Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Visting Members, Spring 2014

Please join us in extending our warmest welcomes (and welcome backs) to the visiting members of the department for this term.

Visiting Scholars

  • Larissa Aronin (Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel) is working on “developing the novel direction of ‘Multilingualism and Philosophy’” and “will continue philosophical discussion, interpretation and conceptualization of multilingualism in an age of globalization.”
  • Toni Borowsky (University of Sydney) works on phonetics and phonology, in particular using evidence from language games.
  • Tianshan Dai’s (Shenzhen Polytechnic University) research interests include biolinguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition.
  • Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh) works on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with particular reference to English and the other Germanic languages, and to Japanese. During her stay, Caroline is looking to work on three projects: “reconstruction effects, particularly in relatives; “embedded root phenomena”; and (incipiently) a project on possible connections between syntactic priming and attrition.”
  • Fuyin (Thomas) Li (Beihang University), who will arrive in June, has a project entitled “Bridging Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Grammar: Their Philosophical Basis.”
  • Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology, Japan) will arrive in April. His research interests include lexical semantics, semantics, and morphology.

Visiting Student

  • Alexandra Vydrina (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris & LLACAN) is a PhD student whose interests include syntax, semantics, fieldwork, endangered languages, and Mande languages. She writes: “The topic of my PhD research is the typologically and theoretically oriented description of the Kakabe language (Mande), a minor language spoken in Guinea which has not been described before.”