Like many of you, we are aware of the many news articles that have appeared in the past few days about Noam’s health. We, Noam’s students and long-time colleagues, are following the news with sadness, and wish him and his family the very best at this difficult time.
Archive for the ‘Editorial’ Category
Whamit! Summer hiatus
Whamit! will be on hiatus during the summer. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall 2023.
Much thanks to the editors, all readers, and contributors. Have a great summer and see you all in the Fall!
Whamit! will be on hiatus during the summer. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall 2023.
Much thanks to the editors, all readers, and contributors. Have a great summer and see you all in the Fall!
A statement from MIT Linguistics faculty, post-docs, and staff
concerning the war in Ukraine
The field of linguistics is international in its very essence: studying the common humanity of all people by studying the fundamental structures of human language — in active collaboration with speakers, students, and colleagues from every corner of the globe. In this context, and as human beings ourselves, we view with horror the brutal attack by the government of Russia on the people of Ukraine, and condemn it. We also note that this war is being publicly condemned by steadily increasing numbers of brave citizens within Russia, including colleagues and dear friends, who are risking their own safety to stand in open solidarity with the people of Ukraine and in opposition to the actions of their own government. We salute their courage and offer our fullest support for their brave efforts.
Adam Albright
Amir Anvari
Athulya Aravind
Noam Chomsky
Michel DeGraff
Kai von Fintel
Edward Flemming
Suzanne Flynn
Danny Fox
Mary Grenham
Martin Hackl
James W. Harris
Irene Heim
Sabine Iatridou
Michael Kenstowicz
Samuel Jay Keyser
Shigeru Miyagawa
David Pesetsky
Jennifer Purdy
Norvin Richards
Leo Rosenstein
Donca Steriade
Abdul-Razak Sulemana
Sheelah Ward
Ken Wexler
The field of linguistics is international in its very essence: studying the common humanity of all people by studying the fundamental structures of human language — in active collaboration with speakers, students, and colleagues from every corner of the globe. In this context, and as human beings ourselves, we view with horror the brutal attack by the government of Russia on the people of Ukraine, and condemn it. We also note that this war is being publicly condemned by steadily increasing numbers of brave citizens within Russia, including colleagues and dear friends, who are risking their own safety to stand in open solidarity with the people of Ukraine and in opposition to the actions of their own government. We salute their courage and offer our fullest support for their brave efforts.
Adam Albright
Amir Anvari
Athulya Aravind
Noam Chomsky
Michel DeGraff
Kai von Fintel
Edward Flemming
Suzanne Flynn
Danny Fox
Mary Grenham
Martin Hackl
James W. Harris
Irene Heim
Sabine Iatridou
Michael Kenstowicz
Samuel Jay Keyser
Shigeru Miyagawa
David Pesetsky
Jennifer Purdy
Norvin Richards
Leo Rosenstein
Donca Steriade
Abdul-Razak Sulemana
Sheelah Ward
Ken Wexler
Chomsky, Wexler on the passing of Lila Gleitman (1929-2021)
Last week, we received the unspeakably sad news that Prof. Lila Gleitman of the University of Pennsylvania had passed away at the age of 91. An obituary article by her daughter Claire can be found reposted here by Barbara Partee (with whom she was collaborating on a paper up to the very last days).
Though Lila was never a member of our department, she was one of our most important colleagues nonetheless, a constant presence in our intellectual lives. From the very beginning, Lila was a close associate of the founders of linguistics at MIT and a guiding spirit for us all: both for the brand-new questions she asked again and again (urgent questions closely linked to the new turn that linguistics was taking when she began her career) and for the answers to these questions that she uncovered, in a lifetime of breathtakingly original studies of language acquisition — always presented with inimitable wit, energy, and charm.
Each of her numerous visits to MIT for talks and conferences was an occasion never to be forgotten; and she worked wonders as an active member of our departmental Visiting Committee from 2006 through 2014. She visited us for the last time, we think, as an invited speaker at a symposium honoring our colleague Ken Wexler on the occasion of his retirement in 2016, where the photo below was taken.
We asked two of our colleagues most closely associated with Lila and her work to share their thoughts on her passing: Noam Chomsky and Ken Wexler. Their remarks follow below.
from Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor Emeritus)
When a great scientist leaves us, the temptation is strong to say that she was a giant in her field. That doesn’t quite work for Lila Gleitman. The study of language acquisition, her primary scientific concern, was her field in a special sense: she virtually created the field in its modern form and led in its impressive development ever since.
Others had studied child language, but Lila was really the first to raise probing questions about what children know and how that knowledge is attained, questions informed by theoretical understanding and directed to issues of far-reaching importance. More than that, Lila developed elegant experiments to answer these questions, devising models that have guided experimental research throughout the years.
Many of the conclusions that Lila firmly established are quite startling. She and others working under her guidance were able to show that the child attains rich knowledge on the basis of very slight data, far beyond what the very young child exhibits in performance, suggesting that the data serve in fundamental ways as a triggering device. Her research also elucidates the means by which this remarkable achievement takes place.
Lila’s work constitutes a fundamental and highly original contribution not only to the study of language and its acquisition, but to the understanding of the human mind and its unique capacities far more generally.
Another reason why it is hard for me to write about Lila’s leaving us is that she was a close personal friend for 60 years. But those feelings hold for just about everyone who was lucky enough to have known her. Lila was one of those rare people who becomes a close friend virtually on first contact — an immediate reaction to her warmth, her wit, her sympathetic understanding. These qualities persisted unchanged, even amplified, through adversity that seemed only to heighten her rare personal qualities. It made her seem immortal.
And in important ways, she is.
-Noam Chomsky
from Kenneth Wexler (Professor Emeritus of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics)
Lila Gleitman died a week ago Sunday, a sad event for everybody who knew her as well as our field. Lila had an extremely distinguished career in the study of language. It is not easy to think of a more distinguished psycholinguist. Her work was always characterized by an intense focus on careful and telling empirical analysis of fundamental issues. She never forgot her linguistic roots, and this interaction helped to mold her career’s work.
Her career is full of probing experimental questions on the most important issues. Who can forget her beautiful experimental take-down of the famous claims of Amos Tversky and his colleagues that seemingly precise terms were actually represented in the human mind in a much more approximate way, with all sorts of strange results. This extended all the way to the number system. “Which numeral is the most odd?” was an answerable experimental question in the view she was arguing against, a view that was beginning to dominate the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology at the time. Lila knew that how you asked a question was as important as the statistical analysis of results.
When I searched the literature for useable studies of the linguistic input to the child developing language for my 1980 book with Peter Culicover, the most useful and careful one I could find was the beautiful empirical demonstration by Elissa Newport, Henry Gleitman and Lila that the input didn’t include a kind of “teaching language,” contra to the standard psychological claim at the time. This helped to establish the need for the child to have some prior knowledge of the nature of language. She pushed the view that the input to the child was extensively from surface information, reflecting, I believe, her studies with Harris with its emphases on distributional analysis. She produced quite a few empirical demonstrations of how this input could be used. In a beautifully simple experiment, she showed that even adults (and thus presumably children) couldn’t figure out the meaning of a verb from context, although they could for nouns. In Noam Chomsky’s terms the meaning of a verb is then not “epistemologically available.”
My comments barely scratch the surface of Lila’s work. She produced generations of students who filled psychology departments around the country and who were strongly devoted to her. When we first met we hit it off instantly, becoming good friends. I will miss her and her constant interest, ideas, conversations, work and general support for our great enterprise. Who will be that thinking psychologist who allows for the hope of integration of our fields?
-Ken Wexler
links:
Lila Gleitman’s website: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/
Interviewed by John Goldsmith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQC2D4-QcDc
Language Log obituary: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=51734
Last week, we received the unspeakably sad news that Prof. Lila Gleitman of the University of Pennsylvania had passed away at the age of 91. An obituary article by her daughter Claire can be found reposted here by Barbara Partee (with whom she was collaborating on a paper up to the very last days).
Though Lila was never a member of our department, she was one of our most important colleagues nonetheless, a constant presence in our intellectual lives. From the very beginning, Lila was a close associate of the founders of linguistics at MIT and a guiding spirit for us all: both for the brand-new questions she asked again and again (urgent questions closely linked to the new turn that linguistics was taking when she began her career) and for the answers to these questions that she uncovered, in a lifetime of breathtakingly original studies of language acquisition — always presented with inimitable wit, energy, and charm.
Each of her numerous visits to MIT for talks and conferences was an occasion never to be forgotten; and she worked wonders as an active member of our departmental Visiting Committee from 2006 through 2014. She visited us for the last time, we think, as an invited speaker at a symposium honoring our colleague Ken Wexler on the occasion of his retirement in 2016, where the photo below was taken.
We asked two of our colleagues most closely associated with Lila and her work to share their thoughts on her passing: Noam Chomsky and Ken Wexler. Their remarks follow below.
from Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor Emeritus)
When a great scientist leaves us, the temptation is strong to say that she was a giant in her field. That doesn’t quite work for Lila Gleitman. The study of language acquisition, her primary scientific concern, was her field in a special sense: she virtually created the field in its modern form and led in its impressive development ever since.Others had studied child language, but Lila was really the first to raise probing questions about what children know and how that knowledge is attained, questions informed by theoretical understanding and directed to issues of far-reaching importance. More than that, Lila developed elegant experiments to answer these questions, devising models that have guided experimental research throughout the years.Many of the conclusions that Lila firmly established are quite startling. She and others working under her guidance were able to show that the child attains rich knowledge on the basis of very slight data, far beyond what the very young child exhibits in performance, suggesting that the data serve in fundamental ways as a triggering device. Her research also elucidates the means by which this remarkable achievement takes place.Lila’s work constitutes a fundamental and highly original contribution not only to the study of language and its acquisition, but to the understanding of the human mind and its unique capacities far more generally.Another reason why it is hard for me to write about Lila’s leaving us is that she was a close personal friend for 60 years. But those feelings hold for just about everyone who was lucky enough to have known her. Lila was one of those rare people who becomes a close friend virtually on first contact — an immediate reaction to her warmth, her wit, her sympathetic understanding. These qualities persisted unchanged, even amplified, through adversity that seemed only to heighten her rare personal qualities. It made her seem immortal.And in important ways, she is.-Noam Chomsky
from Kenneth Wexler (Professor Emeritus of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics)
Lila Gleitman died a week ago Sunday, a sad event for everybody who knew her as well as our field. Lila had an extremely distinguished career in the study of language. It is not easy to think of a more distinguished psycholinguist. Her work was always characterized by an intense focus on careful and telling empirical analysis of fundamental issues. She never forgot her linguistic roots, and this interaction helped to mold her career’s work.Her career is full of probing experimental questions on the most important issues. Who can forget her beautiful experimental take-down of the famous claims of Amos Tversky and his colleagues that seemingly precise terms were actually represented in the human mind in a much more approximate way, with all sorts of strange results. This extended all the way to the number system. “Which numeral is the most odd?” was an answerable experimental question in the view she was arguing against, a view that was beginning to dominate the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology at the time. Lila knew that how you asked a question was as important as the statistical analysis of results.When I searched the literature for useable studies of the linguistic input to the child developing language for my 1980 book with Peter Culicover, the most useful and careful one I could find was the beautiful empirical demonstration by Elissa Newport, Henry Gleitman and Lila that the input didn’t include a kind of “teaching language,” contra to the standard psychological claim at the time. This helped to establish the need for the child to have some prior knowledge of the nature of language. She pushed the view that the input to the child was extensively from surface information, reflecting, I believe, her studies with Harris with its emphases on distributional analysis. She produced quite a few empirical demonstrations of how this input could be used. In a beautifully simple experiment, she showed that even adults (and thus presumably children) couldn’t figure out the meaning of a verb from context, although they could for nouns. In Noam Chomsky’s terms the meaning of a verb is then not “epistemologically available.”My comments barely scratch the surface of Lila’s work. She produced generations of students who filled psychology departments around the country and who were strongly devoted to her. When we first met we hit it off instantly, becoming good friends. I will miss her and her constant interest, ideas, conversations, work and general support for our great enterprise. Who will be that thinking psychologist who allows for the hope of integration of our fields?-Ken Wexler
links:
Lila Gleitman’s website: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/
Interviewed by John Goldsmith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQC2D4-QcDc
Language Log obituary: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=51734
A note to our readers, to our colleagues, and to all friends of MIT Linguistics
Like many universities around the globe, MIT closed its classrooms last week in response to the growing coronavirus pandemic. Our last in-person departmental event for the foreseeable future was a LingLunch presentation on Thursday by visiting student Kinjal Hiren Joshi. He argued that an agreement alternation in Surati Gujarati was a result of two hidden factors: a distinction between accusative and dative case masked by the fact that both involve the same affix; and an alternation in the position of direct objects detectable by effects on information structure. It was a great talk, but some possibilities were left open, so participants, both students and faculty, asked many questions and discussed alternatives.
A great talk, yes, but also just another example of what we do every day: puzzle over intriguing phenomena in the languages of the world, in an attempt to learn how language works in general, formulating and testing hypotheses as we go.
Thanks to the pandemic, we won’t be able to keep meeting in person for a while. But this will not stop us from doing what we do! Like colleagues everywhere, we are busy moving our courses online, and we will be resuming our talks and reading groups in online form as well. It takes more than a virus to stop a linguist.
So while there will be a pause in the usual series of event announcements here (MIT has announced a two-week break), they will be resuming soon. Meanwhile, we wish all our friends and colleagues everywhere the best of health, safety, and happiness as we all work to keep our intellectual and personal communities vibrant in the coming weeks and months, difficult though they may be.
One more note: as we move talks and other events online, you may wonder if some of them might be opened to a wider audience. That is an idea we will certainly be thinking about! Some events are most useful to our students with an audience that is limited to the local community, so forgive us if they stay that way. But other events can benefit from a wider audience — not to mention the benefits for everyone of democratizing our work. So stay tuned as we experiment.
See you on the internet!
Like many universities around the globe, MIT closed its classrooms last week in response to the growing coronavirus pandemic. Our last in-person departmental event for the foreseeable future was a LingLunch presentation on Thursday by visiting student Kinjal Hiren Joshi. He argued that an agreement alternation in Surati Gujarati was a result of two hidden factors: a distinction between accusative and dative case masked by the fact that both involve the same affix; and an alternation in the position of direct objects detectable by effects on information structure. It was a great talk, but some possibilities were left open, so participants, both students and faculty, asked many questions and discussed alternatives.
A great talk, yes, but also just another example of what we do every day: puzzle over intriguing phenomena in the languages of the world, in an attempt to learn how language works in general, formulating and testing hypotheses as we go.
Thanks to the pandemic, we won’t be able to keep meeting in person for a while. But this will not stop us from doing what we do! Like colleagues everywhere, we are busy moving our courses online, and we will be resuming our talks and reading groups in online form as well. It takes more than a virus to stop a linguist.
So while there will be a pause in the usual series of event announcements here (MIT has announced a two-week break), they will be resuming soon. Meanwhile, we wish all our friends and colleagues everywhere the best of health, safety, and happiness as we all work to keep our intellectual and personal communities vibrant in the coming weeks and months, difficult though they may be.
One more note: as we move talks and other events online, you may wonder if some of them might be opened to a wider audience. That is an idea we will certainly be thinking about! Some events are most useful to our students with an audience that is limited to the local community, so forgive us if they stay that way. But other events can benefit from a wider audience — not to mention the benefits for everyone of democratizing our work. So stay tuned as we experiment.
See you on the internet!
Welcome to Fall 2018!
Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Fall 2018! After our summer hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.
Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter, published every Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Itai Bassi, Elise Newman, Keny Chatain and Frank Staniszewski.
To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.
Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Fall 2018! After our summer hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.
Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter, published every Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Itai Bassi, Elise Newman, Keny Chatain and Frank Staniszewski.
To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.
Whinter Whiatus for Whamit!
With the end of the Fall semester, and the coming of the Winter holidays (followed by MIT’s infamous January Independent Activities Period), Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus until the beginning of February. As always, we will publish irregularly during this period, as news arrives.
With the end of the Fall semester, and the coming of the Winter holidays (followed by MIT’s infamous January Independent Activities Period), Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus until the beginning of February. As always, we will publish irregularly during this period, as news arrives.
See you in September!
With this issue, Whamit! goes on its annual summer semi-hiatus — ”semi” because we may put out an issue or two if our pile of exciting news items gets big enough to justify it. Otherwise, see you in September!!
With this issue, Whamit! goes on its annual summer semi-hiatus — ”semi” because we may put out an issue or two if our pile of exciting news items gets big enough to justify it. Otherwise, see you in September!!
Special summer issue
Dear readers,
We know we promised you a summer respite from Whamit!, but so many news items (both glad and sad) accumulated over the past few weeks that we felt a special issue was merited. There might be more issues over the summer (the newswatch never stops!), but otherwise we will return as promised in September.
-the Editors
Dear readers,
We know we promised you a summer respite from Whamit!, but so many news items (both glad and sad) accumulated over the past few weeks that we felt a special issue was merited. There might be more issues over the summer (the newswatch never stops!), but otherwise we will return as promised in September.
-the Editors
Welcome back!
Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, and student editors Michelle Fullwood and Ryo Masuda.
We look forward to receiving items for inclusion in Whamit! throughout the semester. To submit items for inclusion please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears.
Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, and student editors Michelle Fullwood and Ryo Masuda.
We look forward to receiving items for inclusion in Whamit! throughout the semester. To submit items for inclusion please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears.
Where whas WHAMIT? (episode 2)
As you may have noticed, Whamit! missed its Monday deadline once again, due to server problems. But as of Sunday night, Whamit! has now been migrated to a new server (thank you Chris!) hosted by the venerable MIT Student Information Processing Board, an organization so venerable that it’s actually still called an “Information Processing Board”. (Its acronym SIPB is pronounced [sɪpi:].) Our old URL still works, but it now refers you to our new address: http://whamit.mit.edu. You might want to alter your browser bookmarks accordingly.
We are fairly confident that these changes will solve our ongoing problems, and allow us to bring you Whamit! each week with the reliability that you have every right to expect from a publication … called … Whamit!.
As you may have noticed, Whamit! missed its Monday deadline once again, due to server problems. But as of Sunday night, Whamit! has now been migrated to a new server (thank you Chris!) hosted by the venerable MIT Student Information Processing Board, an organization so venerable that it’s actually still called an “Information Processing Board”. (Its acronym SIPB is pronounced [sɪpi:].) Our old URL still works, but it now refers you to our new address: http://whamit.mit.edu. You might want to alter your browser bookmarks accordingly.
We are fairly confident that these changes will solve our ongoing problems, and allow us to bring you Whamit! each week with the reliability that you have every right to expect from a publication … called … Whamit!.
Where whas WHAMIT!?
Doesn’t WHAMIT usually come out on Monday mornings? Yes, but alas we had some server problems over the weekend. We apologize for the delay, but hope you enjoy all the news nonetheless. Please also take the time to notice two new sister blogs in the blogroll to the right. New blogs from Harvard Linguistics and McGill Linguistics. Welcome to the club!
Doesn’t WHAMIT usually come out on Monday mornings? Yes, but alas we had some server problems over the weekend. We apologize for the delay, but hope you enjoy all the news nonetheless. Please also take the time to notice two new sister blogs in the blogroll to the right. New blogs from Harvard Linguistics and McGill Linguistics. Welcome to the club!
Linguists in Japan
In the aftermath of this week’s terrible earthquake and tsunami we have some news to share about former students, colleagues and friends who are linguists in Japan - all of it reassuring, we are relieved to say. Nobuko Hasegawa, a friend to many of us, and a recent visitor to our department, is fine, and writes that Shoichi Takahashi and his wife Yoko are fine. According to Nobuko, Shoichi says “that the inside of the apartment is a mess and the water line stopped but they are physically ok. He is in Fukushima prefecture, which is between Tokyo and Sendai. His place is far from the nuclear plant and I don’t think it affects him.” Masatoshi Koizumi, who works in the seriously affected Sendai area, is in Guatemala doing fieldwork at the moment, and therefore far from the quake. He writes that his family is ok, as is he. Among other linguists working in the most affected area of Japan, our colleague Shigeru Miyagawa reports that Jun Abe, Akira Kikuchi,
Hirohisa Kiguchi and Ken Takita have all been confirmed to be ok - and that the various linguists he has heard from in the Tokyo area are all right too. Shigeru’s own family and friends are fine as well, as are the families and friends of our current students from Japan.
As Yusuke Imanishi has informed us, information about the response to the earthquake organized by MIT students is available here.
In the aftermath of this week’s terrible earthquake and tsunami we have some news to share about former students, colleagues and friends who are linguists in Japan - all of it reassuring, we are relieved to say. Nobuko Hasegawa, a friend to many of us, and a recent visitor to our department, is fine, and writes that Shoichi Takahashi and his wife Yoko are fine. According to Nobuko, Shoichi says “that the inside of the apartment is a mess and the water line stopped but they are physically ok. He is in Fukushima prefecture, which is between Tokyo and Sendai. His place is far from the nuclear plant and I don’t think it affects him.” Masatoshi Koizumi, who works in the seriously affected Sendai area, is in Guatemala doing fieldwork at the moment, and therefore far from the quake. He writes that his family is ok, as is he. Among other linguists working in the most affected area of Japan, our colleague Shigeru Miyagawa reports that Jun Abe, Akira Kikuchi, Hirohisa Kiguchi and Ken Takita have all been confirmed to be ok - and that the various linguists he has heard from in the Tokyo area are all right too. Shigeru’s own family and friends are fine as well, as are the families and friends of our current students from Japan.
As Yusuke Imanishi has informed us, information about the response to the earthquake organized by MIT students is available here.
Welcome to the Fall Semester
Today, Tuesday 9/7, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter appears every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Claire Halpert, and David Pesetsky. To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what happened during the break.
Today, Tuesday 9/7, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter appears every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Claire Halpert, and David Pesetsky. To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what happened during the break.
Summer Pause
This is the last issue of this academic year. Whamit! will resume publication on Tuesday Sept 7.
This is the last issue of this academic year. Whamit! will resume publication on Tuesday Sept 7.
Welcome to the Fall Semester
Tomorrow, Tuesday 9/8, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter appears every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Claire Halpert (who’s taking over as student editor from Jonah Katz), and David Pesetsky. To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit appears. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what happened during the break.
Tomorrow, Tuesday 9/8, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter appears every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Claire Halpert (who’s taking over as student editor from Jonah Katz), and David Pesetsky. To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit appears. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what happened during the break.
Welcome to the Spring Semester!
Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester.
Class descriptions will be added to this week’s newsletter throughout the week.
Please submit items for inclusion in Whamit!
Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester.
Class descriptions will be added to this week’s newsletter throughout the week.
Please submit items for inclusion in Whamit!
Hiatus
Whamit! is on a break and will resume at the beginning of IAP.
Whamit! is on a break and will resume at the beginning of IAP.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Because of the holiday-shortened week, Whamit! has no news items to report. Enjoy the holiday and the long weekend! We’ll be back to the usual jam-packed life in the department next week.
Because of the holiday-shortened week, Whamit! has no news items to report. Enjoy the holiday and the long weekend! We’ll be back to the usual jam-packed life in the department next week.
Welcome to the Fall Semester!
The purpose of Whamit! is to keep the MIT linguistics community informed about events of interest, news, and accomplishments. This year, we welcome David Pesetsky as a new editor, joining
Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Jonah Katz.
Please let us know about goings-on, so we can share them. In this and the next few issues, we will also have some news about what members of the department did over the summer. So, please send us info about that.
You can email us at whamit AT mit DOT edu. We also welcome any and all feedback on the newsletter.
The purpose of Whamit! is to keep the MIT linguistics community informed about events of interest, news, and accomplishments. This year, we welcome David Pesetsky as a new editor, joining Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Jonah Katz.
Please let us know about goings-on, so we can share them. In this and the next few issues, we will also have some news about what members of the department did over the summer. So, please send us info about that.
You can email us at whamit AT mit DOT edu. We also welcome any and all feedback on the newsletter.
Share Your News!
Whamit! is a few weeks old now. The editors are grateful that for the most part, talk and event announcements are put out ahead of the early Monday morning release of the week’s issue of Whamit! It would be great if that could be maintained and even institutionalized some more.
We would really like to encourage everyone, faculty and students, to share news about their professional lives via Whamit! Conference acceptances, successful defenses, colloquia trips, publications, etc. Please make Whamit! more interesting and useful to the community!
Whamit! is a few weeks old now. The editors are grateful that for the most part, talk and event announcements are put out ahead of the early Monday morning release of the week’s issue of Whamit! It would be great if that could be maintained and even institutionalized some more.
We would really like to encourage everyone, faculty and students, to share news about their professional lives via Whamit! Conference acceptances, successful defenses, colloquia trips, publications, etc. Please make Whamit! more interesting and useful to the community!
Welcome to Whamit!
This is the first issue of our (more or less) weekly newsletter. Your editors are Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Jonah Katz. Thanks to Chris Potts (WHISC) and Jim McCloskey (WHASC) for advice. Thanks to Chris Naylor for technical assistance.
Members of the MIT Linguistics community are urged to supply material for the newsletter. The easiest way is to email us at whamit AT mit DOT edu. Please also send us any and all feedback on the newsletter.
This is the first issue of our (more or less) weekly newsletter. Your editors are Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Jonah Katz. Thanks to Chris Potts (WHISC) and Jim McCloskey (WHASC) for advice. Thanks to Chris Naylor for technical assistance.
Members of the MIT Linguistics community are urged to supply material for the newsletter. The easiest way is to email us at whamit AT mit DOT edu. Please also send us any and all feedback on the newsletter.