Whamit!

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!

‘Tis truly the year of the linguist in popular culture (if theatre can be considered popular culture). Central Square Theater’s current season includes a play about a linguist, which several of our own linguists attended on Saturday. Precious Little, written by Madeleine George, explores the mind of linguist faced with the fact that her child may never be able to learn a language. The piece is thought provoking and the linguist humour is on point. We all enjoyed it thoroughly, and would recommend the show to anyone interested in linguistics and theatre!

The 40th edition of GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) will take place later this week (March 15—17) at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. As usual, MIT will be represented by many current students and alumni.

• Daniel Harbour (PhD ‘03) — Feature economy and the Kiowa-Tanoan continuum
• Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15) — Mixed chains and phase impenetrability in Dinka
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14) — Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak
• Ezer Rasin (4th-year grad student) — The stress-encapsulation universal and phonological modularity
• Abdul-Razak Sulemana (3rd-year grad student) — Q-particles and the nature of Covert movement: evidence from Bùlì
• Yasutada Sudo (PhD ‘12) & Jacopo Romoli — Lifetime Effects and Presuppositional Scalar Strengthening
• Theodore Levin (PhD ‘15) & Omer Preminger (PhD ‘11) — M-merger as relabeling: a new approach to head movement and noun-incorporation

Hagit Borer (PhD ‘81) is the invited speaker of the main conference.

There will also be workshops during GLOW. Laura Downing and Lisa Cheng (PhD ‘91) organized the workshop Syntax-Phonology Interface – What does Phonology need to know about Syntax and vice versa. Eulàlia Bonet (PhD ‘91) will be the invited speaker and will give the talk Phases and prosodic domains in exponence and phonology. At the same workshop, Nomi Erteschik (PhD ‘73), Gunlög Josefsson & Björn Köhnlein is presenting the work titled Mainland Scandinavian Object Shift, Match Theory and Prosodic Displacement.

Hamida Demirdache (PhD ‘91) and Janet Grijzenhout organized the workshop Heritage Language Knowledge and AcquisitionHeritage Language Knowledge and Acquisition. Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores & Pilar Barbosa (PhD ‘95) will give the talk Null objects in Heritage Portuguese and Jiyoung Choi & Hamida Demirdache the talk Experimentally investigating intervention effects in adult, child and Heritage Korean

Ezer Rasin will take in part in special workshop called The Interface Within, presenting the work titled ‘Predictions of a phonological architecture with stress encapsulation’.

Finally, GLOW is also hosting a special workshop to honor the retirement of Hans Bennis. Timothy Stowell (PhD ‘81) is one of the invited speakers, talking about ‘Government by Agreement’.

MIT Working Papers in Linguistics is pleased to announce the publication of its 81st volume, Papers on Morphology, available at the MITWPL webstore. Edited by Snejana Iovtcheva and Benjamin Storme, the volume contains the following contributions:

• On An Impossible Affix - İsa Kerem Bayırlı
• Urarina Verbal Morphology - Michelle Fullwood and Suyeon Yun
• Root Realization in Albanian Verbal Morphology - Isaac Gould, Snejana Iovtcheva, and Despina Oikonomou
• Person-Number Morphology in Cupeño - Theodore Frank Levin and Ryo Masuda
• The DP-internal Distribution of the Plural Morpheme in Brazilian Portuguese - Bruna Karla Pereira
• The Mirror Alignment Principle: Morpheme Ordering at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface - Sam Zukoff

Congratulations to Juliet Stanton, a fifth year student graduate, on the publication of her article Learnability Shapes Typology: The Case of the Midpoint Pathology! (The paper can be viewed here.)

The midpoint pathology (in the sense of Kager 2012) characterizes a type of unattested stress system in which the stressable window contracts to a single word-internal syllable in some words, but not others. Kager (2012) shows that the pathology is a prediction of analyses employing contextual lapse constraints (e.g. *ExtLapseR; no 000 strings at the right edge) and argues that the only way to avoid it is to eliminate these constraints from Con. This article explores an alternative: that systems exhibiting the midpoint pathology are unattested not because the constraints that would generate them are absent from Con, but because they are difficult to learn. This study belongs to a growing body of work exploring the idea that phonological typology is shaped by considerations of learnability.

On Wednesday October 26th, MIT Linguistics celebrated the Halloween season with an annual pumpkin carving party. Some of the results:

(photo credit: Snejana Iovtcheva)

Welcome to the new students who are joining the graduate program!

Neil Banerjee

“I’m from Mississauga, Ontario. I was born in West Bengal in India, but I’ve lived in Canada since I was four and so have become very fond of the cold. In June I received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Toronto. My main linguistic interests are the syntax and semantics of the INFL domain. So far I’ve worked on the syntax of historical English and the semantics of epistemic modals cross-linguistically. My main non-linguistic interests are hiking, flags, maps, and Star Trek.”

Christopher Baron

“I’m originally from the suburbs of Chicago, which you’ll hear in my accent pretty quickly. I received a BA in linguistics and a BA in philosophy at UMass Amherst, where I wrote a thesis on attitude ascriptions. I spent this last year at the University of Maryland as a Baggett Fellow, where I did some language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and fieldwork. I’m primarily interested in semantics and its interfaces, especially in Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages. In my spare time, I love cooking, running, and drinking excessive amounts of coffee.  I am also a classically trained clarinetist, and make a mean loaf of banana bread.”

Keny Chatain

“I was born and grew up in Tours (France), in the Loire valley, amid a bunch of Renaissance castles, but I studied in the Quartier Latin in Paris at ENS. I initially got a BA in maths there, before turning to linguistics, by doing a cognitive science master degree. Last year, I decided to take a year off to visit MIT, and MIT got me. My main interest lies in semantics, pragmatics. I have a special sympathy for pronouns, demonstratives, anything anaphoric, referential in general. I also have a dilettante interest in the Arabic language, literal and dialects, mainly Egyptian. Outside academia, I enjoy reading novels and poems, listening to cheesy French pop, I have a passive hobby of hiking, and a soft spot for French classical theater (attending, mind you).”

Yadav Gowda

“I’m from Illinois, specifically the part that’s in the Upper Midwest, so my æshes are all over the place. I completed a BA in linguistics in 2014 at the University of Chicago, which stoked my interest in a few areas: morphology, argument structure, and the intersection of theoretical computer science and linguistics (especially syntax). Apart from linguistics, I enjoy cooking, watching videos of otters, and Scavving.”

Cora Lesure

“I grew up in Annapolis Maryland before attending McGill University in Montreal. I finished my B.A in linguistics last December and have since been working in the McGill Fieldwork Lab. There I have been researching Chuj (Mayan) morphophonology and aiding in the development of orthographic conventions. My main theoretical interests include prosody and morphophonology and I hope to continue working with Mayan. My non-academic interests are rather eclectic, but some highlights include garage rock, knitting, calligraphy, and the collected works of J.R.R Tolkien.”

Newell Lewey

“Currently enrolled in the MIT Linguistics Masters Program with a focus on Indigenous Language (Passamaquoddy).

Newell was the Community Planner for the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point. He helped coordinate research and develop lines of funding for the Tribe with the twin goals of community economic development and job creation. Newell also has a background in Information Technology and expertise with all aspects of computer hardware and software. Over the past 15 years, Lewey has trained many Tribal entities and individual clients in the use and functioning of various office products, personal computers and networks. Newell is also a part time Language Immersion apprentice for the Passamaquoddy Immersion School.  Language learning and teaching has been a life long dream that is coming true. Newell has also been accepted into MIT’s Linguistics Master program; this will benefit him greatly in years to come when teaching the language.

Newell is serving his second elected term as Tribal Councilor for the Pleasant Point Passamaquoddy Tribe. The Council is the sole governmental structure for the Tribe and works to effect positive change for all who live in Sipayik. The Tribal Council is responsible for the development and implementation of policy and procedural issues. Lewey’s experience as a Councilor has taught him that good governance requires careful attention to the will of the people and a commitment to listen very carefully.

In describing himself, Lewey writes, ‘I am a father and grandfather who is concerned about my families’ future and that of all the generations of all our People who are yet to come. I have been in recovery and following the traditional ways of the Passamaquoddy for more than twenty nine years.  In the past I have done work and volunteered with Native youth in many summer camp and fitness programs. I have also been a mentor and coach to Native youth in three Native American Olympic Games. I have also participated in and helped coordinate more than ten sacred runs which were done in an effort to unite the Wabanaki people of the Northeast. I have done some volunteering at a few of the Maine Correctional Institution in order to support the recovery of Native American prisoners.’”

Elise Newman

“I was born and raised in the city of Chicago, otherwise known as ‘the Chi’, ‘Chi-town’, ‘the Windy City’, ‘Chi-beria’, ‘Is that even a city?’ (used by New Yorkers), etc. Between high school and college, I spent a year on exchange in Germany where I learned German and became interested in syntax. I recently graduated from MIT with a B.S. in both Physics and Linguistics, and decided to pursue a PhD in linguistics. My main interests are currently in syntax, and seem to be localized to verb-tense interactions in the vaguest sense. Outside of academia, I enjoy playing soccer, singing in vocal ensembles, pottery, and being outside in any capacity.”

Frank Staniszewski

“I’m originally from Wisconsin, and attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I studied Spanish and Japanese, and also was lucky enough to see a few impromptu late night Prince performances at Paisley Park. After two years at the U of M, I decided to take a leave of absence and move to Los Angeles, where I worked as a musician and songwriter before returning to academics to finish my B.A. in linguistics at UCLA in 2015. My primary interests are in syntax and semantics, with a focus on questions relating to modality, negation, NPIs, and neg-raising. While at UCLA, I worked on negative and positive polarity items in Japanese, and neg-raising in English. I’m excited to continue working in these areas at MIT, and look forward to learning about new topics in areas that I have yet to explore. I am also a lover of music (writing, playing, and listening), reading, and stand up comedy.”

Danfeng Wu

“I was born and raised in Shanghai, China, and did my undergraduate studies at Columbia University with a B.A. in economics and mathematics, during which I studied abroad in Paris and interned in Hong Kong. After that I worked in Mumbai, India for two years in the automobile industry. Despite the detour, I have always been interested in linguistics, and am grateful to have the opportunity to study it formally. I’m very curious in general and like to ask lots of questions. I’m particularly intrigued by syntax and phonology. Puzzled by problems such as the English expletive there and ellipsis, I look forward to exploring them further at MIT, and getting to know more new fields such as experimental and computational linguistics.”

Warm congratulations to this summer’s doctoral dissertators:

• Despina Oikonomou: Covert modals in root contexts
• Ayaka Sugawara: The role of Question-Answer Congruence (QAC) in child language and adult sentence processing
• Suyeon Yun: A theory of consonant cluster perception and vowel epenthesis

Despina and Suyeon will begin post-doctoral positions at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Toronto respectively, while Ayaka is currently an associate professor (lecturer) at Mie University.

Three MIT students participated in the 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm 24) this year:

• Juliet Stanton & Sam Zukoff. Prosodic misapplication in copy epenthesis and reduplication.
• Sophie Moracchini. Backward languages: the case of French Verlan in OT
• Juliet Stanton. Trigger deletion in Gurindji.

Adam Albright was an invited discussant.

You can find the full programme here and the abstracts booklet here.

Congratulations to all our graduating senior majors and minors — Morris Alper, Jessica Kenney, Alyssa Napier, Raúl Rojas, and Elise Newman (as well as unofficial linguistics semi-majors/minors Yihui Quek and Emily Kellison-Linn)!

Congratulations to Gretchen Kern and Coppe van Urk, who are now very officially PhDs!

Fantastic news from our alum Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010), who has accepted a permanent Maître de Conferences (≅ Associate Professor) position in linguistics and neuropsychology of language at the Department of Cognitive Studies of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris! Congratulations, Maria!!

The 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics was held from April, 29 to May, 1st in the Universiy of Utah. Three second year grad students gave talks or presented posters:

• Omer Demirok. A compositional semantics for Turkish correlatives and its implications.
• Daniel Margulis. Expletive negation is an exponent of only.
• Naomi Francis. Modal scope in negative inversion constructions.

Date: Friday, April 22nd
Time: 2-3:30pm
Place: 32D, 7th floor seminar room

Lena Borise (Harvard) (with Mitya Privoznov (MIT)) and Tingchun Chen (MIT) will be giving two separate tutorials (45 minutes each) on the basics of ELAN and FLEx. ELAN is a tool for annotating video and audio recordings. FLEx is a fieldwork archiving program developed by the SIL that has many functions, including compiling a lexicon, storing and interlinearizing sentences and texts, etc.

The 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) was held last week at Stony Brook University (SUNY).

Third year student Sophie Moracchini & Aurore Gonzalez (Harvard) gave a talk about A morpho-semantic decomposition of French `le moindre’ into even + superlative.

Visiting scholars Adina Dragomirescu & Alexandru Nicolae (Romanian Academy - University of Bucharest) presented on Interpolation in Old Romanian and IstroRomanian

Three MIT alumni also presented talks: Dominique Sportiche ‘84 (UCLA) who gave a talk about Overt movement even with island resumptives and consequences; Richard Kayne ‘69 (NYU) about French HCI, Agree, and Clitic Doubling; and Viviane Déprez ‘89 (Rutgers), who gave a talk on Contextual and prosodic disambiguation of French concord and discord with Jeremy Yeaton.

The full program and abstracts can be found here.

Two of our graduate students and two recent alums presented their work at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) last week in Berkeley.

• Second-year student Abdul-Razak Sulemana presented a papret on “Wh-in-situ and intervention in Bùlì”.
• Third-year student Kenyon Branan spoke about “Abstract dependent case: evidence from Kikuyu”
• Claire Halpert (PhD 2012) of the University of Minnesota was a plenary speaker. Her topic was “Surmountable Barriers”
• Newly minted alum Isaac Gould (PhD 2015) co-presented (with Tessa Scott) a talk on “Two derivations for amba relative clauses in Swahili”

Last weekend, many MIT and recently MIT linguists converged on Washington, D.C. for the annual meeting of the LSA.

• Alums Karlos Arregi (PhD ‘02) and Jonathan Bobaljik (PhD ‘95) were honored as LSA Fellows, along with alum and colleague Sabine Iatridou (PhD ‘91) and our colleague Kai von Fintel!
• Barbara Partee of UMass Amherst (PhD 1965), a member of our very first graduate class, received the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award!

(photos: mitcho Erlewine)

Several current students, faculty and recent grads gave talks and posters at the LSA, including:

• Richard Futrell (Brain & Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Adam Albright (Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Peter Graff ‘12 (Intel Corporation), Timothy J. O’Donnell (Brain & Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “Subsegmental structure facilitates learning of phonotactic distributions”
• Michelle Yuan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ruth Brillman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard University): “Inuktitut mood-agreement interactions as contextual allomorphy”
• Ryo Masuda (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “The learnability of tone-voicing associations and the absence of place-sensitive tonogenesis”
• Michelle Yuan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “Subordinate clause types and the left periphery in Gikuyu”
• Miriam Nussbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “Tense and scope in superlatives”
• Suyeon Yun (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “Non-native cluster perception by phonetic confusion, not by universal grammar”
• Theodore Levin ‘15 (University of Maryland): “Unmarked case is unvalued case: Default Voice in Formosan restructuring”
• Hadas Kotek ‘14 (McGill University), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine ‘14 (National University of Singapore): “Unifying definite and indefinite free relatives: evidence from Mayan”
• Patrick Jones ‘14 (Harvard University): “Tonal mobility and faithfulness in Kikuyu”
• Youngah Do ‘13 (Georgetown University), Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University), Jonathan Havenhill (Georgetown University): “Naturalness and frequency in implicit phonological learning”
• Jonah Katz ‘10 (West Virginia University), Sarah Lee (University of California, Berkeley): “Cue integration and fricative perception in Seoul Korean”
• Nicholas Baier of UC Berkeley, who spent the Fall as a much-appreciated visiting student with us, presented a talk of “Deriving partial anti-agreement” (the First Place Student Abstract Award Winner — congratulations!).
• From McMaster University, Cassandra Chapman, a visiting student last Spring, and Ivona Kucerova ‘07 presented a talk on “Structural and semantic ambiguity of why-questions: an overlooked case of weak islands in English”

Very recent grad Coppe van Urk ‘15 (Queen Mary University), who did not give a talk, couldn’t stay away, nor could several of our current students who attended just for the fun. And as always, many many MIT alums from decades past attended and presented talks, too numerous to mention.

We have just received the great news that our alumni Patrick G. Grosz (PhD 2011) and Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012) have accepted tenured Associate Professor positions at the University of Oslo. Congratulations, Patrick and Pritty!

• We are thrilled to take note of the publication of a book by our very recent alum (and very recent colloquium speaker) Claire Halpert (PhD 2012), from Oxford University Press! The book is called Argument licensing and agreement. More information is available here.
• Congratulations also to 4th-year student Juliet Stanton on the acceptance for publication in Language of her paper “Learnability shapes typology: the case of the midpoint pathology”! A pre-publication version of her paper can be downloaded here. Another paper of Juliet’s has just appeared in Linguistic Inquiry: “Wholesale Late Merger in Ā-Movement: Evidence from Preposition Stranding”. A prepublication version can also be downloaded here.
• Congratulations to 4th-year student Sam Zukoff, whose paper “The Reduplicative System of Ancient Greek and a New Analysis of Attic Reduplication” has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry! Download a pre-publication version at either lingbuzz or Sam’s webpage.

We are delighted to announce that Wataru Uegaki (PhD 2015) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He will be affiliated with both the Leiden Institute of Area Studies (LIAS) and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), and will teach Japanese linguistics and semantics. Wataru is currently a Postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Keio University (Tokyo) & the Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS/ENS) (Paris). Wataru’s new position in Leiden is a fantastic opportunity, and we know that the University of Leiden will be as proud of him as we are! Congratulations!!