Biography

Hikaru Hotta is a doctoral assistant who joined the Institute of English Studies in September 2023. Prior to coming to Neuchâtel, he earned a BA in Language Education from International Christian University and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Tokyo.

His dissertation presents a corpus-based investigation of lexical biases in English morphosyntactic alternations using Bayesian multilevel modeling.

Teaching

English Linguistics Workshop (From Autumn 2025).

Publications

2026. With Akiko Fujii, Danni Shi, & Yasunori Morishima. L1 visual support in L2 academic listening: Implications for the strategic use of L1 on lecture slides in EMI contexts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101626

2025a. Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese. Linguistics Vanguard. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0083

2025b. With Tomoko Endo. Reanalyzing “to omou” ‘I think’ Construction: A Corpus-Based Study of Natural Japanese Conversation. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 31. 389–398. https://doi.org/10.5070/J7.48961

2025c. With Martin Hilpert. English comparative constructions at different levels of schematicity: what is the role of adjective-specific variability? Cognitive Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2025-0025

Conferences

Aug 2025. With Martin Hilpert. Variation and isomorphism in the English comparative alternation. Societas Linguistica Europaea. Bordeaux, France.

March 2025. English comparative constructions at different levels of schematicity: What is the role of adjective-specific variability? Swiss Works in English Language and Linguistics. Bern, Switzerland.

Nov 2024. With Tomoko Endo. Reanalyzing the “to omou” ‘I think’ construction: A corpus-based study of natural Japanese conversation. Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference. Melbourne, Australia.

Aug 2024. Rethinking the Principle of No Synonymy from the perspective of intra-speaker variation. International Conference on Construction Grammar. Göteborg, Sweden.

April 2024. A lexical construction across a clausal boundary: an analysis of the Japanese self-quotative construction kana to omou. Challenging Construction Grammar: New insights from Morphology. Monte Verità, Switzerland.

Aug 2023. Psycholinguistic evidence against frequency effects for multi-morphemic sequences in Japanese. International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Düsseldorf, Germany.