Whamit!

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 Newman was an invited speaker at a workshop about Locality across the board in 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).

1. 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:

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.”

You can read more about Irene, her achievements, and the prize, in this article from MIT News: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-linguist-irene-heim-shares-schock-prize-logic-philosophy-1016

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. 

Congratulations to Michael Kenstowicz, whose article surveying (and entitled) “Generative phonology” has just been published in the second edition of Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics edited by Keith Brown (Elsevier)!

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.

Last weekend, David Pesetsky presented a paper entitled “A double life for complement if-clauses revisited” at the Fourth International Conference on Adverbial Clauses at the Free University, Berlin. Alum (PhD 1998) Susi Wurmbrand (University of Salzburg) also presented at the conference, with a paper entitled “A syntactic approach to tense in complementation and beyond”.

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.

A couple of pieces in recent MIT News featuring department members: 

First-year MITILI student Soledad Chango taught an exciting language course on her native language, Kichwa/Quechua during the IAP. MIT News covered the language course here: https://news.mit.edu/2024/investigating-and-preserving-quechua-0228

MIT News also recently highlighted a paper on linguistic and Alzheimer’s disease published by faculty Suzanne Flynn and research affiliate Barbara Lust, among other co-authors. Read more here: https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-cognition-changes-before-dementia-0229

Last Saturday (March 1), faculty David Pesetsky presented a talk titled “Is there an LLM challenge for linguistics? Or a linguistics challenge for LLMs?” at a one-day workshop Magdalen College, University of Oxford. The workshop entitled “Does ChatGPT know language as humans do?” was organized by our own recent alum Danfeng Wu. 

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! 

Congratulations to Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou! Their article, Publication of Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking, was published in Linguistics and Philosophy. It also received coverage on MIT News! 

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

This weekend, the third North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics (NACIL 3) took place at UCLA, and two of the talks were from our community.  First-year student Taieba Tawakoli gave a talk entitled “Ra in intransitive constructions in Dari”, and Amir Anvari gave an invited talk entitled “On (Persian) ordinals”.

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.

On October 14, a guest essay by our very own Michel DeGraff appeared in the New York Times: “As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”. The essay details in a personal and powerful way the effects of language policy on Haitian education and identity, and advocates for the types of change that are promoted by the MIT-Haiti Initiative. Congratulations, Michel!

MIT News has a nice article about our colleague Michel DeGraff’s having been elected a Fellow of the LSA, as previously reported by WHAMIT!.

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:

https://news.mit.edu/2022/shigeru-miyagawa-syntax-treetops-0503

Congratulations to faculty member Shigeru Miyagawa, whose paper “Revisiting Fitch and Hauser’s Observation That Tamarin Monkeys Can Learn Combinations Based on Finite-State Grammar” has been published in Frontiers in Psychology! The abstract is below:

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.

Our colleague Athulya Aravind has been honored by MIT as one of 15 faculty singled out for their outstanding and utterly crucial support of our graduate students during the pandemic period.  Read more here: https://news.mit.edu/2021/fifteen-mit-faculty-honored-committed-caring-1022.  To quote the key passage:

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!  

A new paper by alum Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018) and faculty colleague Athulya Aravind (also PhD 2018) has just been published in the journal Natural Language Semantics, entitled “The nature of the semantic stimulus: the acquisition of every as a case study”.  (It’s open access, so please click on the link to read!)  Here’s the abstract:

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.

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”:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775383 

Our colleague Michel DeGraff’s ABRALIN lecture from June 14 is now available to watch and ponder.

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.

Congratulations to Sabine Iatridou for being named one of the 2020 class of Guggenheim Fellows! You can read more at the Guggenheim site and in the Boston Globe.

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:

https://www.nuhumanrights.com/conference-2020

More news from the January break. David Pesetsky taught a January 10-17 course (“Proseminar in Grammatik-theorie”) at the University of Vienna on the topic of  ”Theories of clause size and their implications”.

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!

We have some summer news to share with you:

• The CreteLing Summer School took place in July at the University of Crete in Rethymnon, and several MIT faculty (and alumni) taught courses:
  
  • Adam Albright - Advanced Morphology: Syncretism and Paradigm Structure
  • Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou - The Linguistics of Desire
  • Sabine Iatridou - Introduction to Syntax
  • Shigeru Miyagawa - Language and Animal Communication in Evolution
  • Donca Steriade - Introduction to Phonology

The summer school was attended by many MIT students as well: Rafael Abramovitz (4th year), Daniel Asherov (2nd year), Tanya Bondarenko (2nd year), Colin Davis (4th year), Ömer Demirok (5th year), Verena Hehl (4th year), Maša Močnik (4th year), Elise Newman (3rd year), Frank Staniszewski (3rd year) and Stan Zompi (2nd year). Rafael, Daniel, Tanya and Ömer also served as course TAs. Check out nice photos from the event, such as this one below, on the summer school’s Facebook page.

• 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.

• Conference presentations:
  • Neil Banerjee (3rd year) presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association (May 30-June 1) on CARP in Kinyarwanda, and at CHRONOS 13 (June 4-June 6) on the temporal orientation of necessity modals.
  • 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!”.
  • Filipe Kobayashi (2nd year) and Sherry Chen (2nd year) presented joint work on distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese at the student session of the North American Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), held at CMU in late June. Maša Močnik also attended the summer school. 
  • 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.

Michel DeGraff recently gave two presentations:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Adam Albright
Noam Chomsky
Michel DeGraff
Kai von Fintel
Edward Flemming
Suzanne Flynn
Danny Fox
Martin Hackl
James Harris
Irene Heim
Sabine Iatridou
Samuel Jay Keyser
Shigeru Miyagawa
Wayne O’Neil
David Pesetsky
Norvin Richards
Donca Steriade
Ken Wexler

UPDATE January 16:

MIT faculty in Philosophy (our sister program within the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy) strongly support the above statement from MIT faculty in Linguistics:

Sylvain Bromberger
E.J. Green
Sally Haslanger
Justin Khoo
Vann McGee
Tamar Schapiro
Kieran Setiya
Judy Thomson
Stephen Yablo

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.

On Friday, Donca Steriade was honored as a Professor Honoris Causa by the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bucharest. Congratulations Donca!

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.

Shigeru Miyagawa’s article, “Integration hypothesis: A parallel model of language development in evolution,” just appeared in Evolution of the Brain, Cognition, and Emotion in Vertebrates (S. Watanabe, M. A. Hofman, T. Shimizu, eds.), Springer, pp. 225-247.

Congratulations Shigeru!

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.

Talks

• Athulya Aravind (5th year) & Martin Hackl (faculty) - Against a unified account of obligatory trigger effects: Evidence from acquisition
• Moshe Bar-Lev & Danny Fox (faculty) - Universal free choice and innocent inclusion
• Matthew Mandelkern (5th year, Philosophy), Jérémy Zehr, Jacopo Romoli & Florian Schwarz - Asymmetry in presupposition projection: The case of conjunction
• Yasutada Sudo (PhD ‘12) & Jacopo Romoli - Lifetime effects as presuppositional scalar strengthening

Posters

• Rachel Dudley, Meredith Rowe, Valentine Hacquard (PhD ‘06) and Jeffrey Lidz - Discovering the factivity of know from its distribution
• Patrick Elliott, Andreea Nicolae and Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98) - Who and what do who and what range over cross-linguistically?
• Yasutada Sudo (PhD ‘12) - It’s not always redundant to assert what is presupposed
• Lyn Tieu, Robert Pasternak (current visitor), Philippe Schlenker (PhD ‘99) and Emmanuel Chemla - Co-speech gestures: Experimental evidence for projection and local accommodation

Our very own Donca Steriade is among the recipients of the 2017 James A. and Ruth Levitan Teaching Awards in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

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.”

Congratulations Donca!

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

Congratulations Shigeru!

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has a great post up about the David Pesetsky@60 workshop! The post can be seen here.

Michel DeGraff participated in a panel, with Ann Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz, at the 2017 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences. The panel was about Leveraging Linguistics for Broadening Participation in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM). Michel’s abstract is available here, and photos are available on Michel’s Facebook wall.

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.”

More details can be found here.

“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.

The report can be accessed here.

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.

A new Brain Research article is in press with co-authors that include visiting scholar Miwako Hisagi, faculty Shigeru Miyagawa, and two alumni, Hadas Kotek and Ayaka Sugawara: “Second-Language Learning Effects on Automaticity of Speech Processing of Japanese Phonetic Contrasts: An MEG study”

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.”

You can read the full article here.

Congratulations to faculty Shigeru Miyagawa, whose paper (co-authored with Nobuaki Nishioka and Hedde Zeijlstra) Negative sensitive items and the discourse-configurational nature of Japanese has been published in Glossa! Here’s the abstract:

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.

• Fifth-year grad student Sam Zukoff attended the 35th Annual East Coast Indo-European Conference, held in Athens, GA June 6-8, where he presented a talk entitled “The phonology of Anatolian reduplication” with co-author Anthony D. Yates (UCLA).

• 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”.

Sabine Iatridou taught at the New York Institute (organized by Prof. John Bailyn of Stony Brook University - hence the “New York” part) in St. Petersburg. David Pesetsky taught a one-week class on Clause Size (and the theory of “Exfoliation”) at a summer school hosted by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Donca Steriade spent July as the Karl-Brugmann-Fellow in Leipzig, Germany, and taught a course on “Cyclicity, Correspondence, Exponence: a unified analysis of cyclic and related phenomena”. Who was Karl Brugmann: more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Brugmann.

Our colleague Norvin Richard’s (extraordinarily interesting and far-reaching) new monograph “Contiguity Theory” has just been published by MIT Press!!

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

Michel DeGraff contributed a commentary that appeared this week in the Boston Review, on the topic “What is education for?”.

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.

Read Mark Liberman’s paper about Morris Halle in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Here is the abstract:

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.

Faculty member Michel DeGraff gave a 2-hour keynote workshop at the Third Bremen Conference on Language and Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.

Our warmest congratulations to Adam Albright on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor!

Very good news, not about linguistics but about life, from our colleague Jay.

Is Haitian a “French patois”?

Read Michel DeGraff’s answer to the New Yorker (Haitian version, original full-length version in English).

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.”

Read more here.

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>.

Kai is the Linguistic Society of America’s gold star linguist of the month (so to speak)! Link here.

The 9th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics was held in Stuttgart, September 24-26. Professor Kai von Fintel was an invited speaker and gave a presentation entitled How to do conditional things with words and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore; Phd 2014) talked about The semantics of the Mandarin focus marker shì.

Precision by Kai: “I wasn’t really talking to an empty auditorium.”

Dear WHAMIT,

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:

http://resourcecenters2015.videohall.com/posters/519

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.

Thank you,

Michel DeGraff

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.”

Read more on the webiste of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (SHASS).

Nature interviews Chomsky and Miyagawa for a program on primate communication and human language. The interview is available on Nature Podcast.

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.