Whamit!

Shigeru Miyagawa’s new article, “A feature-inheritance approach to root phenomena and parametric variation”, has just appeared in the June issue of Lingua. It is jointly authored with Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández (University of Seville). The article compares topic constructions in Japanese, Spanish, and English.

While we were trudging through snow, Norvin traveled to UCLA this week, where he gave a colloquium on “Comtiguity and Pied-Piping”.

We are delighted to be able to publicly announce that Roger Schwarzschild will be joining the MIT Linguistics faculty starting this Fall as Professor of Linguistics.

Roger received his PhD from UMass Amherst in 1991. He has taught at Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and since 1995 has been a member of the Linguistics faculty at Rutgers. Roger is one of the most creative and brilliant semanticists in the world. He has made profound contributions in many areas, including pluralities, focus, the semantics of indefinites, and most recently measure terms and comparatives. Much of his work is also devoted to the ways in which semantics interacts with other aspects of language, including pragmatics, syntax and phonology. Roger is known as one of the best explainers in the field: a great speaker and dedicated teacher. We consider ourselves lucky beyond words that Roger will be joining us, and look forward to welcoming him to MIT next Fall!

Heartiest congratulations to our colleague Michel DeGraff on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor!!

David Pesetsky and his recent LI monograph on Russian case morphology were featured in an MIT News Office article by Peter Dizikes, Cold case: A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian.

David Pesetsky gave a talk on language and music at Rome’s 2014 Festival of Sciences on January 26, based on his joint work with Jonah Katz (PhD 2010). Noam Chomsky was also in attendance, giving talks about politics and linguistics on January 24 and 25. More information here and here.

David Pesetsky’s book “Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories” has just been published in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs.

We are delighted to share the news that Danny Fox will be returning to MIT as a full-time faculty member next Fall, after three years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during which he helped build Hebrew University’s groundbreaking new Language, Logic and Cognition Center. Welcome back, Danny!!

Visiting Scholars

• Gaja Jarosz (Yale University) studies language learning from a computational perspective. Her research employs computational and statistical methods to develop models of phonological acquisition and to examine the primary learning data and its properties. One major focus of her recent work is the development of more robust computational models of phonological learning that make fewer simplifying assumptions about the nature of the input, with a particular emphasis on statistical models that can effectively cope with hidden structure, noise, and other sources of ambiguity.
• Masashi Nomura (Chukyo University) works on case and agreement, clausal architecture, locality, cyclicity and optionality.
• Dennis Ott (University of Groningen) works on theoretical and experimental syntax, in particular Ā movement, locality, ellipsis and morphosyntax. He also works on the formal foundations of linguistic theory and the philosophy of language and linguistics.
• Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona) works on cognitive science, language and mind, biological foundations of language, language evolution, judgment and decision-making.
• Gwang Rak Son (Kyungpook National University) works on the interaction between syntactic structure and prosodic structure (focus, topic, wh–questions, intervention effects, quantifiers, etc.); syntactic theory within generative grammar, including, but not being limited to, minimalism; interpretational mechanisms related to specificity in English, Asian, and Slavic languages; scrambling phenomena of East Asian, Germanic, and Slavic languages; neuroimaging of syntax and syntactic processing (ERP/EEG effects of syntactic processing); comparative syntax and comparative studies of language development; and the neuroscience of phonetics and phonology.
• Masayuki Wakayama (Paichi Shukutoku University) says: “My research concerns how language variation should be explained theoretically with a special focus on transitivity and word order variation. In addition, I am also interested in a correlation between human development and language evolution.”
• Wendy Wu (Shanghai International Studies University) works on the relationship between foreign language production and perception, using ERP and behavioral investigations of cross-linguistic perception; production and perception of different lexical strata in Japanese; phonology-morphosyntax interactions in Makassar languages (Austronesian languages of South Sulawesi, Indonesia); the quality and position of vowels inserted in loanwords and vowel epenthesis in Arabic dialects.

Visiting Student

• Eduard Artés Cuenca (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)’s research explores the trade-off between phonology and morphology. Specifically, it focuses on “morphological epenthesis”, i.e., a direct relation between morphology and the phonological content of epenthesis. The data analyzed come mainly from Catalan, Italian and Spanish.

David Pesetsky has been honored with a Professor Honoris Causa degree at the University of Bucharest, while visiting to give an invited talk at the 15th Annual Conference of the English Department. A photo of the happy event, and a picture of the (impressively Latin) diploma are below. Felicitări, David!

A new paper by Ted Gibson with Leon Bergen and Steve Piantadosi called “Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation” has appeared in PNAS.  If the paper itself is not accessible from your location, you can read an abstract here and some discussion here.

Donca Steriade will give a talk at Oxford University on Monday, May 20 (today), at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, entitled “Vowel-to-Vowel Intervals as Rhythmic Units: Evidence From the Typology of Rhyming Domains”.

An article by Martin Hackl on the Syntax-Semantics Interface has appeared in a special June issue of the journal Lingua.  The purpose of the special issue, as summarized by its editor, Luigi Rizzi, is “to present some fundamental ideas and empirical results of modern syntactic research, and make them available to the scientific communities interested in the study of language as a cognitive capacity” - an especially important task at a time when interest in linguistic questions is increasing within cognitive science.

The weekend before last, David Pesetsky journeyed to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he was a keynote speaker at the 22nd annual conference on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL 22).  In his talk, entitled “Dvuxètapny case assignment and Richards’ conjecture: the Tangkic language Russian, and the Slavic language Lardil”, he argued that the proposal of a deep kinship between Russian and Lardil case marking proposed by Norvin Richards in the article blurbed here runs even deeper.  FASL 22 was brilliantly organized by our own Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007), with a great team of McMaster students.

Last Wednesday, the department said our enthusiastic but tearful good-bye to Maziar Toosarvandani, who has been an active, much appreciated member of the department for the past two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow — and is now taking up an Assistant Professor position at UC Santa Cruz (as reported here). The grad students presented Maziar with two books about MIT and the Stata Center to remember us by, sentimental speeches were made, N. Paiute nominals and the Persian ezafe construction were discussed, and lots of great food was consumed!

photo credit: Snejana Iovtcheva

Ken Wexler’s recently-published work on grammar and autism was featured by the MIT news office.

Donca Steriade is at UC Berkeley this week, giving a trio of lectures on Greek, Latin, and Romance phonology. The first, given in their departmental colloquium series, is entitled “The role of free bases in cyclic phonology;” her second and third lectures discuss “The cycle without containment.”

On Friday, David Pesetsky delivered the 15th annual Pinkel Lecture at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at UPenn. He presented joint work with Jonah Katz on Language and music: same structures, different building blocks.

Maziar Toosarvandani, who has been an exciting presence in our department for the past two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, is concluding his fellowship this Spring, and has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. During his time at MIT, Maziar taught both semantics and syntax classes, a seminar on the syntax and semantics of the Iranian languages, and two undergraduate field methods (on Zazaki and Uyghur) - while continuing his own research on Southern Paiute. Congratulations on your new position, Maziar - we will miss you!!

A summary of Miyagawa, Berwick, and Okanoya’s Frontiers in Psychology article, “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language,” appeared in Science (March 8, 1132-1133). The brief piece was based on the news article Science carried on their news website.

Norvin Richards’ paper “Lardil ‘Case Stacking’ and the Timing of Case Assignment” has appeared in the latest issue of Syntax.  Highly recommended to everyone interested in case or the grammar of Lardil (Tangkic, Australia)!

A paper by Shigeru Miyagawa, Bob Berwick and Kazuo Okanoya on the evolution of syntax has just appeared in the journal Frontiers of Psychology. The paper, entitled “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language”, was featured in a write-up by the MIT News office, and can be found on-line on the Frontiers of Psychology website.

We propose a novel account for the emergence of human language syntax. Like many evolutionary innovations, language arose from the adventitious combination of two pre-existing, simpler systems that had been evolved for other functional tasks. The first system, Type E(xpression), is found in birdsong, where the same song marks territory, mating availability, and similar “expressive” functions. The second system, Type L(exical), has been suggestively found in non-human primate calls and in honeybee waggle dances, where it demarcates predicates with one or more “arguments,” such as combinations of calls in monkeys or compass headings set to sun position in honeybees. We show that human language syntax is composed of two layers that parallel these two independently evolved systems: an “E” layer resembling the Type E system of birdsong and an “L” layer providing words. The existence of the “E” and “L” layers can be confirmed using standard linguistic methodology. Each layer, E and L, when considered separately, is characterizable as a finite state system, as observed in several non-human species. When the two systems are put together they interact, yielding the unbounded, non-finite state, hierarchical structure that serves as the hallmark of full-fledged human language syntax. In this way, we account for the appearance of a novel function, language, within a conventional Darwinian framework, along with its apparently unique emergence in a single species.

Last weekend, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science took place in Boston, including several talks and panels devoted to linguistics, with MIT faculty and alumni well-represented.  Our own Michel DeGraff presented his paper “A Null Theory of Creole Formation” in a session on historical syntax that formed part of a day of sessions on the Biology and Evolution of Human Language, which also featured papers by Tony Kroch (PhD 1974) and Mark Liberman (PhD 1973).  Earlier in the day, a session on The Bases of Human Language in Human Biology included talks by Stephen Anderson (PhD 1968) and David Poeppel (BCS PhD 1995).

At the LSA Annual Meeting in January, David Pesetsky was officially inducted as a 2013 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. David joins an impressive group of MIT faculty who have been elected as LSA fellows, include Irene Heim (in 2012), Morris Halle (in 2006) and Noam Chomsky (in 2007). As David noted at this time last year, the list of fellows also includes four former faculty, and about a sizeable fraction of the current fellows (22 of 84) are alumni of our PhD program.

A photo of the momentous occasion can be found here.

Congratulations, David!!

Shigeru Miyagawa gave an invited talk at the Complementizer Agreement Workshop at Ghent University, “Surprising Agreements at C and T.” Other MIT affiliates giving invited talks were Ur Shlonsky, Dominique Sportiche, and Tim Stowell (the latter two at the Subjects Workshop that followed), October 17-19.

Congratulations to Michel DeGraff, the Principal Investigator on a $1m grant just awarded by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation for research to be conducted at MIT and in Haiti!  The five-year project, entitled Kreyol-based Cyberlearning for a New Perspective on the Teaching of STEM in local Languages,  ”addresses the issue of how to help those whose mother tongue is a language that does not include scientific and technological terminology to nonetheless learn STEM content and practices well. While research in linguistics and on how people learn suggests that learning in one’s native language will promote deeper learning than learning in another language, no research has specifically been done around this question when the native language does not include scientific and technological terminology.”

We extend our warmest welcome to the visiting scholars and students for this term:

Visiting Scholars

• Ana Arregui Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa
  Research in semantics and psycholinguistics.
• Marika Butskhrikidze Associate Professor, College FAMA
  Research in phonology and morphology.
• Maria Giavazzi Postdoc, Équipe de Neuropsychologie Interventionnelle at the Department of Cognitive Studies of ENS (Paris); MIT Linguistics PhD (2010)
  Research in phonology, phonetics, speech perception and in the cognitive neuroscience of language.
• Xinzhong Liu Assistant Professor, Dept. of Chinese Literature and Language, Jinan University
  Has an expertise in phonetics of Chinese dialects. His current research is to transcribe and describe the different sounds in Chinese dialects especially in Southern China.
• Tamina Stephenson Lecturer in Semantics, UMass Amherst; MIT Linguistics PhD (2007)
  Research in semantics and pragmatics.
• Hisao Tokizaki Professor, Sapporo University
  Research in syntax, phonology, morphology, and their interfaces.
• Asako Uchibori Professor, Nihon University
  Research in syntax (Japanese, Old Japanese, Japanese Sign Language) and language and the brain (first and second language processing experiments using fNIRS and fMRI).

Visiting Students

• Dominique Blok Graduate Student at University of Utrecht
  Research description: Will try to create a formal account of Dutch and Flemish conditionals with modal verbs in the antecedent (‘may’ and ‘must’ respectively) that also appear to require a modal verb in the consequent. Will also compare these to similar constructions in English, German, and French.
• Ivano Ciardelli PhD student at the Université de Bordeaux
  His research interests lie in between logic and language.
• Ana Lúcia Pessotto dos Santos PhD student at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)
  Her research focuses on the semantics of the imperfect and the interaction between modality, tense and aspect, including the pragmatic consequences its contribution brings to the meaning of modals and other verbs in PB.

Wayne O’Neil is spending three weeks in China (Mar 28-Apr 18), lecturing on linguistic theory and second-language acquisition, at Shandong University in Jinan for the most part, but also at Beijing Foreign Languages University.

Wayne taught at Shandong University fall term 1982-1983, and since June 1984, he has been an honorary professor of linguistics there. So this trip is a sort of homecoming or reunion.

Our very own Shigeru Miyagawa has won MIT’s President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) “for his contributions to the global OpenCourseWare and Open Education movements.” More here. Congratulations Shigeru!!

Today, February 27, is the publication date for Shigeru’s new book Case, Argument Structure and Word Order, in the Leading Linguists series published by Routledge. Here is a description of the book …

Over the years, a major strand of Miyagawa’s research has been to study how syntax, case marking, and argument structure interact. In particular, Miyagawa’s work addresses the nature of the relationship between syntax and argument structure, and how case marking and other phenomena help to elucidate this relationship. In this collection of new and revised pieces, Miyagawa expands and develops new analyses for numeral quantifier stranding, ditransitive constructions, nominative/genitive alternation, “syntactic” analysis of lexical and syntactic causatives, and historical change in the accusative case marking from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. All of these analyses demonstrate an intimate relation among case marking, argument structure, and word order.

… and here is a nice article about it from the MIT News Office (with one little reporting glitch — can you spot it?).

Congratulations, Shigeru!!

A recent New Yorker article on myths about “Brainstorming” end with a nice discussion of Building 20, and how linguistics got started at MIT. Our link will take you to the linguistics part of the article.

Nevertheless, he soon grew fond of the building, if only because he was able to tear down several room dividers. This allowed Halle to transform a field that was often hermetic, with grad students working alone in the library, into a group exercise, characterized by discussion, Socratic interrogation, and the vigorous exchange of clashing perspectives. “At Building 20, we made a big room, so that all of the students could talk to each other,” Halle remembers. “That’s how I wanted them to learn.

Omer Preminger gave a talk at New York University last Friday on “Agreement in Kichean and Zulu: Filtration vs. Strict Generativity”.

You heard it here first, when Irene was elected a 2012 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.  But now it’s official:

Congratulations, Irene!!

This one’s now official too. UMass Amherst may claim him with pride, but so do we!  At the LSA annual meeting in Portland, Oregon last month, Seth Cable (PhD 2007) received the LSA’s second annual Early Career Award. And here’s the (rather fuzzy) picture to prove it:

Congratulations Seth!!

Michel Degraff has been named one of two delegates from the Linguistic Society of America to the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Wayne O’Neil will present a paper at AAAS-2012 (17-20 February, Vancouver BC): “Two linguists, a teacher, and some middle-school students walk into a room”. Wayne’s paper is part of a three-paper symposium: “Teaching science through language” chaired by Anne Lobeck (Western Washington University).

In the latest issue of Technology Review/MIT News Magazine, Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky are featured in “The Office Next Door” by Peter Dizikes, about long working relationships among MIT faculty members.

At Ling50@MIT, Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky holding a 1988 picture of them holding a picture of them in 1953. Photo credit: Kai von Fintel.

Omer Preminger is off to Brussels, where he is one of three invited speakers at the 6th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics at the beginning of this week, devoted to the topic “Configurations of Agreement”.  Omer’s talk is entitled “Filters vs. Triggers: Deriving the obligatoriness of agreement “.  

Also presenting at the same conference will be postdoc Erik Schoorlemmer and former visiting faculty member Hedde Zeijlstra (who just flew home after joining us for Ling50 last week).

The 18th Amsterdam Colloquium is being held this week at the University of Amsterdam.

• Irene Heim is an invited speaker, giving a talk entitled “Interpreting reconstruction in interrogative clauses.”
• Natasha Ivlieva will speak about “Obligatory implicatures and grammaticality”
• Wataru Uegaki is presenting his paper “Inquisitive knowledge attribution and the Gettier problem” as part of the Workshop on Inquisitiveness.
• Yasutada Sudo, Jacopo Romoli, Martin Hackl and Danny Fox are presenting “Variation of Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences” in the poster session.

Amsterdamming alums include:

• Invited speaker Philippe Schlenker, discussing “The Semantics of Pronouns: Insights and Problems from Sign Language”
• Friederike Moltmann: “Tropes, Intensional Relative Clauses and the Notion of a Variable Object”
• Marta Abrusan: “Focus, Evidentiality and Soft triggers”

A few photos from the lively discussion after last Thursday evening’s screening of the film We still live here (Âs Nutayuneân). (About 150 people attended!) Amidst a series of great questions about language revival, Universal Grammar, and how new words are incorporated into the Wampanoag lexicon, Jessie Little Doe Baird and Norvin Richards also took time to explain the Wampanoag version of the Algonkian inverse construction to us:

Michael Kenstowicz was an invited speaker at USC’s Department of Linguistics last week, presenting “Accent Classes and Lexical Drift in Kyungsang Korean” in their colloquium series. He also met with their PhonLunch group to discuss his paper “Contrasts, Mergers, and Acquisitions in Kyungsang Acccent,” co-authored with Hyesun Cho and Jieun Kim.

David Pesetsky writes:

“Irene Heim has been elected a 2012 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Each year since 2006, the LSA honors several of its members for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. Irene is the third current MIT faculty member to be honored in this fashion, following in the footsteps of Morris Halle (2006) and Noam Chomsky (2007). Four former faculty are also fellows, and about a third of the current fellows (21 of 75) are alumni of our PhD program.

The induction ceremony will take place at the LSA meeting in Portand on Friday, January 6, 2012, as part of the Business Meeting.

This is a great honor for Irene, richly deserved. I’m sure you join me in expressing our warmest congratulations!!”

Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (Ph.D 2007) and Shigeru Miyagawa were invited speakers at the Workshop on Functional Categories and Parametric Variation, held October 6-7 at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Martina’s talk was “Properties of negation in Croatian,” and Shigeru’s talk title was “Minimal variation.” Meltem Kelepir (Ph.D 2001) was a co-organizer of the meeting.

Michel DeGraff writes, “The greater part of my work this Summer was spent in the mountain village of Matènwa in La Gonave, Haiti, working on my NSF-funded project on ‘Kreyòl-based and technology-enhanced learning of math, science, reading and writing.’ (La Gonave is an island off the Haitian mainland.) Much of my time there was spent playing with primary-school kids and helping develop and test computer-based games in Kreyòl to enhance the understanding and practice of elementary mathematics. I also worked on promoting an MIT initiative to help improve higher education in Haiti.”

Some of this work was reported in the international news media this summer, including articles in the Boston Globe, BBC News, Education Portal, and the Voices from Haiti site. A Kreyòl version of that interview can be found halfway down the page at http://www.voicesfromhaiti.com/kreyol.

“How I spent my summer vacation” - faculty version:

• Norvin Richards spent a week in the foothills of the Himalayas, teaching a mini-seminar on the syntax-phonology interface at the 5th LISSIM (Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Mountains).
• Sabine Iatridou had an Eastern European summer vacation, co-teaching a week-long seminar on “3 Puzzles in Syntax and Semantics” at the New York-St. Petersburg Institute founded by John Bailyn, then moving to the Czech Republic, where she taught two classes at the famous EGG School: a solo class on Binding Theory and a joint class on negation with Hedde Zeijlstra, who we remember fondly as a visiting faculty member here in 2008-2009.
• Jay Keyser’s book Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows was published by MIT Press.
• Wayne O’Neil spent July co-teaching a language acquisition course at the Navajo Language Academy workshop. He writes: “This summer workshop, founded by Ken Hale, meets annually on or near the Navajo reservation, bringing together thirty or so Navajo linguists and educators. This summer we were on the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff AZ, suffering through college dormitory life and cafeteria food, but the work was good, and the workshop, as usual, produced a fine T-shirt.”

We have four visiting faculty members in linguistics this Fall

Benjamin R. George has just completed his Ph.D. in semantics at UCLA. He writes that his interests include “question semantics, presupposition, logic, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and mathematical methods in semantic theory”.

Rick Nouwen will be visiting us only for the Fall semester. As his website tells us: “I’m a linguist interested in semantics and pragmatics. My research focuses in particular on (i) scalar phenomena in natural language; (ii) multi-dimensionality and projection phenomena in semantics; (iii) pronominal reference; (iv) the overlap between analytical philosophy, logic and linguistics.”

Maziar Toosarvandani joins us as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow. He writes: “I received my PhD from Berkeley in 2010 where I wrote my dissertation on association with focus. More generally, I am interested in formal patterns that arise from the interaction of sentences in discourse and what these patterns tell us about speakers’ competence about syntax as well as their competence about discourse structure. Currently, I am working on a project to understand why the so-called corrective use of the coordinator “but” (as in “Max didn’t find an apartment in Cambridge but in Somerville”) requires the presence of a negative element in its first conjunct. I also do documentary fieldwork on Northern Paiute (a severely endangered Uto-Aztecan language of the western US), which feeds into my theoretical interests. I have recently been exploring how in Northern Paiute, a language that practically lacks syntactic subordinators, speakers combine lexical, syntactic, and world knowledge with knowledge about discourse structure to convey temporal, causal, and other typically “subordinating” relations.”

Omer Preminger received his PhD here at MIT just this summer, and will be splitting his time between our department and Masha Polinsky’s lab at Harvard. He describes his interests as including “syntax, morphology, and everything in between, including but not limited to: agreement, case, ergativity, argument-structure, and wh-movement”. He will be teaching 24.960 (Syntactic Models, graduate) in the fall, and 24.900 (Intro to Linguistics, undergrad) in the spring.

We extend our warmest welcome to the new (and returning) visiting scholars and students to the department:

New Visiting Scholars

• Khaled Al-Asbahi: Sana’a University.
• Toni Borowsky: Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney.
  Toni’s research interests are in phonology and phonetics. She is working on language games, and syllable structure related matters.
• Barbara Citko: Assistant Professor, University of Washington-Seattle.
  Barbara’s research interests are: syntactic theory, syntax of relative clauses, wh-questions, multidominance, syntax of Slavic languages (Polish in particular).
• Young-Sun Kim: Hanshin University.
  

New Visiting Students

• Laura McPherson: 3rd year PhD student at UCLA.
  Her primary research interests are phonology and morphology, particularly grammatical tone and other areas of phonology-syntax interface. She is currently working on a reference grammar of Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali.
• Jeffrey Watumull: PhD student at the University of Cambridge.
  Jeffrey’s research interests are “in general, mathematical biolinguistics—a research program to discover the mathematical properties universal to human syntax and their possible homologues/analogues in nonhuman animals; in particular, revamping the Chomsky Hierarchy in terms of strong generative capacity and formulating optimal decision procedures for traversing parameter hierarchies.”

To celebrate Irene’s outstanding achievements as Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy for the past three years (which followed three great years as Section Head of Linguistics), the department threw a spectacular gala party last Monday.

Irene’s work as section head was lauded by Dean Deborah Fitzgerald, incoming department head Richard Holton, incoming linguistics section head David Pesetsky and the department Administrative Officer Mary Grenham — as well as by several tons of great food and a big cake.

The party had a “gardening theme” (there were smoked salmon treats in edible spades) and Irene received several presents from a grateful department, including the traditional Bosch 1617EVSPK 12 Amp 2-1/4-Horsepower Plunge and Fixed Base Variable Speed Router Kit with 1/4-Inch and 1/2-Inch Collets, without which no term as department head could be complete. (Spies told us that this is what Irene most wanted!)

But the most memorable laudatio, and the culmination of the grand event, was provided by a band of linguistically minded ukulele players who wandered in off the street and decided to play for us on the spur of the moment:

L to R: Iain Giblin, Sam Steddy, Coppe van Urk, mitcho Erlewine, Edwin Howard
photo credits: mitcho Erlewine & Hrayr Khanjian

The MIT News Office had a great article about Michel DeGraff last week: “A champion of Creole”.

“Looking beyond English: MIT professor uses linguistics in an ESL classroom to teach scientific principles, empower a new generation of critical thinkers” is a nice article about Wayne O’Neil and Maya Honda’s work with linguistics in high schools.

On Saturday, April 30th at 2:15 pm, the Brattle Theater will be showing “We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân”. It’s a film about the revival of the Wampanoag language, featuring Macarthur-award-winning alumna Jessie Littledoe Baird, as well as Norvin and Noam.

[Norvin adds: “Several people have reminded me that the day the Wampanoag film is showing at the Brattle is precisely the day we’re having our open house. So, please come to the open house instead of going to the film…I’m now talking with the filmmaker about having a showing at MIT sometime.”]

Several MIT-affiliated linguists presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held April 7-9 in Seville, Spain.

• Pilar Barbosa: invited speaker, Partial pro-drop as null NP-anaphora
• Shigeru Miyagawa: invited speaker, Minimal Parametric Variation
• Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues: “Autonomous” Morphemes are Underlearned in Romance

Wayne O’Neil has recently returned from his annual (since 2000) March stay in Seattle, where he and his partner Maya Honda spent several days doing linguistics with David Pippin’s fourth- and fifth-graders at St Thomas School in Medina WA. On this occasion, ‘doing linguistics’ focused on some aspects of English orthography: why, example, civil, solemn, and moral are spelt the way they are. However, Wayne was also required to give a spirited reading of the opening lines of Beowulf as a lead-in to a discussion of the history of the English language.

Some of the work that Wayne and Maya have done in Seattle over the past decade is discussed in Honda, O’Neil, and Pippin’s paper “On promoting linguistics literacy: Bringing language science to the English classroom”, in Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck (ed.) Linguistics at school: Language awareness in primary and secondary education, 175-188 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Jay Keyser was interviewed last week on the Callie Crossley Show on WGBH. Full audio of the 24 minute interview is available on the show’s website. Here’s a direct link to the mp3 stream.

The show’s description:

The history of hacks and pranks at MIT dates back almost as far as the venerable institution itself. Students with expertise in engineering, computer science, robotics, and math — and presumably with a little extra time and brainpower to spare — have taken pranksterism to the level of high art. Their hijinks have included a firetruck, police cruiser, and biplane replica, alternately hoisted atop MIT’s Great Dome; a fully appointed room — including a billiards table, a cat, chairs, and an illuminated lamp — hung upside down from the Media Lab; numerous interruptions staged during the annual Harvard - Yale football game; and a cross-country hacking war with rival institution, Caltech. MIT Professor Emeritus Jay Keyser, has seen a lot of it in his time, and he’ll talk about the school’s secret hacking society, the best hacks, and why bright students at a world-class institution can still find time to put one over on faculty.

Mentioned during the interview is Jay’s forthcoming new book: Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows.

Last week, on March 4, Donca Steriade gave a colloquium talk on “Rhyming Evidence for Intervals” at UCLA. That same week, David Pesetsky gave a series of talks at Newcastle University (including a public lecture on his joint work with Jonah Katz on the relation of music and language). Last Friday, Norvin Richards spoke on the topic of “Generalized Contiguity” in the CrISP Distinguished Visitors Series at UC Santa Cruz. Finally, this week, Sabine Iatridou will be teaching a short course at the University of Athens.

From the chapter on MIT in the Yale Daily News Insider’s Guide to Colleges 2011:

Two excellent articles about the research that Martin Hackl and his students are currently conducting in Martin’s Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab were published here on the website of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and here on the MIT website!

There’s a nice interview with David Pesetsky on the MIT News website (triggered by his being named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which we reported on recently). David talks about universal grammar and about the relationship between language and music.

MIT had a strong presence at this year’s LSA meeting, held in Pittsburgh, January 6-9. The following faculty, students, and recent graduates gave presentations:

• Bronwyn Bjorkman: The syntax of inverted conditional antecedents
  
• Jessica Coon (Harvard): Prepositions and the perfective: Deriving aspect-based split ergativity
  
• Jessica Coon and Omer Preminger: Transitivity in Chol: A new argument for the Split VP Hypothesis
  
• Kai von Fintel (with David Beaver): Semantics and pragmatics: The creation of an open access journal
  
• Suzanne Flynn (with Janet Cohen Sherman, Alex Immerman, Barbara Lust, James Gair, Jordan Whitlock, and Diane Rak): Language in aging and dementia: A pilot study
  
• Gillian Gallagher (NYU): Auditory features: the case from laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
  
• Peter Graff (with Max Bane and Morgan Sonderegger): Phonetic convergence among reality television contestants
  
• Peter Graff (with Gregory Scontras and Noah D. Goodman): Plural comparison and collective predication
  
• Peter Graff (with Jeffrey Lim and Sophie Monahan): The determiner complexity hierarchy
  
• Jonah Katz (Centre national de la recherche scientifique): English duration patterns mirror perceptual asymmetries
  
• Giorgio Magri (École Normale Supérieure): Towards a non-universal approach to the problem of the acquisition of phonotactics in Optimality Theory
  
• Tara McAllister (Montclair State University): Patterns of gestural overlap account for positional fricative neutralization in child phonology
• Pritty Patel: Binding conditions and alienable vs. inalienable possession
• Kirill Shklovsky: Tseltal unnegatives

Congratulations to David Pesetsky, who has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)! From the MIT press release, “fellows are recognized by their peers for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.” Pesetsky was chosen for “his innovative and critical research on syntactic theory, connecting it to issues in phonology, morphology, reading, language acquisition and neuroscience, and for his contributions to linguistic education at many levels.” Read more about the appointment here.

Michel DeGraff has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to pursue work for Haiti thoughout the academic year 2010—2011. He writes:

My NSF project title is: “Kreyòl-based and technology-enhanced teaching of reading, writing, math and science in Haiti.” I will help develop, refine and evaluate innovative Kreyòl-based and technology-enhanced educational materials and methods for Haitian classrooms. These materials and methods will be tested in situ in Haiti.

I will thus be on leave during the year to work on this project, which started earlier this year, especially during trips to Haiti over the Summer.

This project seems particularly timely in the context of the post-earthquake reconstruction of Haiti’s school system. Some of the rationale for it is explained in a couple of articles, in the Boston Globe (in U.S.) and in Le Nouvelliste (Haiti). Both articles discuss Haiti’s language barrier:

• http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/16/language_barrier_in_haiti/
• http://www.lenouvelliste.com/articleforprint.php?PubID=1&ArticleID=82891

I hope my NSF project and related efforts will help break down this barrier.

Congratulations, Michel!

Adam Albright’s promotion to tenure has been approved by MIT’s Executive Committee. Congratulations, Adam!!

Michel DeGraff was in Haiti the week before last (April 25 — May 1st) with Professors Dale Joachim and Barry Vercoe from the Media Lab and with seven students from the new Media Lab class “New Media Projects For Haiti.” The students had four projects to further develop and test in Haiti:

1. “Uplifting expressions”: Theater, music, dance and craft as therapy for children’s post-traumatic stress disorder (Asha Martin and Clinton Scroggins)
2. Health education in post-earthquake Haiti (Amritaa Ganguly)
3. Low-cost water testing (Anila Sinha, Jess Kim and Kathy Li)
4. “Pedal Power”: Lost-cost system to produce electricity by pedaling (Marvin Arnold and Daryl Fairweather)

Two of the students (Jess Kim and Amritaa Ganguly) have blogged about their experiences in Haiti:

http://www.mitadmissions.org/JKim.shtml

http://amritaahaiti.blogspot.com/

This week (April 16 & 17), there is a conference on epistemic modals at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. MIT speakers: Kai von Fintel (presenting with co-author Thony Gillies, Rutgers), Bob Stalnaker, and MIT philosophy alum Eric Swanson.

The MIT News site has a very nice article about Norvin’s book Uttering Trees (MIT Press). The article appeared last Friday and on that day, the MIT home page was fully Norvin-themed:

Last Tuesday, Norvin Richards was named a MacVicar Fellow, honoring him for outstanding undergraduate teaching, mentoring and educational innovation. The provost said “Appointment as a MacVicar Fellow recognizes professors who have made exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and complete education of MIT undergraduates, which includes their dedication inside the classroom and beyond.” Fellows receive $10,000 a year of discretionary funds for support of educational activities, research, travel, and other scholarly expenses.

An MIT news article included these quotes:

“Every conceivable virtue is evident in Norvin’s teaching,” explains one of his colleagues. “His planning is extensive and perfect. He comes to class, lays out the issues, data and analysis with clarity and beauty. Norvin is the kind of teacher who makes his audience think and ask questions because they find it fun to do so.”

“Professor Richards is easily one of the best instructors I’ve had in my life,” one of his students told the selection committee. “His lectures are entertaining, interesting and content-packed. The care and attention he pays to his students is very evident and quite inspirational.”

Linguistics & Philosophy has had one previous recipient of this award: David Pesetsky, who received the honor in 2005.

Congratulations, Norvin!

Congratulations to Norvin Richards, whose LI Monograph, Uttering Trees, is now available from MIT press!

Advance praise for Uttering Trees:

“A brilliant book by one of the most creative minds in the field sets an example of how theory should be combined with data, vividly illustrating why syntactic research can be so exciting.” - Elena Anagnostopoulou

“[A] stimulating and provocative illustration of linguistic inquiry at its most satisfying.” - Noam Chomsky

A very nice article about Shigeru Miyagawa’s new book appeared last Friday on the MIT news site.

Shigeru Miyagawa’s new Linguistic Inquiry Monograph has just been published by MIT Press. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse Configurational Languages comes with a terrific endorsement by Mark Baker (see back cover, and also the website).

Aardvark Jazz Orchestra: All Blues
With vocalists Jerry Edwards and Grace Hughes
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 8:00 pm, one show only
Scullers Jazz Club
Doubletree Guest Suites, 400 Soldiers Field Road, Boston, MA
Admission: $18 Reservations and information: 617-562-4111 or

The celebrated Aardvark Jazz Orchestra will open its 37th season at Scullers with a show of All Blues, from Miles and Duke to Mingus and Basie to boogie and funk originals by Aardvark founder/music director Mark Harvey. The band will salute the 50th anniversaries of two seminal albums: Kind of Blue (playing a new arrangement of the iconic Miles Davis piece All Blues) and Mingus Ah Um(performing Pork Pie Hat, the Mingus tribute to Lester Young), with other tunes including Ellington’s Tell Me It’s the Truth, the Count Basie classic Everyday I Have the Blues, and originals by Mark Harvey (Flat Earth Boogie, Blues for D.C., Scamology, and 110 Blues — celebrating Ellington’s 110th birthday).

[Thanks to Jay Keyser, who plays the trombone in Aardvark!]

The Philosopher’s Annual has listed two articles of MIT authors among the top ten best philosophy articles in 2008:

• Kai von Fintel (MIT) & Anthony S. Gillies (Rutgers), “CIA Leaks”
• Agustín Rayo (MIT), “Vague Representation”

Four MIT linguistics faculty members taught at the LSA Institute in Berkeley this summer:

• Adam Albright taught “Morphological innovation and change”
• Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou taught “Morphology, syntax, and semantics of modals”
• Donca Steriade taught “Correspondence and the phonological lexicon”

Donca also gave the Edward Sapir Lecture on “Units of representation for linguistic rhythm”. In addition, third-year grad student Peter Graff attended the institute on a LSA Summer Institute Fellowship.

Norvin spent three weeks teaching introductory syntax in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the New York-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition, and Culture (NYI).

He also spent a weekend teaching and learning Wampanoag at the third annual Wôpanâak immersion camp (at which only Wampanoag is spoken).

And he went to Budapest for the Minimalist Approaches to Syntactic Locality (MASL) conference, where he gave a talk about Improper Movement and tough-movement

His other project over the summer was finishing his book, Uttering Trees, which is scheduled to come out as an LI Monograph in 2010.

For the last three years, the route from Boston to Bellingham WA to Diné Bikéyah (Navajoland) to Boston has come to define Wayne O’Neil’s summers.

During the summer now ending, Wayne taught a three-week course on Navajo phonology at the summer workshop of the Navajo Language Academy (6-24 July). Nearly all of the twenty or so 2009 workshop participants were Navajo teachers of the language and fluent speakers of Navajo.

NLA’s summer workshops are held annually at various Diné Bikéyah venues — NLA 2009 being located at Diné College near the high desert, intersection of Indian Roads 12 and 64 (Tsaile AZ, pop. about 1000).

The course was based on Ken Hale and Lorraine Honie’s unpublished Introduction to the sound system of Navajo (no date [1972?]), as revised and expanded by Wayne during spring 2009. Since returning from his NLA work, Wayne has continued to revise and expand the Hale-Honie ms., with a view toward making it available through the NLA.

(Hale and Honie’s ms. can be found at http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tfernal1/nla/halearch/halearch.htm, from which there is also a link to NLA’s home page. As for Lorraine Honie [Navajo], she was briefly a graduate student in this department in the early 1970s; she is now at Rough Rock Community School, Rough Rock AZ.)

Immediately prior to working at Diné College, Wayne participated in the third annual Western Washington University Linguistics in Education workshop (WWULiE-2009) in Bellingham WA.

This semester, we welcome several visiting faculty. Hedde Zeijlstra joins us from the University of Amsterdam. He will be co-teaching “More Advanced Syntax” with Sabine this semester. Sigrid Beck comes from the University of Tübingen. She will be co-teaching Topics in Semantics with Irene (on comparatives), and teaching Pragmatics. In addition, Tamina Stephenson (PhD 2007) will be joining us to teach 24.910 - the “capstone” course of our undergraduate major and minor.

Norvin Richards and David Pesetsky are back from the workshop Diagnosing Syntax, held in Leiden and Utrecht, in the Netherlands. The conference was organized by Norbert Corver and alum Lisa Cheng. Also presenting at the conference were alums Hamida Demirdache, Chris Tancredi, Heidi Harley and Ora Matushansky, and a cast of thousands. Norvin and David report that it was an excellent workshop.

The 24th annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (Hebrew University of Jerusalem on October 26-27) features talks by Sabine Iatridou with ivy Sichel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on English NegDPs and Scopal Predicates, and by Martin Hackl with Jorie Koster-Moeller and Andrea Gottstein (Pomona College) on Processing Opacity. The program culminates in an invited talk by Danny Fox: Economy and Embedded Implicatures (joint work with Benjamin Spector, CNRS).

Norvin Richards and David Pesetsky are invited speakers this week at the Second Mediterranean Syntax Meeting in Istanbul. Norvin’s talk is called “Beyond Strength and Weakness: intonation and the distribution of overt movement”, and David will be speaking on “Russian case morphology and the syntactic categories”. Afterwards, Norvin will be travelling on to Ankara, where Martina Gra?anin-Yuksek (2007 PhD) has organized a syntax workshop.

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics has just been published by the Oxford University Press. Edited by Shigeru Miyagawa and Saito Mamoru, contributors associated with MIT include Heidi Harley (Causatives), Masa Koizumi (Nominative objects), Norvin Richards (Wh-questions), and Akira Watanabe (The structure of the DP).

Regattabar, Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
Tickets: $16. Reservations: 617.395.7757 or http://www.regattabarjazz.com/
MBTA: Red Line, Harvard Square T Stop

Hailed for “imagination, exuberance and sheer brio” (Jazz Review, UK), The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, led by founder-music director Mark Harvey, will kick off its 36th season with an exhilarating show at the Regattabar featuring 16-year-old piano prodigy Matt Savage as special guest. The show will include Duke Ellington’s classic “Solitude,” the Count Basie favorite “Sent for You Yesterday,” and originals by guest artist Matt Savage and Aardvark music director Mark Harvey. Featured pieces will include the premiere of a big band arrangement of Harvey’s “Rockport Blues” and his multi-stylistic composition “No Walls.”

With worldwide distribution of 10 CDs and wide-ranging performances in festivals, clubs, concert halls, colleges and universities,The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra has been a major force in the international jazz scene for more than 30 years. The band is known for its electrifying concerts spanning the jazz spectrum, from the music of Duke Ellington and other jazz greats to original works by founder/music director Mark Harvey. Winner of the 2000 Independent Music Awards, the band has premiered more than 100 works for jazz orchestra and has garnered consistent critical acclaim around the globe. Downbeat marveled at the band’s “awe-inspiring audience fascination,” while JazzTimes wrote, “Aardvark suggests the best and the brashest of Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, George Russell, and even Frank Zappa.” Aardvark’s latest recording, American Agonistes (Leo Records), contains some of the band’s most evocative work to date (“a stunning hour of music that is in turn beautiful, poignant and raucous” Billboard.com).

Praised by Jazziz as a “wildly inventive composer, interpreter and pianist no matter what his age,” pianist Matt Savage began his performing career at the age of 8 and developed his skill and maturity over the past 8 years, working with such jazz notables as Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, and Bobby Watson, among others. He has performed at the Ottawa International Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz Festival, as well as such famed jazz clubs as Birdland, Blue Note and Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Savage has also won ASCAP’S Young Jazz Composer Award every year since 2004. He has made numerous media appearances including “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” the “Today Show,” “20/20” and Marian McPartland’s popular “Piano Jazz” show on NPR. “This young man plays with grace, energy and originality. Jazz savant indeed!” (Marian McPartland)

Trumpeter-composer Mark Harvey is founder, music director and principal arranger for the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra. He has recorded with George Russell and Baird Hersey and performed with Gil Evans, Claudio Roditi, Howard McGhee, Sam Rivers, Herb Pomeroy and others. A composer with more than 120 works in his catalogue, Harvey teaches at MIT and lectures nationally on jazz and American music. He is a winner of awards/commissions from ASCAP, the National Endowment, Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, Organization of American Kodaly Educators, the 15th Annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert, and the MIT Wind Ensemble, among others.

Aardvark personnel: Arni Cheatham, Peter Bloom, Phil Scarff, Chris Rakowski, Dan Zupan/saxes & woodwinds; K.C. Dunbar, Jeanne Snodgrass/trumpets; Bob Pilkington, Jay Keyser/trombones; Jeff Marsanskis, Bill Lowe/bass trombones, tuba; Richard Nelson/guitar; John Funkhouser/string bass; Harry Wellott/drums; Jerry Edwards/vocalist; Mark Harvey/trumpet, music director. Special guest: Matt Savage, piano.

Adam Albright is off to UMass this Friday, to give a colloquium talk on the topic of “An obligatorily gradient grammatical effect?”

Noam Chomsky was featured on the nationally televized series, “Proposal for the Future (Mirai-e-no Teigen)” on the Japan Television Network (NHK BS) (August 30). He was interviewed by Shigeru Miyagawa on topics ranging from education to politics to linguistics. The program also featured Shigeru’s work with OpenCourseWare at MIT and in Japan. The program will be re-broadcast on September 7, 16:10-17:00.

The May/June issue of Technology Review has an interesting feature on the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, which has the goal of reviving the use of Wampanoag, the Algonquian language once spoken on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. Our department has been involved with this project since 1996, when Jessie Littledoe Baird came here to work with Ken Hale; Norvin Richards joined the project when he joined the faculty, and continues to work on it.

[Thanks Norvin!]

PS. If you want to know how the project is discussed in the blogosphere, check out this post on Languagehat.

Karlos Arregi, MIT Linguistics PhD 2002, visiting professor at MIT in Fall 2005, will be moving from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to the University of Chicago, starting next fall. Congratulations, Karlos!

Experience Jay Keyser and The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra in Concert!

Big Band Panorama: Jazz from the 1920s to the 21st Century
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Bentley College, Koumantzelis Auditorium in Lindsay Hall
175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA
Tickets: $7
Directions: http://www.bentley.edu/directions/

Lush sonorities and a saxophonic blend worthy of Duke’s finest reed sections (Jazz Times)

Awe-inspiring audience fascination (Downbeat)

“the soloists all play with passion and conviction … captivating … highly recommended” (Jazz Improv)

The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, nominated for best jazz artist in the 2008 Boston Phoenix/FNX Best Music Poll, continues its 35th season with a wide-ranging concert tracing the history of jazz from the 1920s to the present. The band will explore changes in style, sound and substance as the jazz big band evolved, evoking echoes of the Swing Era, Kansas City, New Orleans, and West Coast jazz, while also sampling recent works by Aardvark music director Mark Harvey. Selections will include Scratchin’ in the Gravel, a classic by Mary Lou Williams; Walkin’ Shoes, also a classic, by Gerry Mulligan (for the Stan Kenton Orchestra); Solitude and The Mooche by Duke Ellington; and Sent for You Yesterday, a staple of the Count Basie Orchestra. Mark Harvey’s pieces will include NOLA, a tribute to New Orleans, and Spanish Mood, inspired by Gil Evans’ celebrated Sketches of Spain that featured Miles Davis.

The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra is known for its exhilarating concerts spanning the jazz spectrum, from the music of Ellington and other jazz greats to original works by founder/music director Mark Harvey, to performances with film, dance, and poetry. Winner of the 2000 Independent Music Awards, the band has premiered more than 100 works for jazz orchestra and has released 9 CDs (Leo Records, 9Winds, other labels) to international critical acclaim.

Congratulations to Kai von Fintel, who has been named Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He assumes his new role immediately.

Kai will present joint work with Thony Gillies, “Must … Stay … Strong!” at a mini-workshop at the University of Michigan, this week, March 5—7. Chris Potts (UMass Amherst) and Craige Roberts (Ohio State) are the commentators.

“CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.”

The podcast team from the MIT Libraries interviewed Kai about the new journal Semantics & Pragmatics. The interview is about 11 minutes long. Take a listen!.