Next weekend, three talks from MIT will be presented at the 20th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association at the Arlington campus of the University of Texas.
At this year’s AFLA, Norvin Richards, one of three invited speakers at the conference, will be asking and answering the question “Why are so many Austronesian languages verb-initial”. Fourth-year student Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine will be speaking on ”Topic, Specificity, and Subjecthood in Squiliq Atayal” (research arising from his fieldwork in last summer as a member of the NSF-hosted East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute in Taiwan). Third-year student Ted Levin will be speaking on the topic of ”Dissolving the Balinese Bind: Balinese Binding and The A/A-Bar status of Spec TP”. But that’s not all! Joey Sabbagh (PhD 2005) is one of the conference organizers, so we know it will be a great meeting.