Whamit!

A couple of pieces in recent MIT News featuring department members: 

First-year MITILI student Soledad Chango taught an exciting language course on her native language, Kichwa/Quechua during the IAP. MIT News covered the language course here: https://news.mit.edu/2024/investigating-and-preserving-quechua-0228

MIT News also recently highlighted a paper on linguistic and Alzheimer’s disease published by faculty Suzanne Flynn and research affiliate Barbara Lust, among other co-authors. Read more here: https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-cognition-changes-before-dementia-0229

This summer, from July 16 to July 27, 2018, there will be the second Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, in the beautiful city of Rethymnon.

Many MIT folk are involved. Current MIT faculty teaching there: Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Shigeru Miyagawa, Donca Steriade. There are also some who have taught at MIT at some point in the past: Elena Anagnostopoulou, Rajesh Bhatt, Kyle Johnson, Paul Kiparsky, Hedde Zeijlstra. Other MIT graduates on the faculty: Joan Mascaro, Doug Pulleyblank, Tim Stowell, Michael Wagner.

Current MIT students who will be TAing: Rafael Abramovitz, Daniel Asherov, Tanya Bondarenko, Omer Demirok.

Full information (including details on the student application due April 1st), can be found on the summer school website.

We are very pleased to announce that Loes Koring (postdoctoral associate) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Utrecht University! Congratulations Loes!

Several faculty (Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, and Shigeru Miyagawa) will be teaching at the Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, in the beautiful city of Rethymnon, from July 10 to July 21, 2017.

Kai will be teaching a class on modals and conditionals, Sabine will be teaching an Introduction to Syntax class, and Shigeru will be teaching two classes, one on the topic of his recent monograph, Agreement Beyond Phi, and one on language and animal communication in evolution.

Full information (including details on the application due April 10th), can be found on the summer school website.

Linguistic Society of America has established a new student fellowship in honor of our own alumnus S.-Y. (Yuki) Kuroda (1934-2009), a former Professor Emeritus at UCSD; MIT dissertation from 1965 “Generative Studies in The Japanese Language”, supervised by Noam Chomsky. Sige-Yuki Kuroda, known most universally as Yuki, is considered by many the father of modern Japanese linguistics. From LSA: “His work showed that not only could Japanese be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of generative grammar, but that it could play an important role in extending and expanding that theory.”

While snow in a New England winter isn’t news, MIT’s second snow closure within five days might be. The institute is having its second snow closure of the season on Monday February 13th. A reminder to check the MIT Emergency Information page for up to date announcements about closures and other campus emergencies. Stay warm, watch your step, and enjoy the snow day!

Very good news, not about linguistics but about life, from our colleague Jay.

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.

This video is a short overview of the science and data that show why children’s native languages are necessary for learning how to read. In the case of Haiti, Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”), as the native language of all Haitians, should be the cornerstone of literacy projects.

In the first part of this video, Prof. Stanislas Dehaene at the Collège de France provides an overview of findings from neuroscience about “pillars” in the human brain that help us learn how to read. In the second part of he video, Michel DeGraff analyzes the implications of these findings for Haiti, especially regarding how Haitian children are learning (or not learning) how to read. One conclusion is that Kreyòl is an indispensable tool for learning to read in Haiti, though it is, by and large, not used as such, with most children being taught in a language that they do not know, namely French. Such efforts to teach Haitian children in French are, by and large, unsuccessful—-unsurprisingly so, given the neuroscience that is explained in this video.

Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about language evolution to appear in January, 2016 from MIT Press. Here is an overview of the questions covered by the book (from the MIT Press website):

We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language.

Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals.

Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin’s idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.