Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MIT at the LSA meeting

MIT had a strong presence at this year’s LSA Annual Meeting, held Jan 2-5 in Minneapolis. The following talks and posters featured MIT presenters:

  • Michael Erlewine: Association with traces and the copy theory of movement
  • Michael Erlewine and Hadas Kotek: Morphological blocking in English causatives
  • Iain Giblin and Sam Steddy: Disambiguating the Scope of In-Situ Wh-Phrases with Telugu Prosody
  • Aron Hirsch and Martin Hackl: Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction
  • Yusuke Imanishi: When ergative is default: Ergativity in Mayan
  • Patrick Jones: Cyclic evaluation of post-lexical prosodic domains: evidence from Kinande boundary tones
  • Hadas Kotek: Intervention effects follow from Relativized Minimality
  • Hadas Kotek and Martin Hackl: Wh-words must QR locally: evidence from real-time processing
  • Theodore Levin: Pseudo-Noun Incorporation is M-Merger: Evidence from Balinese
  • Miriam Nussbaum: The Interpretation of Indifference Free Relatives
  • Juliet Stanton: A cyclic factorial typology of Pama-Nyungan stress
  • Suyeon Yun : Two Types of Focus Movement

In addition Patrick Jones won a Student Abstract Award, for having one of the three highest-ranked abstracts authored by a student. Congratulations, Patrick!

Several recent alumni were also present:

  • Bronwyn Bjorkman (University of Toronto): Multiple Agrees: Towards a non-unified theory of feature valuation.
  • Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota) and Maria Stolen (University of Minnesota): Fixed aspect in Amharic Conditionals
  • Ora Matushansky (Utrecht University) and E.G. Ruys (Utrecht University): Some indefinites are degrees
  • Brian Buccola (McGill University) and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill University): On the expressivity of Optimality Theory vs. rules: An application to opacity
  • Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University) and Rachael Hardy (McMaster University): Two scrambling strategies in German: Evidence from PPs
  • Young Ah Do (Georgetown University): The asymmetrical base-inflected relation constrains child production and comprehension