Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Welcome to visiting students!

Welcome to visiting students Janek Guerrini, Elham Mehr, and Nur Lan!

Janek GuerriniI am a PhD student in linguistics and philosophy at Institut Jean Nicod, at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, working under the supervision of Benjamin Spector. I specialize in semantics and philosophy of language, and my main research interests are non-intersective modification and genericity. Here’s why I think they’re interesting: both of these phenomena have posed a long-standing challenge to semantic theory, and both seem to be particularly sensitive to the structure of our conceptual, non-linguistic representations. This makes for a domain where the study of language can both illuminate and be illuminated by broader questions in cognitive science. Most recently, I have been looking at some generic readings of indefinites in constructions we use to talk about similarity, as in “look like a lawyer”, which are puzzling because they do not seem to be reducible to an adverbial notion of genericity. 

Elham Mehr

Nur Lan: I’m a visiting PhD student from ENS Paris, co-advised by Emmanuel Chemla (ENS) and Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University). I originally studied computer science and I like to build models of language learning.