Whamit!

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.

We have some summer news to share with you:

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

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

• Justin Colley (4th year), Verena Hehl, Anton Kukhto (1st year) and Mitya Privoznov (4th year) went into the heart of Siberia for a fieldwork expedition in the village of Kazym, Central Khanty. Mitya reports: “We had a lot of fun, suffered from mosquitoes and hopefully gathered some useful data as well :).”

• In August, Tanya Bondarenko and Colin Davis participated in a joint fieldtrip with a group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University to study Barguzin Buryat in Baraghan village, the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.

• Conference presentations:
  • Neil Banerjee (3rd year) presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association (May 30-June 1) on CARP in Kinyarwanda, and at CHRONOS 13 (June 4-June 6) on the temporal orientation of necessity modals.
  • In early June, Elise Newman (3rd year) went to the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented work on the English auxiliary system at OLINCO. Elise: “Several MIT alumni were there; Joe Emonds co-organized the conference and I found out that he and I are both Cubs fans!”.
  • Filipe Kobayashi (2nd year) and Sherry Chen (2nd year) presented joint work on distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese at the student session of the North American Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), held at CMU in late June. Maša Močnik also attended the summer school. 
  • On August 4, Danfeng Wu (3rd year), Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD ’95, now at Tohoku University) and Mamoru Saito (PhD ’85, now at Nanzan University) gave talks at the Workshop on Case Theory and Labeling of Structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to that on July 28, Danfeng presented a poster co-authored with Shigeru and Masatoshi at MAPLL × TCP × TL × TaLK (MT3) at Keio University. After that, she also attended and presented at the Summer Seminar on Frontiers of Language and Cognition Research.
  • Norvin Richards (faculty) gave a series of talks on Contiguity Theory at SICOGG 20 in Seoul, held on August 8-10, and then another talk at Kyungpook National University in Daegu. 
  • Just a few days ago, Verena Hehl gave a presentation at SLE in Tallinn on Bildungsplan Baden Württeberg 2016: Promoting Grammar as Science from the bottom up – a case study.

• Education:
  • Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure (3rd year) and Dóra Takács (2nd year) taught a 7-week introductory linguistics course for middle and high school students as part of HSSP, from June till August. Their course, entitled `How language works’, covered topics ranged from sound production and the IPA over cross-linguistic variation and case to NPIs and implicatures. Dóra writes: “About 35 students participated in the class, which was hopefully a lot of fun and definitely an interesting and valuable experience for everyone.”
  • Naomi Francis (5th year), Verena Hehl and Maša Močnik graduated from the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program (KTCP) in June. The participants report: “Graduates of the KTCP attend 8 sessions on a wide range of topics in teaching and learning and are exposed to current research on pedagogical methodology through assigned readings and in-class discussions. We also had the opportunity to create and receive feedback on teaching philosophy statements for academic job applications.”
  • In May, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), an MIT initiative to support global education, announced a grant funding to MITILI  student Newell Lewey and to prof. Norvin Richards for the project Skicinuwi-npisun: A Community-Centered Project for Documentation and Teaching of the Passamaquoddy Language. The project supports language teaching and curriculum development to help preserve the severely endangered Passamaquoddy language of Northern Maine. The grant includes funding for Newell’s language classes, and for a group of graduate students from the department to travel with Norvin to Passamaquoddy country to work with elders. Here you can read a little more about the project. Congratulations Newell and Norvin!
• Alumni news:
  • Our distinguished alum Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), now at  the University of Arizona, has been elected a 2019 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Heidi’s colleagues as LSA Fellows include 38 other MIT alums and members of our faculty who have been elected in previous years — more than a quarter of the (now) 138 Fellows of the Society. Congratulations Heidi (and our warmest congratulations to the other newly elected Fellows as well)!
  • Another one of our distinguished alums, John McCarthy (PhD 1979) - a pioneer in the development of phonological theory for over four decades - has been named Provost and more at UMass Amherst, where he has taught since 1985. Very exciting news — congratulations John! 

The 25th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association took place May 10-12 at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.  TC Chen presented on Amis Case stacking. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14) sends us this picture of TC standing next to an antique tea chest at the conference:

We are beyond delighted to announce that fifth-year student Athulya Aravind, who specializes in language acquisition, has accepted our offer of a tenure-track assistant professor position!

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 27 took place at Stanford over the weekend, and three MIT presentations were given.

• Colin Davis and Tatiana Bondarenko: Parasitic gaps and covert pied-piping in Russian LBE
• Rafael Abramovitz: Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from Unpronounced Subjects
• Maša Močnik: Where Force Matters: Embedding Epistemic Modals and Attitudes

We are overjoyed to welcome nine new first-year students who will be starting next Fall — including two who will be studying in our MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative (MITILI) Masters program.

• Ruyue (Agnes) Bi (UC Berkeley)
• Enrico Flor (University of Vienna)
• Peter Grishin (University of Cambridge)
• Tracy Kelley (UMass Amherst; Wampanaog, MITILI program)
• Anton Kukhto (Moscow State University)
• Patrick Niedzielski (Cornell)
• Katie Van Luven (Carleton University)
• Roger Paul (University of Maine at Presque Isle; Passamaquoddy/Maliseet, MITILI program)
• Hyun Ji Yoo (UCLA)

Welcome!!

The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) took place at UCLA over the weekend. MIT department members were presented both talks and posters

• Kenyon Branan (5th-year) and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year) Covert movement licenses parasitic gaps
• Ömer Demirok (4th year) Events are Entities: Evidence from Turkish Nominalizations
• Matthew Tyler (Yale) and Michelle Yuan (5th-year) Nominal-clitic case mismatches
• Colin Davis (3rd-year) The Syntax of Stranding at Edges
• Danfeng Wu (2nd-year) English expletives “there” and “it” originate low: Evidence from ellipsis
• Emily Clem (visitor) and Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley) The emergence of case matching in discontinuous DPs
• Kenyon Branan (5th-year) and Colin Davis (3rd-year) Edges and Unlocking: Evidence from Chichewa

Sherry Yong Chen (first-year) presented a few weeks ago at the CUNY sentence processing conference at UC Davis. With co-author E. Matthew Husband, she presented on Modelling Memory Retrieval Processes with Drift Diffusion.

The 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 49) will be held at Michigan State University from March 22-25, 2018. Colin Davis (3rd-year), Kenyon Branan (5th-year) , and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year) will give talks, and Kenyon and Abdul-Razak will also present a poster.

Linguistic Evidence 2018 took place at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, February 15-17 and Dóra Kata Tákacs (first-year) presented a poster: On the presuppositional behavior of two sub-classes of factive predicates.

The annual ESSL/LAcqLab and friends Winter Hike happened on Sunday.  The hikers climbed Mount Pemigawassett in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Thanks to Martin for the photos.

The Manitoba Workshop on Person happened in Winnipeg at the University of Manitoba on Friday and Saturday. This was the tenth annual workshop in a series dedicated to the syntax and semantics of person. The invited student speaker was our very own Michelle Yuan (5th year) who gave a talk about Plural person and associativity. MIT was also very well represented by our alumni and former visitors: both keynote speakers were graduates and at least one co-author on every invited talk was either a graduate of or a visitor to our department!

Our warmest congratulations to this summer’s shower of doctoral dissertators. From Aron Hirsch and Paul Marty’s semantics to Chris O’Brien, Isa Kerem Bayırlı and Ruth Brillman’s syntax and to Sam Zukoff and Ben Storme’s phonology. Between all the fields, a wide variety of topics and excellent defenses, it was truly a fruitful dissertation season. The department was celebrating with an as wide a variety of food and beverages: champagne, a cookie cake, sublime French wine and rakı.

• Aron Hirsch: An inflexible semantics for cross-categorial operators
• Benjamin Storme: Perceptual sources for closed-syllable vowel laxing and nonderived environment effects
• Chris O’Brien: Multiple dominance and interface operations
• Isa Kerem Bayırlı: The universality of concord
• Paul Marty: Implicatures and the DP domain
• Ruth, Brillman: Subject/non-subject extraction asymmetries: the view from tough-constructions
• Sam Zukoff: Indo-European Reduplication: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Theory

Athulya Aravind’s paper Licensing Long-Distance wh-in-situ in Malayalam has just been officially published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

The published version is available here. A pre-publication version can be found on linbgbuzz here.

Newly minted PhD Juliet Stanton and very-soon-to-be-minted Sam Zukoff just received news that their joint paper has just been accepted for publication in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, entitled “Prosodic identity in copy epenthesis: evidence for a correspondence-based approach”. Congratulations to both!! You can read a pre-publication version here: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003522

We are very excited for Michelle Yuan, a graduate student in her fourth year, who has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research grant by the National Science Foundation!! — for a project entitled “Pronominals and Verb Agreement in Inuktitut”

Here’s the official abstract:

“A central question in theoretical linguistics concerns the range of linguistic variation (to what extent languages differ) and language universals (to what extent languages are fundamentally the same at an abstract level, despite surface variation). Answering this question requires both detailed investigation of particular languages and broader cross-linguistic comparison. This project will investigate sentence structure and word structure in an indigenous language of North America. Many of the indigenous languages of the Americas are under-documented; detailed research into the linguistic properties of individual dialect groups is even more lacking for the dialects of the language targeted in this study. Specifically, the project will provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the structural properties of pronouns and pronoun-like verbal agreement forms and will compare the findings with what is already known about related and genetically unrelated languages. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions at the Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as well as the linguistic training of indigenous community members working on translation and language pedagogy. This, in turn, will aid the facilitation of dialect-specific language learning materials and thus contribute towards work in language sustainability.

“The CoPI, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, will document and analyze Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, one of a group of Inuit languages spoken in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, and which are related to Eskimo-Aleut languages spoken in Alaska. The work produced in this project will therefore build a solid empirical foundation for future linguistic research on Inuktitut and Inuit, as well as for the field of theoretical linguistics more broadly. The main hypothesis of this project is that the verbal agreement markers that encode transitive objects in Inuktitut are not canonical agreement markers, but rather ‘doubled clitics,’ pronoun-like elements that co-occur with objects. Historically, linguistic research on these elements has focused on European languages; however, evidence for such an approach for Inuktitut comes from striking distributional and structural parallels with these better-studied languages. This project will investigate how these clitics interact with the case system of Inuktitut as a whole, and show how their absence in other Inuit languages yields a slightly different case system, despite surface appearances. Variation in the distribution of case morphology across the Inuit languages is therefore tightly linked to the underlying structure of the verbal agreement forms. This project will also explore how this novel approach may be extended to account for other pronoun-related phenomena in Inuktitut, as well as case systems cross-linguistically.”

Congratulations are in order for Kenyon Branan (fourth-year grad student), whose paper “Attraction at a distance: Ā-movement and Case” has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry!

You can find a pre-publication draft of the paper (and others too) here: http://kbranan.scripts.mit.edu/papers-and-presentations. Here’s the abstract:

“Some languages allow extraction of possessors from only a subset of nominals. I show that a juxtaposition of two proposals about Case and Agree [Rackowski & Richards (2005), Bobaljik (2008)] correctly predicts these cross-linguistic restrictions on possessor extraction.”

Ezer Rasin (4th year student) will be giving an invited colloquium talk at the University of Leipzig this Wednesday, entitled “An argument for severing stress from phonology”. For the details, click here.

Over the weekend, Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 27 was held at the University of Maryland. On May 11, there was a workshop on Meaning and Distribution at UMD as well. MIT was represented at both!

Pranav Anand (PhD ‘06) was an invited speaker at SALT, and spoke on Facts, alternatives, and alternative facts, and Beth Levin (PhD ‘83 EECS) was an invited speaker at the workshop, and spoke on The Elasticity of Verb Meaning Revisited. In addition, MIT had several students, alumni, and faculty presenting both talks and posters.

Talks

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

Posters

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

Congratulations to Juliet Stanton, who just defended her dissertation, titled Constraints on the Distribution of Nasal-Stop Sequences: An Argument for Contrast, last Friday!

As readers may remember, Juliet will be joining the Department of Linguistics at NYU as an Assistant Professor in the Fall. Well done Juliet!

Ruth Brillman, who is currently finishing her dissertation on antilocality and non-finite clauses, has accepted a fantastic position at Spotify. Here is Ruth’s description of the job:

I’ll be working as a Research Scientist alongside Spotify’s machine learning team (the force behind their recommendation systems like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix) at their Somerville office. A lot of my work will involve figuring out how their machine learning systems should deal with natural language data, and how to evaluate those systems once they’re off the ground. My team will also help establish research goals and standards for the company. I’m so excited!

Friday April 14th, our third-year student, Abdul-Razak Sulemana, gave a talk at NYU Syntax Brown Bag Talk series on Q-particles and the nature of Covert movement: evidence from Bùlì.

Our fourth-year graduate student Michelle Yuan is an invited student speaker for Manitoba Workshop on Person, which is going to take place in September 22-23.

Congratulation to Benjamin Storme (5th year), who’s paper “The loi de position and the acoustics of French mid vowels” was accepted for publication in Glossa. The paper investigates the effect of syllable structure on vowel duration and vowel quality in French. The results are relevant for the study of closed syllable laxing. A pre-publication version can be found on lingbuzz: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003395

Whamit! is happy to announce that, after many weeks of hard work, Ling-16 has completed* a 3000-piece puzzle depicting the fierce naval battle between the French ship “La Cannoniere”, and the English ship “The Tremendous” during the Action of 21 April 1806.

*Careful readers will notice that a single piece is missing from the puzzle. We can only assume this is intentional, and is meant to represent the ever-incomplete nature of our work as linguists.

Good news from fourth-year student Athulya Aravind, whose paper “Licensing long-distance wh-in-situ in Malayalam” has been accepted for publication in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Congratulations, Athulya! Follow the link for a pre-publication draft.

While WHAMIT! was on hiatus because of Spring Break, the 48th Annual Conference on African Linguistics took place at Indiana University, Bloomington. 3rd year grad student Abdul-Razak Sulemana gave the talk GETCASE is Violable: Evidence for Wholesale Late Merger.

We are thrilled to congratulate our very own Juliet Stanton for having accepted a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in phonology at New York University, Department of Linguistics! Wonderful news!

First year graduate student Elise Newman (also MIT S.B. 2016) has received an LSA 2017 Institute Fellowship Award to attend the 2017 Linguistic Institute at the University of Kentucky. Congratulations, Elise!