Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MIT Linguistics @ NELS 55

The MIT Linguistics community and its alums were well-represented at NELS 55, hosted by Yale University on October 17 & 18. Our distinguished alum Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015) of Queen Mary University of London, was one of the invited speakers, and spoke about “The cycle within a syllable: The role of the vP phase in Dinka morphophonology”.  The following talks and posters were presented by our current students and visitors:

  • Ioannis Katochoritis (2nd year) – Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka
  • Magdalena Lohninger (Visiting student) – The A’/A signature: systematic patterns in composite A’/A probing
  • Paul Meisenbichler (2nd year) – Interactions of worlds, times, and locations: On the expressive power of index shifting
  • Oddur Snorrason (Visiting student) – HAVE-omission in Swedish: Towards a theory of auxiliary omission
  • Anastasia Tsilia (4th year) – (In)direct evidential futures in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian

    … and these were the talks and posters by alums of the past decade …
  • Klaus Baki, Anthony D. Yates and Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017) [UCLA] – A phonology–morphosyntax interface explanation of the “nasal infix” in (Proto‑)Indo-European
  • Suzana Fong (PhD 2021) [Memorial University of Newfoundland] – Reciprocal binding and syntactic ergativity in Adyghe
  • Andrew Hedding and Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018) [UCLA] – Distinct pathways to possessor Ā-extraction in Mesoamerican languages
  • Fulang Chen (PhD 2023) [Gridspace]  and Ka-Fai Yip – Facilitator effects in Mandarin topicalization: Evidence for a crossing-based view of antilocality
  • Luke Adamson and Stanislao Zompì (PhD 2023) [Potsdam] – Polite Pronouns and the PCC
  • Peter Grishin (Postdoc, PhD 2023) [MIT] – Impersonal impersonals and personal third persons: An argument for binary [±PART]

    … and their predecesors!
  • Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002) [University of Chicago] and Matthew Hewett – Singular they and the syntax of pronominal imposters
  • Daiki Asami and Benjamin Bruening (PhD 2001) [University of Delaware] – Subjectless readings of again and the Kratzerian model of argument structure
  • Jon Gajewski (PhD 2005) [University of Connecticut] – On the pragmatics of propositional anaphora
  • Isabelle Charnavel, Tom Meadows and Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1984)  [UCLA] – Meaningful Agreement Features: Evidence from indexical binding