On November 22rd and 23rd, Hani Al Naeem, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chemical Engineering postdoctoral associate), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics graduate student) taught over 50 ninth through twelfth grade students at Splash, a weekend extravaganza of courses organized by MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program).
Hani and Christopher offered “Sounds in Motion: Exploring the Science of Speech”; Cora offered “Rhyme and Reason: Exploring the Linguistics of Poetry”; Vincent offered “Linguists vs. Machine: Who Had the Telescope?”; and Jacob offered “The Beauty and Complexity of Language: Introduction to Linguistics”. The courses were designed by each instructor and developed and vetted through a collaborative process. Maya Honda observed all of the classes and attests to the great job everyone did sharing their knowledge and passion for linguistics with the Splash students.
A much-missed visitor from the 2024-2025 academic year, Adam Przepiórkowski, organized this year’s meeting of Generative Linguistics in Poland (GLiP), with MIT alums and faculty as invited speakers. Susi Wurmbrand (University of Salzburg) spoke on “Syntax as a function: A Redundancy and Deficiency approach to Grammar within linguistic behavior”; Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard) spoke about “Old and new objects: Word order and structure in Itelmen”; and David Pesetsky (MIT) gave a talk entitled “Generalized Dependent Case: Towards a maximally sparse theory of passive”.
Adam’s own talk, a joint presentation with colleague Sebastian Zawada, was entitled “Slavic case is not boring: Agreement in Polish copular clauses” (an elegant reply to a side-remark in a famous paper of Jonathan’s that suggested Slavic case might be). David and his fellow alums report that the event, hosted by the Institute of Computer Science at the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPI PAN), was full of interesting papers, and was truly excellent meeting from every perspective.
MIT Linguistics was well-represented at NELS 56, held at New York University from October 17–19, 2025. Two of our alums were invited speakers: Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013) of CUNY, gave a talk titled “Embedded tense: how to learn what some things can(not) mean (joint work with SpencerCaplan)”; and Tanya Bondarenko (PhD 2020), now a Harvard University, gave a talk titled “Selective opacity and clausal embedding”.
Here are the talks and posters presented by our faculty, current students and graduates in recent 10 years:
Yiannis Katochoritis (3rd year): How I learned to stop worrying about distance and love the covert spec-head
Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student), Omri Doron (PhD 2025)[UMass]: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion
Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student): Non-de dicto belief: Revision vs replacement
Si Berrebi (Postdoc): Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study
Peter Grishin (PhD 2023)[Brown University]: Could the Ban on Improper Movement be about binding after all?
Tue Trinh (PhD 2011)[University of Nova Gorica], Danny Fox (Faculty, PhD 1998), Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS; Ben Gurion University]: A unified theory of meta-questions
Metehan Eryılmaz, Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Boğaziçi University], Yağmur Sağ: From Numeral to Indefinite: A Kind-Sensitive Pathway in Turkish
Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018)[UCLA], Gabriela Caballero, Claudia Juárez Chávez: Clitic coalescence in San Juan Piñas Mixtec at the syntax-phonology interface
Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016)[University of Crete], Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Onur Özsoy, Caroline Heycock, Georgios Vardakis, Rümeysa Bektaş: Condition C amelioration effects in wh-movement: An interaction between pronominal type and d-linking
Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Nozomi Moritake, Ken Wexler (Faculty): The Optional Infinitive Stage in Japanese
And more from our alums:
Terrance Gatchalian, Jessica Coon (PhD 2010)[McGill], Lefteris Paparounas: A unified syntax and semantics of Kanien’kéha statives
Idan Landau (PhD 1999)[Tel Aviv]: Silent Resumption: A New Test for Ellipsis
Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD 2023)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl: Fake indexicals in relative clauses: licensing by phase
Ryan Walter Smith, Mark Baker (PhD 1985)[Rutgers University]: Agentless Presuppositions of again: Meet Obligatory Control
Jonathan David Bobaljik (PhD 1995)[Harvard]: The Itelmen Inclusive Imperative: Treetops, Clusivity, Allomorphy
In a high-octane, back-and-forth showdown that could only be described as syntactically chaotic, Noam’s Gnomes edged out the athletic but less semantically structured ZBT fraternity team in a thrilling 6-5 victory.
The Gnomes opened the scoring early, with a well-parsed through ball resulting in a tidy finish that had fans chanting “Tree that sentence!” But ZBT quickly responded with a goal of their own, leveling the playing field and reminding everyone that brute athleticism can sometimes trump careful analysis.
From there, the first half turned into a lexical breakdown for the Gnomes. Though they briefly retook the lead at 2-1, their syntax soon unraveled. ZBT rallied with three unanswered goals, including a particularly devastating counterattack off a misplaced modifier from midfield. By halftime, the frat boys were up 4-2 and looking confident, flexing both muscles and minimal tactical nuance.
But the second half belonged to the Gnomes.
Adjusting their structure and clearly undergoing a pragmatic shift in formation, the linguists came out with renewed cohesion. They scored four consecutive goals, each more elegantly diagrammed than the last — including a cheeky backheel dubbed “The Recursion” that put them up 6-4. Fans of transformational grammar were in ecstasy.
ZBT did manage to claw one back late in the game, narrowing the score to 6-5, but the Gnomes held strong through stoppage time, parsing out the clock with expert possession and clever subclauses down the flanks.
Final Score: Noam’s Gnomes 6 — ZBT 5
A wild, referentially rich affair where form met function — and function triumphed, just barely.
The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25-27 at University of California, Berkeley. Several of our current students, faculty and alumni presented their work:
Runqi Tan (4th year): The Role of Perceptual Contrast in Tone Inventories
Edward Flemming (faculty) and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS]: Gang effects: the perspective from variation
Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS] and Arto Anttila: MaxEnt fails at reasoning by transitivity
Frank Li Hui Tan, Shuang Zheng, Ming Liu, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Modeling Prosodic Development with Prenatal Audio Attenuation
Jian Cui, Hanna Shine, Jesse Snedeker, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Investigating the Tone-Segment Asymmetry in Phonological Counting: A Learnability Experiment
Jonah Katz (PhD 2010)[UCLA]: Boundary conditions on a theory of English footing
Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005)[UCL] and Nicholas Rolle: Xiamen-Taiwanese tone sandhi: Natural and derivable via boundary tones
Paul Kiparsky (PhD 1965)[Stanford]: The Phonology of the Nez Perce Floating Nasal
The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory was held at Harvard University on May 20-22, 2025. MIT linguistics was well represented by current students, faculty and visitors:
Johanna Alstott (student): On aspectual coercion in ‘before’-clauses: Evidence from processing
Danny Fox (faculty and alum!) & Yusutada Sudo (PhD 2012): Nested ‘which’-phrases and degenerate questions
Nina Haslinger (visiting faculty): Constraining imprecision and implicature cancellation via structural alternatives
Adèle Hénot-Mortier (student): Exh and only don’t really compete — they just answer different questions
Jad Wehbe (student): Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustification
The following alums also presented their work:
Keny Chatain (2021) and Dean McHugh: The parts of ‘only’
Jon Gajewski (2005): Neg-raising, accessibility and propositional anaphora
Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (2023): From NPs to predicates of individual concepts
Paul Marty (2017), Patrick Elliott, Guillermo Del Pinal & Jacopo Romoli: Free Choice in (non-)monotonic contexts
Isabelle Charnavel, Anouk Dieuleveut, Tom Meadows, David R. Müller & Dominique Sportiche (1983):Who am I to (dis)agree? Interpretation-sensitive agreement: Experimental evidence from French relatives
Ciyang Qing, Deniz Özyıldız, Maribel Romero & Wataru Uegaki (2015): Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?
Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as “Haj Ross”, his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many — one might even say “most” — of the core research topics under central investigation today. His dissertation Constraints on Variables in Syntax (published many years later as a book, under the title Infinite Syntax!) built on earlier observations by Chomsky that took note of surprising limitations on our ability to form questions and similar constructions out of particular phrasal domains. Ross’s dissertation showed first that Chomsky’s account of these limitations was inadequate. (“Both too strong and too weak” was his famous formulation of the problem.) But more important, Ross put the nature and extent of these limitations front and center for the entire field, discovering and analyzing a vast range of linguistic phenomena that exemplified such constraints, and proposing unified accounts of many of them that still form the baseline for current research that seeks to extend and deepen Ross’s original insights. In the years following his dissertation, Ross was the author of countless papers of a similar character, in which he was literally the first discoverer of linguistic limitations and possibilities that every speaker of a language knows, even if they were totally unaware (before Ross) that they knew them. Taken together, these discoveries constitute much of the agenda of modern linguistics, which attempts to discern the hidden logic behind the properties of human language that Ross first charted, understanding them as reflections of deeper properties of our human language faculty. We would not be surprised to learn that Ross’s thesis (as it is universally known) is one of the most widely read and widely cited doctoral dissertations in any field — it surely has that status in linguistics.
Every paper by Haj Ross communicated its discoveries in an inimitable fashion, tinged by its author’s unique odd sense of humor and unique feel for language itself. As a consequence, the field of syntax to this day is replete with quirky terminology all due to Haj. Domains that are opaque to syntactic processes such as question formation are universally called “islands” — Haj’s term. (To appreciate the metaphor, one needs to imagine that boats and the capacity to swim do not exist: you cannot escape a linguistic island.) The ability of question words that move to the front of the sentence (“Which book did Mary talk about?”) to lure other words to join them (“About which book did Mary talk?”) he called “pied-piping”, celebrating the grim legend of the pied-piper of Hamelin. Some of his infamous terminology bordered on the psychedelic: for example, an ellipsis process in questions that deletes the bulk of a sentence while leaving behind the question phrase (“Mary spoke to someone interesting, but I don’t know who ___ “) was dubbed “Sluicing” as a pun on “S loosing” (S for “sentence”; “loosing” in the sense of “untying”). So remarkable, so numerous, and so beloved are Haj’s terminological coinages that they form part of his lasting legacy, along with his scientific achievements, whose mark on the field will never fade.
Nothing linguistic failed to interest Haj, and his work ranged across many areas of linguistics. He explored the phonological principles that order phrases such as “snap, crackle, pop” and “red, white, and blue” (i.e. why not “pop, crackle, snap” or “blue, white, and red”, which is the order in French?) — and studied the linguistic principles underlying poetry in many papers of his later career. Haj was hired as a professor at MIT immediately following his 1967 dissertation, and remained on the faculty until 1985. He subsequently taught at a number of universities internationally, before taking a position at the University of North Texas, where he retired as Distinguished Research Professor in 2021.
Haj last visited us at MIT in December 2011 for our conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Linguistics graduate program, where he was an enthusiastic and active participant, and regaled us in typical fashion with both impromptu discoveries and hilarious anecdotes. A giant of linguistics, we and the entire field (and beyond) will miss him.
We are ecstatic to announce that Viola Schmitt will be joining our faculty next academic year as Associate Professor of Linguistics with tenure! Most of Viola’s research focuses on semantics, but with deep connections to syntactic and philosophical issues as well. Viola comes to us from the Humboldt University, Berlin, and has also taught at the Universities of Graz and Vienna. She was a visiting professor in our department last year, and her influence on our department as a superb teacher and advisor from just that brief visit is already profound. We could not be more pleased or more proud that she will be joining us. Welcome Viola!
Congratulations to our colleague, Professor Emeritus S. Jay Keyser, who will be receiving the Wilbur Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement from his PhD alma mater, Yale University, this Fall! Yale describes the award this way:
“The Wilbur Cross Medal, named in honor of former Graduate School Dean and Governor of Connecticut Wilbur Lucius Cross, was established in 1966 to honor alumni of Yale Graduate School for outstanding achievements like those of Dean Cross during his multifaceted career. It is the highest honor that the Graduate School bestows on its alumni. Recipients of the medal return to campus to receive the award and spend time with their departments.
“Medalists are nominated by their peers in recognition of their achievements as leaders in their respective fields, true innovators, and world-changing thinkers. They are among the best examples of what can be accomplished with a doctoral degree after leaving Yale.”
Our colleague Norvin Richards had not one but two papers published last week!
The first, entitled “Reconstructing Stress in Wôpanâak”, appeared in the International Journal of American Linguistics. Here is the abstract:
Wôpanâak (also called Wampanoag, Massachusett, Natick), the original language of much of eastern Massachusetts, is known to us from a variety of seventeenth, and eighteenth-century documents, which mostly do not indicate the position of word-level stress. We do have one poem in Wôpanâak, a translation of the book of Psalms into verse. In this paper I present a description of the rules for stress in Wôpanâak, based largely on an analysis of the metrical version of Psalms.
In social media comments, Norvin thanked the members of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project “whose work on this language has been a constant inspiration for me” — and described the paper more informally this way:
It’s about how to figure out which syllable to stress in words in Wôpanâak, the language of the traditional owners of a lot of eastern Massachusetts. Figuring this out is a challenge, because the language spent over a century not being spoken at all, so we know it from 17th- and 18th- century documents, mostly religious documents, which don’t indicate stress. Fortunately, there is one surviving poem in Wôpanâak. Unfortunately, the poet in question was not a terrific poet, and the meter is very uneven. Fortunately, the poem is also very long! So if you are sufficiently stubborn, you can scrape together enough information to figure out the system.
Norvin’s second paper to appear last week is entitled “Finding something to lean on”, and was published in Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Here’s the abstract:
Phrases in a number of syntactic contexts are required, in a variety of languages, to end in their heads. This article offers a unified theory of the relevant properties of these contexts and of why the phenomena in question, while widespread, are not completely universal. The theory makes use of proposals made independently in contiguity theory (Richards 2010, 2016): the relevant syntactic contexts are argued to involve a prosodically dependent element that must attach prosodically to the head of the phrase to its immediate left, and this attachment is often blocked if the phrase in question is not head-final.
MIT Linguistics was well represented at the Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics 14 held at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Some of our current faculty colleague and almuni gave invited talks:
Shigeru Miyagawa: The Treetop Structure in Asian Languages
Lisa Cheng (PhD 1991)[Leiden University]: The structure of verbalization
Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto]: Dialectal Variation in Korean Vowel Harmony
Several of our faculty and alumni also gave the following talks:
Eunsun Jou (Postdoc; PhD 2024): A successive-cyclic dependent case account of adverbial case alternation in Korean passives
Yang Dongwen, Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD 1995)[Tohoku University]: Asymmetrical Topicalization and Clitics in Seediq
Trần Phan, Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai (PhD 1994)[National Tsing Hua University]: Locative wh as negation in Vietnamese
Our faculty colleague Shigeru Miyagawa recently published an article titled “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago” in Frontiers in Psychology on March 11. You can read the abstract below and access the article here:
Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens, based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population division within H. sapiens from the original stem occurred approximately 135 thousand years ago. Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must have been present at the latest by around 135 thousand years ago, before the first division occurred. Had linguistic capacity developed later, we would expect to find some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally different mode of communication. Neither is the case. While current evidence does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must have been present in the modern human lineage. Based on the lower boundary of 135 thousand years ago for language, we propose that language may have triggered the widespread appearance of modern human behavior approximately 100 thousand years ago.
MIT News featured an article on this publication on March 14, which you can read here.
Our colleague Danny Fox presented joint work with students Omri Doron(6th year) and Jad Wehbe (5th year) at a colloquium at UMass Amherst, entitled “Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation”. You can read the abstract here.
Our colleague Elise Newmanwas an invited speaker at a workshop about Locality across the boardin the pun-inviting locality of Nice. Her talk was entitled “The locality of subcategorization: a case for underspecified category”, and here is the abstract for it:
This talk is concerned with the selectional mechanism that underlies verb-argument pairs like (1).
a. depend [PP on …] b. say [CP that …]
Following Pesetsky (1982), I’ll refer to the relationship between the verb and its arguments in (1) as l-selection, where the verb requires a particular lexical item to head its argument. This distinguishes the relationship in (1) from other kinds of selection based on syntactic (c-selection) or semantic (s-selection) properties.
Such a distinction among selectional rules echoes earlier work, such as Chomsky (1965), which claimed that relationships like (1) were governed by strict subcategorization rules, in contrast with selection of a subject, for example, which was governed by selectional rules. Some differences between the two kinds of rules pertained to their locality conditions and the kinds of properties they were sensitive to: 1) strict subcategorization was limited to head-complement pairs, while selectional rules could create other kinds of branching structures, and 2) strict subcategorization rules only applied when there was no more general syntactic property to appeal to.
Puzzle: the modern view of selection (which only makes use of selectional rules) does not capture the original locality distinction between subcategorization and selection: l-selectional relationships like (1) seem to only arise in head-complement pairs. In other words, we do not find cases where a head l-selects for the head of its specifier.
This is a puzzle in current frameworks. Since Merge underlies both complementation and specifier-formation, it is not obvious what syntactic tools we have for enforcing only complementation in these cases.
I offer a proposal that captures the locality profile of strict subcategorization within a current feature-driven framework. Building on Newman (2024), the proposal makes use of an underspecified categorial feature X, which can be checked by any kind of element. The interaction between X-checking and the checking of other c- selectional features imposes restrictions on the order of operations: elements that are not c-selected can only check X, and therefore must merge first, or they will be bled by Merge of another element (which can check X in addition to whatever feature selected it). The requirement to merge first is what restricts l-selected elements to being complements.
While this may seem like just a solution to a technicality, the account makes predictions for the locality of A-movement as well, when we consider how l-selection interacts with the functional hierarchy more generally. I will argue that the functional hierarchy stems from a mixture of l-selectional and c-selectional requirements, where the interaction between the two can produce smuggling configurations (Collins 2005). When smuggling happens, arguments can obviate certain locality conditions on A- movement to derive phenomena such as symmetric passivization.
Adam Albright gave a talk at the Deparmental Seminar of Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Chinese University of Hong Kong, on January 21st, 2025, with the title “Complex Restrictions from Simple Constraints”. You can read the abstract here:
A recurring finding in the past 30 years has been that phonological restrictions that are categorical in some languages often appear as gradient restrictions in others. This parallel is tantalizing, but do languages also exhibit gradient restrictions that have no categorical counterparts? In this talk, I report the results of on-going work applying linear modeling to develop statistical models of lexicons that can identify and quantify gradient restrictions. Results from modeling the lexicon of Lakhota (Siouan) reveal numerous gradient restrictions on combinations of structures, such as a ban on two fricatives within a root, and a ban on combinations of fricatives and consonant clusters. The observed restrictions have (to the best of my knowledge) never been observed as categorical effects, and never motivate alternations.
These complex restrictions raise a number of learnability questions: first, although there is strong statistical evidence for these restrictions as a group, the support for individual restrictions varies, even in a lexicon of modest size. How do children learn such restrictions, with even smaller lexicons? This question is especially pressing if we take the complexity of the relevant constraints into account: in models that evaluate grammars according to the trade-on between complexity and fit, more complex grammars require greater statistical support. Finally, if learners are able to enforce complex constraints, why do we never observe categorical restrictions based on them? I propose that all three problems can be resolved in a model in which complex restrictions may emerge through the cumulative interaction of simpler constraints. I show how in a weighted constraint model based on maximum entropy, combinations of gradient restrictions can “gang up” to create complex restrictions, without the use of complex constraints.
MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Philadelphia Marriott Downtown from 1-9 January. Many of our current students, faculty, and visitors gave talks and posters:
Adèle Hénot-Mortier (6th year): On the QuD-dependence of conditionals
Eunsun Jou (Postdoc; PhD 2024): Korean nonactive suffixes HI and eci are realizations of little v
Christopher Legerme (4th year): Complementizer Agreement and Verb Fronting with Doubling in Haitian Creole
Johanna Alstott (3rd year): Deriving ‘first’ and ‘last’ from ‘before’ and ‘after’: Evidence from Kinyarwanda
Gianluca Porta, Elise Newman (Faculty; PhD 2021): Ne-cliticization and the DP/PP distinction: A case for Q
Hadas Kotek (Faculty; PhD 2014): Strategies for career growth and promotion beyond your first (and second) job outside of academia
Hadas Kotek (Faculty; PhD 2014), David Q. Sun, Zidi Xiu, Margit Bowler, Christopher Klein: Protected group bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models
Chie Nakamura, Suzanne Flynn (Faculty), Yoichi Miyamoto, Noriaki Yusa: Incremental or delayed processing? L2 learners’ active gap-filling in sentence comprehension
Several of our alumni also participated in the following presentations:
Chris Collins (PhD 1993)[NYU]: Foundations of Minimalist Syntax: Steps Toward the Miracle Creed
Luke Adamson, Stanislao Zompì (PhD 2023)[University of Potsdam]: The PCC and Polite Pronouns
Lisa Sullivan, Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University of Toronto]: French speakers’ use of sound symbolic patterns to assign gender to French and English nonce names
Mark Baker (PhD 1985)[Rutgers]: Deriving Obligatory Control from Thematic Uniqueness
On December 7, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT organized a celebratory workshop in honor of our colleague, semanticist Irene Heim, professor emerita of Linguistics — on the occasion of her having been awarded the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize (jointly with Hans Kamp) which we reported earlier here. As we noted at the time, quoting the award description, the award is considered a kind of Nobel prize:
“The Rolf Schock Prize is unusual in that it rewards both logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts and music. The laureates are selected through a unique collaboration between three Swedish royal academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The final decision is made by The Schock Foundation.”
The workshop program featured 5 talks by former students of Irene’s from linguistics and philosophy: Mat Mandelkern (NYU philosophy), Luka Crnic (Hebrew University), Maribel Romero (Konstanz), Wataru Uegaki (Edinburgh), and Valentine Hacquard (Maryland). A poster session featured research by current and recent students Ido Benbaji & Omri Doron; Shrayana Haldar; Filipe Hisao Kobayashi & Enrico Flor, Paul Meisenbichler; and Adele Mortier-Henot — and by Elena Guerzoni, Furkan Dikmen, & Penka Stateva; Chris Kennedy, Bernard Schwarz & Luis Alonso Ovalle; and Tue Trinh, Itai Bassi, and Danny Fox.
At the workshop, Amir Anvari announced the creation of the Heim Archive, a repository of Irene’s published papers and her equally famous unpublished notes and class materials.
More than 80 guests, including students of Irene’s, colleagues and friends from all over the world were able to come on short notice. The event reflecting the broad and lasting impact of Irene’s research and teaching on the field. We are so extremely fortunate to count Irene as one of ours.
Our colleague Michael Kenstowicz is the author or coauthor of three separate articles in the just-published Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, from Oxford University Press: “Vowel harmony in pre-Generative phonology”, “Vowel harmony in Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages”, and “Palatal harmony” (with Charles Kisseberth). Our most harmonic congratulations!!
MIT Press has just announced the publication of a monograph by our newest faculty colleague Elise Newman, entitled When Arguments Merge, in its Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series. The book presents “a novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families” — and has been praised as “refreshingly original and carefully argued”, “deeply thought through”, with “far-reaching theoretical and empirical consequences”. Congratulations, Elise!
Last week, Elise Newman presented and co-presented two talks at the Workshop on Locality at the University of Göttingen. Her solo talk was entitled “When wh-phrases are their own interveners, and she also presented a joint talk with Rob Truswell (based on even more joint work with Caroline Heycock), enitled “When to revisit? Investigating (un)ambiguity in temporal clauses”. Ksenia Ershova presented a talk based on joint work with Nikita Bezrukov, entitled “Moving away from antilocality: A defense of very local movement”. Several MIT alumni also presented at the workshop: Kenyon Branan, Mitya Privoznov, and Susi Wurmbrand.
Last week, Jon Rawski (visiting Assistant Professor) gave an invited colloquium talk at Rutgers Linguistics. The talk was titled Mathematical Linguistics & Cognitive Complexity.
Abstract: Mathematics is the study of structures, and mathematical linguistics studies linguistic structures. Generative linguistics put the focus squarely on grammars: finite abstractions of the highly structured and complex mental computations of linguistic phenomena. The focus of this talk is the expressive power of a grammar, which directly measures the complexity of any cognitive system which instantiates it. Two key algebraic restrictions have emerged: regularity, and transduction (mappings between finite structures). I will use these notions to describe upper and lower bounds on the weak and strong capacity of human grammars (the kinds of phenomena they cover, and the kinds structures they posit during a derivation), as well as mismatches between them. These bounds enable precise theory comparison, and I will show how many linguistic theories drastically overgenerate, using reduplication as a case study. I will then consider the expressivity of so-called ‘neural language models’. I will show, using finite model theory and multilinear algebra, how regular transductions can be embedded into the tensor representations used by neural computation and Optimality Theory. I will then present new theoretical bounds on the capacity of language models, connecting various transformer models to classes of first-order transductions. The overall picture that emerges is that, under the lens of mathematical abstraction, linguistic complexity is indeed a window into fundamental aspects of cognition and computation.
Our emerita colleague Irene Heim has been honored as the recipient of the Rolf Schock Prize for Logic & Philosophy — sharing the prize with Hans Kamp of the University of Stuttgart, for their “(mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”
As described by the awarding organization:
“The Rolf Schock Prize is unusual in that it rewards both logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts and music. The laureates are selected through a unique collaboration between three Swedish royal academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The final decision is made by The Schock Foundation.”
The Schock prize is thus as close to a Nobel Prize as our field offers, a splendid and overwhelmingly well-deserved honor for our colleague. Not only did Irene lay the intellectual foundation for much modern work in semantics, she was also a key founder of the semantics program in Linguistics at MIT, and one of the field’s greatest teachers. You can read more about Irene’s contributions to semantics and to our department in the biographical sketch with which a 2014 volume honoring her work began, here: https://semanticsarchive.net/…/CrnicPesetskySauerland.pdf
Congratulations Irene! Your work enriches and honors us all.
This past weekend, visiting professor Jon Rawski was invited to the “Algebraic Models of Generative Linguistics” workshop at the Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics at Caltech.
Workshop description: “This meeting brings together theoretical linguists, mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and computational linguists, for informal discussions on algebraic models of the Merge operation in generative linguistics, models of the syntax-semantics interface, and models of semantic spaces, along with the question of their realization in large language models.”
A joint paper by David Pesetsky and Kanoe Evile, wh-which Relatives and the Existence of Pied-Piping has just appeared in Glossa. It originated as an Intro to Syntax squib by Kanoe, a Linguistics minor who graduated last spring, who is starting medical school. Congratulations Kanoe and David!
The 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held over the weekend. The following members of our community presented at the conference:
Boer Fu (6th year): Variation in Mandarin Prenuclear Glide Segmentation
Fulang Chen (6th year): Causativization and affectedness in the Mandarin BA-construction
Giovanni Roversi (3rd year): Adjectival “concord” in North Sámi is not concord (and it’s two different phenomena)
Yash Sinha (4th year): Phi-concord in Punjabi singular honorific DPs
Johanna Alstott (1st year): Scalar implicature in Adverbial vs Nominal Quantifiers: Two experiments
Katya Morgunova & Anastasia Tsilia (2nd year): Why would you D that? On the D-layer in Greek clausal subjects
Ksenia Ershova (postdoc): Phi-feature mismatches in Samoan resumptives as post-syntactic impoverishment
Donca Steriade (faculty): Vowel-to-vowel intervals in Ancient Greek and Latin meters
Other recent MIT alums on the program include:
Danfeng Wu (PhD, 2022): Elided material is present in prosodic structure
Tanya Bondarenko (PhD, 2022): Conjoining embedded clauses is either trivial or redundant: evidence from Korean
Congratulations to our postdoctoral associate Dmitry Privoznov (PhD 2021) on the publication in Glossa of his article entitled “Adjunct islands are configurational”! The paper is open access and can be downloaded here.
This paper argues for the Spell Out theory of the Adjunct Condition, based on Uriagereka (1999), Johnson (2003) and Sheehan (2010), using new evidence from Balkar. The Spell Out theory makes two claims: (a) between any two phrasal sisters at least one must be spelled out and become opaque for movement; and (b) a spelled out constituent does not project its category. This predicts adjuncts to be opaque, since they are maximal projections and are merged with a phrase. The Spell Out theory predicts that modifiers can be transparent for movement, but only if they are merged with a head (as complements) or if their sister is spelled out. The argument from Balkar is based on the behavior of so-called coverbs (clausal modifiers). Balkar converbs come in three varieties: vPs attached at the vP-level or as structural complements, TPs attached between the vP and the T′ of the main clause, and CPs attached at the CP-level. vP-converbs are only transparent for scrambling if they are complements. TP-converbs are never transparent. CP-converbs are only transparent if the main clause that they modify is opaque. Thus, Balkar converbs are transparent in all and only structural configurations that are predicted to be transparent by the Spell Out theory. In the end of the paper I discuss English data from Truswell (2007) and argue that the analysis proposed for Balkar can be extended to them as well.
Will Oxford gave two colloquia last week! They were at Boston University (11/7) on The accidental inverse, and at Harvard (11/11) on How to be(come) a direct/inverse language (abstract below).
Abstract for How to be(come) a direct/inverse language:
In a “direct/inverse” alignment system, the agreement morphology that indexes a particular nominal is determined by the nominal’s rank on the person hierarchy rather than by its grammatical function, and a special marker indicates whether the highest-ranking nominal is the agent (direct) or patient (inverse). Algonquian languages are often seen as the prototypical example of such a system, but from a diachronic perspective, the Algonquian direct/inverse pattern is not particularly old: internal and external evidence both point to a reconstructed ancestor in which the agreement morphology shows prototypical nominative/accusative alignment. So where did the direct/inverse pattern come from, and how does the underlying syntax of a direct/inverse language differ from that of a nominative/accusative language? In this talk I propose answers to both questions. Diachronically, I propose that the Algonquian direct/inverse system arose when a gap in an innovative paradigm of verb inflection was filled by the analogical extension of an agreement pattern that was previously dedicated to passive forms. Synchronically, I propose that the direct/inverse pattern reflects the interaction of an object-agreement probe on the Voice head and an “omnivorous” probe on the Infl head. This analysis, formalized using Deal’s (2015) interaction-and-satisfaction model of the Agree operation, provides an elegant account of twelve different distributions of inverse marking across the Algonquian family. These proposals allow the Algonquian system to be integrated more closely into standard typological categories and formal analyses rather than standing as a type of its own. Given the prototypical status accorded to Algonquian in typological and theoretical discussions of direct/inverse marking, the fact that the Algonquian system dissolves into simpler and less unusual parts suggests that a degree of skepticism may be in order for putative direct/inverse systems in other language families as well.)
A new paper on the acquisition of syntax has appeared in the journal Language Acquisition coauthored by our colleague Athulya Aravind and Loes Koring (who was a postdoctoral associate and teacher/advisor in our department in 2016-2018) — entitled “Experiencer troubles: A reappraisal of the predicate-based asymmetry in child passives”. Congratulations, Athulya and Loes!
Congratulations to our colleague Michel DeGraff, who has been elected a 2023 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! This is our field’s highest honor, awarded each year to a small number of linguists for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. This is truly fantastic news.
Michel joins current and former faculty colleagues Noam Chomsky, Kai von Fintel, Morris Halle, Irene Heim, Sabine Iatridou, David Pesetsky, and Donca Steriade, who have been honored as Fellows in previous
years, as well as more than thirty alumni of the department. Approximately a quarter of all LSA Fellows are MIT alumni or faculty. The full list of LSA Fellows can be found at http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/fellows.
Congratulations to our colleague Shigeru Miyagawa on the publication of his new monograph “Syntax in the Treetops”! See this great article from MIT News:
Chomsky’s hierarchy (Chomsky 1959) defined formal grammars starting with finite-state grammar (FSG) as the simplest, followed by phrase-structure grammar (PSG), and so on. Although Chomsky’s original intention was to use this for human language, in particular, to show that FSG is insufficient for modeling language, a large body of work recently has utilized this hierarchy for nonhuman primate and bird systems of communication. In a groundbreaking work, Fitch and Hauser (2004) showed that cotton-top tamarins can master combinations based on FSG, but not PSG, while humans have no problem with both. While accepting their conclusion about humans, I question the assumption that the stimuli that the tamarins were able to master are FSG. In nature, monkeys are never exposed to systems that can be modeled by FSG; the alarm calls are predominantly isolated verbal units, not combinatorial. Old World monkeys do have an ability to combine calls, but the combination is limited to two items. This is not FSG in any meaningful sense. I suggest that the Chomsky hierarchy, which is productively applied to human language, does not apply to nonhuman primate calls, which are severely limited in their combinatorial possibilities.
Throughout the pandemic, numerous faculty members have stepped up to support and guide their graduate students in unique and impactful ways, through efforts such as championing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within their departments; respecting students’ mental health concerns and finding appropriate ways to accommodate them; and fostering community within their advising groups and departments.
We are thrilled and indeed moved, but not surprised in the slightest. As the article linked above makes clear, it was graduate students themselves who nominated the recipients of this award, and participated in the selection process. Congratulations, Athulya!
We are very excited to announce that Amir Anvari, a specialist in semantics and pragmatics, will be joining our faculty in January 2022 as Assistant Professor of Linguistics! Amir comes to us from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he worked primarily with Benjamin Spector and Philippe Schlenker, receiving his M.Sc. in 2016 and PhD in 2019 (with a dissertation entitled “Meaning in Context”). Earlier, he studied math in Iran and received his B.A. in cognitive science at Carleton University in Canada (where he was introduced to linguistics by our own alum Raj Singh).
Amir has done groundbreaking work in the theory of presupposition, scalar implicatures, and indexicality, with far reaching implications for the modular organization of the human language faculty — and its interface with general systems of belief accessed for communicative purposes. He describes his interests on his webpage as follows: “I work on formal semantics and pragmatics, often on the basis of data from Farsi. I am particularly interested in various aspects of context-dependency and intensionality, alternative-based reasoning, syntax-semantics interface, and the interpretation of co-speech gestures.”
We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.
Also speaking at BCGL 13 were several of our distinguished and much-missed alums: Ken Safir (PhD 1982), Idan Landau (PhD 1999), and Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016).
In the December 2020 issue of the journal Language of the Linguistics Society of America, Michel DeGraff responds to the target article “Toward racial justice in Linguistics” by Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz. Michel’s article is titled: “Racial justice in Linguistics: The case of Creole studies”:
Our colleague, Linguistics section head Kai von Fintel was interviewed about language, semantics, language acquisition, “if”, and more, in the series “Philosophical Trials”. Watch it here or click below.
Michel DeGraff was a speaker at the annual Northwestern University Conference on Human Rights on January 16–18, 2020 #NUCHR2020. This year, the conference’s theme was “Language and Human Rights: The Right to Speak”. Michel spoke at a panel on ”Language, education and information”. The title of his presentation was “Language and social justice: Haiti as a ‘canary’ for human rights globally.”
More information on the conference’s speakers and agenda can be found there, with useful links to organizations such as WikiTongues and Universal Human Rights Initiative that also do work at this important intersection of linguistics and human rights:
Last week, WHAMIT welcomed new graduate students and new visitors. This week, we add our enthusiastic welcome to the newest faculty member in the department: Athulya Aravind, who co-directs our Language Acquisition Lab and is a researcher in first language acquisitions and syntax. Athulya, of course, is not a stranger to the department, having received her PhD here in 2018. In between, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lab for Developmental Studies at Harvard. We are delighted to that Athulya has joined us!
Justin Colley (4th year), Verena Hehl, Anton Kukhto (1st year) and Mitya Privoznov (4th year) went into the heart of Siberia for a fieldwork expedition in the village of Kazym, Central Khanty. Mitya reports: “We had a lot of fun, suffered from mosquitoes and hopefully gathered some useful data as well :).”
In August, Tanya Bondarenko and Colin Davis participated in a joint fieldtrip with a group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University to study Barguzin Buryat in Baraghan village, the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.
In early June, Elise Newman (3rd year) went to the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented work on the English auxiliary system at OLINCO. Elise: “Several MIT alumni were there; Joe Emonds co-organized the conference and I found out that he and I are both Cubs fans!”.
On August 4, Danfeng Wu (3rd year), Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD ’95, now at Tohoku University) and Mamoru Saito (PhD ’85, now at Nanzan University) gave talks at the Workshop on Case Theory and Labeling of Structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to that on July 28, Danfeng presented a poster co-authored with Shigeru and Masatoshi at MAPLL × TCP × TL × TaLK (MT3) at Keio University. After that, she also attended and presented at the Summer Seminar on Frontiers of Language and Cognition Research.
Norvin Richards (faculty) gave a series of talks on Contiguity Theory at SICOGG 20 in Seoul, held on August 8-10, and then another talk at Kyungpook National University in Daegu.
Just a few days ago, Verena Hehl gave a presentation at SLE in Tallinn on Bildungsplan Baden Württeberg 2016: Promoting Grammar as Science from the bottom up – a case study.
Education:
Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure (3rd year) and Dóra Takács (2nd year) taught a 7-week introductory linguistics course for middle and high school students as part of HSSP, from June till August. Their course, entitled `How language works’, covered topics ranged from sound production and the IPA over cross-linguistic variation and case to NPIs and implicatures. Dóra writes: “About 35 students participated in the class, which was hopefully a lot of fun and definitely an interesting and valuable experience for everyone.”
Naomi Francis (5th year), Verena Hehl and Maša Močnik graduated from the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program (KTCP) in June. The participants report: “Graduates of the KTCP attend 8 sessions on a wide range of topics in teaching and learning and are exposed to current research on pedagogical methodology through assigned readings and in-class discussions. We also had the opportunity to create and receive feedback on teaching philosophy statements for academic job applications.”
In May, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), an MIT initiative to support global education, announced a grant funding to MITILI student Newell Lewey and to prof. Norvin Richards for the project Skicinuwi-npisun: A Community-Centered Project for Documentation and Teaching of the Passamaquoddy Language. The project supports language teaching and curriculum development to help preserve the severely endangered Passamaquoddy language of Northern Maine. The grant includes funding for Newell’s language classes, and for a group of graduate students from the department to travel with Norvin to Passamaquoddy country to work with elders. Here you can read a little more about the project. Congratulations Newell and Norvin!
Alumni news:
Our distinguished alum Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), now at the University of Arizona, has been elected a 2019 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Heidi’s colleagues as LSA Fellows include 38 other MIT alums and members of our faculty who have been elected in previous years — more than a quarter of the (now) 138 Fellows of the Society. Congratulations Heidi (and our warmest congratulations to the other newly elected Fellows as well)!
Another one of our distinguished alums, John McCarthy (PhD 1979) - a pioneer in the development of phonological theory for over four decades - has been named Provost and more at UMass Amherst, where he has taught since 1985. Very exciting news — congratulations John!
By tradition, the headship of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy rotates between the Linguistics and Philosophy sections. From July 1, the department head will be our Philosophy colleague Alex Byrne, who has served as section head of Philosophy for the past five years. He succeeds linguist David Pesetsky, who is concluding his five-year term as department head. The new section head for Linguistics will be Kai von Fintel — but Adam Albright will serve as interim section Head during Kai’s well-earned sabbatical this Fall. Thank you all!
Norvin Richards(faculty) spent the week of April 14-21 at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, learning about Basque and Spanish and teaching a week-long course on Contiguity Theory.
Michel DeGraff shares some good news about the Dual Language (English/Haitian Creole) Two-Way Immersion program at the Mattapan Early Elementary School which he has been helping with. The school was recently recognized with the Phil H. Gordon Legacy Award from EdVestors, a nonprofit focused on improving urban education. The award recognizes schools that are leveling the playing field for all students to learn. The Mattapan Early Elementary School was awarded $30,000 to help it grow.
The full story is available at the Boston Herald. A video presentation about the program at Mattapan Early Elementary is also available here.
Today we mourn the loss of Morris Halle, our colleague, our teacher, our friend, co-creator of MIT Linguistics, one of the most imaginative, insightful, and influential linguists in the history of the field.
We are told by his children that Morris passed away peacefully this morning at 3:45am. There will be a memorial - details to be announced.
The annual ESSL/LAcqLab and friends Winter Hike happened on Sunday. The hikers climbed Mount Pemigawassett in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Thanks to Martin for the photos.
Hiking up Mount Pemigawassett
At the summit. From left to right: Ishani Guha, Sophie Moracchini, Jaehyun Son, Danfeng Wu, Milena Sisovics, Maša Močnik, Leo Rosenstein, Keny Chatain, Sherry Chen, Dan Pherson, Jie Ren, Martin Hackl
On January 18, 2018, Michel gave the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecture for the University of Michigan’s Romance Languages & Literatures department. The Michigan Daily wrote an article about his lecture, which can be found here.
On January 24, 2018, Michel gave an invited presentation Science & Human Rights Coalition meeting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Slides from the meeting can be found here.
A statement from MIT faculty in Linguistics (January 12, 2018, updated January 16)
As linguists and human beings, we stand in appalled opposition to yesterday’s reported statement by Donald Trump that disparaged in grotesque racist terms the populations, cultures and circumstances of an array of countries. These include the native countries of treasured colleagues, students, and visitors to our department, past and present. We stress, now and forever, the utter incompatibility of such characterizations and sentiments with basic human values, the nature of scientific inquiry, and the fundamental lessons of our field: respect for human diversity in all its manifestations, enhanced by the continual discovery of deep threads of unity that underlie this diversity.
We take this opportunity to renew our own commitment to diversity — to building bridges that will enrich our humanity, not walls.
MIT faculty in Philosophy (our sister program within the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy) strongly support the above statement from MIT faculty in Linguistics:
Shigeru Miyagawa, who was recently appointed Senior Associate Dean for the MIT Office of Digital Learning (ODL - responsible for OpenCourseWare, MITx, and other digital initiatives), has given an interview for MIT News discussing his goals for ODL and the future of digital learning and cross-institute collaboration. The full article can be found here.
Michel DeGraff (faculty) gave a talk Cornell University as part of a new lecture series on language and inequality. On October 20th,
Michel presented Language, Education and (In)equality in Haiti: Struggling Through Centuries of Coloniality, a talk which focuses on linguistic inequality and the exclusion of “local languages” in education. While at Cornell, Michel also gave a colloquium talk on Thursday titled Walls vs. Bridges Around Creole Languages and Their Speakers. More details can be found at the Cornell Chronicle.
Heidi Harley (PhD ‘95) and Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty) have just had an article on the Syntax of Ditransitives published by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. The article is available online at the link. Congratulations Heidi and Shigeru!
Michel DeGraff (faculty) will be giving two talks at the University of Hong Kong this week.
Linguistics and Social Justice: De-Colonizing Creole Studies
The sustainable (re)vitalization of local languages is indispensable for education, development and social justice: The MIT-Haiti Initiative as case study
The first is a special seminar, and the second is part of the Second International Conference on Documentary Linguistics - Asian Perspectives (DLAP-2). Abstracts and the program can be found by following the links.
Over the weekend, Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 27 was held at the University of Maryland. On May 11, there was a workshop on Meaning and Distribution at UMD as well. MIT was represented at both!
Pranav Anand (PhD ‘06) was an invited speaker at SALT, and spoke on Facts, alternatives, and alternative facts, and Beth Levin (PhD ‘83 EECS) was an invited speaker at the workshop, and spoke on The Elasticity of Verb Meaning Revisited. In addition, MIT had several students, alumni, and faculty presenting both talks and posters.
Announcing the 2017 award recipients, Dean Nobles remarked, “This prize honors those instructors in our School who have demonstrated outstanding success in teaching our undergraduate and graduate students. These great educators, who are nominated by students themselves, have made a difference in the lives of our remarkable students.”
That Donca should receive an award for fantastic educators should come as no surprise to those of us lucky enough to have taken one of her classes. David Pesetsky notes, “The most important point is indeed the fact that Donca’s students themselves nominated her for this award — honoring one of our most distinguished colleagues and most devoted teachers.”
Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) and Michel DeGraff have recently published a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar. The chapter, titled A Null Theory of Creole Formation Based on Universal
Grammar argues that Creoles emerge from principles of UG as all other languages do, and thus can provide important insight into both contact induced and diachronic language change.
Michel writes:
Enoch and I propose an analysis of Creole formation that goes against the grain of the most popular classic textbook dogmas which cast Creoles as the “exceptional” outcome of a Pidgin-to-Creole cycle. Our is a straightforward theory of “creolization,” without any “pidgin” phase and without any other creolization-specific stipulation. That is, ours is a “Null theory of Creole formation.”
An online version of the chapter is available here.
Faculty member Michel DeGraff shares with us the news of the opening of the first dual-language Haitian Creole-English elementary school in Boston, as reported in The Atlantic:
“I think this is a great example of linguistics and education for social justice—-and an antidote against “othering” in our political era. I particularly like these headlines from the Atlantic: ”Dual-language programs universally focus on both language and culture, giving students who come from that given culture an opportunity to see their own histories prioritized by their schools and giving other students an opportunity to develop a deep appreciation for people who are different from them.”“
Michel DeGraff published the article “Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn” in the UNESCO journal PROSPECTS (Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment). The article is available here.
Shigeru Miyagawa’s most recent book, Agreement Beyond Phi has just been published by the MIT Press as an LI Monograph. Building on his previous monograph Why Agree? Why Move?, this book investigates agreement in so-called agreementless languages in arguing for a unified view of grammatical features that includes both phi-features and discourse configurational features.
“Miyagawa opens up formal syntax to include discourse-related phenomena and thus contributes to the building of a new research agenda.”—Liliane Haegeman
Michel DeGraff published an article on ‘linguistic apartheid’ in Haiti, sharing his concerns about human rights, education and development in his native Haiti. The article is published in both English and Kreyòl.
Faculty Shigeru Miyagawa is featured on MIT News’ top page: his work on language evolution inspired a musical piece, which premiered in NYC’s World Financial Center. The full article is here.
Faculty Michel DeGraff is excited to teach the first “Kreyòl Studies” course for Boston Public School teachers. The first session of a 5-session 10-hour series was this past Thursday, November 17, 2016. Here are excerpts from the course description:
“This course is to provide historical, cultural and linguistic background to fourteen Boston Public School (BPS) teachers who will support BPS’s Kreyòl/English Dual Language Program and other educators who support students of Haitian descent. Why are such Dual Language Programs so crucially important for the future success of all of our children? What do BPS teachers need to know about the linguistic, cultural, social and political backgrounds of their students from Haiti? How can the cultural and linguistic assets of these children contribute to their wellbeing and that of society at large? In answering these questions, we will mine history and linguistics for lessons that may help improve education for and about Haitians in Haiti and in the diaspora—and eventually set up models toward improving education for all children.
….
Our asking and answering these and related questions will bear on the importance of a Kreyòl/English Dual Language Program in the Boston Public School system. Such Dual Language programs can, in many ways, be a game changer as they help create, locally, citizens with global understanding of history, culture and language—citizens that can use local cultural and linguistic assets in confronting and solving global challenges.”
“Song of the Human” is a composition by the British composer Pete Wyer, who was inspired by faculty member Shigeru Miyagawa’s work on the connections between human language and bird song. The premiere in the World Financial Center was on October 12, 2016. The composer and Shigeru were guests on a WNYC public radio show; the full segment is available online. Shigeru shared two pictures from the premiere.
Michel DeGraff contributed to a report by the Linguistic Society of America on the protection of children’s rights in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is a report being compiled by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. DeGraff’s comments are formulated in the context of his work as director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative and as the representative of the LSA to the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences.
Faculty member Kai von Fintel just returned from ten days in Europe, where he talked about “The absence of certain ambiguities in some contexts” at the University of Tübingen, spent two days working on a secret project or two with fellow faculty member and co-author Sabine Iatridou, who is on sabbatical in Amsterdam, gave a public lecture on “If” and taught a class on “How to do conditional things with words” at the University of Manchester.
Faculty member Michel Degraff sends this article on the MIT-Haiti Initiative (available in both English and Kreyòl) published in the MIT Faculty Newsletter, with the following blurb:
In this article, Prof. Haynes Miller (MIT Mathematics Department) reports on his engagement in the MIT-Haiti Initiative. This report is timely in light of current recovery efforts in Haiti after the devastation caused by Hurricane Matthew. The sort of projects described in this article is what Haiti needs the most: education projects that can, at long last, preempt the man-made disasters that have been accruing, on top of natural disasters, in 2 centuries of neo-colonial exclusion, mis-education and mis-management in Haiti.
The Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) is hosting the UNESCO-sponsored conference Territorialities and the Humanities (October 4—7). Michel DeGraff is one of the invited speakers and he will give a talk at the panel ‘Identities and Languages’. The conference is also part of the celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais.
Norvin Richard’s recently published Contiguity Theory was featured on MIT News!
But exactly why do languages differ in this way? Linguists who study syntax have catalogued myriad distinguishing rules and patterns among world languages — without necessarily explaining why such differences exist. But now Richards has a new explanation, detailed in his book, “Contiguity Theory,” recently published by the MIT Press.
The answer, Richards claims, is sound. That is, the sounds of languages have hugely influenced their syntax. To a greater degree than has been the case, Richards believes, we need to integrate phonology — the study of sound in language — with syntax. Then we can better grasp why languages have their specific rules.
“The claim I’m making in this book is that our explanations should start with a careful explanation of the phonology and morphology,” Richards says. When studying syntax, he says, “We’ve been missing the deepest level of explanation by insisting that we not pay attention to morphology and phonology.”
We take up three Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Japanese, Wh-MO plain negative indefinites, exceptive XP-sika, and certain minimizing indefinites, such as rokuna N (‘any decent N’). Although these three NSIs behave differently, we demonstrate that the two traditional NSI categories of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are sufficient for characterizing these items. We argue that Wh-MO and XP-sika are NCIs, thus they contain a neg feature ([uneg]) which enters into (upward) agreement with its corresponding an uninterpretable feature ([ineg]). The third NSI, rokuna N, is an NPI. Two issues arise with XP-sika. First, it has an inherent focus feature, which distinguishes it from the other two. Second, this focus feature is syntactically active – meaning that movement is forced – only for the argument XP-sika. We argue that these properties of XP-sika associated with focus are independent of NP-sika as an NSI, and should be dealt with as an overall property of Japanese being a discourse configurational language. We introduce a case-theoretic solution to how focus becomes syntactically active solely with argument XP-sika.
We have several items of summer news from students and faculty:
For the second year in a row, a group from MIT visited the University of Brasilia (August 15-18) for minicourses and invited talks in connection with their annual Congresso Internacional de Estudos Linguísticos (CIEL)— this year, joined by some distinguished alums! This year’s participants were MIT faculty Adam Albright and David Pesetsky, fifth-year grad student Juliet Stanton, and alums Karlos Arregi (PhD ‘02) of the University of Chicago and Andrew Nevins (PhD ‘05) of University College London. More details here: http://www.lefog.pro.br/?page_id=1429
‘Song of the human’ by the British composer Pete M. Wyer composed under a commission from Arts Brookfield is premiering in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in New York City on October 12, with an installation to follow starting on October 15. One source of the idea for this original orchestral and choir piece came from MIT faculty Shigeru Miyagawa’s Integration Hypothesis. More details about the composition and the event here: http://www.artsbrookfield.com/event/songofthehuman/
Faculty Michel Degraff reports: “During two weeks in June (June 13-24), the MIT-Haiti Initiative team was in the town of Limonade, in Northern Haiti. In collaboration with the Campus Henry Christophe, Limonade, of Haiti’s State University (“CHCL-UEH”), we had a 4-day workshop on Kreyòl-based and active-learning of science and mathematics. The workshop was attended by 43 professors in math, physics, chemistry and biology. We also spent a week of intensive consultation with CHCL-UEH faculty and administration, working on improvement of curricula, active-learning materials and interactive pedagogy in science, mathematics and Haitian Creole. One outcome was the creation of a teaching-and-learning center at CHCL-UEH. This work was funded, in part, by CHCL-UEH, the National Science Foundation and by the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.” More information about the collaboration and pictures can be found here and here.
Michel Degraff also attended the 2016 Meeting of the Society of Caribbean Linguistics, held Aug. 1-6, 2016 at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where he gave a keynote talk, “A Workshop on Language & Liberation: The MIT-Haiti Initiative as case study of ‘Caribbean SPEAKERS to the world,” and took part in a panel on “The Linguist as Public Intellectual.” Michel adds that he “also had the opportunity to discuss with authorities at Jamaica’s Ministry of Education on the importance of Jamaican Creole for improving education outcomes in Jamaica.” Pictures of the conference can be found here, and interviews given by Michel can be found here and here.
Fourth-year grad student Kenyon Branan and faculty Norvin Richards presented at The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop held at UMass Amherst July 29-31. Kenyon’s poster was entitled “A prosodic approach to intervention,” while Norvin gave an invited talk on “Contiguity theory and pied-piping”.
The MIT-Haiti Initiative, under the leadership of Michel DeGraff (MIT Linguistics), is announcing its seventh MIT-Haiti workshop on active learning of STEM in Kreyòl. This workshop is the second that’s co-organized by the State University of Haiti (“UEH”), and it will be hosted, June 13-16, 2016, on the Campus Henry Christophe of UEH at Limonade. Deadline for registration is this Friday, May 27. The announcement is online at: http://bit.ly/1TCYcd4
This weekend, the department held a conference on the occasion of Ken Wexler’s retirement, to honor and celebrate his foundational, lasting contributions to the field. The program can be found here. You can read messages of congratulations from his colleagues and students and also add your own here.
Michel DeGraff participated in a panel on education as part of the launching this weekend (April 28-29, 2016) of the City University of New York’s Haitian Studies Institute, to be hosted at Brooklyn College. Michel’s presentation for the event was titled:
Haitian Studies => Solutions to Haiti’s “language & education problem”.
Some photos from the event, including the program, are available on Michel’s Facebook page.
Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics.
This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights
into the sound patterns of English and Russian, ideas about the nature of
metered verse, ways of thinking about phonological features and rules, and
models for argumentation about phonological description and phonological
theory. But he has had an equally profound influence through his role as
a teacher and mentor, and this personal influence has not been limited to
students who follow closely in his intellectual and methodological footsteps.
It has been just as strong—or stronger—among researchers who disagree
with his specific ideas and even his general approach, or who work in entirely
different subfields. This appreciation is a synthesis of reflections from
colleagues and former students whom he has formed, informed, and inspired
Heartfelt congratulations to our colleague Sabine Iatridou, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Crete last Wednesday — a great honor!! See the link for the official announcement. Here is the announcement of the event by the university, and here is a link to the coverage in the local paper.
