Whamit!

Patrick Grosz and Jeremy Hartman are back from the most recent GLOW conference. (That’s “GLOW” as in Generative Linguistics in the Old World, and they actually came home last week — but we failed to let you know.) As we noted in an earlier Whamit, Jeremy Hartman spoke on “The Position and Variety of Traces with respect to MaxElide”, and Patrick presented his work on “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”. Recent alum Shoichi Takahashi (PhD 2006) also presented, as did Elena Anagnostopoulou, who taught at MIT in Spring 2007. Danny Fox was an invited speaker. The Nantes GLOW was organized by MIT linguistics alums Hamida Demirdache (PhD 1991) and by Orin Percus (PhD 1997). Our participants uniformly report that it was a great conference with excellent talks.

Peter Graff and T. Florian Jaeger of the University of Rochester presented their talk, The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Jessica Coon was an invited speaker at a “syntax brown bag” at NYU, where she talked about “Predicate Fronting and its Consequences: Ergativity in Chol”. Meanwhile, uptown a bit, Pritty Patel and Patrick Grosz were invited speakers at a CUNY Syntax Supper, where they spoke on “On the Typology of Pronouns: Two Types of Anaphor Resolutions”.

Finally, MIT will soon be invading Manchester, for the 17th Manchester Phonology Meeting (17mfm). Bronwyn Bjorkman will be presenting on “Uniform exponence and reduplication: evidence from Kinande”; Maria Giavazzi will presenting “On the application of velar palatalization in Italian nouns and adjectives”; and Peter Graff will be presenting a joint paper with alum Andrew Nevins, entitled “Vowel harmony provides a figure-ground relation for consonant phonotactics”. Adam Albright will also present, on “Cumulative violations and complexity thresholds: Evidence from Lakhota”