Four linguistics conferences were held in Europe over the last two weeks.
(1) The 20th Sinn und Bedeutung was held at the University of Tübingen, Germany (September 9-12 2015). Irene Heim gave an invited talk in the Stechow workshop. Two MIT students presented posters.
- Fourth year Aron Hirsch: A compositional semantics for wh-ever free relatives
- Edwin Howard: The Pragmatics of Verb-Initial Conditional Antecedents in English
Three recent alumni gave talks and presented posters:
- Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore; PhD 2014) and Hadas Kotek (McGill; PhD 2014) Relative pronoun pied-piping, the structure of which informs the analysis of relative clauses
- Yasutada Sudo (UCL; PhD 2012) and Giorgos Spathas (University of Stuttgart): Nominal Ellipsis and the Interpretation of Gender in Greek
- Hadas Kotek (McGill; PhD 2014): On the semantics of Wh Questions
- Patrick Elliott and Yasutada Sudo (UCL): E-Type Readings of Quantifiers Under Ellipsis: Consequences for the Identity Condition
Two recent visiting students at MIT gave poster presentations:
- Maria Del Mar Bassa Vanrell (The University of Texas at Austin / MIT): The puzzle of Punctual Until revisited
- Yaron McNabb, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Dominique Blok, Rick Nouwen and Sophia Bimpikou (Utrecht Institute for Linguistics): The likelihood of upper-bound construals among different modified numerals: a cross-linguistic and experimental investigation
(2) The 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 12) was held at the University of Nantes, Nantes (France) on September 10-12, 2015. An MIT student and a recent alumnus gave talks.
- Third year Athulya Aravind (with Martin Hackl & Ken Wexler): Subject-object asymmetries in the acquisition of clefts
- Ayaka Sugawara (Mie University; PhD 2015) (with Martin Hackl, Irina Onoprienko & Ken Wexler): Acquisition of quantifier scope: Evidence from English Rise-Fall-Rise
(3) The University of Göttingen hosted the Göttingen Spirit Summer School on Negation on September 14th-17th, 2015. An MIT student and an MIT alumnus gave poster presentations.
- Second year Daniel Margulis: When Negation Goes Mad: On the Puzzle of Expletive Negation
- Magda Oiry (UMass) and Jeremy Hartman (UMass; PhD 2012): The Interaction of Negation and Factivity in Acquisition
(4) The 2015 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2015) was held at University College London, 15-18 September 2015. The abstract booklet can be found here. An MIT student and two alumni gave talks.
- Sam Steddy (UCL): Uniform and non-uniform analysis of bracketing paradoxes
- Fourth year Benjamin Storme: Modeling aspectual asymmetries in the past and in the present
- Coppe van Urk (Queen Mary, University of London; PhD 2015): Pronoun copying and the copy theory of movement: Evidence from Dinka