News and Events

Speaker: Isabella Senturia (Yale)Title: On the Spectra of Syntactic StructuresTime: Tuesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: This talk explores the application of spectral graph theory to the problem of characterizing linguistically significant classes of tree structures. As a case study, we focus on three classes of trees, binary, X-bar, and asymmetric c-command extensional, as […]

Posted: April 22, 2024, 10:08 am

Speaker: Yiyang GuoTitle: TBATime: Thursday, April 25th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: TBA

Posted: April 22, 2024, 10:02 am

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): […]

Posted: April 16, 2024, 10:10 am

On Friday, April 12, visiting faculty Jon Rawski was invited to give a talk at the Computional Linguistics at Yale (CLAY) talk series, where he presented joint work with Zhouyi Sun, 2nd year grad student in our department.   Title: Tensor Product Representations of Regular Languages and Transformations   Abstract:  A crowning achievement of connectionist […]

Posted: April 16, 2024, 10:06 am

Last week, Elise Newman presented and co-presented two talks at the Workshop on Locality at the University of Göttingen. Her solo talk was entitled “When wh-phrases are their own interveners, and she also presented a joint talk with Rob Truswell (based on even more joint work with Caroline Heycock), enitled “When to revisit? Investigating (un)ambiguity […]

Posted: April 16, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT) Title: Unexpected Syncretisms: A Look at the Nganasan Case and Subjective Agreement Paradigms Time: Thursday, April 18th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Nganasan (Szeverényi, Várnai, and B. B. Wagner-Nagy 2002, B. Wagner-Nagy 2018) seems to have a near-exact, cross-paradigmatic syncretism between the NOM exponents of the Case Paradigm and 3rd […]

Posted: April 15, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Janayna Carvalho (UFMG)Title: Generic null impersonals in Brazilian Portuguese and structure removalTime: Tuesday, April 16th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this presentation, I explore some sentential properties of generic null impersonals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In particular, I look for an explanation for two of their properties: a) their restricted modal readings; b) their […]

Posted: April 15, 2024, 10:08 am

Speaker: Sarah Payne (Stony Brook University)Title: Marginal Sequences as a Window into Phonotactic AcquisitionTime: Thursday, April 18th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Most current theories of phonotactic learning (e.g., Hayes & Wilson 2008, Chandlee et al. 2019) assume a close relationship between attestation and licitness. Under such accounts, a sequence is licit only if its subcomponents […]

Posted: April 15, 2024, 10:02 am

Last week, Jon Rawski (visiting Assistant Professor) gave an invited colloquium talk at Rutgers Linguistics. The talk was titled Mathematical Linguistics & Cognitive Complexity.  Abstract: Mathematics is the study of structures, and mathematical linguistics studies linguistic structures. Generative linguistics put the focus squarely on grammars: finite abstractions of the highly structured and complex mental computations of […]

Posted: April 8, 2024, 10:52 am

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT) Title:Fixing Engdahl’s Type-Shifter and Heim’s Unary Which Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Engdahl’s (1986) account of functional readings of sentences like (1) involved having the pronoun herself bound upstairs by a covert binder E, given in (2), while having a totally impoverished trace (i.e., just “t”, without any restrictor) […]

Posted: April 8, 2024, 10:50 am

Last weekend, David Pesetsky presented a paper entitled “A double life for complement if-clauses revisited” at the Fourth International Conference on Adverbial Clauses at the Free University, Berlin. Alum (PhD 1998) Susi Wurmbrand (University of Salzburg) also presented at the conference, with a paper entitled “A syntactic approach to tense in complementation and beyond”.

Posted: April 8, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Dóra Takács (MIT)Title: Vowel-zero alternations in HungarianTime: Monday, April 8th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: There are a closed class of about 500 stems in Hungarian that are subject to vowel-zero alternations if they are followed by a potentially vowel-initial suffix (Siptár & Törkenczy 2000). Early proposals (Vago 1980, Törkenczy 1992, Siptár & Törkenczy 2000, […]

Posted: April 8, 2024, 10:04 am

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 […]

Posted: April 8, 2024, 9:45 am

On Friday, 22 March 2024, James Cooper Roberts (first year student) presented his work on a computational investigation of the productivity of medials in Passamaquoddy at the Seventh Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages (ComputEL-7). This workshop was colocated with 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2024) […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 4:06 pm

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)Title: *ABA in Multidimensional Paradigms: A Harmonic Grammar-based accountTime: Monday, April 1st, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In piece-based and realizational models of morphology, a fundamental question concerns the assignment and conditioning of phonological content to morphemes represented as feature bundles. This talk shows the limitations of Underspecification […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Fangning Ren (University of Cambridge)Title: Approaching Mandarin wh-topicalization/focalization: D-linking effectTime: Tuesday, April 2nd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: This talk mainly provides two findings and the proposed analyses: (i) To form a content question, Mandarin ex-situ wh-nominals are invariably D-linked (Pesetsky 1987), whereas all wh-nominals can stay in situ regardless of their D-linking status; (ii) […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 10:08 am

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT)Title: Minimum-standard predicates as resultatives and measure phrase interpretationsTime: Wednesday, April 3rd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this practice talk for WCCFL, I will propose a compositional analysis of verbal predicates in Japanese that have been treated as minimum-standard gradable adjectives (GAs) (e.g., Kubota 2011; Sawada and Grano 2011). I demonstrate that […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 10:06 am

Speaker: Heidi Duressi (MIT) Title:An analysis of the Albanian verbal paradigm with with multiple exponence and paradigm contrast Time: Monday, April 1st, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Albanian verbs are typically analyzed to be broadly split into 2 categories: those with roots ending in vowels (Class 1) and those with roots ending in consonants […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass)Title: Complex anaphorsTime: Thursday, April 4th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Anaphors with a complex morphological structure are attested across many different languages and show recurring traits in meaning and distribution. Despite extensive research into these phenomena, there is no broadly-accepted definition of the primary grammatical function(s) of complex anaphors. This talk will […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 10:02 am

Speaker: Amanda Rysling (UC Santa Cruz)Title: What it takes to comprehend (a) focusTime: Friday, April 5th, 3:30pm - 5pmLocation: 32-141Abstract: Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus have found that comprehenders preferentially attend to focused material and process it more “deeply” or “effortfully” than non-focused material. But psycholinguists have investigated only a limited […]

Posted: April 1, 2024, 9:58 am

Our emerita colleague Irene Heim has been honored as the recipient of the Rolf Schock Prize for Logic & Philosophy — sharing the prize with Hans Kamp of the University of Stuttgart, for their “(mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.” As described by the awarding organization: “The Rolf Schock […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Keely New (MIT) Title: There’s no deletion in meN-deletion Time: Tuesday, March 19th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In Indonesian/Malay, there is an optional verbal prefix meN- which is widely taken to be the subject voice marker since it correlates with subject voice SVO word order, and when it is present, only the […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:08 am

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)Title: Exclusive disjunction in bilateral logic: Hurford Disjunctions as evidence for split connectives in natural languageTime: Wednesday, March 20th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: “Disjoint Hurford Disjunctions” (DHD; Amir Anvari, p.c.) are a novel class of examples of deviant disjunctions that resemble Standard Hurford Disjunctions (SHD; Hurford, 1974), but don’t present any classical […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:06 am

Speaker: Yeong-Joon Kim (MIT)Title: Overapplication opacity as a consequence of phonetic faithfulnessTime: Monday, March 18th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: This study contributes to the understanding of opacity by identifying substantive restrictions on counterbleeding interactions and proposing a novel analysis tied to these typological generalizations. A typological survey of counterbleeding-on-environment instances reveals an asymmetry in the […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT) and Nikita Bezrukov (UPenn)Title: Moving away from antilocality: A defense of very local movementTime: Thursday, March 21st, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Most syntactic research assumes that syntactic dependencies are subject to locality constraints: agreement and movement cannot cross certain elements (bounding nodes, phase boundaries, elements which bear the same features, etc.). […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:02 am

On Sunday, March 17, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Elhana Sugiaman (a Harvard Graduate School of Education master’s student), and Arun Wongprommoon (an MIT M.Eng student) taught 64 7th-10th graders at Spring Spark, an educational enrichment program run by MIT students. As part of their work for 24.S95 Linguistics in K-12 Education, Elhana and Christopher designed and […]

Posted: March 18, 2024, 10:01 am

Speaker: Shota Momma (UMass Amherst)Title: A theory of structure building in speakingTime: Tuesday, March 12th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Partly due to our free will, our ability to produce sentences is notoriously hard to study. Existing theories of sentence production are not very good at capturing how speakers assemble structurally complex sentences that involve syntactically […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 10:08 am

Speaker: Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh) & Elise Newman (MIT)Title: When to revisit? investigating (un)ambiguity in temporal clausesTime: Wednesday, March 13th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Ever since the seminal work of Geis in the 1970s, it has been known that temporal adverbial clauses in English (and a number of other languages) show the same kind […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 10:06 am

Speaker: Levi Driscoll Title: Ludika: Playing with Feet Time: Monday, March 11th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: We present a description and formal analysis of a novel English-based ludling called Ludika. Starting from clear cases with direct cues to foot structure, we argue that meaningless bits are affixed to the right edge of surface […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) Title: A blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu Time: Friday, March 15th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In this talk, I will present a blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu that could be characterized as Poser blocking, namely a word winning over a phrase. This blocking arises in the context of deverbal adjectives […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:58 am

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 […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:51 am

More great news about fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi: Giovanni’s paper “Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory! In the paper, Giovanni observes that the Äiwoo language doesn’t contain possessives like “my” or “her(s)”. Instead, all it has is a possessive verb, so […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:41 am

Fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi presented at the biannual GLOW in Asia 14 which took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 6 to March 8, 2024. Giovanni presented his work “Condition C, Anti-cataphora, and “Reverse Crossover” in Äiwoo”.   

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:40 am

Last Saturday (March 1), faculty David Pesetsky presented a talk titled “Is there an LLM challenge for linguistics? Or a linguistics challenge for LLMs?” at a one-day workshop Magdalen College, University of Oxford. The workshop entitled “Does ChatGPT know language as humans do?” was organized by our own recent alum Danfeng Wu. 

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:22 am

This past weekend, visiting professor Jon Rawski was invited to the “Algebraic Models of Generative Linguistics” workshop at the Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics at Caltech.  Workshop description: “This meeting brings together theoretical linguists, mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and computational linguists, for informal discussions on algebraic models of the Merge operation in generative linguistics, […]

Posted: March 11, 2024, 9:20 am

Phonology Circle will meet on March 4, 5-6.30pm, in the 8th floor conference room for a logistical meeting. Be there or be square!

Posted: March 4, 2024, 11:23 am

On February 22, 2024, our fifth-year grad student Ido Benbaji-Elhadad gave an invited talk at the interdisciplinary colloquia series organized by the Linguistics Department at Tel Aviv University.  Title: Specific-opaque readings and the temporal interpretation of noun phrases Abstract: Szabó (2010,2011) argues that in addition to their de dicto, de re and third readings, DPs […]

Posted: March 4, 2024, 11:14 am

Speaker: Heidi Harley (UofA) Time: Wednesday, March 6th, 1 - 2:30pm and Thursday, March 7th, 12:30pm - 2:00pm Location: Day 1: TBA; Day 2: 32-D461   Day 1: ‘flavors’ of v,  causation and ‘teleological capability’ I present some background work by me and Folli to situate the context in which we came to the object […]

Posted: March 4, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Heidi Harley (University of Arizona) Title: Object drop, intention, and event individuation (joint work with Raffaella Folli) Time: Friday, March 8th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: We introduce a pattern of interaction between object drop and the animacy of the external argument in English, particularly with verbs of contact. Object drop produces an […]

Posted: March 4, 2024, 10:58 am

Over the weekend, the linguistics department at UMass Amherst hosted the annual ECO-5 workshop. ECO-5 is a workshop for graduate students of five departments on the East Coast (UMass, Harvard, UConn, UMD, MIT) to present work in progress to each other. This year, MIT was represented by two second-year graduate students, Zachary Feldcamp and Bergül […]

Posted: March 4, 2024, 10:45 am

Our MITILI student Rani Ukhengching Marma was recently featured on 7000.org for International Mother Language Day. The feature highlights the important work that Ukheng is doing to preserve and protect her native language Marma. Some of this work is ongoing right now as part of her MA thesis work, but Ukheng also shares about her […]

Posted: February 26, 2024, 1:32 pm

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Movement Dependencies and Existential HAVE constructions in Haitian Creole Time: Tuesday, February 27th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: For this upcoming Syntax Square, I will be presenting content from two papers which are relevant for an unresolved puzzle of Haitian Creole syntax: 1. Takahashi and Gracanin-Yuksek’s (2008) Morphosyntax of […]

Posted: February 26, 2024, 11:08 am

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT)Title: Disjunctive inferences and presupposition projectionTime: Wednesday, February 28th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Multiplicity and Homogeneity (demonstrated in 1 and 2 below) are cases of a truth value gap: the negated sentences in (1b) and (2b) are stronger than what we would get by applying logical negation to the sentences in (1a) […]

Posted: February 26, 2024, 11:06 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Verbal (Non-)Apocope in Haitian Creole Time: Thursday, February 22nd, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Verbal apocope is widely attested across French-lexified creole (FLC) languages and it involves the alternation between a short and long form of the verb in certain syntactic contexts (Seuren 1990, Henri and Abeillé 2008). (1)  […]

Posted: February 19, 2024, 11:10 am

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT) Title: Degree constructions in Gitksan Time: Wednesday, February 21st, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: I will present my ongoing work on degree constructions in Gitksan (Ts’imshianic; see Rigsby 1986 and Bicevskis et al. 2017 for previous documentation). Based on the availability of comparative and superlative interpretations of positive forms as […]

Posted: February 19, 2024, 11:06 am

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)Title: Workshopping φ-marking in ÄiwooTime: Tuesday, February 13th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Äiwoo verbs usually carry markers indexing the φ-features of the subject (agreement? Clitics/reduced pronouns? We’ll talk about it). Beyond this one basic fact, not much is neat or clear. These markers show different patterns in different voices, in terms of […]

Posted: February 12, 2024, 11:08 am

Speaker: Amir Anvari (MIT)Title: Revisiting E-Type TheoryTime: Thursday, February 15th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: A implementation of E-Type Theory faces two serious problems, the problem of uniqueness and the problem of formal link. In this talk, I will discuss a simple implementation of E-Type Theory that addresses the problem of uniqueness with minimal auxiliary assumptions. […]

Posted: February 12, 2024, 11:02 am

Welcome back everybody from winter break, whether it was restful or productive! Here is a round-up of what people have been up to:  The 100th LSA meeting was held in NYC January 4-7!  Anton Kukhto, along with Alexander Piperski (Stockholm University, Sweden), gave a talk Stress clash avoidance in Russian comparatives: A corpus study.  Megan Gotowski […]

Posted: February 5, 2024, 12:00 pm

Speaker: Nicholas Rolle Title: “Phonological locality and constraints on exponent shape” Time: Friday, Feb 9th, 3:30pm - 5:00pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The focus of this talk is exponence – the mapping of syntactic representation (e.g. features, nodes, small trees) to phonological representation (e.g. segments, tones, etc.) via stored X↔Y pairings. What are the restrictions on the contents of Y (the exponent) […]

Posted: February 5, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Nicholas Rolle Title:“Grammatical tone and current linguistic theory” Time: Wednesday, Feb 7th, 12:30pm - 2:00pm and Thursday, Feb 8th, 12:30pm - 2:00pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: This mini-course examines “grammatical tone” (GT), defined as a tone alternation occurring in a restricted grammatical context, which targets a non-restricted class of morphemes or constructions, and as such […]

Posted: February 5, 2024, 11:00 am

We are pleased to announce a series of five lectures by Prof. Matilde Marcolli. The lectures will be based on three recent papers by Matilde co-authored with Bob Berwick and Noam Chomsky. The talks will be hybrid. Contact Amir Anvari for any questions.  Title: Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge: An Algebraic Model for Generative Linguistics  Abstract: This […]

Posted: December 11, 2023, 2:30 pm

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT)Title: Trying and failing to count in dense intervalsTime: Wednesday, December 13th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this LSA practice talk, I offer a semantic analysis of a puzzling restriction on the distribution of ordinal numbers in English: while the temporal adverbials “at first” and “at last” are felicitous, putting any other […]

Posted: December 11, 2023, 11:06 am

Speaker: Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-ENS-EHESS) Title: Varieties of dynamic semantic, and a non-dynamic alternative Time: Tuesday, Dec 5, 1-2:30pm and Wednesday, Dec 5, 1-2.30pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: Dynamic semantics is a major formal framework to model anaphora in natural languages. We’ll start with (a version of) classical dynamic semantics for anaphora which does […]

Posted: December 4, 2023, 1:38 pm

Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT)Title: What’s in a (polysynthetic) phase: Dynamic domains, spellout and localityTime: Thursday, December 7th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: INTRODUCTION This talk demonstrates how languages with complex morphology (=polysynthetic languages) can help tease apart rules which apply purely in the syntax from interface conditions which determine how linguistic structure is pronounced. The two […]

Posted: December 4, 2023, 11:02 am

Speaker: Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-ENS-EHESS)) Title: Reasoning with Quantifiers, Lewisian Imaging and the Confirmation Paradox Time: Friday, December 8th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: From a normative point of view, the conclusions we can draw from a sentence of the form No A is B are the same as the ones we […]

Posted: December 4, 2023, 10:58 am

Speaker: Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen) Title: The emergence of a Generalized Quantifier: English ‘every’ Time: Friday, Dec 1, 3:30pm – 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The talk investigates the diachronic development of universal quantifiers in English. The etymological source of Present Day English ‘every’, Old English ‘aelc’ is analysed as an indeterminate pronoun. It participates in an alternative […]

Posted: November 27, 2023, 3:29 pm

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass Amherst)Title: No choice: Anaphoric dependencies in the prepositional domainTime: Tuesday, November 28th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Pronominal elements have long been understood as cues for the length of linguistic dependencies. This is based on a regular morphology that targets pronouns in local dependencies and leaves long-distance pronouns unmarked, leading to the […]

Posted: November 27, 2023, 11:08 am

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger (MIT)Title: Cross-clausal A-dependencies: A composite probe approachTime: Thursday, November 30th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Hyperraising, i.e. A-movement out of a CP complement clause, posits a puzzle for generally assumed constraints like the Ban on Improper Movement or the Phase Impenetrability Condition and has been discussed widely in the recent years. In this […]

Posted: November 27, 2023, 11:02 am

Our graduate student Ruoan Wang gave a talk for Northeastern University’s Fall Speaker Series, titled An eventually very simple account of Japanese honorification (joint work with Takanobu Nakamura). Some details can be found here. 

Posted: November 20, 2023, 1:29 pm

Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, and Lorenzo Pinton represented MIT Linguistics at Fall Splash on November 18-19. Splash is an MIT student-run educational enrichment program for 9th-12th graders that draws a thousand students to MIT each November for a weekend of classes on all sorts of topics. Christopher and Lorenzo designed and taught “The Mathematical Foundations […]

Posted: November 20, 2023, 1:20 pm

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Pronominal Copulas and Defective T(ense) in Haitian Creole Time: Tuesday, November 21st, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Hi, I will be presenting some of my ongoing work on the morphosyntax of copular clauses in Haitian Creole (HC), focusing on the puzzling distribution the word se (glosses ranging from “FOC”, “COP”, or “SE”), which […]

Posted: November 20, 2023, 11:08 am

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)Title: Modal Debris: Threefold Ambiguities between Permission, Weak Necessity, and Strong Necessity in BengaliTime: Wednesday, November 22nd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: The usual way to characterize the Bengali copular modal hoy is to say it’s the strong necessity modal of the language. I will show that hoy is ambiguous between strong necessity […]

Posted: November 20, 2023, 11:06 am

Congrats to our MITILI student Ukhengcheng Marma, who was awarded the Priscilla King Gray (PKG) social impact fellowship for IAP 2024! 

Posted: November 13, 2023, 2:59 pm

Speaker: Zachary Satoshi Feldcamp (MIT)Title: Paradoxical A-movement locality in locative inversionTime: Tuesday, November 14th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Locative inversion has a locality paradox. It involves movement of PP over the would-be DP subject, and is restricted in non-finite clauses, like topics (Stowell 1981). Yet inversion only occurs when DP is in an exceptional rightward […]

Posted: November 13, 2023, 11:08 am

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)Title: Two puzzles for gather-like and numerous-like predicates. Anti-restrictiveness, maximality, and triviality in pluralsTime: Wednesday, November 15th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Among collective predicates, gather (and alike) and numerous (and alike) have been noticed to give rise to different patterns when plural quantifiers are involved (Kroch, 1974; Dowty et al., 1987; Champollion, […]

Posted: November 13, 2023, 11:06 am

The 48th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 48) happend this past weekend November 2—5, 2023. MIT had a great showing with 4 talks coming out of ongoing projects at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab. Giovanni Roversi, Kate Kinnaird, Athulya Aravind: Acquisition of *ABA paradigms in a child Artificial Language Learning Experiment Keely […]

Posted: November 6, 2023, 2:03 pm

Maya Honda just returned from the Abralin (Brazilian Association of Linguistics) Institute where she co-taught a week-long course on “Teaching about Language(s) as Science in Basic Education” with former MIT faculty member Richard Larson (Stonybrook University). There were 40 course participants, including high school teachers, teachers-in-training, linguistics graduate students, and linguistics faculty. Maya also spoke […]

Posted: November 6, 2023, 1:11 pm

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger and Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)Title: It’s getting out of control! – Control, the A/Ā-distinction and the subjecthood of pivots in Austronesian languagesTime: Tuesday, November 7th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Control has long been employed as diagnostic of subjecthood: in an active embedded clause, the controllee should invariably correspond to the agent qua external […]

Posted: November 6, 2023, 11:08 am

Speaker: Jad Wehbe (MIT)Title: Covert ReciprocalsTime: Wednesday, November 8th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Predicates like “date” and “hug” participate in alternations between seemingly 1-place variants in (1a) and (2a) and 2-place variants in (1b) and (2b). Analyses of these alternations can be grouped into syntactic analyses (e.g. Hackl, 2002) and lexical analyses (e.g. Winter, 2019). […]

Posted: November 6, 2023, 11:06 am

Speaker: Vina Tsakali Title: Interpretation of complex- and simple-Or in adult and child Greek Time: Thursday, November 9th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Disjunctive particles have been argued to differ cross- and intra-linguistically as to whether they are obligatorily exclusive or not (Szabolcsi 2001, Aloni 2016). The current project examines the differences between the simple […]

Posted: November 6, 2023, 11:02 am

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT) Title: Reduplication and number in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian Time: Wednesday, November 1st, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: NPs in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (CJI) do not generally bear any overt number morphology, and are traditionally assumed to be number-neutral semantically. For example, (1) is judged to be true both when there […]

Posted: October 30, 2023, 10:06 am

Speaker: Anastasia Tsilia (MIT) & Zhuoye Zhao (NYU)Title: What the incompatibility of ‘then’ with the present teaches us about perspectives in tenseTime: Thursday, November 2nd, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: This talk focuses on the then-present puzzle, namely the observation that the present tense is incompatible with the temporal adverbial ‘then’ (Ogihara & Sharvit 2012; Vostrikova […]

Posted: October 30, 2023, 10:02 am

Speaker: Yoonjung Kang (UToronto) Title: Speech Rate Accommodation under Sound Change in progress: Case Studies from Daejeon Korean Time: Friday, November 3rd, 3:30pm – 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: Variation in speech rate is a common characteristic of speech and serves as a significant source of synchronic variation and potential sound change. During fast speech, segments tend to […]

Posted: October 30, 2023, 10:00 am

Jon Rawski (Visiting Professor, MIT; Assistant Professor, SJSU Linguistics) gave a colloquium talk at University of Buffalo Center for Cognitive Science on Oct. 18!   Title: Rethinking Poverty of the Stimulus   Abstract: This talk reimagines the “poverty of the stimulus” in language acquisition and linguistic theory. I will explain deficiencies and confusions in PovStim […]

Posted: October 30, 2023, 9:17 am

This last Saturday (10/28) was the warmest weekend before spring, and a group set out to Boston Hill Farm for apple and pumpkin picking! See pictures below. 

Posted: October 30, 2023, 9:12 am

Our postdoc Peter Grishin gave two talks at the 55th Algonquian Conference this past weekend (Oct 20–Oct 22, 2023), hosted by the University of Alberta in Edmonton (https://algonquian-conference.org/pac50/): Peter Grishin (MIT): Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey modals Peter Grishin (MIT) & Will Oxford (University of Manitoba): When central suffixes agree with peripheral participants Check the slides out here and […]

Posted: October 23, 2023, 3:40 pm

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT) Title: When wh-phrases are their own interveners Time: Tuesday, October 24th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Much work on syntactic locality has shown that processes like wh-movement are subject to several kinds of locality restrictions. In addition to being sensitive to intervening wh-phrases, wh-movement must proceed successive cyclically through various […]

Posted: October 23, 2023, 10:08 am

Speaker: Yizhen Jiang (MIT)Title: Putting bare plurals into context (joint work with Yasu Sudo)Time: Wednesday, October 25th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Bare plurals give rise to plurality inferences in positive sentences but not in negative sentences. There are two main approaches to this phenomenon. The implicature approach derives plurality inferences via scalar implicatures (Ivlieva 2020, […]

Posted: October 23, 2023, 10:06 am

Speakers: Keely New, Premvanti Patel, Giovanni Roversi, Kate Kinnaird, Athulya Aravind (MIT) Title: BUCLD Practice Talks Time: Thursday, October 26th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 How toddlers answer multiple wh-questions (Keely New, Premvanti Patel and Athulya Aravind) Abstract: The ability to comprehend wh-questions is one that already emerges in infancy. Infants comprehend subject whquestions like […]

Posted: October 23, 2023, 10:02 am

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)Title: Ā-extraction, Word Order, and Object Shift (?) in ÄiwooTime: Tuesday, October 17th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: I will present some ongoing work in progress I’ve been doing on the clausal syntax of Äiwoo, an Austronesian language from the Solomon Islands. Largely, Äiwoo shows some reassuringly familiar Austronesian fare: the classic “pivot-only” […]

Posted: October 16, 2023, 10:08 am

Speaker: Lucas Champollion (NYU)Title: The Limits of Possible Worlds SemanticsTime: Friday, October 20th, 3:30pm - 5pmLocation: 32-141Abstract: The standard paradigm of possible world semantics fails to account for the subject-matter preserving nature of entailment and for discrepancies between connectives in propositional logic and in natural language. These discrepancies show up in empirical domains such as […]

Posted: October 16, 2023, 9:58 am

Hadas Kotek will be participating in a panel on careers in AI/ML on campus. It will take place Thursday 10/19, 4-6pm, at 1-190. 

Posted: October 16, 2023, 8:23 am

Speaker: Anastasia Tsilia (MIT)Title: The future in desire: the case of Colloquial Jakartan IndonesianTime: Wednesday, October 11th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian behaves like a tenseless language, with no tense morphology on the verb stem; the context disambiguates between a present and a past tense interpretation. As in many tenseless languages (Bochnak, 2019), […]

Posted: October 9, 2023, 10:06 am

Speaker: Jon Rawski (MIT)Title: A Computational Puzzle from Signed ReduplicationTime: Thursday, October 12th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Reduplication is a cross-linguistically common yet computationally complex morphological copying process. Reduplication is far more ubiquitous and expressive in sign than in speech, regularly exhibiting partial and total copying, as well as triplication and other variants which are […]

Posted: October 9, 2023, 10:02 am

The first-ever Linguistics Retreat was held at Endicott House this past Saturday! Activities featured a hike at Wilson Mountain Reservation, indoor games, a showing of Tenet, soccer, and badminton. See photos below.  Thanks to all the organizers —- Shrayana, Bergül, Cooper, Danny, Suzanne —- who made this a great day!   

Posted: October 2, 2023, 10:32 am

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): […]

Posted: October 2, 2023, 10:26 am

Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko (Harvard) Title: Scope-marking in Georgian, and the impossibility of long-distance movement Time: Tuesday, October 3rd, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this work in progress, I present some observations about long-distance dependencies in Georgian. Georgian is a language that lacks long-distance wh-movement, (1): wh words cannot be extracted across a finite […]

Posted: October 2, 2023, 10:08 am

Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT) Title: Studying naturalness bias in transmission and communication with ALL experiments Time: Monday, October 2nd, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Phonetic substance is believed to affect phonological grammar through acquisition. Patterns with a clear phonetic motivation are considered more natural and also typologically more frequent. While the hypothesis suggests a bias towards […]

Posted: October 2, 2023, 10:04 am

Speaker: Natalie Weber (Yale University) Title: Resolving prosodic structure inside of polysynthetic words Time: Friday, October 6th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: Background Over the last decade there has been a renewed interest in domain-delimited phonological processes and their correspondence with syntax (cf. Selkirk 2011; and overviews in Bennett & Elfner 2019; Elfner 2018; […]

Posted: October 2, 2023, 9:58 am

A very warm welcome to ling-23 and visitors!  ling-23 Soledad Chango: My name is Soledad Chango and just joined the MITILI program. I’m from an indigenous Kichwa community called Salasaka which is located in the highlands of Ecuador. I enjoy swimming, dancing, embroidering, and playing the violin a lot. Cooper Roberts: I am Cooper Roberts, […]

Posted: September 25, 2023, 12:00 pm

Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko (Harvard) Title: Scope-marking in Georgian, and the impossibility of long-distance movement Time: Tuesday, September 26th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this work in progress, I present some observations about long-distance dependencies in Georgian. Georgian is a language that lacks long-distance wh-movement, (1): wh words cannot be extracted across a finite […]

Posted: September 25, 2023, 11:08 am

Speaker: Hani Al Naeem (MIT)Title: Timing and the Rhythm Class HypothesisTime: Monday, September 25th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: The rhythm class typology classifies languages into stress-timed and syllable-timed, originally conceptualized in terms of the isochrony of stressed feet vs. isochrony of syllables, and later in terms of durational variability. Despite strong phonetic evidence against isochrony […]

Posted: September 25, 2023, 10:04 am

Congratulations to Giovanni Roversi, whose joint paper with Sebastian Sauppe, Åshild Næss, Martin Meyer, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, and Balthasar Bickel was just published in Cognitive Science! Take a look at the paper, An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language During Sentence Comprehension, here. 

Posted: September 18, 2023, 10:30 am

Speaker: Keely New (MIT)Title: Voice and the variable position of auxiliaries in colloquial Jakartan IndonesianTime: Tuesday, September 19th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (CJI) displays a voice system typical of Austronesian languages: in each clause there is one argument (the “pivot”) that occupies the sentence-initial position, and the choice of this argument affects […]

Posted: September 18, 2023, 10:08 am

Speaker: Hadas Kotek (MIT)Title: Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language ModelsTime: Thursday, September 21st, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this talk I’ll discuss my recent co-authored paper on gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). We used syntactically ambiguous sentences that contained one stereotypically male occupation-denoting noun and one stereotypically female occupation-denoting noun along […]

Posted: September 18, 2023, 10:02 am

A big congratulations to all those who defended over the summer!  Christopher Yang: How Joint Inference of the Lexicon and Phonology Affects the Learnability of Process Interactions Stanislao Zompi’: *ABA in multidimensional paradigms: A MAX/DEP-based account Boer Fu: Uncovering Mandarin Speaker Knowledge with Language Game Experiments Cora Lesure: Selecting for and selecting despite: A Javanese […]

Posted: September 11, 2023, 10:52 am

A joint paper by David Pesetsky and Kanoe Evile, wh-which Relatives and the Existence of Pied-Piping has just appeared in Glossa. It originated as an Intro to Syntax squib by Kanoe, a Linguistics minor who graduated last spring, who is starting medical school. Congratulations Kanoe and David!     

Posted: September 11, 2023, 10:47 am

Congratulations to Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou! Their article, Publication of Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking, was published in Linguistics and Philosophy. It also received coverage on MIT News! 

Posted: September 11, 2023, 10:46 am

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 […]

Posted: September 11, 2023, 10:14 am