Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Summer news 2020

We have some summer news to share with you:

  • Tracy Kelley (3rd year): “This summer I spent time teaching Wôpanâôt8âôk ‘Wampanoag Language’ to Tribal Elders for WLRP’s first remote Elders language class. We focused primarily on locatives, asking questions using the subordinative, and daily routine language. We also played interactive immersion games remotely, such as ômâsh! (Go Fish), Jeopardy, and Pictionary to reinforce our target vocabulary in a fun way.
     
    “Additionally, I continued research on nominalization and worked on my Wôpanâôt8âôk website which will be launching next month. The website is being developed to increase accessibility to Wôpanâôt8âôk for tribal families.  One of the components I’m most excited about is the audio! This will be our tribal nation’s first website for language learning.”
  • Patrick Elliott (visiting faculty): “I’ve finalized a number of manuscripts, including my paper on intensionality (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005107), and a response to Chierchia’s recent paper on weak crossover (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005297). I also have a paper to appear in the proceedings of WCCFL 38, which extends some material on continuation semantics from the appendix of my intensionality paper (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005297). More recently, Yasu Sudo and I gave a joint talk on crossover phenomena beyond anaphora at SALT 30 (https://osf.io/avms8/). More generally, I’ve been trying to teach myself about a bunch of topics, including epistemic modality and truthmaker semantics. If you’re interested in chatting about any of these things (or indeed anything else!) do get in touch – i’ve been desperately missing the random corridor interactions from the days of yore.”
  • David Pesetsky taught a two-week class on “The Unity of Movement” at the Virtual New York Institute — alas from his living room via Zoom rather than in non-virtual St. Petersburg, Russia as originally planned.