About

I am a Reader (≈ Associate Professor) 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.

Wataru's photo; Credit: Natasha Korotkova

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

I completed my PhD at MIT Linguistics in 2015, and was previously at Leiden University.

My profiles can also be found on the University of Edinburgh website and Google scholar.

My pronouns are he/him. My first name Wataru [wataɾɯ] is unaccented while my last name Uegaki [ɯegaki̥] has an accent on the second mora [e], but people typically pronounce them with a stress on the penultimate syllable in English-speaking contexts (and that is fine).

What I do.

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 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.

Teaching and supervision are an essential part of my academic life. See the Teaching page for my teaching philosophy, information on classes I have taught, and students I have supervised.

News (recent and upcoming talks, papers etc.)

  • Sept 2025: Poster presentation “ Flavors of German necessity modals: experimental evidence” at Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (Mucha, Uegaki & Sorace)
  • August 2025: Come to Wataru’s Fringe comedy show! Tickets available here
  • July 2025: Poster presentation “Automatic Extraction of Clausal Embedding Based on Large-Scale English Text Data” @ SCiL 2025 (Carslaw, Milton, Navarre, Qing & Uegaki)
  • May 2025: Talk by the MECORE members (Qing et al.) “Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?” at SALT @ Harvard
  • May 2025: Wataru’s talk at Mayfest @ Maryland