with the title “A clarification about the EGG board”. We publish it here unchanged.
ovaschool.github.io
November 20, 2025 at 11:20 AM
I have been elected as a fellow of the Young Academy of Europe.

Within YAE, I'm excited to engage in discussions on policies on research funding for collaborative projects, and issues related to academic cultures, hiring practices and career progression across nations & disciplines.

yacadeuro.org
Welcome - Young Academy of Europe
yacadeuro.org
November 20, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Özyıldız & Qing et al. “Operationalizing focus-sensitivity in a cross-linguistic context” is accepted by _Natural Language Semantics_ lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007...
Operationalizing focus-sensitivity in a cross-linguistic context - lingbuzz/007004
This paper evaluates empirical methods for detecting the focus-sensitivity of clause-embedding predicates, with the objective of making them applicable to predicates within and across languages. Our p...
lingbuzz.net
November 20, 2025 at 10:49 AM
Also how I sometimes feel when filling out a post-training survey form
November 11, 2025 at 11:26 PM
How I sometimes feel reading a semantics paper.
November 11, 2025 at 11:15 PM
When can I be like this?
March 20, 2025 at 11:55 PM
Qing, Özyildiz, Romero & Uegaki will give a talk “Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?” at SALT @ Harvard
March 6, 2025 at 1:13 PM
If you have a child above 8yo and looking for a fun (free!) activity during the Easter break. Come to our Drop-in activity "Let's Grow a Language" at the Scottish National Museum! www.edinburghscience.co.uk/event/lets-g...
Let’s Grow a Language! - Edinburgh Science
www.edinburghscience.co.uk
March 6, 2025 at 1:11 PM
New revised manuscript by MECORE members “When can non-veridical preferential attitude predicates take questions?” lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...
When can non-veridical preferential attitude predicates take questions? - lingbuzz/008113
A growing body of evidence suggests that whether or not attitude predicates may combine with question complements is determined at least in part by some of their semantic properties. Zooming in, non-v...
lingbuzz.net
March 6, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Very excited to be collaborating with @slab.org!!
Happy that @wataruu.bsky.social and I have some funding for a mini-project "Heritage language as natural code", investigating the boundaries between natural languages and programming languages.. Connecting e.g. multi-lingual poetry, drumming languages, live coding, language universals, ...
February 14, 2025 at 9:27 AM
Please fellow me on letterboxd

letterboxd.com/wataruu/
February 4, 2025 at 4:44 PM
any info on Sinn und Bedeutung this year? I heard that it would be held in a nice place, somewhere I would want to go to, but that's the only info I have (and that the conference will involve some semantics)
January 17, 2024 at 10:29 AM
Let's play a game! A Sampha song or a semantics paper?

1. Whatever
2. Any
3. Only
4. Evidence
5. Always and only
6. Without
7. Answer
8. Maybe
9. Since
10. Yes, but...
December 6, 2023 at 10:44 PM
Wondering about the threshold of language proficiency at which point listening to music with lyrics in that lang becomes distracting. I sometimes dream in English, but *still* listening to English songs isn't distracting when I work although listening to Japanese songs def is #linguistics
December 1, 2023 at 11:01 AM
#linguistics Linguists, submit your work on clausal embedding to the MECORE workshop in Konstanz in June! linguistlist.org/issues/34-35... (Deadline: 15 Jan; Conf: 19-21 June)

We have exciting invited speakers!

- M. Maldonado
- P Portner
- T. Bondarenko
- K. Djärv
- J. Lecavelier & M. Zimmermann
November 30, 2023 at 12:18 AM
Idk maybe because of how I look, some academics I meet for the 1st time at conferences (typically older generation) seem to struggle with some sort of cognitive dissonance when they interact with me. They just can't believe I teach and do research at a university or something
October 15, 2023 at 10:10 AM
New paper w/ @ozdeniz.bsky.social (to appear in Proc of SALT): psyarxiv.com/dbh4z/ There has been much attention on the phenomenon of "factivity alternation" in a number of langs ie. some clause-embedding predicates are interpreted factively wrt one embedding strategy but not in another.
psyarxiv.com
October 7, 2023 at 10:09 AM
Q to Linguists (and esp semanticists): Which journal should we submit this to? We have a paper that describes a dataset of modal semantics in 24 languages. The meat of the paper is a description of the dataset (the data collection method; design/format of the dataset etc). 1/3
October 2, 2023 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Wataru Uegaki
Reviewer invitations for SALT34 have been sent to those who reviewed for SALT33. If you did not receive an invitation and would like to be considered for inclusion on the program committee as a reviewer, please fill out this form: forms.office.com/r/D6dCqAFa1t.
September 25, 2023 at 3:08 PM
Ok first post here. Started taking a BSL course (thanks Edinburgh Linguistics), and the joy I am experiencing is immense. It's comparable to the joy I felt when I was 12, when I first started learning English
September 26, 2023 at 1:49 PM