Whamit!

On December 7, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT organized a celebratory workshop in honor of our colleague, semanticist Irene Heim, professor emerita of Linguistics —  on the occasion of her having been awarded the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize (jointly with Hans Kamp) which we reported earlier here.  As we noted at the time, quoting the award description, the award is considered a kind of Nobel prize:

“The Rolf Schock Prize is unusual in that it rewards both logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts and music. The laureates are selected through a unique collaboration between three Swedish royal academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The final decision is made by The Schock Foundation.”

You can read more about Irene, her achievements, and the prize, in this article from MIT News: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-linguist-irene-heim-shares-schock-prize-logic-philosophy-1016

The workshop program featured 5 talks by former students of Irene’s from linguistics and philosophy:  Mat Mandelkern (NYU philosophy), Luka Crnic (Hebrew University), Maribel Romero (Konstanz), Wataru Uegaki (Edinburgh), and Valentine Hacquard (Maryland). A poster session featured research by current and recent students Ido Benbaji & Omri Doron; Shrayana Haldar; Filipe Hisao Kobayashi & Enrico Flor, Paul Meisenbichler; and Adele Mortier-Henot — and by Elena Guerzoni, Furkan Dikmen, & Penka Stateva; Chris Kennedy, Bernard Schwarz & Luis Alonso Ovalle; and Tue Trinh, Itai Bassi, and Danny Fox.  

At the workshop, Amir Anvari announced the creation of the Heim Archive, a repository of Irene’s published papers and her equally famous unpublished notes and class materials.  

More than 80 guests, including students of Irene’s, colleagues and friends from all over the world were able to come on short notice.  The event reflecting the broad and lasting impact of Irene’s research and teaching on the field. We are so extremely fortunate to count Irene as one of ours. 

Speaker: Heidi Durresi (MIT)
Title: Hauser & Hughto (2020) on contextual faithfulness constraints for opacity
Time: Monday, December 9th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: For this week’s Phonology Circle, I’ll be presenting a recent paper by Hauser and Hughto which explores the use of contextual faithfulness constraints to analyze opacity in parallel Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism. These are faithfulness constraints which assign violations under a context present in the input, crucially different from previously used positional faithfulness constraints (Beckman 1998, Lombardi 1999). I will be laying out the capabilities of these constraints for analyzing various kinds of opacity, as well as the typological consequences of the availability of such constraints.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences & MIT)
Title: Exponence of stacked feature bundles: Evidence from Slavic numerals
Time: Tuesday, December 10, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A number of languages exhibit overt case stacking, and it has been argued that other languages also make use of case stacking, but with just one of the stacked cases overtly exponed (e.g., Richards 2013, Pesetsky 2013). Similarly, some languages exhibit overt stacking of phi features (e.g., Clem and Deal 2024), and it has been argued that, at least in Passamaquoddy, covert stacking of phi features may take place, with only the outermost phi features exponed (Grishin 2024). Building on these ideas, I will first show that adopting another exponence rule, “Expone Most Marked”, makes it possible to immediately explain the quirky homogeneous vs. heterogeneous case pattern of Slavic numeral–noun constructions (e.g., Babby 1987 a.m.o.). I will also generalize previous work on feature stacking to the idea of feature bundle stacking, where feature bundles contain both case and phi features, and I will show how this generalization makes it possible to explain the mind-boggling behavior of Russian paucal numerals. In the process, I will attempt to make the mechanisms involved more explicit and precise than in previous literature, and – if time allows – I will present some remaining puzzles.