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Anvari announced the creation of the Heim Archive, a repository of Irene’s published papers and her equally famous unpublished notes and class materials.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

The 60th annual meeting of the Chicago Lingusitic Society (CLS60) was held on April 26—April 28, 2024. The following members of the department made presentations:

• Shrayana Haldar (3rd year PhD student): Threefold ambiguity between Strong Necessity, Permission, and Weak Necessity in a Bengali Modal.
• Giovanni Roversi (4th year PhD student): Exceptional A’-extraction in Austronesian informs theories of voice systems
• Anastasia Tsilia (3rd year PhD student) & Zhuoye Zhao: Why is then incompatible with the present?
• Yurika Aonuki (2nd year PhD student): Inherent context sensitivity in two unrelated degreeful languages
• Kai von Fintel (Faculty): Unasked questions (Invited talk)
• Tanya Bondarenko (PhD, 2022): Building the meaning of a long-distance question via prolepsis: the case of Georgian

(Photo credit: Giovanni Roversi)

This year, the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL42) took place at UC Berkeley on April 12—14. MIT was well-represented by the following current and very recently graduated students:

• Yeong-Joon Kim (5th year): Overapplication opacity as a consequence of phonetic faithfulness
• Fulang Chen (PhD, 2023): Generalized composite probing in Mandarin
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (5th year): Specific-opaque readings relative to tense and DP-internal quantification over times
• Anastasia Tsilia (3rd year) & Zhuoye Zhao: Why is then incompatible with the present?
• Gurmeet Kaur & Yash Sinha (5th year): Gender asymmetry as a window into the mechanism of mixed concord
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (5th year) & Omri Doron (5th year): Relevance as a dynamic constraint
• Yurika Aonuki (2nd year): Minimum-standard predicates as resultatives and measure phrase interpretations
• Zachary Feldcamp (2nd year): Precedence-sensitive A-movement in locative inversion
• Stanislao Zompì (PhD, 2023) & Zhouyi Sun (2nd year): *ABA in Multidimensional Paradigms: A Harmonic Grammar-based account
• Danfeng Wu (PhD, 2022): The absolute and contextual forms of ‘one’ and ‘two’ in Mandarin Chinese
• Magdalena Lohninger & Ioannis Katochoritis (1st year): Between topics and subjects: an A’/A typology of Austronesian pivots
• Itai Bassi (PhD, 2021): Pathological Questions, focus, and unacceptable ellipsis

(Photo credit: Fulang Chen. Missing: Anastasia, Zach, Yash, Yeong-Joon—-as indicated on the piece of paper in the photo.)

The 14th Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages, FASAL 14, was held at Stony Brook University on April 4—6, 2024. MIT linguistics was well-represented by the following members of the department. Unverified rumour has it that the earthquake in New York City on April 5 has something to do with their groundbreaking research. 

•  Gurmeet Kaur and Yash Sinha (5th year): A novel account of mixed concord: the view from Punjabi honorifics
• Shrayana Haldar (3rd year): Threefold ambiguity between Strong Necessity, Permission, and Weak Necessity in a Benjali Modal
• Ruoan Wang (5th year): Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan: [Hon]-less, and also presuppositionless
• Athulya Aravind (Faculty): Malayalam long-distance anaphor taan: a null theory (Invited Talk)

MIT was well represented at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 17 (WAFL 17), held on September 27-29 at the National University of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar. Current students, faculty members and alumni presented talks and posters:

Eunsun Jou (5th year): “Positional restriction on case assignment: Evidence from Korean nominal adverbials” (talk)

Yeong-Joon Kim (5th year): “A Generative Phonetic Approach to the Sound Change in Kyengsang Korean” (talk)

Norvin Richards (faculty): “Placing wh-phrases in Altaic: a Turkish case study” (invited talk)

Mamoru Saito (PhD 1985): “Null arguments in EA languages revisited: Ellipsis or Pronoun” (invited talk)

Isaac Gould (PhD 2015) and Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013): “The diagnostic status of non-negative contexts for negative concord: The view from Turkish” (talk)

Lisa Bylinina, Natalia Ivlieva (PhD 2013) and Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2014): “Balkar participle da and domain maximality” (talk)

Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013) and Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012): “Temporal ‘made’ in Japanese and its interaction with aspect and polarity” (poster)

Dmitry Privoznov (PhD 2021): “Causatives: A modal account” (talk)

Here’s a group photo of some of the presenters, along with faculty member Shigeru Miyagawa who is WAFL’s co-founder (with Jaklin Kornfilt).

The M100 conference, honoring Morris Halle’s centenary, took place in Stata Sep 8-10! It featured sessions on various topics of his work: Morphology, Stress & Meter, Features & Evaluation Metrics, Rule ordering & the cycle. Dinner featured an open mic with participants sharing their memories and stories of Morris. 

A huge thank you to the organizers who made this possible: Anton Kukhto, Donca Steriade, Michael Kenstowicz, Zhouyi Sun, Johanna Alscott, and Runqi Tan.

Many of the presentations featured members of the MIT community. 

Current students: 

• Yeong-Joon Kim, Auditory features and phonological opacity
• Runqi Tan, Comparing features and dimensions in tone evaluation

Alums: 

• Juliet Stanton: Distantial faithfulness in Yindjibarndi cluster reduction
• Daniel Harbour: Is Georgian agreement competition just a matter of allomorphy and adjacency? & The Subset Principle and dual-inverse syncretism in Kiowa-Tanoan (joint with Jane Middleton) 
• Ezer Rasin: Stress Precedence: A new universal constraint on rule ordering (joint with Vera Rusyanov) & Phonological derivations are not harmonically improving: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic (joint with Eyal Marco, Radan Nasrallah) 
• William Idsardi: Same/different and the evaluation metric (joint with Eric Raimy)
• San Duanmu: Zero Derivation between N and V in English and Chinese
• Ora Matushansky: Suffixal complexes and semantic deletion
• Sam Zukoff: Mirror Principle Effects in Templatic Morphology: Asymmetries in Bantu Suffix Doubling and Morphophonology
• Charles Yang: The structural basis of lexical diffusion: The case of diatonic stress shift
• Michael Wagner: Encoding and retrieving grouping and prominence in the speech stream
• Jonah Katz: Meter and constituency in old-school hip-hop
• Andrew Nevins: Stress and Segmental Rules in the Brazilian Ludling TTK (jiont with Felipe Vital) 
• Bruce Hayes: A MaxEnt analysis of the meter of Beowulf (joint with Donka Minkova)

Pictures below! 

The 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held over the weekend. The following members of our community presented at the conference:

• Boer Fu (6th year): Variation in Mandarin Prenuclear Glide Segmentation
• Fulang Chen (6th year): Causativization and affectedness in the Mandarin BA-construction
• Giovanni Roversi (3rd year): Adjectival “concord” in North Sámi is not concord (and it’s two different phenomena)
• Yash Sinha (4th year): Phi-concord in Punjabi singular honorific DPs
• Johanna Alstott (1st year): Scalar implicature in Adverbial vs Nominal Quantifiers: Two experiments
• Katya Morgunova & Anastasia Tsilia (2nd year): Why would you D that? On the D-layer in Greek clausal subjects
• Ksenia Ershova (postdoc): Phi-feature mismatches in Samoan resumptives as post-syntactic impoverishment
• Donca Steriade (faculty): Vowel-to-vowel intervals in Ancient Greek and Latin meters

Other recent MIT alums on the program include:

• Danfeng Wu (PhD, 2022): Elided material is present in prosodic structure
• Tanya Bondarenko (PhD, 2022): Conjoining embedded clauses is either trivial or redundant: evidence from Korean

The 53rd annual meeting of the North East Linguistics Society was held at the University of Göttingen on January 12-14, 2023. Here are the presentations made by current MIT linguists:

• Ido Benbaji (4th year), Omri Doron (4th year) and Adèle Hénot-Mortier (4th year): Distinguishing levels of morphological derivations in world-embedding models
• Janek Guerrini (visiting student): Keeping ‘fake’ simple: a similarity-based theory
• Ido Benbaji (4th year) and David Pesetsky (faculty): E-extension and the Uniformity of Silence
• Peter Grishin (5th year): How to covertly move: Evidence from Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey
• Haoming Li (1st year): The Syntax and Semantics of Asymmetrical ATB Wh-constructions in Mandarin Chinese
• Zhouyi Sun: Mixed probe, competing for licensing and information-structural neutrality in Shiluk

Other recent alumni who presented their work include:

• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (Phd 2011), Elizabeth Cowper, Daniel Currie Hall, Daniel Siddiqi and Isabelle Boyer: Limits on pronominal gender: A semantic account of a morphologicla pattern
• Carol Rose Little, Scott Anderbois and Jessica Coon (PhD 2010): The iota type-shifter in headless relative clauses: Implications from Mayan 
• Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005) and Diane Stoianov: Word Order and Differential Object Marking in Three Cohorts of CENA Signers
• Yağmur Sağ & Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019): Getting even without “even” in Turkish
• Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015) and Adam Chong: On the preference for nonconcatenative morphology in Dinka
• Jessica Coon (PhD 2010) and Martina Martinović: Predication, Specification, and Equation in Ch’ol
• Gaurav Mathur (PhD 2000) and Christian Rathmann: Constraints on interactions between morphological processes and gesture in signed languages 
• Suzana Fong (PhD 2021): Pronouncing PRO in Wolof
• Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002): The Hell Bias
• Aron Hirsch (PhD 2017) and Bernhard Schwarz: Type disambiguation and logical strength 

The 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium took place at the University of Amsterdam on December 19-21. The following MIT grad students presented their work:

• Ruoan Wang (4th year): Morphological effects on indexical shift in Uyghur
• Omri Doron (4th year) & Jad Wehbe (3rd year): A constraint on presupposition accommodation
• Adèle Mortier (4th year), Steven Verheyen, Paul Égré and Benjamin Spector: An experimental investigation of the around/between contrast
• Lorenzo Pinton (2nd year): Numerous relative clauses: permutation invariance, anti-restrictiveness, triviality
• Jad Wehbe (3rd year): Revisiting presuppositional accounts of homogeneity

In addition, several recent alumni also gave presentations:

• Márta Abrusán (PhD 2007): Projection, attention and the meaning of negation (Invited talk)
• Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002): The Hell with questions 
• Moshe E. Bar-Lev and Roni Katzir (PhD 2008): Positivity, (anti-)exhaustivity and stability 
• Yizhen Jiang, Rebecca S. Ren, Yihang Shen, Richard Breheny, Paul Marty (PhD 2017) and Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012): Plural priming revisited: inverse preference and spillover effects
• Sonia Ramotowska, Paul Marty (Phd 2017), Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012) and Richard Breheny: Diversity with Universality 

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Several of our current students, faculty, and visitors gave presentations:

• Danfeng Wu (6th year) and Boer Fu (5th year): Prosodic evidence for syntax in biased questions in Mandarin
• Boer Fu (5th year) and Danfeng Wu (6th year): Numeral Allomorphy of ‘One’ and ‘Two’ in Mandarin Chinese
• Danfeng Wu (6th year): Bipartite syntax of negation in corrective “but” sentences
• Boer Fu (5th year): Prenuclear Glide in Mandarin Chinese: Is It a Segment?
• Fulang Chen (5th year): Can noun modifiers be stranded or extracted in Mandarin?
• Yash Sinha (3rd year): The Structure of Hindi indirect causatives: Evidence from apparent *ABA violation
• Patrick Elliott (postdoctoral associate): A scopal theory of pied-piping in relative clauses
• Yourdanis Sedarous (visiting student; University of Michigan) and Marlyse Baptista (University of Michigan): Optimization of Shared Structures in Egyptian Arabic-English Bilinguals: A View From Language Contact
• Annie Birkeland (University of Michigan), Adeli Block (University of Michigan), Justin Craft (University of Michigan), Yourdanis Sedarous (visiting student; University of Michigan), Wang Sky (University of Michigan), Gou Wu (University of Michigan), and Savithry Namboodiripad (University of Michigan): Problematizing the “native speaker” in Linguistic Research: History of the term and ways forward
• Robert Frank (Yale) and Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014; research affiliate): Top-down derivations: Flipping syntax on its head
• Itamar Kastner (University of Edinburgh), Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014; research affiliate), Anonymous, Rikker Dockum (Swarthmore College), Michael Dow (Université de Montréal), Maria Esipova (University of Oslo), Caitlin M. Green (None), and Todd Snider (Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf): The Open Letter: Responses and Recommendations

Professor Michel DeGraff delivered a plenary talk:

• Michel DeGraff (faculty): On impure linguistics for self-purification and direct action

And several alums also presented in the conference:

• Kimiko Nakanishi (Ochanomizu University) and Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005; Meiji Gakuin University): Indeterminates in Comparatives as Free Choice Items
• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005; Meiji Gakuin University) and George Akanlig-Pare (University of Ghana): Syntax of Reduplication and Negative-Polarity Items in Buli
• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005; Meiji Gakuin University): Animacy Hierarchy and Case/Agreement in Okinawan
• Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017; University of Leipzig): Less is Moro: Streamlining Jenks & Rose (2015)
• Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California), Ramida Phoolsombat (University of Southern California), Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012; University of Oslo), and Patrick Georg Grosz (PhD 2011; University of Oslo): Resolving ambiguity in speaker- and hearer-oriented body part emoji: Reference resolution beyond pronouns
• Yu’an Yang (University of Maryland), Daniel Goodhue (University of Maryland), Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006; University of Maryland), and Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland): Are you asking me or telling me? Learning to identify questions in early speech to children
• Suzana Fong (PhD 2021): Nominal licensing via dependent case: the view from Pseudo Noun Incorporation in Wolof

This year’s edition of ECO-5 will take place on Saturday, April 3. ECO-5 is an informal workshop for graduate students of five departments in the East Coast (UMass, Harvard, UConn, UMD, and MIT) to present their syntax research.

Each year, one of the five schools organizes the workshop, but this year’s edition was a joint effort by all departments. It will be held via Zoom. Members of each school will receive the link in an e-mail.

The schedule and other information can be checked here: https://sites.google.com/view/eco-5/home

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Many of our current students, faculty, and visitors gave presentations - some as collaboration with alums.

• Danfeng Wu (5^th year): Evasion strategies save apparent island violations in stripping
• Tanya Bondarenko (4^th year), Colin Davis (PhD 2020): What cross-clausal scrambling in Balkar reveals about phase edges
• Daniel Asherov (4^th year), Danny Fox (faculty), Roni Katzir (PhD 2008): On the Irrelevance of contextually given states for the computation of Scalar Implicatures
• Rafael Abramovitz (6^th year): Deconstructing Inverse Case Attraction
• Tanya Bondarenko (4^th year): Inverse in Passamaquoddy as the spell-out of Feature Gluttony
• Neil Banerjee (5^th year): Two ways to form a portmanteau: Evidence from ellipsis
• Daniel Goodhue (University of Maryland), Jad Wehbe (1^st year), Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006; University of Maryland), Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland): That’s a question? Preschoolers’ comprehension illocutionary force, clause type and intonation
• Suzanne Flynn (faculty), Barbara Lust (visiting professor; Cornell University), Janet Sherman (Harvard University), Charles R. Henderson (Cornell University): Binding and Coreference Dissociate in Mild Cognitive Impairment 
• Colin Davis (PhD 2020), Patrick Elliott (postdoctoral associate): Radical successive cyclicity and the freedom of parasitic gaps

Our alums also presented in the conference:

• Colin Davis (PhD 2020; University of Southern California): On parasitic gaps in relative clauses and extraction from NP
• ​Kenyon Branan (PhD 2018; National University of Singapore), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD 2014; National University of Singapore): Binding reconstruction and the types of traces
• ​Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017; University of Leipzig): Deriving Arabic Verbal “Templates” without Templates
• ​Joey Lim (National University of Singapore), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD 2014; National University of Singapore): Word order and disambiguation in Pangasinan
• ​Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California), Patrick Georg Grosz (PhD 2011; University of Oslo): Anaphoricity in emoji: An experimental investigation of face and non-face emoji
• ​Jeong Hwa Cho (University of Michigan), Ezra Keshet (PhD 2008; University of Michigan): Actuality and Counterfactual Implicatures in Korean Possibility and Necessity Modals
• ​Tzu-Hsuan Yang (University of Kansas), Yueh-chin Chang (National Tsing Hua University), Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007; National Tsing Hua University): Perceptually inconspicuous yet articulatorily distinct merger: A case study of Taiwanese Mandarin coda nasals
• ​Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005; Meiji Gakuin University): Sluicing cannot Apply In-Situ in Japanese
• ​Suyeon Im (Hanyang University), Jennifer Cole (PhD 1987; Northwestern University): Discourse meaning in perception and production of prosodic prominence
• ​​Deepak Alok (Rutgers University), Mark Baker (PhD 1985; Rutgers University): Person and Honorification: Features and Interactions in Magahi (talk presented during the symposium on the features of allocutivity, honorifics and social relation)

Our department will be hosting the 30th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL)! You can find the call for papers, including submission details, below.

* * *

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is pleased to announce that it will host the 30th annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL), which will be held virtually on May 13–16, 2021.

Abstracts are invited for talks on topics in formal Slavic linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. Both theoretical and experimental studies that have consequences for linguistic theory are welcome. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author (or two joint abstracts per author).

Both talks and posters will be selected. Each talk selected for presentation will be allotted 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Poster presenters will give lightning talks and then present their poster virtually via Zoom.

Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format through EasyChair, with all non-standard fonts embedded. Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages, which includes the data. An additional third page may be used for references. Abstracts must be submitted in letter or A4 format with 1in or 2.5cm margins on all sides, single-spaced, and in a font no smaller than 11pt. Abstracts should be anonymous. Please make sure that PDF files do not have any identifying metadata.

Conference website: https://fasl30.mit.edu/

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fasl30
Submission deadline: January 25, 2021, 23:59, anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)
Notification of acceptance: March 2021

For inquiries, please e-mail us at: fasl30.mit@gmail.com.

NELS 51 was held virtually at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The following students, faculty, and staff members presented at the conference.

• Wenkai Tay, Keely New (1st year), Mary Dalrymple and Dag Haug: Reciprocal scope in Mandarin
• Martin Hackl (Faculty), Curtis Chen (Undergraduate Researcher) and Leo Rosenstein (Linguistics Lab Manager): Maximize Presupposition Effects in Haddock-Descriptions
• Fulang Chen (4th year): The role of Strong Strong Start in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi
• Ido Benbaji (2nd year), Omri Doron (2nd year), Margaret Wang (2nd year): Reduplication in Hebrew as a Diagnostic for Antonym Decomposition
• Rafael Abramovitz (6th year): Deconstructing Inverse Case Attract

Three of our alums also gave presentations:

• Colin Davis (PhD 2020): On parasitic gaps in relative clauses and extraction from NP
• Joana Serwaa Ampofo and Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018): True self-counterfeeding vowel harmony in Akan serial verb constructions
• Richard Stockwell, Aya Meltzer-Asscher and Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1983): There is reconstruction for Condition C in English questions

BUCLD 45 was also held virtually last week at Boston University. Many of our students, faculty, and staff members gave presentations:

• Athulya Aravind (Faculty) and Martin Hackl (Faculty): Maximize Presupposition! in development
• Cindy Torma (Acquisition Lab Manager), Gabor Brody, Athulya Aravind (Faculty): Decomposing both
• Daniel Goodhue, Jad Wehbe (1st year), Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006), Jeffrey Lidz: Preschoolers’ comprehension of the interaction of intonation and illocutionary force
• Martin Hackl (Faculty), Ella Apostoaie, Leo Rosenstein (Linguistics Lab Manager): Acquisition of numerals, the natural numbers, and amount comparatives
• Fulang Chen (4th year), Leo Rosenstein (Linguistics Lab Manager), Martin Hackl (Faculty): Quantifier-spreading under negation

Our alums also presented:

• Hisao Kurokami, Jeffrey Lidz, Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006), Daniel Goodhue: Children’s interpretation of additive particles mo ‘also’ and also in Japanese and English
• Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006), Yu’an Yang, Jeffrey Lidz: Acquisition of belief reports by Mandarin speaking children
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016), Elena Anagnostopoulou; Vina Tsakali: The development of DATIVE arguments: Evidence from Modern Greek clitics

The Linguistic Society of America’s Annual Meeting for 2020 was held at in New Orleans in January. As per usual, MIT was well represented. The following department members presented talks and posters:

Students/faculty who gave a talk:

• Danfeng Wu (4th year): ‘Whether’ can pied-pipe
• Christopher Baron (4th year): States in the semantics of degree achievements
• Tamisha Lauren Tan (Harvard) & Peter Grishin (2nd year): Three Types of (Mis)matching in Free Relatives
• Yadav Gowda (4th year) & Danfeng Wu (4th year): Clitic climbing and linear adjacency in Wolof
• Canaan Breiss (UCLS) & Adam Albright (MIT faculty): When is a gang effect more than the sum of its parts?
• Neil Banerjee (4th year): Ellipsis as Obliteration: Evidence from Bengali negative allomorphy
• Jennifer Hu (MIT BCS), Sherry Yong Chen (3rd year), and Roger Levy (MIT BCS). A closer look at the performance of neural language models on reflexive anaphor licensing. (Sister conference the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL))

Students who presented a poster:

• Rafael Abramovitz (5th year) & Itai Bassi (5th year): Relativized Anaphor Agreement Effect
• Christos Christopoulos (University of Connecticut) & Stanislao Zompi’ (3rd year): Weakening Case Containment: an argument from default allomorphs
• Justin Colley (5th year) & Itai Bassi (5th year): Don’t leave me behind, I lean on you! A condition on ellipsis, and a case for Conjunction Reduction
• Suzana Fong (5th year): The syntax of number marking: the view from bare nouns in Wolof
• Tatiana Bondarenko (3rd year) & Stanislao Zompì (3rd year): Leftover Agreement across Kartvelian languages
• Elise Newman (4th year): The future perfect since Stump
• Filipe Hisao de Salles Kobayashi (3rd year): Reciprocity can be compositionally built: Scattered Reciprocals in Brazilian Portuguese
• Fulang Chen (3rd year): Split partitivity in Mandarin: A diagnostic for argument-gap dependencies
• Colin Davis (5th year) & Andrei Antonenko (Stony Brook University): Order Preservation in the Russian Nominal Phrase
• Colin Davis (5th year) & Tatiana Bondarenko (3rd year): A Linearization Explanation for Asymmetries in Russian Scrambling
• Colin Davis (5th year) & Justin Colley (5th year): On the near absence of subject HNPS

Alumna Jessie Little Doe Baird (PhD 2000; Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project) gave an invited plenary address: “The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project: Nine Years On from We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân”. 

In addition, many recent alumni also presented their work:

• Maša Močnik (5th-year) and Rafael Abramovitz (5th-year): A Variable-Force Variable-Flavor Attitude Verb in Koryak
• Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (3rd-year) and Enrico Flor (2nd-year): Coordinating Complete Answers: The Case of Tanto–Quanto Conjunction

They were joined by many MIT alumni and visitors:

MIT was the very proud host of the 14th Workshop of Altaic Formal Linguistics, which took place from Friday October 19th to Sunday 21st. This year’s edition celebrated the career of Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, co-founder of WAFL (with Jaklin Kornflit). In his honour, a workshop was held on the day before the conference, featuring talks by friends, estimated colleagues, and former students.

MIT presenters at WAFL:

• Dmitry Privoznov (4th year), Causality of passives and paradigmatic gaps
• Colin Davis (4th year), Crossing and Stranding at vP in Altaic and beyond
• Tatiana Bondarenko (2nd year), Combining CPs by Restrict: evidence from Buryat
• Ömer Demirok (5th year) & Despina Oikonomou (alumna), Difficult Imperatives in Turkish

One of our recent alumni, İsa Kerem Bayırlı, was an invited speaker. He gave a talk on Concord in Altaic languages. Suyeon Yun, another alumna, was presenting.

Prof. Miyagawa’s speech at the dinner organized in his honour

Tanya Bondarenko presenting her poster

Musicians at the WAFL dinner: (left to right) Mongolian singer, Japanese shamisen player, traditional Turkish music band

We have some summer news to share with you:

• The CreteLing Summer School took place in July at the University of Crete in Rethymnon, and several MIT faculty (and alumni) taught courses:
  
  • Adam Albright - Advanced Morphology: Syncretism and Paradigm Structure
  • Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou - The Linguistics of Desire
  • Sabine Iatridou - Introduction to Syntax
  • Shigeru Miyagawa - Language and Animal Communication in Evolution
  • Donca Steriade - Introduction to Phonology

The summer school was attended by many MIT students as well: Rafael Abramovitz (4th year), Daniel Asherov (2nd year), Tanya Bondarenko (2nd year), Colin Davis (4th year), Ömer Demirok (5th year), Verena Hehl (4th year), Maša Močnik (4th year), Elise Newman (3rd year), Frank Staniszewski (3rd year) and Stan Zompi (2nd year). Rafael, Daniel, Tanya and Ömer also served as course TAs. Check out nice photos from the event, such as this one below, on the summer school’s Facebook page.

• Justin Colley (4th year), Verena Hehl, Anton Kukhto (1st year) and Mitya Privoznov (4th year) went into the heart of Siberia for a fieldwork expedition in the village of Kazym, Central Khanty. Mitya reports: “We had a lot of fun, suffered from mosquitoes and hopefully gathered some useful data as well :).”

• In August, Tanya Bondarenko and Colin Davis participated in a joint fieldtrip with a group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University to study Barguzin Buryat in Baraghan village, the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.

• Conference presentations:
  • Neil Banerjee (3rd year) presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association (May 30-June 1) on CARP in Kinyarwanda, and at CHRONOS 13 (June 4-June 6) on the temporal orientation of necessity modals.
  • In early June, Elise Newman (3rd year) went to the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented work on the English auxiliary system at OLINCO. Elise: “Several MIT alumni were there; Joe Emonds co-organized the conference and I found out that he and I are both Cubs fans!”.
  • Filipe Kobayashi (2nd year) and Sherry Chen (2nd year) presented joint work on distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese at the student session of the North American Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), held at CMU in late June. Maša Močnik also attended the summer school. 
  • On August 4, Danfeng Wu (3rd year), Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD ’95, now at Tohoku University) and Mamoru Saito (PhD ’85, now at Nanzan University) gave talks at the Workshop on Case Theory and Labeling of Structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to that on July 28, Danfeng presented a poster co-authored with Shigeru and Masatoshi at MAPLL × TCP × TL × TaLK (MT3) at Keio University. After that, she also attended and presented at the Summer Seminar on Frontiers of Language and Cognition Research.
  • Norvin Richards (faculty) gave a series of talks on Contiguity Theory at SICOGG 20 in Seoul, held on August 8-10, and then another talk at Kyungpook National University in Daegu. 
  • Just a few days ago, Verena Hehl gave a presentation at SLE in Tallinn on Bildungsplan Baden Württeberg 2016: Promoting Grammar as Science from the bottom up – a case study.

• Education:
  • Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure (3rd year) and Dóra Takács (2nd year) taught a 7-week introductory linguistics course for middle and high school students as part of HSSP, from June till August. Their course, entitled `How language works’, covered topics ranged from sound production and the IPA over cross-linguistic variation and case to NPIs and implicatures. Dóra writes: “About 35 students participated in the class, which was hopefully a lot of fun and definitely an interesting and valuable experience for everyone.”
  • Naomi Francis (5th year), Verena Hehl and Maša Močnik graduated from the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program (KTCP) in June. The participants report: “Graduates of the KTCP attend 8 sessions on a wide range of topics in teaching and learning and are exposed to current research on pedagogical methodology through assigned readings and in-class discussions. We also had the opportunity to create and receive feedback on teaching philosophy statements for academic job applications.”
  • In May, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), an MIT initiative to support global education, announced a grant funding to MITILI  student Newell Lewey and to prof. Norvin Richards for the project Skicinuwi-npisun: A Community-Centered Project for Documentation and Teaching of the Passamaquoddy Language. The project supports language teaching and curriculum development to help preserve the severely endangered Passamaquoddy language of Northern Maine. The grant includes funding for Newell’s language classes, and for a group of graduate students from the department to travel with Norvin to Passamaquoddy country to work with elders. Here you can read a little more about the project. Congratulations Newell and Norvin!
• Alumni news:
  • Our distinguished alum Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), now at  the University of Arizona, has been elected a 2019 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Heidi’s colleagues as LSA Fellows include 38 other MIT alums and members of our faculty who have been elected in previous years — more than a quarter of the (now) 138 Fellows of the Society. Congratulations Heidi (and our warmest congratulations to the other newly elected Fellows as well)!
  • Another one of our distinguished alums, John McCarthy (PhD 1979) - a pioneer in the development of phonological theory for over four decades - has been named Provost and more at UMass Amherst, where he has taught since 1985. Very exciting news — congratulations John! 

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 27 took place at Stanford over the weekend, and three MIT presentations were given.

• Colin Davis and Tatiana Bondarenko: Parasitic gaps and covert pied-piping in Russian LBE
• Rafael Abramovitz: Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from Unpronounced Subjects
• Maša Močnik: Where Force Matters: Embedding Epistemic Modals and Attitudes

WSCLA 2018 (The Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas) was held at the University of Ottawa on April 13-15, 2018.

A contingent of MIT students and alumni studying the languages of the Americas participated in the conference:

• Michelle Yuan (fifth year student) gave a talk on Last Resort case licensing in Inuktitut.

The conference was organized by Andres Salanova (PhD ‘2007). Among other participants there were Nico Baier (former visiting student), Maziar Toosarvandani (former postdoc), Karin Vivanco (former visiting student), and Guillaume Thomas (PhD ‘2012).

The 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 49) will be held at Michigan State University from March 22-25, 2018. Colin Davis (3rd-year), Kenyon Branan (5th-year) , and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year) will give talks, and Kenyon and Abdul-Razak will also present a poster.

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT will be hosting the 14th edition of WAFL, the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics. The workshop will take place on October 19–21, 2018.

Abstracts are invited for presentations on topics dealing with formal aspects of any area of theoretical Altaic linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. The deadline for abstract submission is March 30, 2018. 

Additionally, there will be a workshop in honor of Shigeru Miyagawa on October 18, 2018.

The organizing committee can be reached at wafl14@mit.edu. More information can be found on the workshop’s website.

The Linguistic Society of America’s Annual Meeting for 2018 was held in Salt Lake City, Utah in January. As per usual, MIT was well represented. The following department members presented talks and posters:

• Kenyon Branan - Determining what gets in the way
• Colin Davis - Cyclic Linearization Constrains Intermediate Stranding
• Suzana Fong - Featural definition of syntactic positions: evidence from hyper-raising
• Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband - Comprehending anaphoric presuppositions involves memory retrieval too
• Carolyn Spadine - Overt realizations of syntactic perspective: evidence from Tigrinya
• Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband - “Forward Lifetime Effects” and Non-Future Tense in Mandarin Chinese
• Hanzhi Zhu - Mandarin cai: a later-than-expected inference
• Matthew Tyler and Michelle Yuan - Case-assignment before and after clitic doubling: Evidence from Choctaw and Yimas
• Justin Colley - Object-preferring Agreement is derived by Object Movement
• Michelle Yuan - Inuktitut antipassive morphology and the Anaphor Agreement Effect
• Elise Newman and Danfeng Wu - A new analysis and prediction about Lubukusu agreeing complementizers

Alumni who presented or organised symposia include: Karlos Arregi (PhD ‘02), Benjamin Bruening (PhD ‘01), Aniko Csirmaz (PhD ‘05), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14), Clair Halpert (PhD ‘12), Bruce Hayes (PhD ‘80), Ezra Keshet (PhD ‘08), Paul Kiparsky (PhD ‘65), Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14), Theodore Levin (PhD ‘15), Janet Pierrehumbert (PhD ‘80), and Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15).

Going Romance 31 took place over the weekend at the University of Bucharest. Donca Steriade (faculty) was a keynote speaker, presenting on Cyclic and pseudo-cyclic evaluations: evidence from Romanian. Kenyon Branan (5th-year) also gave a talk on Determining what gets in the way.

SNEWS (the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) is happening at MIT on Saturday, December 2nd! This is an informal graduate student workshop featuring presenters from MIT, Harvard, UMass Amherst, UConn, Brown, and Yale. More information, including a program, can be found on the workshop website.

NELS 2017 was held in Reykjavík, at the University of Iceland, from October 27th-29th. This NELS is the first one to not be on continental North America. However, Reykjavík is located on the edge of the North American tectonic plate, making this perhaps the most North-Eastern NELS possible while still (geologically) in North America.

A large contingent of MIT students participated in the conference:

• Ezer Rasin, Iddo Berger, Nur Lan and Roni Katzir (visiting faculty) - Rule-based learning of phonological optionality and opacity
• Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir (visiting faculty) - Learning abstract URs from distributional evidence 
• Tingchun Chen - Successive-cyclic case assignment in Amis: evidence from case-stacking
• Justin Colley - Object movement derives object preference
• Carolyn Spadine  - Tigrinya attitude reports: arguments for syntactic perspective
• Itai Bassi and Nicholas Longenbaugh - Features on bound pronouns: an argument for a semantic approach
• Ömer Demirok - A Modal Approach to Dative Subjects in Laz
• Athulya Aravind and Kristen Syrett (Rutgers) - Investigating Context Sensitivity and Vagueness in Nominals in Child and Adult Language 
• Michelle Yuan - M-merger and copy spell-out in Inuktitut noun incorporation

Additionally, alums Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002), Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (PhD 2011), Julie Anne Legate (PhD 2002), Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (PhD 2007), Rafael Nonato (PhD 2014), Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2014), Omer Preminger (PhD 2011), Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015), and Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998) all presented work, along with many friends and former visiting scholars.

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2017 took place at New York University over the weekend and MIT was well represented by students, faculty, and alumni.

Current MIT-ers:

• Edward Flemming (faculty): Stochastic harmonic grammars as random utility models (poster)
• Ezer Rasin (5th-year) and Roni Katzir (TAu and MIT): Minimum description length subsumes free ride effects in UR learning (poster)
• Ezer Rasin (5th-year), Iddo Berger (Tel Aviv), Nur Lan (Tel Aviv), and Roni Katzir (TAU and MIT): Acquiring opaque phonological interactions using minimum description length (poster)
• Sam Zukoff (Postdoc, PhD ‘17): Segmental ordering and alignment in Arabic nonconcatenative morphology (poster)

Alumni:

• Arto Antilla (Stanford) and Giorgio Magri (CNRS/Paris 8, PhD ‘09): T-orders across categorical and probabilistic constraint-based phonology (talk)
• Heather Campbell (NYU), Doug Whalen (CUNY) & Tara McAllister (NYU, PhD ‘09): Quantifying complexity of children’s tongue contours using ultrasound imaging (workshop)
• Benjamin Storme (PhD ‘17): A theory of phonologically-derived environment effects (poster)
• Suyeon Yun (Toronto, PhD ‘16) and Yoonjung Kang (Toronto, PhD ‘00): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects (poster)

Last weekend, several MIT faculty, students, postdocs and alumni gave talks at Sinn und Bedeutung 22 in Potsdam. Danny Fox was an invited speaker, and gave a talk on Exhaustivity and the Presupposition of Questions. Other talks by members of our community and alums included:

Current MIT-ers:

• Itai Bassi (3rd year) and Ezer Rasin (5th year): Intensional-functional relative clauses with syntactic reconstruction (talk)
• Vincent Rouillard (first year) with Bernhard Schwarz (McGill): Presuppositional implicatures: Quantity or Maximize Presupposition? (poster)
• Sarah Zobel (postdoctoral associate, PhD ‘12 University of Tübingen): Capturing the interpretational possibilities of weak free adjuncts (talk)

Alumni:

• Pranav Anand (UCSC, PhD ‘06) with Natasha Korotkova (University of Tübingen): Acquaintance content and obviation (talk)
• Pranav Anand (UCSC, PhD ‘06) and Maziar Toosarvandani (UCSC, former visiting faculty): No explanation for the historical present: Temporal sequencing and discourse (talk)
• Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland, PhD ‘06) with Saskia Brockmann (University of Tübingen), Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland) and Sara McConnell (University of Maryland): Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites (talk)
• Despina Oikonomou (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, PhD ‘16): Imperatives: How minimal are they? (poster)
• Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo, PhD ‘12) and Patrick G. Grosz (University of Oslo, PhD ‘11) with Tejaswinee Kelkar and Alexander Refsum Jensenius (University of Oslo): Coreference and disjoint reference in the semantics of narrative dance (talk)
• Yasutada Sudo (UCL, PhD ‘12) and Alexandre Cremers (former visiting student) with Frances Kane (Ulster University), Lyn Tieu (Macquarie University), Lynda Kennedy (Ulster University), Raffaella Folli (Ulster University) and Jacopo Romoli (Ulster University): Testing theories of temporal inferences: Evidence from child language (poster)

Please join us on September 23, 2017 for the MIT Workshop on Simplicity in Grammar Learning.

The workshop will bring together members of MIT’s Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences departments to share current work that revisits the relevance of simplicity criteria in the study of language. Our goal is to build a dialogue between the two departments around questions of common interest about simplicity.

The workshop will take place in room 32-155. Please visit simplicity2017.mit.edu for more details and be sure to register if you plan to join as space will be limited.

Best, Ezer Rasin, on behalf of the organizers

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign organized the 26th annual meeting of FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics), which took place this past weekend. MIT was represented by the following talks and posters:

Mitya Privoznov (2nd year grad student): Russian stress in inflectional paradigms[poster]

Masha Esipova (current visitor/NYU): Two types of verb fronting in Russian [poster]

Natalia Ivlieva (PhD ‘13) and Alexander Podobryaev (PhD ‘14): How to negate a disjunction in Russian

Ora Matushansky (PhD ‘02) (UiL OTS/Utrecht University/CNRS/Université Paris-8), Nora Boneh (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Lea Nash (University Paris 8) & Natalia Slioussar (School of Linguistics, Higher School of Economics, Moscow): To PPs in their proper place.

A glimpse of Masha’s poster and of Mitya. Thanks Masha for the picture!

2nd-year grad student Rafael Abramovitz is headed to Manchester for the 25th Manchester Phonology Meeting (25mfm). He will give the talk An Argument against the Richness of the Base from Koryak Labials. Alum Giorgio Magri (PhD ‘09) will present the poster MaxEnt does not help with phonotactic restrictiveness. Adam Albright (faculty) will be one of the discussants

The 6th Cambridge Comparative Syntax conference (CamCoS 6) took place on 4—6 May. Michelle Yuan (4th year grad student) gave the talk Object agreement and clitic doubling across Inuit: Evidence from Inuktitut ABS objects

The University of Calgary organized this year’s West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 1st year grad student Neil Banerjee (Trouble with attitudes and the future) and Heidi Harley (PhD ‘95) were keynote speakers and several current students and alumni presented their work:

Hanzhi Zhu (3rd year grad student): Desonorization in Kyrgyz: Licensing by cue, not syllable contact

Nico Baier (UC Berkeley) & Michelle Yuan (4th year grad student): Deriving anti-agreement with bound variables: feature transmission and impoverishment

Rafael Nonato (PhD ‘14) Skewed AGREE: accounting for a closest-conjunct effect with semantic implications

Ivona Kučerová (PhD ‘07) & Adam Szczegielniak (Rutgers): A dual theory of roots: Evidence from gender-marking languages

Benjamin Bruening (PhD ‘01) & Eman Al Khalaf (U. Jordan): No argument-adjunct distinction in reconstruction for binding Condition

Neil during his keynote [thanks Hanzhi for the picture!]

The University of Delaware organized the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, which took place in April 20—23. MIT was represented by the following presentations:

Benjamin Storme (5th year grad student): Schwa-stem derivatives in French and gradient attraction

Nikos Angelopoulos & Dominique Sportiche (PhD ‘83): Romance Scrambling and Hierarchy within Clitic Clusters

Luca Iacoponi & Viviane Déprez (PhD ‘89): Negative Concord in Italian: An experimental approach

Sophie Harrington & Maria Cristina Cuervo (PhD ‘03): Mood selection under parecer (‘to seem’): introducing the polarity indicative [poster]

The 22nd Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) will take place later this week at the University of British Columbia, Canada, on April 21—23. Some current students and alumni will present their work:

• Michelle Yuan (4th year grad student): Why ABS objects are exceptional in Inuktitut: Clitic doubling and cross-dialectal variation
• Karin Vivanco (University of São Paulo, current visitor): The morpheme ti- in Karitiana
• Emily Hanink & Karlos Arregi (PhD ‘02): Switch reference in Washo as inverse marking
• Suzi Lima & Guillaume Thomas (PhD ‘12): Person sensitive switch reference in Yudja

The East Coast Syntax Workshop (ECO5) was held at the University of Connecticut on Saturday April 15. MIT was represented by two current students.

• Colin Davis: Cyclic Linearization and Partial Pied-Piping
• Suzana Fong: Getting out of a finite CP: an analysis of hyper-raising

AFLA 24 happened over the weekend, and MIT was represented by students both current and erstwhile. TC Chen (Ling-11) and Mitcho Erlewine (PhD ‘14) gave talks, while Julie Anne Legate (PhD ‘02) was an invited speaker.

• TC Chen (MIT): Derive case successive-cyclically in Amis clauses and gerunds
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (NUS): Quantifying over alternatives with Toba Batak manang
• Julie Anne Legate (UPenn): Passive Applicatives

Credits for the picture: Michael Erlewine (mitcho)

The MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will be hosting the seventh annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 7) workshop on March 4-5, 2017. The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a platform to discuss formal or experimental approaches to syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology from the perspective of South Asian Linguistics.

The invited speakers are:

• Ashwini Deo (Ohio State)
• Miriam Butt (Konstanz)
• Norivn Richards (MIT)

The full program can be found on the FASAL 7 website. Attendees are requested to register for the workshop. We hope to see you there!

The 7th Annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) will be hosted at MIT March 4-5, 2017. The conference offers a platform to discuss formal and experimental approaches to natural language from the perspective of South Asian Linguistics.

The program is available here. The invited speakers are Miriam Butt (Konstanz), Ashwini Deo (Ohio State) and Norvin Richards (MIT).

We ask that those who are planning to attend to please register. There is no registration fee.

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 DeGraff: Linguistics, 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 Hirsch: Fragments, 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 Magyar: Gemination 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’Brien: ATB-movement and island effects: an experimental study

Wayne O’Neil: This time is different

Juliet Stanton: Interactions 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 Yuan: On apparent ergative agreement in Inuktitut

Ryan Sandell (UCLA) and Sam Zukoff: The 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.

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) is an annual graduate student conference that brings together presenters from six universities: Harvard, MIT, Brown, Yale, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and University of Connecticut. This year, SNEWS took place at Brown University. The following MIT grad students gave talks:

• Itai Bassi: A puzzle about binding by focus operators
• Amanda Swenson: Existential and episodic: Reexamining the Malayalam -unnu Imperfective

Turkish, Turkic, and the Languages of Turkey (Tu+2) took place on November 19-20, 2016 at Indiana University, Bloomington. MIT was represented by the following students and alumni:

The fourth edition of FAMLi (Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics) took place on November 17 and 18 at Universidad de Oriente (México). Several current students and alumni gave talks:

Cora Lesure (first year grad student) — La morfofonología del chuj y la representación ortográfica

Carol-Rose Little, Morella Vázques Martínez, Lauren Clemens and Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10) — Codificación del enfoque en el habla semi-natural en ch’ol

Theodore Levin (PhD ‘15) and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14) — On the availability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel

Christopher Baron (first year grad student) — A prospective puzzle and a possible solution

Jessica Coon was also one of the invited speakers. She gave a talk entitled Construyendo verbos en ch’ol y chuj.

The 41th BU Conference on Language Development took place this past weekend at Boston University. The following MIT students and faculty gave talks or presented posters:

• Veronica Boyce (undergrad), Athulya Aravind (4th year grad student), and Martin Hackl (faculty): Lexical and syntactic effects on auxiliary selection: Evidence from Child French
• Athulya Aravind and Martin Hackl: Factivity and At-Issueness in the Acquisition of Forget and Remember
• Jill de Villiers, Amy Pace, Madeline Klein, Athulya Aravind, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Mary Wilson: Fast mapping word meanings across trials: young children forget all but their first guess
• Valentine Hacquard (PhD ‘06), Rachel Dudley, Christopher Baron (1st year grad student), and Jeffrey Lidz: Factivity is acquired gradually over the preschool years

Several alumni and current visitors also presented their work:

• Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98), Artemis Alexiadou: The Unmarkedness of Plural: Crosslinguistic Data
• Uli Sauerland, Kazuko Yatsushiro: Conjunctive Disjunctions in Child Language: A New Account [poster]
• Jeffrey Lidz, Rachel Dudley, and Valentine Hacquard (PhD ‘06) : Children use syntax of complements to determine meanings of novel attitude verbs
• Jeffrey Klassen, Annie Tremblay, Michael Wagner (PhD ‘05), and Heather Goad: Prominence Shifts in Second Language English and Spanish: Learning versus Unlearning
• Kathryn Schuyler, Charles Yang (PhD ‘00 CS), and Elissa Newport: Children form productive rules when it is more computationally efficient to do so
• Ayaka Sugawara (PhD ‘16): Japanese L2 learners of English are sensitive to QUD and prosodic inference
• Emma Nguyen, William Snyder (PhD ‘95): The (Non)-Effects of Pragmatics on Children’s Passives [poster]
• van Hout, Angeliek, María Arche, Hamida Demirdache (PhD ‘91), Isabel García del Real, Ainara García Sanz, Anna Gavarró, Lucía Gomez Marzo, Saar Hommes, Nina Kazanina, Jinhong Liu, Oana Lungu, Fabienne Martin, Iris M. Strangmann: Agent Control and the Acquisition of Event Culmination in Basque, Dutch, English, Spanish and Mandarin [poster]
• Jiyoung Choi, Hamida Demirdache: Intervention Effects in Korean: Experimental L1 Evidence [poster]

As posted about in last week’s issue, NELS47 took place Oct. 14-16 at UMass Amherst. Here are some pictures from the conference dinner:

(From L-to-R: Chris Baron, Michelle Yuan, Kenyon Branan, Chris O’Brien, Ted Levin, Aron Hirsch)

(From L-to-R: Ted Levin, Sam Zukoff, Coppe van Urk, Athulya Aravind, Aron Hirsch)

The 2016 edition of the Annual Meeting on Phonology will be held at the University of Southern California from October 21st to October 23rd. MIT will be represented by the following talks/posters:

Adam Albright — Sour grapes cyclicity: Derivational gaps in Yiddish [poster]

Erin Olson (3rd-year graduate student) — Intermediate markedness in phonological acquisition [poster]

Juliet Stanton (5th-year graduate student) — Segmental blocking in dissimilation: An argument for co-occurrence constraints

Benjamin Storme (5th-year graduate student) — The effect of French schwa on mid vowels: Cyclicity and variant correspondence [poster]

Sam Zukoff (5th-year graduate student) — Onset skipping in the serial template satisfaction model of reduplication

Furthermore, Bruce Hayes (UCLA, PhD ‘80) is among the invited speakers.

The 47th Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) will be hosted at UMass Amherst, from 14–16 October.

Several current graduate students will present posters or give talks:

• Kenyon Branan (4th year graduate student) — Dependent Case as a licenser in Kikuyu [poster]
• Sam Zukoff (5th year graduate student) — Arabic Nonconcatenative Morphology and the Syntax-Phonology Interface [poster]
• Itai Bassi (2nd year graduate student) and Moshe E. Bar-Lev — A unified existential semantics for Bare Conditionals [poster]
• Milena Sisovics (4th year graduate student) — Permission and irony: the case of German “duerfen” [poster]
• Ezer Rasin (4th year graduate student) — Resumptive pronouns across components: evidence from Hebrew [poster]
• Jeremy Zehr, Aron Hirsch (5th year graduate student), Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin and Florian Schwarz — Priming local accommodation of hard triggers in disjunction
• Yihui Quek and Aron Hirsch — Separating focus meanings and focus forms in Standard and Colloquial Singapore English
• Ömer Demirok (3rd year graduate student) — Free Relatives and Correlatives in Wh-in-situ

Several alumni and current visitors will also present their work:

• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD ‘05; current visiting scholar) — Labeling Roots and Pronouns [poster]
• Luka Crnic (PhD ‘11) — More on less
• Isabelle Charnavel and Dominique Sportiche (PhD ‘83) — Icelandic sig: a standard anaphor, after all
• Ivona Kučerová (PhD ‘07) — On labeling of DP coordinations and the lack of phi-feature resolution in syntactic Agree
• David Adger, Alex Drummond, David Hall and Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15) — Deconstructing Condition C Reconstruction [poster]
• Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98) and Artemis Alexiadou — Testing Plural Unmarkedness Across Languages
• Lauren Clemens and Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10) — VOS two ways: A unified account of V1 order in Mayan
• Jessica Coon, Stefan Keine and Michael Wagner (PhD ‘05) — Hierarchy effects in copular constructions: The PCC corner of German [poster]
• Theodore Levin (PhD ‘15) — Distinguishing object agreement and clitic doubling in Noun Incorporation constructions [poster]
• Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02) — Indefinite Pronouns [poster]
• Shoichi Takahashi (PhD ‘06) and Ohtaka Akane — A Lacuna in Adjunct Extraposition
• Patrick Elliott, Nathan Klinedinst, Yasutada Sudo (PhD ‘12) and Wataru Uegaki (PhD ‘15) — Predicates of relevance and theories of question embedding
• Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD ‘13) and Uli Sauerland — Covert Across-the-Board Movement Revisited
• Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14) — Movement and alternatives don’t mix: A new look at wh-intervention effects
• Coppe van Urk — Phase impenetrability and resumption in Dinka
• Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley, current visiting scholar) — Covert hyperraising to object
• Andres Salanova (PhD ‘07) and Javier Carol — The mirative evidential is neither surprise nor contradiction, but discovery
• Ora Matushansky (PhD ‘02) and Joost Zwarts — Making space for measures

The Workshop on Shrinking Trees took place on October 10 at the University of Leipzig. The event was organized by Gereon Müller.

Howard Lasnik and Susi Wurmbrand also gave talks:

Check the full list of talks here.

Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) 7
March 4-5, 2017
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstracts are invited for talks on any aspects of the syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology or processing of South Asian languages. The conference will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 4 and 5, 2017.

Invited Speakers:
Ashwini Deo (Ohio State)
Miriam Butt (Konstanz)
Norvin Richards (MIT)

Submission Details
Abstracts, including references and data, should be limited to two single-spaced pages (A4 or US Letter) with 1-inch (2.5cm) margins and a minimum font size of 11pt. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author. Abstracts should be submitted through EasyChair by December 2 at the following URL:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fasal7.

Abstract deadline: Dec. 2, 2016
Notification: Jan. 6, 2017
Conference: March 4-5, 2017
Any questions about the workshop can be directed to fasal7@mit.edu
Conference website: http://fasal.mit.edu

The 7th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America Conference (GALANA) was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign September 8-10. The program included talks and posters by:

• Fourth year student Athulya Aravind and faculty Martin Hackl: Variation in the acquisition of presupposition triggers (poster)
• Jason Borga (UConn) and William Snyder (PhD ‘95, BCS): On passives in English, and causatives in French
• Emma Nguyen (UConn) and William Snyder: The (non)-effect of pragmatics on children’s passives
• Ava Irani (UPenn) and Charles Yang (PhD ‘00, CS): Control, raising, and the problem of generalization

The 21st edition of Sinn und Bedeutung was hosted by the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, on September 4—6. Several MIT students, alumni and visitors gave talks or presented posters.

• Floris Roelofsen & Wataru Uegaki (PhD ‘15) — Ignorance and the selectional restrictions of inquisitive predicates
• Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD ‘13) — Contrastive topic and local weakening SIs
• Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02) — On the embeddability of epistemic modals
• Itai Bassi (2nd-year graduate student) & Moshe E. Bar-Lev — A unified existential semantics for bare conditionals
• Hedde Zeijlstra (visiting assistant professor ‘09; visiting scholar ‘14) — Strong vs. weak NPIs and PPIs
• Amy Rose Deal (current visiting scholar) & Julia Nee — Number marking and bare noun interpretation in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec
• Sam Alxatib (PhD ‘13) & Natasha Ivlieva (PhD ‘13) — Van Benthem’s problem, exhaustification, and distributivity
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD’ 14) & Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14) — Untangling Tanglewood using covert focus movement
• Aron Hirsch (5th-year graduate student) — Disjoined questions as mention-some questions
• Ezra Keshet (PhD ‘08) — Dynamic Update Anaphora Logic (DUAL)
• Pranav Anand (PhD ‘06) & Maziar Toosarvandani (former postdoc ’11-13) — Unifying Canonical, Historical, and Play-by-Play Present
• Wataru Uegaki (PhD ‘15) — Japanese alternative questions and a unified in-situ semantics forka
• Daniel Margulis (3rd-year graduate student) — Expletive negation as a decomposed only
• Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98) & Kazuko Yatsushiro — Conjunctive disjunctions: Evidence for the ambiguity theory
• Milo Phillips-Brown (MIT philosophy graduate student) — I want to, but…
• Matthew Mandelkern (MIT philosophy graduate student) & Jacopo Romoli — Parsing, presuppositions, and structure in the calculation of local contexts
• Aron Hirsch, Florian Schwarz, & Jérémy Zehr — Presupposition projection from disjunction in online processing (poster)

The GLOW Program is out for this year’s meeting in Göttingen, and several of our students will be presenting their discoveries there! “GLOW” stands for “Generative Linguistics in the Old World” and is the premiere international conference for generative linguistics in Europe (and, some might argue, internationally).

• Ömer Demirok, “A Compositional Semantics for Turkish Correlatives”
• Naomi Francis, “Scope in negative inversion constructions: Evidence from positive polarity item modals”
• Nicholas Longenbaugh, “Rethinking the A/A’-distinction: evidence from English Tough Movement” and “Subject/object symmetry: A spurious effect” (with Masha Polinsky, UMD)
• Despina Oikonomou , “Interpretation Domains in the Verbal Spine: Synthetic vs. Analytic morphology” (with Artemis Alexiadou, Berlin)
• Michelle Yuan, “Clitic dissimilation and dependent case”
• In addition, our colleague Shigeru Miyagawa is an invited speaker, and will be presenting his paper “The Syntax of Participants” co-authored with Liliane Haegeman, at a session devoted to “Phonological and Syntactic Representation of Speech Acts”.Recent alums also presenting include Guillaume Thomas (‘12, Toronto), Yasutada Sudo (‘12, University College London) and Bronwyn Bjorkman (‘11, Queen’s) — and many other alums, former visitors and old friends will be there too.

Several students, faculty and alumni presented talks and posters at the 2015 Annual Meeting on Phonology in Vancouver this weekend:

Adam Albright & Youngah Do: Paradigm uniformity in the lab: prior bias, learned preference, or L1 transfer?

Juliet Stanton: Environmental shielding is contrast preservation

Gillian Gallagher: Vowel height and dorsals: allophonic differences cue contrasts

Ezer Rasin: Constraints on URs and blocking in nonderived environments

The ‘McGill/MIT Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and the Brain’ will be held at MIT on January 31-February 1st in Room 32-141. It is a two day workshop that brings together a group of neuroscientists with an interest in language and a group of experimental and formal linguists interested in the brain, in an attempt to enhance the dialogue between the linguistic and the neurophysiological cultures, and help to close the gap between these two growing groups of researchers. The theme of the workshop is centered on aspects of gradability and quantity as it pertains to the cognitive domains of Number, Space, and Time.

http://brainlang.scripts.mit.edu

The workshop is open and all are welcome to attend. To access the background material for the talks the following information is required: username: brainlang, password: mitmcgill2014

The invited speakers are:

• Katrin Amunts, University of Düsseldorf/Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Irene Heim, MIT
• Andreas Nieder, University of Tübingen
• Martin Hackl, MIT
• Roumyana Pancheva, USC
• Bernhard Schwarz, McGill University
• Veronique Izard, CNRS & Université Paris Descartes
• Manfred Krifka, ZAS and Humbolt University
• Yoad Winter, Utrecht University
• Roger Schwarzschild, Rutgers University
• Galit Sassoon, Bar-Ilan University
• Yonatan Loewenstein, The Hebrew University at Jerusalem
• Hans Otto Karnath, University of Tübingen
• Yosef Grodzinsky, McGill University

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS for short) will be held on Saturday November 16th at MIT, in room 32-D461. The tentative program can be found here.

As you may remember, on September 20 and 21 of this year, MIT Lingustics hosted M@90, a Workshop on Metrical Structure, Stress, Meter and Text Setting — to celebrate Moris Halle’s 90th birthday.

Thanks to Tim Halle and his colleagues at Video Visuals, the workshop was recorded (both talks and discussion) and can now be watched in its entirety on Youtube at http://goo.gl/XETSLA. Our deepest thanks to Tim and to all the speakers and participants!

As previously announced, WAFL10 will be held at MIT next year. The conference now has a website: http://wafl.mit.edu.

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT is pleased to announce the 10th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL10), to be held on May 2-4, 2014. The term ‘Altaic’ is understood to include Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, as well as Korean and Japanese.

WAFL began ten years ago at MIT, and it has traveled to various locations: Boğaziçi University, Moscow State University, Harvard University, University of London, Nagoya University, University of Southern California, University of Stuttgart and Cornell University.

The invited speakers are: Katja Lyutikova (Moscow State University), Masha Polinsky (Harvard), Koji Sugisaki (Mie University), and Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University).

The call for papers is out, and the submission deadline is January 15, 2014. Please visit the conference website for details.

The 23rd meeting of the Japanese/Korean Linguistics conference (JK23) will be held at MIT this weekend, Oct 11-13.　Please see the website for registration and the full schedule — the invited speakers are:

• Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto, MIT PhD 2000)
• Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
• Junko Shimoyama (McGill University)
• James Hye Suk Yoon (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Last Friday and Saturday, about 130 linguists gathered at MIT for M@90: Workshop on Stress and Meter to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, where phonologists celebrated Morris’s achievements as a researcher, teacher and “founder of modern phonology” (to quote Noam Chomsky’s introduction to Morris’s own talk) — while simultaneously making progress on some of the toughest problems in stress theory and meter (linguistic, poetic, musical). A great celebration honoring the greatest of linguists, our colleague, our teacher, our friend. We extend our deepest thanks to all who gave talks and participated in the (extremely lively) discussions.

M@90, the 2-day workshop on stress and meter to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, will be held at our department this week, Sept 20-21. Registration is free but required for attendance — registration details and program information are available at the website, http://m90.mit.edu/.

At least three conferences and workshops will be held at MIT during the fall semester:

M@90, a two-day workshop on Metrical Structure: Stress, Meter, and Textsetting to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, will be held on Friday September 20th and Saturday 21st. Advance registration is free but required; please email Lilla Magyar to register.

Japanese/Korean Linguistics 23 will be held from Friday October 11th to Sunday October 13th.

Invited speakers are:

• Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto)
• Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
• Junko Shimoyama (McGill University)
• James Hye Suk Yoon (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

NECPhon, the Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop, will be held on Saturday October 26th in room 32-D461. Please contact Adam Albright for more details.

On September 20-21, 2013, MIT Linguistics will host a Conference on Metrical Structure: Text-setting and Stress. The conference marks a number of new developments in these fields as well as a number of 90th anniversaries: among them, the publication of Roman Jakobson’s O češkom stixe (1923), the first typological study of meter and stress, hailed as the beginning of Prague School phonology; Eduard Hermann’s Silbenbildung im Griechischen und in den andern indogermanischen Sprachen (1923), the first typological study of syllable weight as applied to quantitative meter; and other 1923 events of significance for the theory of metrical structure. The abbreviated name of the conference is M@90.

We are soliciting abstracts for two poster sessions: one on the role of metrical structure in stress and the other on the role of metrical structure in poetics. The abstracts should be limited to two pages including references and data and submitted in pdf format. Abstract deadline is April 30 2013. Accepted poster presenters will be notified by May 20, 2013. The address to which abstracts should be sent is stressmeter [æt] mit [dɑt] edu.

Next Saturday, May 12, MIT Linguistics will host a special one-day workshop on Cross-Discplinary Perspectives on Scalar Implicatures.. The workshop brings together researchers across a variety of disciplines to discuss linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic aspects of scalar implicatures.  All are welcome - but bring your own scales!

Schedule (Visit the website for abstracts):
8:30-9a Breakfast/Welcome (32-D461)

9-10a Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University): Three –ities: Unity of Scalarity and Polarity.
10-11a Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University): A note on implicatures and focus
11a-12p Gerhard Jäger (University of Tübingen): Trust is good, strategic thinking is better.

12-1:30p Lunch (8th floor lounge)

1:30-2:30p Noah Goodman (Stanford University): Modeling language understanding as social cognition
2:30-3:30p Richard Breheny (University College London): tba

3:30-4p Coffee Break (32-D461)

4-5p Dave Barner (University of California, San Diego): Grammatical constraints on pragmatic inference (tentative/to be confirmed)
5-6p Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University): Good things come to those who wait

7p Dinner (tbd)

As we wrote in last week’s issue, MIT was the host of the second-ever workshop on Formal Approaches to South Asian Linguistics (FASAL 2) last weekend, and it was a fantastic conference, with great speakers and a great atmosphere.  Thank you,  organizers - and special thanks to Pritty Patel-Grosz.for creating such a successful and exciting event!

photo credit mitcho

MIT students, visitors and alumni contributed 8 talks to Sinn und Bedeutung 16, which took place from September 6-8 in Utrecht. They are:

• Wataru Uegaki: Content nouns and the semantics of question-embedding predicates
• Patrick Grosz (PhD 2011): Optatives, minimal sufficiency and the two readings of “only”
• Micha Breakstone (recent visitor): Inherent evaluativity
• Sarah Ouwayda (recent visitor): Cardinals, agreement, and plurality in Lebanese Arabic
• Sophia Malamud & Tamina Stephenson (PhD 2007): Three ways to avoid commitments
• Sergei Tatevosov (recent visiting professor): Telicity, measures, and endpoints
And at its satellite event, the workshop on degree semantics and its interfaces:


• Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002): On the morphosyntax of comparative semantics
• Edwin Howard: the most alternative analysis of superlative NPIs ever

The department was proud to host the 20th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL).  The conference, which ran from May 13-15, was a resounding success, drawing linguists from 13 countries and 3 continents to MIT.  The presentations included invited talks by four of MIT’s own: professors Donca Steriade and Morris Halle (who was introduced by Noam Chomsky), visiting professor Sergei Tatevosov from Moscow State University, and recent alum Ivona Ku?erová (now at McMaster University in London, Ontario).   Thanks to all presenters, attendees, and organizers for making FASL 20 such a success!

RUMMIT, the semesterly meeting of phonologists from Rutgers, UMass, and MIT will be held at Rutgers on May 16, 2011, from 11am - 5pm.

A schedule and directions can be found here.

This Friday through Sunday, May 13-15, MIT Linguistics will host the 20th anniversary meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL). During the three days of the conference, almost 30 talks (including several plenary lectures) will be presented by Slavic linguists from a dozen different countries. In the two decades since the very first FASL was organized by Jindrich Toman at the University of Michigan twenty years ago, the conference has become one of the major venues for reporting research on the structure of all the Slavic languages. FASL has also served as an inspiration for similarly-themed conferences for other languages areas such as AFLA for Austronesian and FAMLi for Mayan. The second meeting of FASL (which cemented its status as an annual event) was held here at MIT, where it was co-organized by Sergey Avrutin and by Masha Babyonyshev, to whose memory this twentieth-anniversary conference will be dedicated. The FASL talks will span all areas of Slavic formal linguistics: syntax, semantics, morphology and phonology.

So welcome to, ????? ?????????? ?, vitajte na, ????????????? ??, vitejte na, dobrodošli na, witamy na, ??????? ??????? ??, ????? ????? ?, & witaj?e k…FASL! See you there!

The program for SNEWS (Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) is now available.

On Saturday, April 2 MIT will host this year’s ECO5 student syntactic workshop. It is a yearly small conference where graduate students from five East Coast departments (Harvard, UConn, UMass, UMaryland and MIT) can present their ongoing or completed work on syntactic issues to a friendly crowd of faculty and students, which rotates between the five co-organizing departments.

This year it is MIT’s turn to run things, and you can find the tentative schedule here.

The workshop starts at 11am on Saturday, and will continue until around 6pm.

See you there! Coppe and Igor, MIT ECO5 representatives

This coming weekend, MIT will be hosting the MIT Workshop on Comparatives which will bring together researchers from the Cambridge area (and beyond!) to discuss the syntax/semantics of comparative (and related) constructions in a variety of languages.

WHAT: MIT Workshop on Comparatives
WHERE: 32-D461
WHEN: Saturday the 13th (10am - 5:45pm), Sunday the 14th (10am - 4pm)

Invited talks:

• Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst): “The Derivation and Distribution of than-Clauses”
• Roger Schwarzchild (Rutgers): “‘Incomplete’ Comparatives (no comparative marker or no standard phrase)”
• Bernhard Schwarz and Junko Shimoyama (McGill): “Epistemic Wa and Negative Islands in Japanese”

Save the date! The fourth annual Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop will take place this year on October 9th. If you are potentially interested in presenting something at it, please let Adam know as soon as possible. (We need to know how many presenters there will be by September 24th)

For information about preceding years’ events, see the websites for NECPhon 1, NECPhon 2, and NECPhon 3.

This fall MIT will be hosting a weekend workshop on the syntax/semantics of comparative constructions.

MIT Workshop on Comparatives
November 13-14 2010 at MIT
http://comparatives.mit.edu

Recent crosslinguistic studies of comparative constructions such as Beck, Oda and Sugisaki (2004; “Parametric variation in the semantics of comparison”; Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 13: 289-344) and Kennedy (2007; “Modes of comparison”, Proceedings of CLS 43) among others have not only broadened our understanding of how natural language expresses comparison, but also raised theoretical issues of how languages can differ both semantically and syntactically in what types of comparison can be expressed in what forms. The aim of this workshop is to provide an opportunity for linguists in the Cambridge area (and beyond) who are interested in this topic to share their recent findings and discuss their implications on the crosslinguistic typology of comparative constructions.

Invited speakers: * Rajesh Bhatt, UMass Amherst * Bernhard Schwarz, McGill * Roger Schwarzchild, Rutgers * Junko Shimoyama, McGill

All are invited to attend. Please contact Yasu or mitcho if you are interested in presenting or would like to otherwise get involved.

Another date to keep in mind: The Fall meeting of RUMMIT (Rutgers-UMass-MIT Phonology meeting) will take place at MIT on Saturday December 4. More details about the meeting will come closer to that date.

On April 23-25, our department will host the first-ever international workshop on Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi). This NSF-funded conference will bring together specialists from Europe, North America, Mexico and Guatemala, to discuss the unique properties of Mayan languages — and the light they shed on language in general. FAMLi features 15 presentations, a poster session, and invited talks by Judith Aissen, Heriberto Avelino, Ximena Lois, B’alam Mateo-Toledo, and Norvin Richards. A particularly exciting (and unprecedented) feature of this workshop is the fact more than half of the presentations will come from linguists who are also native speakers of Mayan languages. The organizing committee is headed by our own Jessica Coon, currently writing her dissertation on Chol, a Mayan language of Chiapas, Mexico, and Robert Henderson, a third-year graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and specialist in the Mayan languages of Guatemala — as well as fourth-year grad student Kirill Shklovsky, Tseltal specialist and designer of the FAMLi logo, and Katie Franich of Boston University.

The official languages of the conference are English and Spanish, but all speakers have been encouraged to include English in their handouts. We hope you all can make it!!

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) is an annual workshop where graduate students in Linguistics present their work in Semantics/Pragmatics and related topics at their interfaces. This year, the workshop aims to reflect the flourishing of experimental semantics in current work, with experimental studies being presented along with theoretical papers.

Harvard is hosting SNEWS this year, on February 27th 2010 (this Saturday). The website for the event can be found here.

MIT Semantics will be represented by the following team this year:

• Mitcho Erlewine: “Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese”
• Jorie Koster-Moeller
• Hadas Kotek: “An Indefinite Amount Relative: Evidence from Romanian”
• Yasutada Sudo

MIT will host the first Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) Workshop this spring, April 23–25th. The program has just been posted on the conference website.

The program consists of presentations and posters by researchers from around the world, including many native speakers of Mayan languages who will be traveling from Mexico and Guatemala to present their work. The workshop will also feature five invited speakers: Judith Aissen (UCSC), Heriberto Avelino (Max Planck Institute), Ximena Lois (U. Michigan), and B’alam Mateo-Toledo (CIESAS), along with our own Norvin Richards, who will give a talk about the relationship between work on under-documented languages and theoretical linguistics. The workshop is bilingual and talks and posters will be given in both English and Spanish. However, when possible participants presenting in Spanish will include some English on their handout or poster.

Registration for the workshop is free before March 1st, but we do ask you to register if you plan to attend more than just a talk or two in order to get an accurate head count for the caterers.

Don’t forget that NELS 40 is this weekend, November 13-15! For the full program and other information, visit the NELS40 website. See you there!

The fall meeting of UMMM (UMass-MIT Meeting in phonology) will take place this Sunday 11/1 at UMass. (Please note that it will be Sunday instead of the usual Saturday!) Presenters from MIT will include Youngah Do, Peter Graff, and Claire Halpert. If you would like to attend, please let Donca know if you need a ride or if you can offer rides.

For the full program, click here (via John Kingston)

This coming weekend, MIT will host the 3rd annual meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology meeting. A preliminary program is below. (Actual times may shift a bit; a finalized version will be sent around later in the week.)

All are welcome to attend! If you plan on coming, it would be helpful if you could let Adam know so we have a rough nose-count.

NECPhon 3 - The Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
Date: October 24, 2009
Location: MIT, 32-D461

The fall meeting of the phonology workshop UMMM will take place on Sunday, Nov 1, at UMass Amherst (which happens to coincide with Daylight Savings Time, giving you an extra hour to recover from Halloween). A schedule and further details will be forthcoming as the date gets closer.

The yearly meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology circle will take place this year at MIT.

Title: NECPhon 3
Date: Oct 24, 2009
Location: 32-D461

Details of the event, including the precise time and schedule of talks, will be announced as the date gets closer. In the meantime, save the date, and if you may be interested in presenting, please contact Adam Albright.

SULA5 (Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas) will take place on Friday May 15 at Harvard and on Saturday and Sunday, May 16-17 at MIT. The schedule is available online at the following URL:

http://web.mit.edu/sula5/program.html

And here is what SULA is all about: “The goal of the conference is to bring together researchers working on languages or dialects which do not have an established tradition of work in formal semantics. We especially encourage abstract submissions from those whose work involves primary fieldwork or experimentation as well as analysis.”

There will be very nice talks on the semantics of very exciting languages from North, Central and South America.

The spring MIT/UMass Meeting in Phonology will take place at MIT this Saturday, May 9, from 11am until 6pm in 32-D461. The schedule of talks is as follows:

[From Shigeru:]

The program for the 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (May 22-24, Nagoya, Japan) has been announced.

Mark your calendars! This year’s SNEWS (“Southern New England Workshop in Semantics”) will be held on Saturday, April 25th, at UMass/Amherst. It is an informal workshop where students can present their ongoing work. There are still slots available. If you are interested in presenting/participating, please contact Patrick at grosz@mit.edu.

Detailed information will be posted on the website: http://people.umass.edu/harris/snews/snews.html.

Mark your calendars! The Spring meeting of the MIT/UMass Meeting in Phonology will take place on May 9th at MIT. More details will be forthcoming as the date approaches.

SNEWS (“Southern New England Workshop in Semantics”) will be held in Amherst this coming spring. It is an informal workshop where students can present their ongoing work. This year MIT contact person for SNEWS is Patrick (grosz@mit.edu). If you are interested in presenting/participating at this coming SNEWS, please let Patrick know. Also, let him know if you have a (dis)preference for any of the following dates when SNEWS might be held: March 28; April 11; April 25; May 2.

Seventeenth Manchester Phonology Meeting
28-30 MAY 2009
Deadline for abstracts: 2nd March 2009

Special session: ‘The History of Phonological Theory’ featuring John Goldsmith, D. Robert Ladd, and Tobias Scheer, and with a contribution from Morris Halle. The session will be introduced by Jacques Durand.

Held in Manchester, UK. Organised through a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, the Universite Toulouse-Le Mirail and elsewhere.

Conference website: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/17mfm.html

This year’s ECO5 (East Coast 5) syntax workshop will be held at the University of Maryland on Saturday, April 4th. ECO5 is a yearly event and involves presenters from 5 east coast schools: MIT, Harvard, UMass, UMd, and UConn. It is an informal and friendly graduate student workshop and is a great place to present work and work in progress, get feedback from lots of people, and to get practice presenting.

This year they are looking for three presenters from each of the 5 schools. Titles and abstracts (for the program) will be due March 21st and we hope to have a preliminary list of presenters by March 7th. Abstracts are just for the program. Unless there is a huge amount of interest, you will be accepted to the conference just by sending an email to MIT’s ECO5 liaison, Jessica Coon.

Please let Jessica know if you have any questions and if you are interested in presenting or attending. It’s possible that we will be able to get a carpool together, so if you need or are able to offer a ride, please let her know as well. Also, flights are quite cheap right now (about $120), so that is another option.

Call for Papers

for the 3rd annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
April 4-5, 2009

UnderLings, the Cornell University undergraduate linguistics association, requests abstract submissions for the third annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. Student submissions at all levels are encouraged in a variety of subfields of linguistics, including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, syntax, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition. Applicants pursuing a B.A., B.S., or equivalent degree are invited to submit a one-page abstract for a talk of no more than twenty minutes in length or for a poster presentation at our poster session. Abstracts should be submitted to culc2009@gmail.com by Friday March 6th, 2009. Please indicate whether you would like to be considered for a talk or for the poster session or both. There is a high probability that the conference proceedings will be published afterward, most likely in an online, widely-accessible format.

More information about the colloquium and online pre-registration will be available soon at http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/culc2009.

Please direct any questions to culc2009@gmail.com.

This year’s MITing of the Minds is the Fifth Annual MIT Philosophy Alumni Conference. The conference will showcase recent work in a variety of areas in contemporary philosophy. Presentations will cover topics in philosophy of science, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, and will be accessible to a broad audience. Each day will feature talks by MIT faculty members, current students, and alumni of the graduate program.

Composed of talks by department faculty and graduate students of past and present.

Thursday, January 29th, and Friday, January 30th
9:30 am-5:45 pm
The Stata Center, 32-D461

All are welcome.

-> more info

MIT will have a strong presence at the upcoming LSA Meeting in San Francisco January 8-11.

Peter Graff is organizing a workshop entitled ‘The Culture-Phonology Interface: Implications of Laboratory Sociophonetics for Phonological Theory’. Edward Flemming will be a discussant. Peter is involved in two of the workshop talks:

Peter Graff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Benjamin Munson (University of Minnesota): Studying the culture-phonology interface.

Peter Graff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kie Zuraw (University of California, Los Angeles), Kuniko Y. Nielsen (University of California, Los Angeles): Investigating preferential imitation.

Giorgio Magri will give a poster on ‘Modeling the order of acquisition of Dutch syllable structures’.

Several recent MIT alumni will be presenting as well:

Andrew Nevins (Harvard University): Contributions of Sign Language morphology to the agreement/cliticization distinction

Ivona Kucerova (University College London): Nulls subjects and the extension requirement

Martin Hackl (Pomona College): Decomposing complex quantifiers: Evidence from verification

Seth Cable (University of Massachusetts): Use of subordinate clauses as matrix utterances in the Pacific Northwest

This Friday (12/12) and Saturday (12/13), the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will be hosting a small conference to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Bob Stalnaker’s “Assertion”. The aim is to showcase some recent work that builds on the picture of context and communication originally developed in “Assertion”, and to have linguists and philosophers discuss recent developments and implementations of that framework. All will be welcome.

The conference will include an introduction by Kai von Fintel, talks by Philippe Schlenker and Jason Stanley, and a roundtable discussion with Bob Stalnaker, Alex Byrne, and Gennaro Chierchia. Dinner (on Friday) and breakfast and lunch (on Saturday) will be provided for everyone.

There is a website with more detailed information (including location and schedule).

On Saturday, December 6th, 2008, Angelika Kratzer’s PhD students (current and former) will gather at MIT for a workshop in her honor. Anybody is welcome to come and listen to the talks (and partake of the refreshments). Location is the Linguistics & Philosophy seminar room, a.k.a. the Star Chamber, 32-D461.

This year’s fall UMass/MIT Meeting in Phonology (UMMM) will take place this Saturday, Nov. 22, at UMass (Amherst), from 9:30am-6pm. If you are interested in attending, please contact Donca for details.

This year’s fall UMass/MIT Meeting in Phonology (UMMM) will be held on Saturday Nov. 22 at UMass (Amherst). Mark your calendars, and stay tuned for schedule and details!