Whamit!

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.

Maša Močnik defended her dissertation (“Strange attitudes on top”) on August 5. Her committee was Kai von Fintel (chair), Amir Anvari, and Danny Fox. About her dissertation, Kai writes:  ”In her extraordinarily rich investigation, Maša analyzes the interaction of several kinds of attitude predicates with embedded modal operators (epistemic, bouletic). In the first chapter, she studies the Slovenian doxastic possibility attitude ‘dopuščati’ (which lexicalizes the meaning of “consider it possible”) and the distribution of epistemic modals in its complement. In the second chapter, she explores the distribution of expressions of epistemic modality in the complement of desire predicates. In the third chapter, she extends and deepens earlier joint work with Rafael Abramovitz on the Koryak attitude verb ‘ivək’ and how its variable force/variable flavor arises, sometimes in interaction with modal meanings in its complement. In all three chapters, she deploys a brilliant combination of insights from modal logic and its application to natural language, recent philosophical work on (local) information-sensitive modality, and detailed empirical investigations of multiple, unrelated languages.”

Congratulations Maša!!

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 August 19th, Yeong-Joon Kim brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Phonetic faithfulness in phonological opacity”! Congratulations, Yeong-Joon!!

Here’s the abstract:

This dissertation presents a novel approach to phonological opacity, which is grounded in new findings regarding substantive restrictions on the patterns of opaque interactions. The central thesis posits that phonological opacity functions to preserve the phonetic properties specified in the input of a phonological operation. Specifically, it argues that inputs are enriched with phonetic auditory features, and surface opacity emerges as a result of processing these enriched inputs. This proposal can be detailed as follows. First, processes that become opaque are initially biased by certain phonetic markedness conditions. Second, these phonetic biases, encoded in the phonetically enriched inputs, are mapped onto the nearest phonologically contrastive sounds to satisfy the requirement of phonetic faithfulness, resulting in surface phonological opacity.
This hypothesis yields a testable prediction: only phonetically natural processes, which possess an appropriate phonetic markedness condition, can become opaque. The results of typological surveys of 87 counterfeeding and 65 counterbleeding interactions across languages support this prediction, revealing that opacified processes are subject to a narrow range of markedness conditions, such as coarticulatory assimilation (e.g., palatalization) and durational adjustments (e.g., segmental weakening). Other types of phonological processes, particularly non-natural ones, which are unlikely to have appropriate phonetic markedness conditions, are rarely, if ever, opacified. This asymmetry in the patterns of phonological opacity underscores that opaque interactions are not independent of phonetic substance.

In addition to this main finding, it is also shown that the current proposal offers additional advantages in explaining phonological opacity. First, it successfully accounts for various non-typical opaque interactions, such as feeding opacity and stress misapplications, alongside counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions. The proposal also integrates various phonological phenomena, such as compensatory lengthening, coalescence, and incomplete neutralization, within the framework. Second, the proposed model suggests that learners can successfully acquire and reproduce opaque patterns. Learning simulations using a weighted constraint version of the proposed model demonstrate that intermediate hidden structures, such as phonetically enriched inputs, can be learned based solely on surface patterns when the mappings between abstract inputs and surface representations are known. This challenges the conventional notion that opaque patterns are more difficult to learn than transparent phonology.