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.
This video is a short overview of the science and data that show why children’s native languages are necessary for learning how to read. In the case of Haiti, Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”), as the native language of all Haitians, should be the cornerstone of literacy projects.
In the first part of this video, Prof. Stanislas Dehaene at the Collège de France provides an overview of findings from neuroscience about “pillars” in the human brain that help us learn how to read. In the second part of he video, Michel DeGraff analyzes the implications of these findings for Haiti, especially regarding how Haitian children are learning (or not learning) how to read. One conclusion is that Kreyòl is an indispensable tool for learning to read in Haiti, though it is, by and large, not used as such, with most children being taught in a language that they do not know, namely French. Such efforts to teach Haitian children in French are, by and large, unsuccessful—-unsurprisingly so, given the neuroscience that is explained in this video.
Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about language evolution to appear in January, 2016 from MIT Press. Here is an overview of the questions covered by the book (from the MIT Press website):
We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language.
Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals.
Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin’s idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
“Six veteran educators from Haiti — two biologists, two physicists, and two mathematicians — were on campus recently to work closely with MIT faculty to develop and hone Kreyòl-based, technology-enhanced pedagogical tools for STEM education. This interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange was the most recent effort of the MIT-Haiti initiative, founded in 2010 by MIT professor of linguistics Michel DeGraff.”
Punchcard from a 1978 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship that allowed Noam Chomsky to refine and expand his theories of universal grammar. That was the year he spent at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, which led to his 1981 book “Lectures on Government & Binding”.
A new addition to our departmental website collects a number of papers, both published and unpublished, as well as previously unavailable teaching materials by our legendary colleague and dear friend, the late Ken Hale (1934-2001). To quote from the introduction to the page (and please note our interest in adding more materials):
This page collects many of Ken Hale’s papers as well as some of his unpublished teaching materials that were preserved by his students. The collection includes some papers that are well-known but not very accessible, as well as others that will be new to most readers — along with hectographed handouts from the 1970s and marvels of early word processing that should bring a smile of reminiscence to students and colleagues who were lucky enough to attend Ken’s classes or public lectures.
“We are making these materials available so that the work that went into these papers and handouts will not be lost to the communities of linguists and speakers that Ken’s work so enriched. These papers do not merely document a wonderful man, a great career and a stunningly productive era in the history of linguistics. They also contain ideas, discoveries and puzzles that Ken himself did not develop further that still have the power to excite — to advance the study of human language and languages, and the intellectual wealth that they embody for their speakers.
“We are grateful to Ken’s children Ezra and Caleb for their permission to organize this site, as well as to Ken’s co-authors represented here. We are eager to add to this collection. If you have additional materials to contribute, please contact <see site for email address>.
The MIT-Haiti Initiative has produced a 3-minute video on our efforts to promote active learning of STEM in Haiti. This video is part of an online showcase organized by the National Science Foundation. WHAMIT readers can help MIT and Haiti win a “Public Choice” award by voting for this video—-i.e., by sharing or tweeting the video that will be available on Monday, May 11, at 8AM, at this link:
By voting (between Monday, May 11 and May 15—early and often!), the WHAMIT community can help MIT and Haiti move ahead together, so teachers and students in all social classes in Haiti can do science and math better, in their native Kreyòl with state-of-the-art technology for active learning. That way, Haiti will, indeed, get on the much awaited path of development, with the participation and for the benefit of *ALL* her children. And this breakthrough will also serve as an example for the rest of the world to see that local languages, coupled with technology, can have global impact in improving access and quality in education.
The most comprehensive survey of rhyme ever made reveals a new possibility for one of the essential units of language.
“The syllable has long been considered to be the basic building block of language in the area of rhythm. MIT’s Donca Steriade now believes that a different element — known as the ‘interval’ — may be the basic unit of rhythm in human language.”
Laurent Lamothe (Former Prime Minister of Haiti, 2012-2014) at MIT Sloan School of Management on April 13, 2015, discussing how the MIT-Haiti Initiative is opening up access to quality education in Haiti—-thus, dismantling Haiti’s linguistic apartheid and its barriers against development. The video can be watched here.
A new article co-authored by Shigeru Miyagawa was published last week in Frontiers in Psychology, “The precedence of syntax in the rapid emergence of human language in evolution as defined by the integration hypothesis” (Vitor Nóbrega and Shigeru Miyagawa).
The University of Connecticut celebrates Irene Heim!
The UConn Logic group is proud to announce its annual logic workshop. The workshop is organized around a researcher whose work has had a significant and lasting influence on the field. The remaining talks, invited and selected, will be given by critics or contributors to the field who were influenced by the keynote speakers’s work.
2015: Going Heim. Linguistic Meaning Between Structure and Use.
Irene Heim is among the most influential scholars in the study of natural-language semantics and pragmatics. Several of her lasting contributions to the field were contained or foreshadowed in her dissertation “The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases” (UMass Amherst, 1982). There, Heim demonstrated that Montagovian semantics and Chomskyan syntax, two schools of thought which had developed independently and were deemed at cross-purposes by many, could in fact be unified to mutual benefit. Heim’s dissertation is also one of the first fully developed accounts in what would come to be known as dynamic semantics. With this workshop, we will celebrate Heim’s recent 60th birthday and use the occasion to reflect on the transformative nature of her early work, its continued influence over the years since, and the present state and trajectory of the field of formal semantics and pragmatics.
Location: TBA
Date: May 2-3, 2015
Keynote: Irene Heim (MIT)
Confirmed Speakers:
David Beaver (Texas)
Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart/Texas)
Barbara Partee (UMass)
Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)
In January, the 5th MIT-Haiti Workshop on Active Learning in STEM was held in Haiti. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Vijay Kumar (Senior Strategic Advisor, MIT Office of Digital Learning) and Professor Michel Degraff have been leading a team of MIT faculty and staff engaged in helping improve STEM education in Haiti through the use of open education resources and digital technology for active learning all in Haitian Creole. This is the first time ever that such resources and pedagogies are being produced and tested in Haitian Creole—Haiti’s national language—with the help of a valiant team of MIT educators and staff, alongside educators and administrators in Haiti. This 5th workshop was the most successful to date with some 80 participants, and it was co-hosted by Haiti’s Ministry of National Education.
There’s also a moving video of a group of Haitian artists donating to the MIT-Haiti Initiative a fresco that they painted during the workshop.
The slides that Michel used to introduce the workshop are available on his Facebook page. There’s an English version of these slides for a keynote speech Michel gave on January 4, 2015, for a Haitian Independence Day gala in Randolph, Massachusetts.
And here’s an article, in French, about the workshop.
The Haitian Creole Academy for the promotion of Haitian Creole was officially inaugurated in Port-au-Prince last week. Professor Michel DeGraff is one of the first 33 members of the Academy, along with two other MIT-Haiti colleagues: Nicolas André of CreoleTrans in Miami and Pierre-Michel Chéry in Port-au-Prince.
Michel DeGraff was also invited to be part of a recently created National Commission on Curricular Reform (see this article in the newspaper Haiti Libre).
Below are more news, photos and videos of the Akademi Kreyòl (some but not all of it in Kreyòl!):
Michel DeGraff has received the “Award for Excellence” from the Haitian Studies Association at their 26th annual conference at Notre Dame University this weekend. (Read the citation in the photos below.) Great news, Michel!
Last week, we celebrated Irene Heim’s 60th birthday. On this occasion, a Festschrift was offered to Irene by some MIT students, faculty and alumni to honor her great contribution to the field of formal semantics. Happy birthday, Irene!
(We do think this merits a special late-summer issue of Whamit!)
We are overjoyed to announce that our colleague Donca Steriade has been named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Congratulations, Donca!!!
The just-announced class of 2015 LSA Fellows includes two other MIT PhD alums, in addition to Donca (PhD 1982): C.-T. James Huang of Harvard (MIT PhD 1982) (Donca’s classmate, in fact) and Thomas Wasow of Stanford (MIT PhD 1972). Of the 110 LSA Fellows named since the honor was initiated in 2006, 30 - slightly more than a quarter - are MIT PhDs. Donca is the fifth member of the MIT faculty to be named an LSA Fellow, joining her colleagues Irene Heim and David Pesetsky and Institute Professors emeritus Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky.
Congratulations to Donca, Jim and Tom! Congratulations as well to the other newly named 2015 Fellows: John Baugh, Lyle Campbell, Andries Coetzee, Pat Keating, Donna Jo Napoli, Robin Queen, and Bernard Spolsky
