Whamit!

The 6th joint meeting between the Acoustic Society of America and the Acoustic Society of Japan took place at Honolulu from 1-5 December, 2025. Several students and alums presented their work:

• Amy Li (2nd year): A phonetic correlate of velar palatalization: Shorter front cavity
• Na-Young Ryu and Suyeon Yun (PhD 2016) [Chungnam National Univ.]: Perceptual comparison of emotional Korean speech: Human versus AI-generated voices
• Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007)[National Tsing Hua Univ.]: Spatiotemporal modeling of tongue kinematics using ultrasound tongue imaging: A case study of apical vowels in Mandarin Chinese
• Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007)[National Tsing Hua Univ.], Kye Shibata, and Yueh-chin Chang: Visualizing parasagittal articulation: An electromagnetic articulography analysis of lateralization in East Asian languages
• Yueh-chin Chang, Jing Huang, and Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007)[National Tsing Hua Univ.]: Acoustic evidence for asymmetric /l/–/n/ merger in Southwestern Mandarin

On 1-2 December 2025, the 7th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology was hosted by The University of Edinburgh. Our 4th-year PhD student Juan Cancel presented his poster, entitled The diachronic asymmetry of nasal apocope between nominal and verbal paradigms in Nganasan! You can read the abstract here.

The conference “Ontology as Structured by the Interface with Semantics” (OASIS) 5 was held at University of Edinburgh on 3-5 December, 2025. Our current 3rd-year PhD student Cooper Roberts gave a presentation, entitled “Part is part (plus pragmatics)”. Our recent alum Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD, 2023) also presented his work on “Building individual concepts structurally”.

On November 22rd and 23rd, Hani Al Naeem, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chemical Engineering postdoctoral associate), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics graduate student) taught over 50 ninth through twelfth grade students at Splash, a weekend extravaganza of courses organized by MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program).

Hani and Christopher offered “Sounds in Motion: Exploring the Science of Speech”; Cora offered “Rhyme and Reason: Exploring the Linguistics of Poetry”; Vincent offered “Linguists vs. Machine: Who Had the Telescope?”; and Jacob offered “The Beauty and Complexity of Language: Introduction to Linguistics”. The courses were designed by each instructor and developed and vetted through a collaborative process. Maya Honda observed all of the classes and attests to the great job everyone did sharing their knowledge and passion for linguistics with the Splash students.

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) took place at UMass Amherst this Saturday. The following MIT students presented:

• Seva Masliukov (1st year): Puzzles of actional composition in an atelicity-marking language
• Vlad Orlov (2nd year): Reciprocal alternation and bound de-re readings
• Alma Frischoff (2nd year): Type-label comparison and Type Economy Principle

MIT Linguistics was well-represented at NELS 56, held at New York University from October 17–19, 2025. Two of our alums were invited speakers: Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013) of  CUNY, gave a talk titled “Embedded tense: how to learn what some things can(not) mean (joint work with Spencer Caplan)”; and Tanya Bondarenko (PhD 2020), now a Harvard University, gave a talk titled “Selective opacity and clausal embedding”.

Here are the talks and posters presented by our faculty, current students and graduates in recent 10 years:

• Yiannis Katochoritis (3rd year): How I learned to stop worrying about distance and love the covert spec-head
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student), Omri Doron (PhD 2025)[UMass]: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student): Non-de dicto belief: Revision vs replacement
• Si Berrebi (Postdoc): Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study
• Peter Grishin (PhD 2023)[Brown University]: Could the Ban on Improper Movement be about binding after all?
• Tue Trinh (PhD 2011)[University of Nova Gorica], Danny Fox (Faculty, PhD 1998), Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS; Ben Gurion University]: A unified theory of meta-questions
• Metehan Eryılmaz, Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Boğaziçi University], Yağmur Sağ: From Numeral to Indefinite: A Kind-Sensitive Pathway in Turkish
• Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018)[UCLA], Gabriela Caballero, Claudia Juárez Chávez: Clitic coalescence in San Juan Piñas Mixtec at the syntax-phonology interface
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016)[University of Crete], Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Onur Özsoy, Caroline Heycock, Georgios Vardakis, Rümeysa Bektaş: Condition C amelioration effects in wh-movement: An interaction between pronominal type and d-linking
• Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Nozomi Moritake, Ken Wexler (Faculty): The Optional Infinitive Stage in Japanese

And more from our alums:

• Terrance Gatchalian, Jessica Coon (PhD 2010)[McGill], Lefteris Paparounas: A unified syntax and semantics of Kanien’kéha statives
• Idan Landau (PhD 1999)[Tel Aviv]: Silent Resumption: A New Test for Ellipsis
• Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD 2023)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl: Fake indexicals in relative clauses: licensing by phase
• Ryan Walter Smith, Mark Baker (PhD 1985)[Rutgers University]: Agentless Presuppositions of again: Meet Obligatory Control
• Jonathan David Bobaljik (PhD 1995)[Harvard]: The Itelmen Inclusive Imperative: Treetops, Clusivity, Allomorphy

In a high-octane, back-and-forth showdown that could only be described as syntactically chaotic, Noam’s Gnomes edged out the athletic but less semantically structured ZBT fraternity team in a thrilling 6-5 victory.

The Gnomes opened the scoring early, with a well-parsed through ball resulting in a tidy finish that had fans chanting “Tree that sentence!” But ZBT quickly responded with a goal of their own, leveling the playing field and reminding everyone that brute athleticism can sometimes trump careful analysis.

From there, the first half turned into a lexical breakdown for the Gnomes. Though they briefly retook the lead at 2-1, their syntax soon unraveled. ZBT rallied with three unanswered goals, including a particularly devastating counterattack off a misplaced modifier from midfield. By halftime, the frat boys were up 4-2 and looking confident, flexing both muscles and minimal tactical nuance.

But the second half belonged to the Gnomes.

Adjusting their structure and clearly undergoing a pragmatic shift in formation, the linguists came out with renewed cohesion. They scored four consecutive goals, each more elegantly diagrammed than the last — including a cheeky backheel dubbed “The Recursion” that put them up 6-4. Fans of transformational grammar were in ecstasy.

ZBT did manage to claw one back late in the game, narrowing the score to 6-5, but the Gnomes held strong through stoppage time, parsing out the clock with expert possession and clever subclauses down the flanks.

Final Score: Noam’s Gnomes 6 — ZBT 5
A wild, referentially rich affair where form met function — and function triumphed, just barely.

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25-27 at University of California, Berkeley. Several of our current students, faculty and alumni presented their work:

• Runqi Tan (4th year): The Role of Perceptual Contrast in Tone Inventories
• Edward Flemming (faculty) and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS]: Gang effects: the perspective from variation
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS] and Arto Anttila: MaxEnt fails at reasoning by transitivity
• Frank Li Hui Tan, Shuang Zheng, Ming Liu, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Modeling Prosodic Development with Prenatal Audio Attenuation
• Jian Cui, Hanna Shine, Jesse Snedeker, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Investigating the Tone-Segment Asymmetry in Phonological Counting: A Learnability Experiment
• Jonah Katz (PhD 2010)[UCLA]: Boundary conditions on a theory of English footing
• Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005)[UCL] and Nicholas Rolle: Xiamen-Taiwanese tone sandhi: Natural and derivable via boundary tones
• Paul Kiparsky (PhD 1965)[Stanford]: The Phonology of the Nez Perce Floating Nasal

Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (SuB30) took place at Goethe University Frankfurt from September 23-27, 2025. MIT Linguistics was well-represented by our current students and recent graduates:

• Paul Meisenbichler (3rd year): Upper limit effects beyond tenses and the interdependence of worlds and times
• Haoming Li (4th year), Yizhen Jiang (3rd year): Oddness and probability-sensitivity of number-marked indefinites in negation and questions
• Yurika Aonuki (4th year), Kathryn Davidson: On the QUD sensitivity of a third reading
• Yizhen Jiang (3rd year), Haoming Li (4th year), J. Cooper Roberts (3rd year): Passamaquoddy quantifiers: outlier of distributivity-number generalization?
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (PhD 2025)[Queen Mary]: Covert operators are picked to minimize QuD-ambiguity: the view from pex and only

Several of our alumni also presented their work:

• Naomi Francis (PhD 2019)[University of Ottawa], Patrick Georg Grosz, Pritty Patel-Grosz: The FLING gesture asa marker of discoursestatus
• Keny Chatain (PhD 2021)[ENS]: Ignorance inferences andpresuppositions: a new Neo-Gricean challenge
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016)[University of Crete]: Greek Directive Subjunctive Questions, High Negation Bias and Modality
• Paul Marty (PhD 2017)[Universidade de Lisboa], Guillermo Del Pinal, Patrick Elliott, Alexandros Kalomoiro, Jacopo Romoli: Presupposition projection in (non-)monotonic contexts
• Orin Percus (PhD 1997)[Nantes University]: Identity issues after Flight AF 006 (invited talk)

Elora Cromarty: Tánsi Káhkinaw! My name is Elora Cromarty, and I am one of the incoming students in the MITILI program! I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada, and am a member of Kinoséw Sípí, or Norway House Cree Nation, located in Northern Manitoba. I’m Muskego-Ininéw (Swampy Cree) and an L2 learner/speaker of Ininímowin (Swampy Cree/ N-dialect of Cree). My dialect has around 3,000 speakers with an average age of 50, and my community has around 500 L1 speakers. I just finished my BA in Linguistics from the University of Manitoba, and my interests are in morphology, syntax, morphosyntax, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. Outside of academics, I’ve worked with several non-profit/grassroots/community-based organizations and have supported programming with the 7 different Indigenous languages spoken in my province. I’m really interested in seeing how linguistics can support revitalization and documentation practices in a way that ultimately supports our communities. Finally, in my free time I like to bead, sew, play video games, and go sightseeing! Ékosáni!

Aya Halabi: I am originally from Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank, Palestine. I earned my BA in English Language & Literature and my MA in Applied Linguistics and Translation in Palestine before moving to the U.S., where I completed an MA in Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research lies in syntax and its interface with morphology, with a particular focus on agreement, case, and their interactions—especially in ergative languages. I am also interested in broader questions of allomorphy, locality, and spell-out domains in complex words. Empirically, I work on endangered (and moribund) Semitic languages and conduct fieldwork with these communities. Beyond linguistics, I enjoy reading fiction, cooking, and taking long walks.

Eyal Marco: My name is Eyal (I visited the department last year, so some of you may know me). I come from Tel Aviv University, where I worked at Ezer Rasin’s phonological computation lab. My theoretical phonological work at the lab was primarily informed by original fieldwork on two endangered Jewish varieties of Arabic. In a different line of research, I’ve been evaluating theories of phonological representation based on their predictions regarding learning. Before joining the lab, I spent many years in the Israeli music industry. I’m also a devoted Arsenal fan and always enjoy discussing Premier League football.

Amanda Michel: Hi, my name is Mandy! I grew up in Northern Virginia (around Washington D.C.) and completed my Bachelor’s at the College of William & Mary in Linguistics and Computer Science. My linguistic interests lie in theoretical and computational phonology; so far, I’ve done work modeling variation in Norwegian stress patterns using MaxEnt models. When I’m not incessantly asking friends and family to repeat things because they have unknowingly done something of phonological interest, I enjoy reading (fantasy and sci fi, in particular), crocheting (or knitting… or embroidering… or sewing…), and going to live music shows.

Vsevolod (Seva) Masliukov: I come from Ivanovo, a regional center in the European part of Russia. I received a B.A. in linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. I am primarily interested in the semantics of aspect & event/argument structure. Most of my research to date was done through fieldwork and was focused on Uralic languages (especially Northern Khanty and Forest Nenets). Outside of linguistics, I enjoy cinema, reading fiction and trivia, traveling around the globe and some occasional origami. 

Ro’nikonhkátste Norton: Kwe kwe, my name is Ro’nikonhkátste Norton, I am wolf clan of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. I come from Kahnawà:ke, located just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. I began actively learning Kanien’kéha as a second language 13 years ago and have since been heavily involved in its revitalization, primarily as a language instructor for the past 11 years. While my formal background is in education, having earned a B.Ed. from McGill University, my interest naturally lies in linguistics. I am looking forward to starting the MITILI program and gaining knowledge and experience that I can bring back to my communities. As someone trying to reclaim my entire language, my areas of interest in linguistics are pretty broad and all-encompassing. I’ll have to narrow that down and choose something at some point during my time here at MIT. Otherwise, I enjoy reading good books, watching good television, and cooking (and eating) good food. I recently began lifting. I am also prone to doing whatever it is that my daughter would like to do. One fun fact about her (and me, I suppose) that I’m quite proud of is that I successfully bridged the intergenerational gap between L1 speakers, between my grandmother and her.

Thomas Truong: Hi I’m Thomas, I’m from Orlando, Florida and I got my BA in Linguistics and Philosophy from UMass Amherst. I enjoy learning about many topics in semantics and syntax, such as modality, tense/aspect, polarity, and comparatives/superlatives. Non-linguistics subjects I like include math and philosophy and art history. I like getting museum fatigue in random exhibits and traveling to see cool things. I also like trying new foods- especially strange and uncommon dishes from any cuisine. Recently I enjoy bouldering but I want to try and learn new sports.

Karolin Kaiser: I’m Karolin from Berlin. I am interested in semantics, especially comparison constructions, additivity, and at times disjunction. The internet in all its forms is my main hobby (especially texting). I do enjoy reading and politics. I don’t particularly enjoy board games. 

Nima Bahrami

James Morley

On 5th August, 4th year student Yurika Aonuki gave an invited talk with the title “Differential measure phrases and comparatives in Gitksan” in a workshop held at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan.

On 25-27 June, 2025, the Society of Pidgin and Creole Language presented its summer conference (SPCL), hosted by The University of the West Indies, Mona, under the theme “Pidgin and Creole Studies in the Era of Big Data and AI”. 5th-year student Christopher Legerme gave an oral presentation, titled Intermodular Spell-Out and the Distribution of Ye in Haitian Creole. His talk discussed how the copular morpheme ye in Haitian Creole emerges to satisfy prosodic requirements at PF, linking its distribution to broader patterns in Haitian Creole like verbal apocope.

4th year student Juan Cancel presented a paper entitled “A reanalysis of syllabic and rhythmic gradation in Nganasan as a single consonant gradation process” at the 31st Manchester Phonology Meeting last May.

In addition, Juan also gave a talk, titled “Metrical Incoherence or Opacity: A Stratal OT Analysis of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan”, at the Congressus XIV Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum (CIFU) held in Tartu. You can read the abstract here.

Below are two photos of the beautiful campus of University Manchester (left) and University of Tartu (right):

On August 29th, Omri Doron successfully and eloquently defended his dissertation, titled Another look at the typology of number: the mystery of the missing singular! Congratulations, Omri!! You can read the abstract below:

The typology of nominal number marking features, in addition to languages like English, in which all nouns in argument position are singular or plural, languages in which nouns can appear in the general number form (Andrzejewsky, 1960) - a form which is semantically unspecified for number. In my dissertation, I discuss two challenges that these languages pose to theories that assume that plural nouns are born inclusive (containing both atomic and plural individuals), and get their multiplicity inferences from competition with their singular alternative. First, languages like Bayso (Cushitic, East Africa), in which nouns come in either the singular, the plural or the general form, raise the question of why the plural form gives rise to multiplicity inferences but the general form does not. Second, languages like Indonesian, in which nouns seem to come only in the plural and the general form, raise the additional question of how multiplicity inferences arise from the plural form in the lack of a singular alternative to compete with. I propose a solution for these two problems, and show that it provides us with a parsimonious account of the typological picture, and naturally exntends to the pattern of plural marking on wh-words in languages like Spanish (Maldonado 2020, Elliott et al. 2022, Alonso-Ovalle & Rouillard 2023).

Here are photos of Omri and three members in his committee (from left to right: Danny, Kai, Omri and Viola). In addition, Martin joined the defense via Zoom:

On July 16th, Adele Mortier successfully and briliantly defended her dissertation Oddness under Discussion! Here is Adele’s abstract:

At a broad level, this dissertation’s main claim is that many cases of pragmatic oddness, do not stem from assertions alone, but rather from their interaction with the questions they implicitely evoke. Felicitous assertions, must evoke felicitous questions. To operationalize this claim, a model of compositionally derived implicit question is devised, along with conditions of their well-formedness, drawing from familiar concepts in pragmatics, such as Redundancy and Relevance. This model assigns a central role to the degree of specificity, or granularity, conveyed by assertions.

At a more narrow level, this dissertation argues that disjunctions and conditionals fundamentally differ in terms of the questions they evoke, and that this difference has direct consequences on the oddness/felicity profiles of sentences involving these operators. Disjunctions are shown to be prone to Redundancy issues, while conditionals are shown to be prone to Relevance issues. In other words, disjunctions and conditionals typically display distinct flavors of oddness. This is supported by three main classes of sentences. First, sentences that can be seen as equivalent, but which combine conditionals and disjunctions in distinct ways, display varying felicity profiles. This will be the focus of the public presentation. Second, “pure” disjunctions and conditionals that can be seen as isomorphic, if not equivalent, display varying felicity profiles. This will be partially covered during the public presentation. Third, some differences between these disjunctions and conditionals remain when additional pragmatic phenomena, in particular scalar implicatures, are at play, and such differences shift in a way predicted by our approach. This will not be covered in the public presentation.

This dissertation therefore supports the use of a more elaborate model of (implicit) questions, which, when fed to the pragmatic module, is characterized by a better empirical accuracy on challenging data, than previous model solely based on assertive content.

Congratulations, Adele!! Here are some photos of Adele and members in her committee (from left to right: Martin, Danny, Adele, Amir, Athulya):

 

Congratulations to Giovanni Roversi, who successfully defended his fascinating dissertation on Locality: a case study from Äiwoo on July 15th!! Here is Giovanni’s abstract:

This dissertation focuses on the notion of locality in syntactic theory, using as its empirical base a case study from Äiwoo (Solomon Islands; Oceanic < Austronesian).

In this language, word order is variable, yet strict. Depending on a variety of factors, every (transitive) clause can look a number of different ways, with different verbal mophology and the two arguments surfacing in different positions. However, these are not optional alternatives: for any clause, only one order is ever grammatically possible. Moreover, this variation in word order and verbal morphology is partially correlated with a restriction on which argument(s) may or may not be Ā-extracted from any type of clause, but there is no one-to-one mapping between word order, verbal morphology, and Ā-extraction possibilities.

I try to disentangle these aspects of Äiwoo syntax by building a model that generates all and only the attested clause types, with a principled account of their respective extraction profiles. This will provide us with a fine-grained view on a number of issues in syntactic theory, all ultimately revolving around locality. I argue that the typical locality properties of A- and Ā-movement (respectively, strictly local vs. not) are solely derivable from featural Relativized Minimality without adding any new mechanisms to our theoretical apparatus, and that therefore, locality is actually independent from the A/Ā-distinction altogether. This correctly predicts the existence of exceptions in both directions, that is, instances of movement that break with our expectations (surprisingly non-local A-movement, and surprisingly strictly local Ā-movement) – which we do indeed find in Äiwoo. I show that these are only“exceptions”prima facie, and they can receive a principled account based on Relativized Minimality. Furthermore, my model of Äiwoo clausal syntax will also have theoretical consequences for the morphosyntactic properties of Austronesian voice systems, and for the external and internal syntax of different categories of nominals.

See below for some photos of Giovanni after the defense with the three committee members (from left to right: Norvin, David, Omri, Amy Rose Deal, Athulya):

    

On July 10th, Yash Sinha successfully and excellently defended his dissertation, titled Plurals of politeness and the morphosyntax of number! Congratualtions, Yash!! You can read the abstract below:

Many languages use plural pronouns to address (and refer to) single individuals with politeness or honorification. In some languages, these plurals of politeness (PoPs) show mixed agreement, triggering plural agreement on some agreement targets and singular on others. In this dissertation, I use PoPs to investigate the internal structure of DPs, focusing on how number features are represented within them. 

Starting first with pronominal DPs, I adopt the view that these contain two phrases: (i) a noun phrase (NP) headed by a silent noun (Postal 1966 and subsequent work), and (ii) an index phrase (idxP), realized by the pronoun, which occupies the specifier of the DP and introduces a referential index (Jenks 2022; see also Choi 2014, Giusti 2015). My novel claim is that both the NP and the idxP bear their own number features. In most cases, this is not detectable because the number features of the NP and idxP typically match. I argue, however, that this is not the case for PoPs, which allows us to see that these two number features are in fact distinct. Specifically, I show that the agreement patterns of PoPs are best accounted for by treating them as consisting of a plural idxP with a singular NP (i.e., a plural pronoun with a silent singular noun). This analysis not only derives the mixed agreement of PoPs seen in some languages, but also explains certain cross-linguistic restrictions on the distribution of singular agreement with them. 

I also extend this analysis to account for nominal PoPs, a type of nominal DP found in a subset of languages with pronominal PoPs. These nominal PoPs have the same semantics and the same agreement patterns as their pronominal counterparts, but crucially, the morphology on the noun in nominal PoPs is singular and not plural.  I argue that these similarities and differences can be explained by positing that idxPs are present in nominal DPs as well, but are not realized overtly.

Here are photos of Yash with three members of his committee and opening the traditional post-defence champagne:

We are delighted to announce the open-access publication of the paper “Hidden Causality on Modern Greek” by fourth-year grad student Anastasia Tsilia in the journal Natural Language Semantics.

Congratulations, Anastasia!!

Anastasia’s website: https://www.anastasiatsilia.com

link to paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11050-025-09235-w

Congratulations to finishing student Omri Doron, who has accepted a position as Visiting Faculty in semantics at UMass Amherst for next year!!   

Congratulations to our wonderful advanced degree recipients who marched in MIT’s commencement ceremony on May 29 and received their well-deserved diplomas!

Eunsun Jou and Enrico Flor, receiving the degree of Doctor of Science in Linguistics

Soledad Chango and Renhard Saupia, receiving the degree of Master of Science in Linguistics — graduates of our Indigenous Language Program (MITILI)

Thank you all for enriching our community and the field during your years at MIT!!

MIT commencement video: https://commencement.mit.edu/SHASS-Advanced-Degree-Ceremony

Last week, Ruoan Wang successfully defended her dissertation entitled Proxies and Social Meaning! Below is Ruoan’s abstract:

This dissertation presents an analysis of polite meaning as part of a pragmatic calculus, without dedicated features in the core grammar. I present a purpose-built typology (n>200) showing that polite pronouns often have no inherent form of their own, instead piggybacking on certain phi-featural values targeted for recruitment, resulting in recruitment asymmetries in the shapes of polite proxies (PL but not SG; 3 but not 1/2; INCL but not EXCL). I argue asymmetries result because only certain grammatical forms are well-suited for linguistically manifesting the anthropological notion of negative politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987): respecting an interlocutor’s right “to freedom of action and freedom from imposition”. A polite context is thus a context where speakers avoid making assumptions about their interlocutor(s), where only number- and/or person-neutral forms may surface.

Such a pragmatic approach is shown to deliver results. First, the number- and/or person-neutrality of polite proxies is independently supported by the shapes of semantic defaults. Second, the machinations of the recruitment mechanism are illuminated by an Optimality-Theoretic analysis which delivers a factorial typology that perfectly mirrors the typological nuances within recruitment asymmetries.

Here are photos of Ruoan during the defense and her with three members in her committee (from left to right: Norvin Richards, Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel):

Congratulations, Ruoan!!

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory was held at Harvard University on May 20-22, 2025. MIT linguistics was well represented by current students, faculty and visitors:

• Johanna Alstott (student): On aspectual coercion in ‘before’-clauses: Evidence from processing
• Danny Fox (faculty and alum!) & Yusutada Sudo (PhD 2012): Nested ‘which’-phrases and degenerate questions
• Nina Haslinger (visiting faculty): Constraining imprecision and implicature cancellation via structural alternatives
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (student): Exh and only don’t really compete — they just answer different questions
• Jad Wehbe (student): Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustification

The following alums also presented their work: 

• Keny Chatain (2021) and Dean McHugh: The parts of ‘only’
• Jon Gajewski (2005): Neg-raising, accessibility and propositional anaphora
• Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (2023): From NPs to predicates of individual concepts
• Paul Marty (2017), Patrick Elliott, Guillermo Del Pinal & Jacopo Romoli:  Free Choice in (non-)monotonic contexts
• Isabelle Charnavel, Anouk Dieuleveut, Tom Meadows, David R. Müller & Dominique Sportiche (1983):Who am I to (dis)agree? Interpretation-sensitive agreement: Experimental evidence from French relatives
• Ciyang Qing, Deniz Özyıldız, Maribel Romero & Wataru Uegaki (2015): Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?

This year, the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place at University of Washington on April 25-27. MIT was well-represented by the following current and very recently graduated students with their work:

• Yiannis Katochoritis (2nd year), Magdalena Lohninger: Same but Different: Balinese vs. Malagasy Pivots
• Giovanni Roversi (5th year): “Non-local A-movement” is predicted to exist, and it does
• Fulang Chen (PhD 2023)[Gridspace]: The unaccusative-unergative distinction in Mandarin resultative constructions
• Zachary Feldcamp (3rd year), Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (6th year): Structure matters: missing implicatures and their consequence for the theory of alternatives
• Yurika Aonuki (3rd year): ‘Irrealis’ particle ji in Gitksan
• Yiannis Katochoritis (2nd year): An argument for Syntactic Reconstruction: Distributivity as Variable Binding
• Haoming Li (3rd year): Diagnosing modal clause structure with focus-sensitive operators in Mandarin Chinese
• Zhouyi Sun (3rd year), Peter Grishin (Postdoc; PhD 2023): Ordering postsyntactic operations within domains

On Sunday, April 6, we were excited to host PhPhoNE 2025. The event featured multiple presentations by graduate students from institutions across the Northeast, covering a diverse range of topics in phonology and phonetics. You can find the detailed program here.

Our third-year PhD student Juan Cancel presented his work, entitled “A Reanalysis of Syllabic and Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan As A Single Consonant Gradation Process”.

The 22nd annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference was held at Montreal, and Mont Tremblant, Quebec, Canada from 27 March to 1 April 2025. Our first-year PhD student Heidi Durresi presented her work with others (Authors: Linghao Kong, Heidi Durresi, Lu Mi, and Nir Shavit) at the conference, entitled “Presynaptic input synchrony at scale”! You can read the abstract here.

Our sixth-year PhD student Margaret Wang was an invited speaker at the 3rd workshop on Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes (CHAMP3) held at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from March 28 to 29, 2025. Her talk was entitled “Politeness as a part-time vocation for vacuous linguistic forms”, and here is the abstract:

This talk will describe and explain how various expressions of politeness, whether phi-featural or
not, are recruited as such. Presenting various diagnostics, I argue that semantic vacuousness is a
necessary condition for forms recruited for the task of politeness. Invoking typological
asymmetries and economy principles, the talk will also make the case for politeness necessarily
being a part-time vocation (arising only via pragmatic principles), instead of a full-time one
(which would involve dedicated linguistic features).

The 47th meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) was held at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Göttingen on March 25-28, 2025. Here are the presentations made by current students, faculty and alumni:

• Yiannis Katochoritis (2nd year): If Distributivity is Variable Binding, Scope Reconstruction must be Syntactic (abstract)
• Gianluca Porta & Elise Newman (faculty, PhD 2021): Ne-cliticization and the DP/PP distinction: A case for Q (abstract)
• Shoichi Takahashi (PhD 2006)[Aoyama Gakuin University]: What Prepositional Object Gaps Tell Us about Merge and Linearization (abstract)
• Isabelle Charnavel & Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1984)[UCLA]: On Semantic Agreement (abstract)
• Isabelle Charnavel, Tom Meadows, Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1984)[UCLA]: Interpreted Agreement in Indexical Binding (abstract)
• Silvia Silleresi, Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS/Ben Gurion University], Abigail Anne Bimpeh, Imke Driemel, Johnson Folorunso Ilori & Anastasia Nuworsu: Pronoun preferences unmasked: an experimental study on Ewe and Yoruba (abstract)
• Colin Davis (PhD 2020)[Nord University]: Punctuated movement facilitates (multi-)clausal pied-piping in Albanian (abstract)
• Danfeng Wu (PhD 2022)[Oxford]: Two paths to correction (abstract)
• Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Andreea Nicolae, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Napoleon Katsos & Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998)[ZAS]: Not all children find no subjects hard: A cross-linguistic investigation of children’s negative indefinite production (abstract)

On March 1st 2025, the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) was held at University of Southern California. Our current student Bergül Soykan (3rd year student) presented a poster entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. You can read the abstract here, and a shorter version is provided below:

This study investigates the structure of correlatives and unconditionals in Turkish, focusing on their syntactic and semantic parallels and distinctions. I propose that correlatives align with standard if-conditionals, while unconditionals resemble antecedent-external “even if” da conditionals in Turkish, particularly through the interaction with the particle da. The study addresses the key question: Why do non-past markers (-Ir, -Iyor, -Acak) block unconditional interpretations? Drawing on previous analyses and new evidence, it proposes that this restriction arises from the presuppositional conflict introduced by da and the non-past markers.

Several of our alimuni also attended the conference (you can read the abstracts by clicking on the titles):

• Utku Türk & Aaron Hirsch (PhD 2017)[University of Maryland, College Park]: Turkish allows covert scrambling
• Züheyra Tokaç & Jennifer Cole (PhD 1987)[Northwestern University]: Vowel cooccurrence as a predictor of perceived vowel similarity in Turkish
• Nazmiye Öyük & Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Boğaziçi University]: Turkish Possessive Constructions by Upward Agree

On 1st March 2025, the 3rd Theoretical Approaches to Ryukyuan Languages conference (ThARL3) was hosted by University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Cooper Roberts (2nd year student) presented a paper entitled “Another way to allocutively agree in Japonic?”, which compares and contrasts addressee honorification in Japanese and Shuri Okinawan. He suggests a way of analyzing addressee honorification in Shuri inspired by proposals from Shigeru Miyagawa and Akitaka Yamada, but crucially without affix raising (something which Japanese seems to have, but Okinawan seems to not have).

Several of our alumni also participated in the following presentations:

• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005)[Meiji Gakuin University]: 沖縄語首里方言と日本語の不定語の比較対照統語論 [Comparative and Contrastive Syntax of Okinawan Shuri Dialect and Japanese Indefinite Words]
• Yusuke Imanishi (PhD 2014)[Kwansei Gakuin University]: The right periphery of Kikai (Amami): evidentiality and complementation
• Shinsho Miyara (former visiting scholar)[University of the Ryukyus]: 沖縄語の母音体系 [Vowel system of Okinawan language]

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.

We are delighted to announce the publication in Natural Language Semantics of  (third year PhD student) Johanna Alstott’s paper “First and last as superlatives of before and after”. Congratulations Johanna!! Here’s the abstract:

First and last have been variously described as ordinals, superlatives, or both. These descriptions are generally not accompanied by extensive argumentation, and those who label first and last as superlatives do not present and argue for a particular decomposition. Thus, first and last’s status as ordinals vs. superlatives and their internal composition remain open issues. In this paper, I argue that first and last are superlatives, in particular the superlative forms of before and after. To argue that first and last are superlatives, I show that they pattern like superlatives and unlike ordinals (second, third, etc.) with respect to plurality, modifier choice, “modal superlatives” with possible, and the ordinal superlative construction. I next argue that the relations between before and first and between after and last show themselves overtly in many languages and in English paraphrases; furthermore, first and last semantically differ in ways that before and after have also been noted to differ. While I acknowledge one observation that prima facie counterexemplifies these claims, I argue that it constitutes a genuine counterexample only if one formalizes my decomposition of first/last using a standard Heimian (Heim in Notes on superlatives. Manuscript, MIT (1999)) entry for -est. The counterexample, which concerns the “upstairs de dicto” reading of superlatives, ceases to be an issue if one treats before and after as simplex and formalizes my decomposition using a Containment Hypothesis-inspired semantics (Bobaljik in Universals in comparative morphology: Suppletion, superlatives, and the structure of words, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012) for -est.

Natural Language Semantics is an open-access journal so everyone can access the paper here: https://link.springer.com/journal/11050

On January 28th, 2025, our six-year student Omri Doron gave an invited talk at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled “Presupposing multiplicity: another look at the semantics of plural marking”. Abstract can be seen here:

Plural indefinites in argument position give rise to so-called multiplicity inferences, which are neutralized in downward-entailing environments:

(1) a. Mary owns cats. -> Mary owns more than one cat.
      b. Mary doesn’t own cats. -> Mary owns zero cats.

Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain this pattern (Sauerland 2003, Spector 2007, Zweig 2009, de Swart and Farkas 2010, Ivlieva 2013, Kriz 2017, a.o.), but all seem to face major empirical or conceptual challenges. I take as a desideratum two puzzling facts, both pointed out by Spector (2007): the projection of multiplicity from non-monotonic environments (2), and the infelicity of negated sentences in certain contexts (3).

(2) Exactly one of my friends owns a cat. ->
       a. Exactly one of my friends owns exactly one cat.
       b. The rest of my friends own zero cats.

(3) a. Bill likes to dress fancy, but today he’s not wearing a suit.
      b. #Bill likes to dress fancy, but today he’s not wearing suits.

I propose a solution to these puzzles based on the argument that multiplicity is the result of a presupposition, present both in the basic examples (1a) and the negated ones (1b): that Mary either has more than one cat or zero cats. I show that this presupposition naturally falls out once we consider a recent proposal on the nature of scalar implicatures (Bassi et al. 2021). Finally, I argue that the same mechanism may be extended to account for the behavior of plural definites as well (homogeneity).

Sixth-year graduate student Omri Doron gave a talk at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on January 23rd, 2025, with the title “Revisiting pronominal copulas”.  Here is the abstract:

(1) dana (hi)                 gvoa
     Dana (Pron.3FSG) tall
     “Dana is tall”

Doron (1983) analyzes Pron as the realization of agreement features in I⁰, spelled out as a pronoun in the lack of a verb. I point out that this analysis is unable to account for Pron’s complicated distribution and interpretative effects, and argue for an alternative analysis of Pron as a resumptive pronoun. I then show that this analysis can shed light on the interaction of Pron with genericity (Greenberg, 2002).

Our alum Heejong Ko (PhD 2005) gave the opening remarks at the 1st SNU Linguistics Symposium on January 10 and 11, 2025.

Third-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. A brief abstract is given below and you can read the longer version here.

This study investigates the structure of correlatives and unconditionals in Turkish, focusing on their syntactic and semantic parallels and distinctions. I propose that correlatives align with standard if-conditionals, while unconditionals resemble antecedent-external “even if” conditionals in Turkish, particularly through the interaction with the particle da. The study addresses the key question: why do non-past markers (-Ir, -Iyor, -Acak) block unconditional interpretations? Drawing on previous analyses and new evidence, it proposes that this restriction arises from the presuppositional conflict introduced by da and the non-past markers. These findings shed light on Turkish morphosyntax and its implications for cross-linguistic patterns, leaving open questions about the broader interaction of tense and modality in conditional structures.

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:

The MIT Linguistics community actively participated in the Amsterdam Colloquium 2024 held at University of Amsterdam on December 18-20. Our current students and faculty gave the following talks:

• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (6th year): Scalarity, information structure and relevance in varieties of Hurford Conditionals
• Jad Wehbe (5th year), Kate Kinnaird (Lab Manager), Martin Hackl (Faculty; PhD 2001): Distributivity facilitates ACD resolution

Several of our recent alumni from the past decade presented:

• Tatiana Bondarenko (PhD 2022)[Harvard], Richard Luo, Vincent Rouillard (PhD 2023)[Harvard]: Thinking Statively and Dynamically: a view from Georgian
• Patrick Elliott & Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD 2023)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg]: Ignorance under attitudes
• Paloma Jeretic, Aurore Gonzalez, Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS], Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998)[ZAS]: DUAL as a core concept and the pronounceability of alternatives
• Silvia Silleresi, Itai Bassi, Abigail Bimpeh, Imke Driemel, Anastasia Nuworsu, Maria Teresa Guasti: The interpretation of logophoric and ordinary pronouns in Ewe: an experimental study

And their predecessors as well!

• Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Kurt Erbach, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012)[UCL]: Non-maximality effects in gestural plural predication
• Andreea Nicolae, Yasutada Sudo, Muyi Yang: On the anti-exhaustive inference of ya
• Lisa Bylinina, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Yasutada Sudo: Priming NPI Acceptability Judgments and The Bagel Problem
• Pranav Anand (PhD 2006)[UCSC], Natasha Korotkova: Facts, intentions, questions: English “come-to-know” predicates in deliberative environments
• Wataru Uegaki (PhD 2015)[University of Edingurgh]: Semantic triviality leads to ungrammaticality through iterated learning

On December 17th, Enrico Flor brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled Coarse Modality! 

The dissertation documents the existence of what Enrico calls “coarse modality”, drawing mostly on Italian data.  Much of the focus is on reducing apparent polysemy to an underspecified meaning that interacts with other modal expressions.  The central theoretical argument of the dissertation is that an insightful and natural analysis of coarse modality across speech acts relies on a novel use of certain peculiar and somewhat underutilized properties of Kratzer’s premise semantics for modals.

Here is Enrico with three members of his committee (l to r: Martin Hackl, Sabine Iatridou, Enrico Flor, Kai von Fintel).  The fourth member, Viola Schmitt, participated remotely.

Congratulations, Enrico!!

MIT Linguistics community participated in Formal Diachronic Semantics 9 hosted by Università di Bologna on November 28-29! The following talks were presented by our current students and alumni:

• Ruoan Wang (6th year): Variable preservation of honorificity after repluralization: A diachronic typology
• Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002)[Université Paris VIII]: Affix conglutination as allosemy in a complex affix

MIT folks presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2024) which took place November 1-3 at Rutgers University. The following talks and poster were given by our students and visitors: 

Current students and visitors:

• Alma Frischoff (1st year), Ezer Rasin (Visiting professor, PhD 2018): Unattested opaque interactions are Input Strictly Local (abstract)
• Bingzi Yu (2nd year), Shuang Zheng, Youngah Do (PhD 2013): Learners’ generalization of alternation patterns from ambiguous data (abstract)
• Eyal Marco (Visiting student), Ezer Rasin (Visiting professor, PhD 2018): Optimal Paradigms: a challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (abstract)

Alums: 

• Jian-Leat Siah, Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017), Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007): Reduplicative Opacity in Malay Revisited: Preliminary Phonetic Evidence for Variable “Recopying” and BRCT (abstract)
• Klaus Baki, Anthony D. Yates, Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017): A Phonology–Morphosyntax Interface Explanation of the “Nasal Infix” in (Proto-)Indo-European (abstract)
• Antón de la Fuente, Sarang Jeong, Arto Anttila, and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009): What do harmony-based grammars exclude? (abstract)
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009): Why phonologists got it right: a principled derivation of OT and HG (abstract)

Second-year student Cooper Roberts presented a paper on October 25 at an online workshop devoted to Puzzles of Agreement: Syntactic, Semantic, and Psycholinguistic perspectives. His talk, entitled “Half of an answer: on agreement with fraction partitives”, proposed an analysis of some puzzling agreement patterns in English nominals like one-third of the students, and suggests a way to think about analogous constructions elsewhere in Indo-European. The workshop was organized by linguists at UMass Amherst, ZAS Berlin, the University of Toronto, and the University of Bucharest.

We are delighted to announce that a paper entitled  ”Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” by 5th-year student Giovanni Roversi has just been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.  Congratulations, Giovanni!

Here’s the abstract:

This paper argues that possession is syntactically category-flexible. While it is clear that in many languages possession is mostly grounded in and operates in the nominal extended projection (Szabolcsi 1983; Kayne 1993), I show that this cannot be universal. The empirical part of this article is a case study of Äiwoo, which I argue has an inherently verbal counterpart of English ’s, an abstract transitive verb I label POSS. This verb can be used by itself to form clausal possession: ‘I POSS this boat’ ≈ ‘this boat is mine.’ Possessed DPs also contain the verb POSS: the object of this verb is extracted, forming a relative clause. Informally, ‘my boat’ really is ‘the boati ’ ≈ ‘the boat that is mine.’ Given this, Äiwoo simply lacks true nominal possessives. The theoretical consequence is that possession can be mapped onto different syntactic categories in different languages. This is a welcome result, as it makes the syntax-semantics mapping as flexible as it needs to be: if possession is just a tool to assert that a certain relation holds between two entities, nothing in our theory of grammar predicts that such a notion should only be limited to a specific syntactic category.

The paper is open access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-024-09623-7

The MIT Linguistics community and its alums were well-represented at NELS 55, hosted by Yale University on October 17 & 18. Our distinguished alum Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015) of Queen Mary University of London, was one of the invited speakers, and spoke about “The cycle within a syllable: The role of the vP phase in Dinka morphophonology”.  The following talks and posters were presented by our current students and visitors:

• Ioannis Katochoritis (2nd year) - Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka
• Magdalena Lohninger (Visiting student) - The A’/A signature: systematic patterns in composite A’/A probing
• Paul Meisenbichler (2nd year) - Interactions of worlds, times, and locations: On the expressive power of index shifting
• Oddur Snorrason (Visiting student) - HAVE-omission in Swedish: Towards a theory of auxiliary omission
• Anastasia Tsilia (4th year) - (In)direct evidential futures in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian
  
  … and these were the talks and posters by alums of the past decade …
• Klaus Baki, Anthony D. Yates and Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017) [UCLA] - A phonology–morphosyntax interface explanation of the “nasal infix” in (Proto‑)Indo-European
• Suzana Fong (PhD 2021) [Memorial University of Newfoundland] - Reciprocal binding and syntactic ergativity in Adyghe
• Andrew Hedding and Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018) [UCLA] - Distinct pathways to possessor Ā-extraction in Mesoamerican languages
• Fulang Chen (PhD 2023) [Gridspace]  and Ka-Fai Yip - Facilitator effects in Mandarin topicalization: Evidence for a crossing-based view of antilocality
• Luke Adamson and Stanislao Zompì (PhD 2023) [Potsdam] - Polite Pronouns and the PCC
• Peter Grishin (Postdoc, PhD 2023) [MIT] - Impersonal impersonals and personal third persons: An argument for binary [±PART]
  
  … and their predecesors!
• Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002) [University of Chicago] and Matthew Hewett - Singular they and the syntax of pronominal imposters
• Daiki Asami and Benjamin Bruening (PhD 2001) [University of Delaware] - Subjectless readings of again and the Kratzerian model of argument structure
• Jon Gajewski (PhD 2005) [University of Connecticut] - On the pragmatics of propositional anaphora
• Isabelle Charnavel, Tom Meadows and Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1984)  [UCLA] - Meaningful Agreement Features: Evidence from indexical binding
  
  

On June 18, Dóra successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Constraints on vowel-zero alternations in Hungarian”! Congratulations, Dóra!!

Here’s the abstract:

I analyze a large set of Hungarian nominal and verbal stems whose last vowel alternates with zero in certain contexts (Vago (1980), Siptár & Törkenczy (2000)): e.g. bokor, bokr- ok. I argue that the mechanism underlying these alternations is syncope, departing in this from earlier work (Vago (1980), Abondolo (1988), J. Jensen & Stong-Jensen (1988, 1989), Törkenczy (1995), Abrusán (2005)) which assumes epenthesis or metathesis.

My research focuses on which stems fall into this closed group of vowel-zero alternating stems. I show that there is an interaction between phonological processes that repair phono- tactically illicit consonant clusters – like voicing assimilation, gemination, affrication – and vowel-zero alternations. I present a proposal that correctly predicts that these phonological processes block vowel-zero alternations.

The grammar that generates this result includes a ranking schema where the constraint triggering syncope (referred to below as Syncope) is outranked not only by the Markedness constraints that define illicit CC-clusters in Hungarian but also by the faithfulness constraints that are normally violated in the repair of such clusters. The general ranking I will argue for is:

(1) Markedness (*CC for various CCs) » Faithfulness to Cs » Syncope » Max V

I also present results from a wug experiment, which confirms that Hungarian speakers are aware of the systematic restrictions my analysis characterizes.

The broad significance of the work is to document a large-scale conspiracy (Kisseberth (1970)) whereby permissible CC clusters emerge in at least two ways: through direct action of repair processes (assimilation or merger of two Cs into one) and through blockage of the syncope process that could yield the inputs to such repairs.

 

Tamari Berulava I’m Tamari (she/her), but feel free to call me Tam. Originally from Georgia, I pursued linguistics in Göttingen, where I earned my MA degree. I find the most fun in semantics and pragmatics, and I’ve recently worked on topics like pluralities and (in)definiteness. In my free time, I love doing puzzles, playing the piano, and capturing moments with my film camera. I’m also a big fan of getting some quality sleep.

Jinlin Chen My name is Lin. I’m from Shanghai, China. My main interests lie in semantics and pragmatics, especially the semantics of Chinese dialects. Outside linguistics, I enjoy watching anime, detective series, comedy shows, playing and watching sports (soccer, pingpong) and travelling.

Heidi Durresi Hi! My name is Heidi (she/her). I’m originally from Albania but was born in the US, and spent most of my childhood and teenage years in Albania. I returned to the US to do my undergraduate degree here at MIT, where I studied linguistics and theoretical computer science, and did some research in computational neuroscience.  Within linguistics, I’m generally interested in theoretical and computational phonology. I’m also more broadly interested in work that bridges generative linguistics and cognitive science. Outside of linguistics, I like watching movies and helping out behind the scenes with theater productions at MIT.

Alma Frischoff My name is Alma, and I’m from Tel Aviv. I studied at the interdisciplinary program at Tel Aviv University, where I mostly focused on linguistics, mathematics and literature, and eventually continued to an MA degree in linguistics. I am primarily interested in semantics, pragmatics and their interface, and my MA thesis focuses on pragmatic, game-theoretic models and their predictions for conjunctive readings of disjunctions (e.g. free choice inferences). In my free time, I enjoy reading and making ceramics.

Amy Li Hi everyone, I’m Amy (she/her). You might know me already since I just finished my undergrad here at MIT. I’m interested in phonetics and phonology, speech production, language variation and change, mental representations of language, and applying computational methods to all of the above. Outside of linguistics, I like playing card games, taking walks along the river, and spending time with friends.

Rotsuprit Saengthong My name is Rotsuprit Saengthong, and I usually go by my nickname, Ford, which is a common practice in my home country. I’m originally from Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand. I grew up speaking both Lao and Thai. I have currently completed my MA in Linguistics at the University of Kansas, USA. My primary research interest is syntax. I’m particularly interested in topics such as A and A’- dependencies, left-periphery, and structure-building of non-finite clauses. Outside of Linguistics, I enjoy sightseeing and listening to Mohlam—the traditional folk music of northeastern Thailand. And I’m a dog person.

Ogloo Jurkhaichin My name is Ogloo, and I come from Inner Mongolia, China. I’m mostly interested in syntax, morphology, and their interfaces, with a focus on Mongolian and other Altaic languages. Here at MIT, I look forward to leveraging the MITILI program to explore the latest theoretical linguistic theories and methodologies. I hope to be able to contribute to the Mongolian linguistic research by bridging the gap between traditional descriptive studies and contemporary theoretical linguistic theories.

William Pacheco Kuu’t weh tsi hoopah? My name is William Kaishr’tuuwah Pacheco – I am from the village of Kewa, also known as Santo Domingo Pueblo - it’s located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am in the ILI program, and I will be working on my indigenous language – Keres. I was a teacher of Kewa Keres at Santa Fe Indian School.

I graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in May, and during my time there, I cross-registered here and met several faculty members and students from the linguistics department. Outside of academics, I love to travel and have been working with pottery and ceramics since I was very young. Being from New Mexico, I embrace our “land of mañana” vibe — meaning things can often wait until tomorrow!

One more thing — in high school, I was quite the class clown in my math class. To channel my energy, my teacher gave me a book to read: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Feynman’s humorous exploits and the fact that he worked nearby in Los Alamos made him one of my heroes. I even dreamed of becoming a physicist. Now, as I walk the Infinite Corridor, I feel a connection to Feynman and my youth — though it wasn’t physics that led me to MIT, but my passion for my own native language.

Vladislav Orlov My name is Vlad (he/him), I am originally from a small town near Moscow, Russia, although I stayed at different places in the last two years. I completed my Master’s in Linguistics at Moscow State University . I am primarily interested in syntax and semantics focusing on the approaches to scope phenomena. I study Uralic languages in the field, so I worked on a bunch of Finnic languages, Mari and Udmurt languages. Apart from linguistics, I am really into classical music, and I also like hiking and watching some good old movies.

On August 22, Eunsun Jou successful defended her extremely interesting dissertation about the nature of case marking on adverbials in Korean. entitled “Structural case on adjuncts”.   In addition to David Pesetsky, Adam Albright, and Norvin Richards, Prof. Heejeong Ko joined the committee from Seoul National University, via Zoom.  Here is Eunsun’s abstract: 

In my dissertation, I investigate case marking on adverbials in Korean. In a number of unrelated languages, there are adverbials that get marked with accusative case in active sentences. A question that arose in the face of these adverbials is whether they bear structural accusative case (like objects do), or inherent/lexical accusative case. In order to answer this question, researchers have observed what happens under passivization. If the accusative case on the adverbial is replaced by nominative, it is most likely behaving as structural case; if the adverbial retains its case under passivization, it is behaving like inherent/lexical case. Interestingly, languages behave differently in the face of this diagnostic. German and Russian adverbials keep their accusative case, while Finnish adverbials become nominative-marked. Complicating the picture even further, Korean adverbials allow both nominative and accusative case.

I argue that Korean adverbials bear structural case like their Finnish counterparts. In the talk, I will demonstrate that whether an adverbial bears nominative or accusative case correlates with the syntactic position of the subject. I will then provide an explanation for this correlation based on two factors. The first is the competition between the theme and the external argument to move from Spec, VoiceP to Spec, TP. The second factor is the successive-cyclic Dependent Case model. By doing so, the dissertation shows that a syntactic theory of case can do much more than one might imagine. The complexities of Korean case-marked adverbials have led some researchers to argue against a purely syntactic analysis of case on these adverbials. But I demonstrate that the same mechanism that assigns case on subjects and objects can account for case on adverbials as well.

Congratulations, Eunsun!!

On Sunday, March 17, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Elhana Sugiaman (a Harvard Graduate School of Education master’s student), and Arun Wongprommoon (an MIT M.Eng student) taught 64 7th-10th graders at Spring Spark, an educational enrichment program run by MIT students. As part of their work for 24.S95 Linguistics in K-12 Education, Elhana and Christopher designed and taught “How to Be a Linguistic Detective” and Cora and Arun designed and taught two sections of “Making Waves: An Introduction to Phonetic Speech Analysis”. Maya Honda attended their classes and can vouch for the wonderful job that they did of enthusiastically sharing their knowledge and passion for linguistics with the Spark students. 

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

More great news about fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi: Giovanni’s paper “Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory! In the paper, Giovanni observes that the Äiwoo language doesn’t contain possessives like “my” or “her(s)”. Instead, all it has is a possessive verb, so that “my dog” is more literally something like “the dog that I have”, and “his sister” is “the one he has as a sister”. This empirical fact ends up having repercussions for our theories of syntactic categories: something that we thought was usually nominal can actually be verbal as well. Congratulations, Giovanni!

You can read the pre-print on lingbuzz here: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/006565. 

Here’s how we recently congratulated Giovanni in the department:

Fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi presented at the biannual GLOW in Asia 14 which took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 6 to March 8, 2024. Giovanni presented his work “Condition C, Anti-cataphora, and “Reverse Crossover” in Äiwoo”. 

Our graduate student Ruoan Wang gave a talk for Northeastern University’s Fall Speaker Series, titled An eventually very simple account of Japanese honorification (joint work with Takanobu Nakamura). Some details can be found here. 

The 48th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 48) happend this past weekend November 2—5, 2023. MIT had a great showing with 4 talks coming out of ongoing projects at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab.

• Giovanni Roversi, Kate Kinnaird, Athulya Aravind: Acquisition of *ABA paradigms in a child Artificial Language Learning Experiment
• Keely New, Premvanti Patel and Athulya Aravind: How toddlers answer multiple wh-questions
• Athulya Aravind and Megan Gotowski: Children’s Interpretations of Referential and Expletive It
• Megan Gotowski and Athulya Aravind: Non-Canonical Agreement in Early Grammar

A big congratulations to all those who defended over the summer! 

• • Christopher Yang: How Joint Inference of the Lexicon and Phonology Affects the Learnability of Process Interactions
    
    
  • Stanislao Zompi’: *ABA in multidimensional paradigms: A MAX/DEP-based account
    
  • Boer Fu: Uncovering Mandarin Speaker Knowledge with Language Game Experiments
    
  • Cora Lesure: Selecting for and selecting despite: A Javanese case study
    
  • Vincent Rouillard: A Semantic Account of Distributional Constraints on Temporal in-Adverbials
    
  • Peter Grishin: Lessons from CP in Passamaquoddy and beyond
    
  • Daniel Asherov: Constraining grids
    
    
  • Filipe Kobayashi: Quantifying over individual concepts
    

And here are some photos of ling-17 together: 

A big welcome back to the department, everyone! Here are news of what some of us got up to during the summer:

• June 24: Shrayana Haldar presented an invited talk at one of LSA’s workshops, How Many Mothers: Multidominance in Syntax. It was titled Linearizing Disintegrated Traces.
• July 19: Jad Wedbe presented a talk at the homogeneity workshop HNM2, titled Homogeneity as presuppositional exhaustification. 
• Aug 11: Yurika Aonuki presented a talk at UBC, titled Degree semantics in Gitksan and Japanese.
• Aug 14-15: Adèle Hénot-Mortier and Eunsun Jou presented posters at SICOGG 25! Adele presented Bridging the gap between French tough-constructions and pseudorelatives, while Eunsun presented Case Marking of Korean Nominal Adverbials Correlates with Subject Position.
  
• The 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute was hosted at UMass Amherst. Student participants from MIT included Taieba Tawakoli, Zhouyi Sun, and Shrayana Halder (see above). Several classes were taught by faculty and alums: 
  * Athulya Aravind ‘18 (Acquiring Word Meaning [cotaught])
  * Mark Baker ‘85 (Complementizers Relating to Noun Phrases: Rare Constructions within a Theory of Universal Grammar)
  * Seth Cable ‘07 (Introduction to Semantics)
  * Jessica Coon ‘10 (Structure of Mayan)
  * Ray Jackendoff ‘69 (The Parallel Architecture and its Components)
  * Hadas Kotek ‘14 (Careers in Language Technology)
  * Giorgio Magri ‘09 (What Exactly is Phonological Opacity? [co-taught] & Advanced Phonology)
  * Elise Newman ‘21 (Feeding and Bleeding in Syntax)
  * David Pesetsky ‘82 (Introduction to Syntax)
  * Juliet Stanton ‘17 (Introduction to Phonology)
  * Michelle Yuan ‘18 (The morpho-syntax of case and licensing) 
• Creteling 2023 was a smashing success! Pictured here is (most of) the CreteLing 2023 Faculty, Staff, and TAs along the beautiful coast: 
  

Two of our recent graduates received diplomas and ceremonial hoods at MIT’s graduate commencement ceremony last Friday: congratulations to John Dennis, who brilliantly completed the Masters program in Linguistics under the MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative, and renewed congratulations to Tanya Bondarenko!

On March 22-24, Ukhengching Marma (first-year MITILI student) attended the United Nations 2023 Water Conference in New York. As the ceremonial queen of Mong Circle from Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, Ukheng represented the voice of marginalized indigenous minorities in Bangladesh. After the conference, she was interviewed by Premier Magazine: read the feature here (pages 72-77).

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”.

The annual Workshop on Turkic and Langugages in Contact with Turkic (TU+8) was held at Harvard University on March 4-5. Our first-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk titled “The interaction between past and conditional morphemes in Turkish.” You may find the abstract here. 

On February 21, 2023, our second-year student Lorenzo Pinton gave a talk at S-Babble, a syntax-semantics discussion group at UC San Diego. 

Title: “Numerous” relative clauses: permutation invariance, anti-restrictiveness, triviality

Abstract: It’s been observed that gather-like and numerous-like predicates give rise to different felicity patterns when combined with plural quantifiers (Kroch, 1974; Dowty et al., 1987; Champollion, 2010; Amiraz, 2021):

1)  a.    All the students gathered.

     b.  #All the students are numerous.

In this work, I aim to provide an analysis for similar data brought about by restrictive relative clauses:

2)  a.    Jack only talked to the students that gathered.

     b.  #Jack only talked to the students that were numerous.

While gather can be felicitously applied in a restrictive construction (2a), numerous cannot (2b). First, I will argue, through Italian data, that the problem is really tied to restriction, rather than relative clauses in general. Second, I will claim that predicates like numerous have a specific property, permutation invariance (i.e. the fact that such predicates only care about the cardinality of a group, and not about the specific members that compose that group). This property is problematic when numerous is combined with pluralized predicate, where pluralization is defined as the star operator (Link, 1984). In particular, I will show that when a pluralized predicate modified by numerous combines with the definite article the, it generates triviality, which leads to infelicity (Gajewski, 2002). A positive outcome of this solution is that it  predicts the puzzling data in (3), namely the fact that (2b) becomes good if students is modified by another predicate:

3)  Jack only talked to the gathered students that were numerous.

In fact, we can assume that, when gathered students is not pluralized, it will feed numerous plural individuals (since it is a collective predicate), without leading to triviality. In the presentation I will discuss the conclusion that this solution seems to suggest: namely that pluralization is a rather free operation, which is syntactic in nature and its application is governed by certain logical properties, like avoiding triviality. I would like to conclude showing some problems that might be lurking in the proposed solution, and possible extensions of this solution to the plural quantifiers puzzle in (1) that the literature has focused on so far.

(Thanks to JJ Lim for the screenshot!)

Over the weekend, some of us (Bergül Soykan, Katie Martin, Keely New, and Cora Lesure) participated in a very fun and stimulating installment of ECO-5 hosted by the University of Connectiticut in Storrs. ECO-5 is a venue for graduate students from five East Coast universities (UMass, MIT, Harvard, UConn, and UMD) to present their ongoing, original work in linguistics. 

Congratulations are in order for our dissertating student Stanislao Zompì and co-author Christos Christopoulos (University of Connecticut) whose paper “Taking the nominative (back) out of the accusative” has been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory! Félications, Stan and Christos!! The article is open-access and can be downloaded here. 

The nominative, the accusative and the dative have been recently argued to stand in proper containment to one another. In contrast to more traditional decompositions which posited no such containment, this new decomposition has been shown to account for the absence of ABA exponence patterns for this triplet of cases, i.e. for the fact that no rule of exponence applies in both nominative and dative without also applying in the accusative. We point out that, in addition to its desirable predictions regarding *ABA, the more recent decomposition also makes an undesirable prediction about the derivation of ABB patterns, as we show based on data from Indo-European languages. We argue that a third theory—under which the accusative is properly contained within the dative, but the nominative and the accusative do not stand in a containment relation to one another—accounts for all the relevant facts.

When the Wall Street Journal needed a linguist to weigh in on issues concerning the proper pronunciation of the name of the singer Adele, naturally they consulted with our very own Adèle — graduate student Adèle Mortier — who acquitted herself excellently. Perhaps the first time the word “phonologist” has even appeared in the Wall Street Journal, for one thing — though the reference to “uh-dewl” in the article should be taken with a grain of salt (there were supposed to be some phonetic symbols there, and the name does not rhyme with “duel”).  If you have not used up your four free articles for the month, you will be able to read all about it at https://www.wsj.com/articles/wait-how-do-you-say-adeles-name-even-the-expert-is-confused-11667508528

Screenshot of the important part below:

Three of our grad students, Anastasia Tsilia (now 24), Christopher Legerme (now 30), and Shrayana Haldar (now 23) had birthday celebrations in the department last week, complete with cake! Happy belated!

Speakers: Ido Benbaji and Omri Doron (MIT)
Title: Adversative only is only only
Time: Wednesday 10/19, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: 

Jespersen (1954) discusses uses of the word only in which it seems to behave as a sentential connective, as in (1) below. Following von Fintel & Iatridou, we call this adversative only.
(1) He’s a nice man, only he talks too much.
We propose a unified analysis for regular only and adversative only, and suggest that the difference between the uses stems from scopal interaction with an operator in LF that enforces the informativity requirement on sentences. We extend our analysis to other cases of CP-taking only and even.

Fourth-year student Ido Benbaji and faculty colleague David Pesetsky presented a joint paper entitled “E-Extension and the Uniformity of Silence” at the international online You’re on Mute workshop on ellipsis last Friday (co-organized by Gary Thoms (NYU) and Danfeng Wu (PhD 2022)).

Congratulations to Frank Staniszewski, who successfully and excellently defended his dissertation on August 25, 2022, titled Modality and Time in Logical Context! 

The dissertation develops a theory of neg-raising that unifies the phenomenon with existing theories of free choice and negative polarity items. The empirical focus is on “until”-phrases and on the neg-raising predicates “want”, “should”, and “be supposed to”. Predictions of the formal account are then examined in a language acquisition experiment.

Many congratulations to Christopher Baron, who successfully and excellently defended his dissertation on August 15, 2022, titled The Logic of Subtractives, or, Barely anyone tried almost as hard as me!

The dissertation analyzes the elements “almost and “barely”, proposing a formal analysis in which they are subtractive modifiers of quantifiers that via exhaustification result in exceptive meanings. The resulting theory is then used to examine the compositional structure of comparative and equative constructions as well as numeral constructions.

Congratulations to Tanya Bondarenko, who successfully and excellently defended her dissertation, titled “Anatomy of an Attitude”!

The thesis explores the syntax and semantics of different types of tensed embedded clauses, with lots of intricate data from Russian, Buryat, and Korean, and innovative analyses of their compositional semantics.

As previously announced, this fall Tanya will be taking a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University.

This past Friday (June 17, 2022) Ianá Ferguson, one of Prof. Michel DeGraff’s undergraduate students in his Spring 2022 course “Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities” had one of her essays for the class published in a newspaper in her home country Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. This piece is an extremely important analysis on “Linguistics and economics in the Caribbean”—with lessons for the struggle against linguistic (neo-)colonialism worldwide, especially in former European colonies. It has been an honor for Michel DeGraff to have had Ianá Ferguson as one among so many inspiring students in his courses.

The article is available online here.

“Initially thinking she might want to study creative writing or theater, Gandhi first learned about linguistics as its own field of study through an online course in ninth grade. Now a linguistics major at MIT, she is studying the structure of language from the syllable to sentence level, and also learning about how we perceive language. She finds the human aspects of how we use language, and the fact that languages are constantly changing, particularly compelling.

 ’When you learn to appreciate language, you can then appreciate culture,’ she says.

[…]  ”Looking ahead, Gandhi wants to focus on designing systems that better integrate theoretical developments in linguistics and on making language technology widely accessible. She says she finds the work of bringing together technology and linguistics to be most rewarding when it involves people, and that she finds the most meaning in her projects when they are centered around empathy for others’ experiences.”

Last week, fifth-year student Tanya Bondarenko presented at the kickoff workshop of MECORE — an international project to investigate the semantics of clausal embedding crosslinguistically — with a talk entitled titled “When clauses are Weak NPIs: polarity subjunctives in Russian”. 

Another great August dissertation defense. On August 27, Keny Chatain defended with the greatest possible success his dissertation entitled “Cumulativity from Homogeneity”.

Cumulativity is a central, yet extremely puzzling phenomenon in plural semantics which has prompted radical overhauls and enrichments of canonical assumptions about predicate denotations (lexical semantics) and semantic composition. Despite these (often heavy-handed) efforts, a treatment that is both empirically and theoretically satisfying has proven illusive.
The dissertation approaches cumulativity from a new perspective, pointing out and exploiting close and systematic parallels with homogeneity phenomena in plural semantics. From this perspective, plural predication contributes only weak (existential) truth-conditions which are directly detectable in negative environments but strengthened, hence masked by exhaustive participation inferences in canonical positive sentences. This two-pronged mechanism paves the way for a principled account of what aspects of lexical semantics are responsible for cumulative readings and why, as well as the precise way in which they rely on the structural configuration feeding semantic composition.

The resulting proposal is developed with remarkable clarity and penetrating insight into the empirical phenomena as well as the space of analytical options, has far reaching consequences for all areas of (plural) semantics, and — in the opinion of his committee — is sure to become a landmark in this domain of inquiry.

Félicitations, Keny!! Congratulations!!

The official abstract:

“Since Schein (1996), cumulative readings of quantifiers have often motivated a departure from standard assumptions about composition. This dissertation proposes a new theory of these cumulative readings that connects them to the phenomenon of homogeneity. Specifically, taking inspiration from Bar-Lev (2018), I argue that predicates sometimes have weak existential meanings, which are revealed when placed under negation. The stronger meaning observed in positive sentences are the result of a procedure of exhaustification. By recognizing predicates’ underlying weak meanings and their liability to strengthening, cumulative reading of quantifiers can be accounted for by maintaining relatively standard assumptions about composition. This analysis predicts a range of intricate cases, including Schein’s famous video-game examples. It also predicts the truth-conditions of negative cumulative sentences and asymmetries in the availability of cumulative readings of quantifiers.”

Please welcome our beautiful new students who are joining our graduate program this fall!

Keely Zuo Qi New: I grew up on the sunny island of Singapore, so I classify anything below 20C/68F as “freezing”. In 2018 I completed my BA in linguistics at the National University of Singapore. Since then, I have been working at the syntax/semantics lab in the same department where I have done research based primarily on fieldwork in Burmese. Outside of linguistics, I like dogs, board games, and baking bread.

Lorenzo Pinton: I’m Lorenzo Pinton and I come from a country town near Venice, Italy. In Venice I did my undergrad in philosophy, before moving to Amsterdam for a master in logic. There I discovered semantics and pragmatics, and they have been my gateway to linguistics. The topic of my thesis was the interplay between sluicing and free choice (focusing in particular on the contrast between ‘You may have coffee or tea, I don’t know which’ and ‘You may have coffee or tea, I don’t care which’). Related to these, other topics I’m interested in consist of question embedding verbs and the interaction between tense, aspect and modality. Outside academia, my passions are music, chess, and, lately, architecture. 

Negative side: I make bad puns that apparently people don’t find funny.
Positive side: If you make one, I’ll laugh.
During the PhD I’d like to understand better the intersection between syntax and semantics. But it won’t be easy… let’s (inter)face it!

Shrayana Halder: I’m Shrayana Haldar. I’m from Kolkata, India and my first language in Bengali. Before MIT, I went to UMass Amherst from 2017 to 2021 for my undergrad and I majored in Linguistics and French and Francophone Studies. My principal interest in linguistics is theoretical syntax and I worked on Bengali Verb-stranding VP Ellipsis when I was at UMass. A relatively little studied — maybe not so much so — recess in syntax that has fascinated me for some time now with an intensity that was somewhat notorious among the UMass professors who taught me syntax happens to be Multidominance. As for my hobbies, I have a certain interest in music and film studies. I enjoy playing my keyboard and watching movies. I especially like singing Rabindrasangeets (songs composed by Rabindranath Tagore) on YouTube. I sometimes also write French poems. To mark it with the force of finality, I find inevitable, irresistible and — no less importantly — therapeutic joy and belonging in all things Satyajit Ray.

Anastasia Tsilia: My name is Anastasia (she/her) and I come from Greece. I did my studies in France, where I received a B.A. in Philosophy and Logic and a M.Sc. in Cognitive Science. It was during the latter that I delved deeper into semantics and tense. My research interests include semantics, the interface with syntax, pragmatics, philosophy of language, typology and cross-linguistic work. I am also looking forward to exploring syntax as well as other research topics more in depth during my PhD. In my master thesis, I worked on the typology and the cross-linguistic aspect of sequence of tense and shiftable present, focusing mostly on data from Modern Greek. Outside of linguistics, I like watching movies, visiting exhibitions, dancing salsa, and travelling.

Christopher Legerme: Christopher Gaston Romero Legerme, here! (he/him/his; /kristofɛ leʒɛm/ or /krIstəfɚ ləʒɚm/; you can also call me Chris or Christopher). I’m 28 yrs. and was born at noon on Thursday October 15, 1992 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Haiti is where I acquired my native language, Haitian Creole, however, I have spent most of my life outside of Haiti and growing up in USA or Canada. I could also say that English is my L1 with Haitian Creole being my heritage language. In USA, I spent time living in the states of Maryland, Virginia, and New York before moving to Canada where I’ve lived in the provinces of Quebec, Alberta, and Ontario. My research interests broadly include phonological theory and variationist sociolinguistics. Initially, I completed BA and MA degrees in Religious Studies at the Concordia University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. My MA thesis at the time focused on Biblical and Christian Studies where I drew inspiration from philosophy and literary theory in developing a dialogical critique of Biblical Hebrew poetry, particularly the Book of Lamentations, under the supervision of Prof. William H. U. Anderson. I did a second MA, this time in Linguistics, at the University of Toronto. There, I developed my interests in Sociolinguistics and Phonology, and under the supervision of Prof. Sali A. Tagliamonte, I received extensive training in Labovian Variationist methods involving the application of various quantitative and computational methods for modeling language variation and change. My most recent MA project was on a linguistic variable in Haitian Creole, that is, the surfacing of nasal forms of the LA postposed definite determiner in non-nasalizing phonological contexts, taking me back to my Haitian heritage. My academic trajectory has brought me across many awesome fields of research in the humanities and social sciences from which I constantly draw inspiration. Today, I focus my efforts on studying both the psychological and sociological dimensions of linguistic systems as they stem from the mind and are performed in daily life. Language always patterns in cool ways with social constructs, and I do work on how these patterns differ across languages and across cultures. Notwithstanding, I am also deeply invested in learning about the ways in which all people are connected as a species through language. What properties, then, are universal to the knowledge and use of human languages? The pursuit of this question is not only exciting to me but has brought linguistics a long way as a field over the past century, and I’m working to be a part of what’s next! For hobbies, I love learning languages in general. I started learning French in school later into my youth and continued with it up through university. I’ve also done courses on Spanish, Latin, Ancient Hebrew, and Classical Greek. I’m a big fan of (horror) movies and I began undergrad doing music (classical guitar) and drama. My favorite director is Quentin Tarantino, my favorite “boardgame” is DnD, and my favorite sports (to watch mostly) are Table Tennis, Chess, and Football (the real one haha!) - Cheers!

John Dennis

The 34th Going Romance conference was held virtually by the laboratory “Structures Formelles du Langage” (CNRS/Université Paris 8).

Suzana Fong presented under the title “Distinguishing between explanatory accounts of the A/A’-distinction: the view from Argentinian Spanish Clitic Doubling”.

Some of our alums also gave presentations:

• Benjamin Storme (PhD 2017): Deriving the gradient behavior of French liaison through constraint interaction
• Bridget Copley (PhD 2002), Marta Donazzan, Clémentine Raffy: Characterizing French LAISSER using causal functions and scales
• Beatriz Gómez-Vidal, Miren Arantzeta, Jon Paul Laka, Itziar Laka (PhD 1990): Eye-tracking the Unaccusative Hypothesis in Spanish

Danfeng Wu will be giving an invited talk next Monday, November 23 (10:15 EST) at the Syntax Colloquium at Goethe University Frankfurt on “Syntax and prosody of either…or… sentences”.  Here is her abstract:

Prosodic structure largely reflects syntactic structure, but there are also mismatches. If we follow the intuition that prosodic structure is matched to pronounced material, an obvious place to study the syntax-prosody mismatch is syntactic structure involving non-pronounced material, such as ellipsis. In this talk I will present prosodic evidence of elided material in a phonetic experiment, where I show that the presence or absence of elided structure has an effect on the prosodic realization. Not only does this result provide a new source of evidence for ellipsis, but it also informs the question of what sort of syntactic information is accessible to prosody. 

The construction where I examine the prosodic effects of ellipsis is English either…or… coordination because it provides a suitable environment for the experiment, and allows me to design materials where ellipsis size could be parametrically varied. The prosodic work requires careful syntactic and semantic arguments that there is ellipsis in this coordination in the first place. As background, I will present evidence showing that there is ellipsis in either…or… coordination (following Schwarz 1999), and the size of the elided material is correlated with the position of either (as in 1a-d). These arguments rely on constituency tests, diagnostics involving elided pronouns and referring expressions, antecedent-contained deletion, and verb particle constructions.

(1) a. Lillian will look for either Lauren or Bella.
    b. Lillian will either look for Lauren or look for Bella.
    c. Lillian either will look for Lauren or will look for Bella.
    d. Either Lillian will look for Lauren or she will look for Bella.

After showing evidence for the analysis of ellipsis for (1a-d), I will move on to the prosodic part of the talk. The difference in ellipsis among (1a-d) might lead to a difference in prosody, specifically in phrasing. Consider (1d), which involves coordination of two clauses in syntax. If prosodic structure is built from a structure that contains elided material, and furthermore, if large syntactic constituents correspond to large prosodic constituents, we would have two large prosodic constituents, as can be observed by a large boundary (of intonational phrase, IP) between Lauren and or (2a). On the other hand, if prosody only considers surface structure, it might group Lauren or Bella as a single prosodic constituent even though they are not a constituent underlyingly, creating a small boundary (intermediate phrase, iP) between Lauren and or (2b).

(2) a. Either Lillian will look for Lauren _IP) or she will look for Bella _IP).
    b. Either Lillian will look for Lauren _iP) or Bella _IP).

If prosody is built from a structure containing hidden material, the boundary between Lauren and or would increase as we move from (1a) to (1d), since the amount of elided structure increases. In contrast, if prosody only considers surface structure, that boundary between Lauren and or would be the same for (1a-d). Preliminary results based on transcriptions of tones and breaks in the productions suggest speakers’ strong preference for (2a): the boundary between Lauren and or does increase as the elided material increases, suggesting that prosody tracks syntax closely. These results also bear on the question of timing: the non-pronunciation of material must occur after the creation of prosodic phrasing.

MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative (MITILI) student Annauk Olin (Iñupiaq) received a scholarship to participate in the American Indian Language Development Institute’s (AILDI) summer session. AILDI’s mission is to provide critical training to strengthen efforts to revitalize and promote the use of Indigenous language across generations. Annauk will be taking a class on “Master Apprentice Immersion Methods”.  Congratulations Annauk!

We are delighted to announce the publication in Glossa of (rising fifth-year student) Elise Newman’s paper “Facilitator effects in middles and more”. A “facilitator effect” is the ameliorating effect of adverbials and similar elements in middle constructions such as the famous Bureaucrats bribe easily, where the presence of the adverb is close to obligatory. A novel insight of Newman’s paper is a proposed connection between this effect and other situations ameliorated by intervening material that have been described as an anti-locality” requirement for movement, as well as a comparable proposal for passive constructions where at first glance one might think no facilitator effect is at work.

Because Glossa is an open-access journal, you can click the link below and read the abstract and paper immediately.

Congratulations, Elise!

https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.990/

Elise’s website: https://esnewman.github.io/elisenewman/

Congratulations to finishing student Colin Davis, who has accepted a position as Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California. At USC he will conduct research and teach undergraduate and graduate classes in syntax and general linguistics. Colin is currently completing a dissertation entitled “The Linear Limitations of Syntactic Derivations”. Great news, Colin!

(Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ((F)ASAL10) at OSU was hosted virtually on 3/21 - 3/22.

Neil Banerjee (4th year) and Gurmeet Kaur (Goettingen) spoke on Deferred imperatives across Indo-Aryan.

Third year student, Filipe Hisao Kobayashi, presented at the Workshop “Cross-Linguistic Semantics of Reciprocals” last week at Utrecht University. He gave a talk entitled “Scattered Reciprocals” and presented a poster entitled “Two Types of Reciprocals in Mandarin Chinese”.

This is the link to the conference website: https://rocky.sites.uu.nl/workshop-on-cross-linguistic-semantics-of-reciprocals/​. 

Congratulations to second-year student Boer Fu, who has won the graduate student division of MIT’s Obermayer Prize for Writing for the Public, with an essay about the building of the first underground transit systems in London (1863) and Boston (1897)! Our linguistics students have talents above and beyond!!

Third-year student Yadav Gowda spoke on “Movement within and without a clause” at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL9) this weekend at Reed College.

Congratulations to fourth-year student Suzana Fong, on the publication in Glossa of her article entitled “Proper movement through Spec-CP: An argument from hyperraising in Mongolian”! Glossa is an open-access journal, so you can read the abstract and download the paper at https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.667/.  

Our happiest congratulations to this summer’s impressive group of doctoral dissertators! The department celebrated the excellent defenses with champagne and some doctoral level baking, including cat-themed cake decorations and vegan Oreo-cheesecake.

• Athulya Aravind - Presuppositions in Context
• Kenyon Branan - Relationship Preservation
• Tingchun (TC) Chen - Multiple Case Assignment: An Amis Case Study
• Michelle Fullwood - Biases in Segmenting Non-concatenative Morphology
• Ishani Guha - Distributivity across domains: A study of the distributive numerals in Bangla
• Sophie Moracchini - Morphosemantics of degree constructions and the grammar of evaluativity
• Takashi Morita - Unsupervised Learning of Lexical Subclasses from Phonotactics
• Ezer Rasin - Modular interactions in phonology
• Milena Sisovics - Embedded Jussives as Instances of Control: The Case of Mongolian and Korean
• Michelle Yuan - Dimensions of Ergativity in Inuit: Theory and Microvariation

Welcome to the students who are joining our graduate program!

Agnes Bi

Ruyue Bi, who also goes by Agnes, grew up in a small city along the Yangtze River in Mainland China. I received my B.A. in Linguistics and Math from UC Berkeley. My main areas of interest, in general, are syntax, semantics and their interface. My current research focuses on pronoun ellipsis in Mandarin, which hopefully provides a little insight into the broader, cross-linguistic picture. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy traveling and trying new food.

Enrico Flor

I was born and grew up in a tiny alpine village in northern Italy, but I received all my higher education in Austria (I got my MA in General Linguistics in Vienna). Semantics (with a focus on focus, quantification and plurals) has been my primary interest during my studies and work in Vienna. Coming to MIT, I obviously look forward to widening and deepening my knowledge of the field. Outside of Linguistics, I am interested in philosophy (of language and meta-ethics in particular), history, literature and politics - I never get tired of debating! Listening to and singing old music is my main hobby, but when I can I like to spend time in theater. Good typography and Free Software are things of beauty for me.

Peter Grishin

I was born and grew up in Dallas and got my BA in linguistics at the University of Cambridge. My main interests lie in syntax, especially in cases of unexpected agreement and/or movement (or lack thereof), and I have worked a bit on agreement with argument CPs in Zulu and VP fronting in English. I also like to dabble in phonetics, and am especially interested in the question of “how much” phonetics we should encode in the phonology, as well as interactions between prosody and syntax. Outside of linguistics, I’m an avid violinist, cat lover, board gamer, tabletop RPGer, and YouTube cooking video watcher and aspiring home cook.

Tracy Kelley

Wunee Keesuq! I was born and raised in the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe located in Mashpee, Massachusetts. I’m a very proud mother of one son. I received my BA in English and Journalism from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, where I was also engaged in student life, youth mentoring, and civil rights advocacy. I am passionate about revitalizing my native language, in which I have been growing with since the language project’s inception in 1993, as an apprentice, instructor, illustrator, and author. Some of my personal interests include gaming with my son, teaching language, cooking, swimming, and listening to NPR—oh and coffee!

Anton Kukhto

I’m a Muscovite; I received a BA and an MA in linguistics at Moscow State University. My main interest lies in phonetics and phonology, particularly lexical stress in Irish, Russian, and beyond. I’ve also done some fieldwork on Mordvin, Mari, and Khanty. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy reading, watching films, going to art galleries, taking pictures, singing, learning to play the harp, drinking tea, skiing, and obviously being a bore. But above all, I want to thank all of you who have been ever so ready to lend me a helping hand over the past year (and before). Even eleventy-one years would be far too short a time to spend among you.

Patrick Niedzielski

I grew up in Massachusetts, and did my undergrad at Cornell University, where I majored in Linguistics and Computer Science. After graduating, I took some time away from academia to work in software development.  My research interests are mainly in historical linguistics and the syntax-morphology interface, especially focusing on analyzing data from ancient, highly-synthetic languages that have not received much treatment within the generative tradition—-my undergrad thesis was on clausal structure and polysynthesis in Sumerian, one such language.  I’ve also done work in computer science at the intersection of systems programming and programming language theory.  Otherwise, I spend too much time listening to comedy podcasts, and not enough time playing jazz harmonica.  I also like good espresso, Jethro Tull, and conlanging.

Roger Paul

Katie Van Luven

I’m from Kingston, Ontario in Canada. I received a B.A. in Linguistics and an M.Cog.Sc., both from Carleton University in Ottawa. I am primarily interested in syntax, semantics and their interfaces. In my master’s thesis I looked at various issues surrounding the focal properties of pseudocleft constructions. I’ve also worked on the argumenthood/event structure of directional PPs, as well as locality and low-level effects in phonetics/phonology. Outside of linguistics, I like reading, hiking, re-watching old X Files episodes and getting tattooed.

Hyun Ji Yoo

I was born in Korea, not far from Seoul, and moved to Los Angeles when I was nine. I never really got out of the city since then, and received my B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology and M.A. in Linguistics at UCLA. I am currently working on finding predictability of medial tones in Seoul Korean Accentual phrases, but also am interested in paradigm effects, loanword phonology, and Harmonic Grammar. In my free time, I like to eat good food, watch Korean TV shows and play board games—all the better with coffee and/or ice cream.