The 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics was held over the weekend, from March 6th to March 8th, at the University of British Columbia. The following MIT grad students and faculty members gave talks or presented posters:
- Peter Grishin (2nd year): Scrapping clauses: an anaphor based approach
- Colin Davis (5th year): Overlapping paths, parasitic gaps, and the path containment condition
- Patrick Elliott (Postdoctoral Associate): A flexible scope theory of intensionality
- Tatiana Bondarenko (3rd year) & Colin Davis (5th year): Long-distance scrambling in Balkar and the nature of edges
- Rafael Abramovitz (5th year): Person and Predication in Koryak
- Adam Albright (Faculty): Speakers avoid saying improbable words, but not exceptional words
- Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (3rd year): Two ways of building reciprocity: A study of Mandarin Chinese reciprocals
- Tatiana Bondarenko (3rd year) & Stanislao Zompi’ (3rd year): Leftover Agreement: Spelling out Kartvelian number
Gillian Gallagher (PhD 2010; now at NYU) gave a plenary talk: Synchronic knowledge of phonetically unnatural classes
In addition, many recent alumni also presented their work:
- Kenyon Branan (PhD 2018; now at National University of Singapore) & Keely New (National University of Singapore): Pronominal paradigms in two varieties of English
- Ivona Kucerova (PhD 2007; now at McMaster University), Cassandra Chapman (University of Toronto) & Keir Moulton (University of Toronto): How to value gender: lexicon, agree and feature transmission under ellipsis
- Shoichi Takahashi (PhD 2006; now at Aoyama Gakuin): Agreement Insulators and Quantifier Float
- Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002; now at University of Chicago) & Asia Pietraszko (University of Rochester): Unifying long head movement with phrasal movement: a new argument from spellout
- Idan Landau (PhD 1999; now at Ben Gurion University): A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control
- Heidi Harley (PhD 1995; now at University of Arizona) & Meg Harvey (University of Arizona): Hiaki echo vowels are motivated by phonotactics, not quantity