Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MIT Linguistics at the LSA

MIT linguists had another strong year at the LSA 2017 Annual Meeting, this year held in Austin, TX from January 5th-8th, 2017.

The following department members and recent graduates presented talks and posters:

Athulya Aravind and Kristen Syrett (Rutgers): Gradability and vagueness in the nominal domain: an experimental approach

Lauren Clemens (SUNY Albany), Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10), Carol-Rose Little (Cornell), and Morelia Vázquez Martínez (ITSM): Encoding focus in Ch’ol spontaneous speech

Michel DeGraffLinguistics, STEM, educational justice and political and economic equality: MIT-Haiti as case study for retooling linguistics

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14): C-T head-splitting: evidence from Toba Batak

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Ted Levin (PhD ‘15): On the unavailability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel

Rachel Dudley (UMD), Meredith Rowe (Harvard), Valentine Hacquard (PhD ‘06) and Jeffrey Lidz (UMD): Distributional cues to factivity in the input

Aron HirschFragments, pseudo-clefts, and ellipsis

Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02), Angelika Kiss (UToronto), and Tomohiro Yokotama (UToronto): The semantics of object marking in Kinyarwanda

Sudheer Kolachina (S.M. ‘16): Vowel harmony in Telugu

Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14): Movement and alternatives don’t mix: a new look at intervention effects

Ivona Kučerová (PhD ‘07): Evidence against φ-feature resolution accounts of agreement with DP coordinations

Ted Levin (PhD ‘15): Palauan DOM is a licensing phenomenon

Lilla MagyarGemination in loanwords: interaction between perceptual similarity and gradient phonotactic well-formed ness

Kevin Tang (Yale) and Andrew Nevins (PhD ‘05): Expectation and lexical retrieval in naturalistic and experimental misperception

Christopher O’BrienATB-movement and island effects: an experimental study

Wayne O’Neil: This time is different

Juliet StantonInteractions between prenasalized stops and nasal vowels

Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15): Mixed chains in Dinka

Michael McAuliffe (McGill), Michaela Socolof (McGill), Sarah Mihuc (McGill), Michael Wagner (PhD ‘04), and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill): Montreal Forced Aligner: an accurate and trainable forced aligner using Kaldi

Michelle YuanOn apparent ergative agreement in Inuktitut

Ryan Sandell (UCLA) and Sam ZukoffThe development of the Germanic preterite system: learnability and the modeling of diachronic morphophonological change

Additionally, Christopher Baron (A prospective puzzle and a possible solution) and Cora Lesure (Phonologically null morphemes and templatic morphology: The case of Chuj (Mayan) ‘h’) presented at SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) 2017, which was held jointly with the LSA annual meeting.