News and Events

Dear Whamit friends, As is traditional, Whamit will be going on hiatus as our classes and other regular activities wind down at the end of the year.  The Spring semester begins on February 2, and we will resume regular posts then.   Rest assured, of course, that we will be there for you with any […]

Posted: December 15, 2025, 11:00 am

Speaker: Amanda Michel (MIT) Title: A Variable Account of Norwegian Stress Time: Tuesday, December 8th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: The stress system of Norwegian has traditionally been argued to be fixed/predictable with a robust set of exceptions. Much of the analysis of Norwegian stress is based on loanwords, as the inventory of native […]

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:04 am

The 6th joint meeting between the Acoustic Society of America and the Acoustic Society of Japan took place at Honolulu from 1-5 December, 2025. Several students and alums presented their work: Amy Li (2nd year): A phonetic correlate of velar palatalization: Shorter front cavity Na-Young Ryu and Suyeon Yun (PhD 2016) [Chungnam National Univ.]: Perceptual […]

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:03 am

On 1-2 December 2025, the 7th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology was hosted by The University of Edinburgh. Our 4th-year PhD student Juan Cancel presented his poster, entitled The diachronic asymmetry of nasal apocope between nominal and verbal paradigms in Nganasan! You can read the abstract here.

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:02 am

Speaker: Sabine Iatridou (MIT) Title: Superlatives meet Definiteness in Bulgarian and Greek Time: Thursday, December 11, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The aim of this paper (joint work with Artemis Alexiadou and Roumyana Pancheva) is to enrich the debate on the nature of absolute and relative readings of superlatives with data from Bulgarian and […]

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:02 am

The conference “Ontology as Structured by the Interface with Semantics” (OASIS) 5 was held at University of Edinburgh on 3-5 December, 2025. Our current 3rd-year PhD student Cooper Roberts gave a presentation, entitled “Part is part (plus pragmatics)”. Our recent alum Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD, 2023) also presented his work on “Building individual concepts structurally”.

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:01 am

On November 22rd and 23rd, Hani Al Naeem, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chemical Engineering postdoctoral associate), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics graduate student) taught over 50 ninth through twelfth grade students at Splash, a weekend extravaganza of courses organized by MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program). Hani and Christopher offered “Sounds in Motion: […]

Posted: December 8, 2025, 11:00 am

Speaker: Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst) Title: “On Sayings and Rumors” When: Friday, December 5th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141   Abstract: The work presented in this talk is part of a bigger project that tries to derive the distinctive properties of attitude ascriptions and speech reports from a pool of recurring building blocks that combine and recombine to […]

Posted: December 1, 2025, 2:01 pm

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT) Title: Cross-Categorial Syncretisms: Theoretical Predictions and Empirical Observations Time: Thursday, December 4th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Syncretisms and their generalizations have been the topic of much discussion in the morphological literature for a few years already (ex: Caha 2009, Starke 2017, Zompì 2023, etc). Nonetheless, a kind of syncretism […]

Posted: December 1, 2025, 11:10 am

Speaker: Tam Berulava (MIT)Title: Case-Matching Effects in Long-Distance Wh-Questions in GeorgianTime: Tuesday, December 2nd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: I will present an ongoing project on long-distance wh-questions in Georgian, focusing on the interaction between cross-clausal wh-movement and case. Building on recent claims that Georgian lacks true cross-clausal wh-movement and instead uses only proleptic question constructions, […]

Posted: December 1, 2025, 11:08 am

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT) Title: A cautionary note on word learning paradigms and presupposition triggering Time: Thursday, December 4, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Cross-linguistically, predicates with both initial-state and change-of-state components tend to encode them as presupposition and assertion, respectively. Bade et al. (2024) argue on the basis of a series of artificial […]

Posted: December 1, 2025, 11:02 am

Speaker: Iva Kovač (Vienna/UMass Amherst) Title: Scope in NPI licensing Time: Wednesday, December 3rd, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Licensing of weak NPIs like any is subject to at least three scope-related constraints: certain elements, such as every, may not take scope between the NPI and its licenser (Linebarger 1980, 1987), the NPI must […]

Posted: December 1, 2025, 11:02 am

Speaker: Paul Meisenbichler (MIT)Title: Reference to individuals across worlds and constraints on de re phenomena (Part 2)Time: Wednesday, November 26th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: I will continue our discussion from November 12 about how certain ideas from counterpart theory (CT, see Lewis 1986) could contribute to our understanding of de re/de dicto phenomena. The central […]

Posted: November 24, 2025, 11:06 am

Speaker: Heidi Durresi (MIT)Title: Comparing different predictions of learnability on typologyTime: Monday, November 24th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Stanton (2016) is not only an argument for learnability shaping typology, but also that the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA; Boersma 1997, Magri 2012) is the vehicle for it. In this talk, I will discuss some preliminary ideas […]

Posted: November 24, 2025, 11:04 am

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) took place at UMass Amherst this Saturday. The following MIT students presented: Seva Masliukov (1st year): Puzzles of actional composition in an atelicity-marking language Vlad Orlov (2nd year): Reciprocal alternation and bound de-re readings Alma Frischoff (2nd year): Type-label comparison and Type Economy Principle

Posted: November 24, 2025, 11:01 am

Speaker: Pavel Caha (Masaryk University) Title: “Allomorphy in Nanosyntax” When: Wednesday, November 19th, 1pm-2:30pm (Day 1) + Thursday, November 20th, 12:30-2pm (Day 2)   Where: 32-D461   Abstract:  Syntax is a combinatorial system which, in the simplest case, takes two objects and joins them together. E.g., when an excessive marker (too) combines with an adjective (tall), […]

Posted: November 17, 2025, 12:39 pm

Speaker: Pavel Caha (Masaryk University) Title: “Spatial cases in Tsez: a nanosyntactic analysis” When: Friday, November 21st, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141   Abstract: The talk investigates spatial case marking in Tsez. Comrie and Polinsky (1998) argue for the decomposition of these forms into at least two morphemes (roughly Path and Place), and optionally others, like the […]

Posted: November 17, 2025, 12:00 pm

Speaker: James Cooper Roberts (MIT) Title: Part is part (plus pragmatics) Time: Thursday, November 20th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: In this work, I argue that the natural language item part (and its translational equivalents) is the same as the mereological notion of PROPER PART, full stop. While this seems trivially true, state-of-the-art semantics […]

Posted: November 17, 2025, 11:10 am

Speaker: Rotsuprit Saengthong (MIT)Title: Clause Size Reduction by Projection FeatureTime: Tuesday, November 18th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: I will present an ongoing project on clausal complementation. I have observed that when tested with restructuring diagnostics as used in Wurmbrand (2001), clauses containing functional elements (e.g., C and T) behave like full CPs in some environments, […]

Posted: November 17, 2025, 11:08 am

Speaker: Amy Li (MIT)Title: A phonetic correlate of velar palatalization: shorter front cavityTime: Monday, November 17th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: I will start this talk by practicing presenting the poster that I will bring to the ASA (poster abstract below). Velar palatalization is a common sound change involving a velar stop becoming a palatal affricate […]

Posted: November 17, 2025, 11:04 am

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:11 am

Speaker: Daniar Kasenov (NYU) Title: Nonce word wellformedness and abstract URs: the case of Russian yers Time: Thursday, November 13th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Nonce word studies are part of the toolbox to probe productivity, especially of non-automatic phonological alternations, such as Russian vowel-zero alternations (Russian yers). Existing work (Gouskova, Becker 2013; Becker, […]

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:09 am

Speaker: Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University)  Title: “On deriving different types of incomplete neutralisation” When: Friday, November 14th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  Research over the last few decades has consistently questioned the sufficiency of abstract/discrete phonological representations based on putative misalignments between predictions from such representations and observed experimental results. Here, I’ll first suggest […]

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:08 am

Speaker: Paul Meisenbichler (MIT) Title: Reference to individuals across worlds and constraints on de re phenomena Time: Wednesday, November 12th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this LFRG, I want to lead a (mostly informal) discussion on the role that counterpart theory (CT, see Lewis 1986) should play in our approaches to de re/de […]

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:06 am

A much-missed visitor from the 2024-2025 academic year, Adam Przepiórkowski, organized this year’s meeting of Generative Linguistics in Poland (GLiP), with MIT alums and faculty as invited speakers.  Susi Wurmbrand (University of Salzburg) spoke on “Syntax as a function: A Redundancy and Deficiency approach to Grammar within linguistic behavior”;  Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard) spoke about “Old […]

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:00 am

We were delighted to learn that our illustrious alum Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007) is the recipient of the 2026 C.L. Baker award from the Linguistic Society of America.  To quote from the LSA’s announcement: “The C.L. Baker Award recognizes excellence in research in the area of syntactic theory on the part of a mid-career scholar. […]

Posted: November 12, 2025, 11:00 am

Speaker: Ogloo Jurkhaichin (MIT) Title: The Nature of ‘Edge’: Evidence from Cross-clausal A-movement in Mongolian Time: Thursday, November 6th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Syntactic operations are bounded by phases, in which the edge is typically taken to be the highest specifier (Fox & Pesetsky 2005; Rackowski & Richards 2005; Bošković 2016, a.o.). In […]

Posted: November 3, 2025, 11:10 am

Speaker: James Morley (MIT)Title: An “Only-You” restriction in Chamorro and the problems it poses for the theory of hierarchy effectsTime: Tuesday, November 4th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: This talk investigates a person-animacy restriction - henceforth PAR - in Chamorro (Malayo-Polynesian; Austronesian), previously reported in Chung (1998, 2014, 2020) but which has otherwise been subject to […]

Posted: November 3, 2025, 11:08 am

Speaker: Thomas Truong (MIT)Title: Plural superlatives and cumulativityTime: Wednesday, November 5th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this talk I will present some ongoing work on the interactions between plurals and superlatives. To do so, I examine a unique reading of sentences containing plurals and superlatives. (1) Rafa climbed each of the tallest mountains that his […]

Posted: November 3, 2025, 11:06 am

Speaker: Gasser Elbanna (Harvard)Title: A model of speech recognition reproduces behavioral signatures of human speech perception and reveals mechanismsTime: Monday, November 3rd, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Humans dexterously extract meaning from variable acoustic signals and can faithfully repeat back novel utterances—hallmarks of spoken communication. Speech perception is thought to subserve these downstream tasks via transforming […]

Posted: November 3, 2025, 11:04 am

Speaker: Cooper Roberts (MIT) Title: A rational solution to an agreement-interpretation puzzle Time: Thursday, November 6 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In some Indo-European languages, a fraction partitive (FP) which embeds a plural DP licenses an optional-agreement phenomenon—-in the appropriate syntactic position, an agreeing predicate can copy the features of either the fraction (1b) […]

Posted: November 3, 2025, 11:02 am

Speaker: Chelsea Tang (MIT) Title: Reduplicative Opacity in Gĩkũyũ: Evidence for Backcopying and BR-Distantial Faithfulness Time: Monday, October 27th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831   Abstract: Backcopying is an overapplication phenomenon where the reduplicant undergoes a phonological process, then the base “copies back” from the reduplicant even when the environment is not met in the base. The […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:15 am

Speaker: Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard) Title: Verb classes and affix ordering in Seediq Time: Thursday, October 30th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: This talk looks at verbal morphology in Seediq, with supplementary data from other Formosan languages. I will focus on the ordering of “voice” morphology with respect to derivational and TAM morphology, which […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker: Vsevolod Masliukov (MIT)Title: Participial Complementation in RussianTime: Tuesday, October 28th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this talk I will present a syntactic analysis of Russian sentences such as (1), which feature participles marked with the so-called ‘Predicate instrumental case’ (Bailyn 2001). I will argue that these participial clauses are arguments with a PredP (small […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Bergül Soykan (MIT)Title: Limitations on meta questions: insights from TurkishTime: Wednesday, October 29th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this ongoing work, I present data on the basic patterns of Turkish meta questions (MQs) and show that Turkish appears to allow meta-meta questions as in (1), which Trinh, Fox, and Bassi (2025) predict to be […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:06 am

Speaker: Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz) Title: How resumptive pronouns ameliorate island violations - evidence from Hebrew Time: Thursday, October 30, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: While some resumptive pronouns (RPs), in some languages, ameliorate island violations (Hebrew, Irish, Lebanese Arabic, among others), not all do (Vata (Koopman 1982), Welsh (Tallerman 1983), Nupe (Kandybowicz […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:02 am

Speaker: Yael Sharvit (UCLA)  Title: “Disjunctive antecedents, accommodation and type-flexibility” When: Friday, October 31st, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  Examples (1a) and (1b) are equivalent. One of their readings presupposes (2) and asserts (3). In view of these facts, we defend (A)-(B).   (1)   a.   If Mia is penniless or proud of her money, then Sue […]

Posted: October 27, 2025, 10:01 am

Sad news has reached us of the passing of our very distinguished alum Stephen R. Anderson (PhD 1969), a foundational contributor to many areas of linguistics, especially phonology and morphology. Steve belonged to one of the first generations of graduate students in our department, and had a a long and illustrious career serving our field […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:20 am

Congratulations to our alum Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011), who will be joining the linguistics faculty of Princeton University next year as Associate Professor of Linguistics!  Bronwyn is currently a professor at Queens University (Canada), whose research has yielded important findings in many areas of the field — especially (but not only) syntax and morphology. Great […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:19 am

Speaker: Filipe Kobayashi (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg) Title: Syntactic constraints on fake indexicals in relative clauses (joint work with Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl and Susi Wurmbrand) Time: Thursday, October 23rd, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Fake indexicals (i.e., bound occurrences of 1st and 2nd person pronouns) have a much more restricted […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT)Title: Micro-variation is a conspiracy: Condition C, Case and Wholesale Late Merge in Balinese vs. MalagasyTime: Tuesday, October 21st, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: (joint work with Lena Lohninger) This talk aims to illustrate the idea that microvariation is an epiphenomenonal conspiracy of the derivation. The focus will be two Malayo-Polynesian languages, Balinese […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Giuseppe Varaschin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)Title: From descriptions to epithets: A structurally uniform account of definitesTime: Wednesday, October 22nd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Slurs are nominal expressions that contribute meaning on both the truth-conditional (TC) and use-conditional (UC) dimensions, functioning as constraints on utterance contexts (Kaplan 1999; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2015, i.a.). When such expressions […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:06 am

Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT) Title: Tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin Time: Monday, October 20th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Chengdu Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in southwestern China. Like Standard Mandarin, it has four citation tones, but the tone contours and sandhi patterns differ notably. […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:04 am

MIT Linguistics was well-represented at NELS 56, held at New York University from October 17–19, 2025. Two of our alums were invited speakers: Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013) of  CUNY, gave a talk titled “Embedded tense: how to learn what some things can(not) mean (joint work with Spencer Caplan)”; and Tanya Bondarenko (PhD 2020), now a […]

Posted: October 20, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Yold Winter (Utrecht University) Time: Tuesday Oct 14, 5-6:30pm Location: 32D-461 Abstract: The art of Senegalese *griots* - poets, musicians, and oral historians - offers a unique example of the interplay between language and music. While many traditional Senegalese griots describe their *sabar* drums as having a “talking mode”, sabar does not exhibit the […]

Posted: October 14, 2025, 10:05 am

Speaker: Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (MIT) & Omri Doron (UMass Amherst) Title: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion Time: Tuesday, October 14th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Jacobson (2016) observes that fragment answers to which-questions seem to have different felicity conditions than fully spelled out answers and even ones with VP ellipsis, […]

Posted: October 13, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)Title: VP-ellipsis and parasitic gaps: observations on temporal modifiers and parallelismTime: Wednesday, October 15th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: As the title suggests, in this LFRG I present ongoing work on PV-ellipsis and Parasitic Gaps. I discuss novel data involving parasitic gaps (henceforth PGs) in VP-ellipsis constructions. In particular, I present a series […]

Posted: October 13, 2025, 10:06 am

In a high-octane, back-and-forth showdown that could only be described as syntactically chaotic, Noam’s Gnomes edged out the athletic but less semantically structured ZBT fraternity team in a thrilling 6-5 victory. The Gnomes opened the scoring early, with a well-parsed through ball resulting in a tidy finish that had fans chanting “Tree that sentence!” But […]

Posted: October 6, 2025, 10:09 am

Speaker: Janos Egressy (UCLA)Title: Size-sensitive Sequence of Tense in HungarianTime: Tuesday, October 7th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In Sequence of Tense (SOT) Analyses (e.g. Ogihara 1995), it has been argued that past-under-past configurations (e.g. John said that Mary was pregnant) have a simultaneous reading if the embedded past head undergoes “deletion” under agreement with the […]

Posted: October 6, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT) Title: Long-distance agreement on Procrustes’ bed: a revival of spec-head Time: October 9, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Long-distance agreement (LDA) refers to the phenomenon where a matrix verb may (optionally) agree in φ-features with an embedded argument of its complement clause, otherwise showing default agreement with the entire complement […]

Posted: October 6, 2025, 10:02 am

This week saw the publication of two papers by dissertation-writing student Jad Wehbe in Natural Language Semantics and Journal of Semantics. Congratulations, Jad!   Here are the abstracts of the two papers. Both of the journals provide open access, and you can find the papers in the links below.   Covert reciprocals: a scope-based analysis […]

Posted: October 6, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Zhouyi Sun (MIT) Title: Magri and Anttila (submitted), “Probabilistic phonology is intrinsically categorical” Time: Monday, September 29th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location:32-D831 Abstract: We say that an implicational universal (x, y) → (x̂, ŷ) holds for a (probabilistic) phonological grammar G if the probability of realizing the underlying form x̂ as the surface form ŷ […]

Posted: September 29, 2025, 10:10 am

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25-27 at University of California, Berkeley. Several of our current students, faculty and alumni presented their work: Runqi Tan (4th year): The Role of Perceptual Contrast in Tone Inventories Edward Flemming (faculty) and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS]: Gang effects: the perspective from variation Giorgio Magri […]

Posted: September 29, 2025, 10:02 am

Speaker: Elise Newman, Cora Lesure, Norvin Richards, Cooper Roberts (MIT), Peter Grishin (Brown University) Title: What’s new with the Passamaquoddy working group Time: Thursday, October 2, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this talk, we (the Passamaquoddy working group) will each present a part of our research on the Passamaquoddy language, based on our […]

Posted: September 29, 2025, 10:02 am

Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (SuB30) took place at Goethe University Frankfurt from September 23-27, 2025. MIT Linguistics was well-represented by our current students and recent graduates: Paul Meisenbichler (3rd year): Upper limit effects beyond tenses and the interdependence of worlds and times Haoming Li (4th year), Yizhen Jiang (3rd year): Oddness and probability-sensitivity of number-marked indefinites in […]

Posted: September 29, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard) Title: Morphological decomposition in Austronesian voice: evidence for intermediary movement Time: Tuesday, September 23rd, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This talk takes a morphological starting point to Austronesian voice, and argues in favor of positing several distinct syntactic projections whose various combinations give rise to surface voice alternations (cf. […]

Posted: September 22, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)Title: A Reanalysis of Syllabic and Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan As A Single Consonant Gradation ProcessTime: Monday, September 22nd, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: The literature on Avam Nganasan (Helimski 1998; Wagner-Nagy 2018) has argued that the language exhibits two kinds of Consonant Gradation: Syllabic Gradation (SG), in which an onset consonant alternates […]

Posted: September 22, 2025, 10:04 am

  We are delighted to announce that our very recent alum Eunsun Jou (PhD 2024) has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences (DHCSS) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Our warmest congratulations to Eunsun and to KAIST (often described as […]

Posted: September 15, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)Title: Some thoughts on clefts and wh-frontingTime: Tuesday, September 16th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: To kick off the new semester of syntax square, I want to explore a question: why do some languages primarily use clefts for question-formation when wh-fronting should be a possibility? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping […]

Posted: September 15, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT)Title: On the QUD sensitivity of a third readingTime: Wednesday, September 17th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: We provide the first experimental evidence for the hypothesis that transparent readings are sensitive to the QUD (Question Under Discussion) (Schwager (Kaufmann) 2009; Percus 2020; Benbaji-Elhadad 2023; Mayr and Schmitt 2023, 2024), using third readings (Fodor […]

Posted: September 15, 2025, 10:06 am

The 12th TripleA workshop for semantic fieldworkers was held at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan on September 10-12, 2025. The following members of our community presented at the conference: James Cooper Roberts (3rd year), Yizhen Jiang (3rd year) & Haoming Li (4th year): How to talk about groups in a language without group nouns: The case of Passamaquoddy […]

Posted: September 15, 2025, 10:05 am

Speaker: Aljoša Milenković (Harvard) and Kevin Ryan (Harvard)Title: Stress-weight and stress-tone interaction in South Slavic folk verseTime: Monday, September 15th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: We analyze the distribution of stress, tone and syllable weight in the epic decasyllable, a traditional verse form of South Slavic folk poetry. The meter imposes strict distributional constraints on tone […]

Posted: September 15, 2025, 10:04 am

Speaker: Eric Baković (UC San Diego) Title: “Representation as computation” When: Wednesday, September 10th, 1pm-2:30pm (Day 1) + Thursday, September 11th, 12:30-2pm (Day 2)   Location: 32-D461   Abstract:  This minicourse introduces Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (BMRS; Bhaskar et al. 2020, Chandlee & Jardine 2021) as a computational framework for phonological analysis. We will learn to apply […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:21 am

Speaker: Eric Baković (UC San Diego) Title: A computational typology of vowel harmony patterns Time: , 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: We propose a typology of vowel harmony patterns using Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (BMRS; Bhaskar et al. 2020, Chandlee & Jardine 2021). BMRS describe input-output maps as logical transductions using conditional IF…THEN…ELSE… syntax, […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:21 am

Elora Cromarty: Tánsi Káhkinaw! My name is Elora Cromarty, and I am one of the incoming students in the MITILI program! I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada, and am a member of Kinoséw Sípí, or Norway House Cree Nation, located in Northern Manitoba. I’m Muskego-Ininéw (Swampy Cree) and an L2 learner/speaker […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:20 am

On 5th August, 4th year student Yurika Aonuki gave an invited talk with the title “Differential measure phrases and comparatives in Gitksan” in a workshop held at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan.

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:13 am

On 25-27 June, 2025, the Society of Pidgin and Creole Language presented its summer conference (SPCL), hosted by The University of the West Indies, Mona, under the theme “Pidgin and Creole Studies in the Era of Big Data and AI”. 5th-year student Christopher Legerme gave an oral presentation, titled Intermodular Spell-Out and the Distribution of […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:13 am

4th year student Juan Cancel presented a paper entitled “A reanalysis of syllabic and rhythmic gradation in Nganasan as a single consonant gradation process” at the 31st Manchester Phonology Meeting last May. In addition, Juan also gave a talk, titled “Metrical Incoherence or Opacity: A Stratal OT Analysis of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan”, at the […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:12 am

Course announcements in this post: Topics in Semantics (24.979) Topics in Phonology (24.964) 24.979: Topics in Semantics Instructor: Amir Anvari & Martin Hackl & Viola Schmit Time: Thursday, 2pm-5pm Room: 32-D461 The very basic observation that expressions can refer to semantic objects raises two general questions. The first concerns the mapping, i.e., how a particular […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:11 am

On August 29th, Omri Doron successfully and eloquently defended his dissertation, titled Another look at the typology of number: the mystery of the missing singular! Congratulations, Omri!! You can read the abstract below: The typology of nominal number marking features, in addition to languages like English, in which all nouns in argument position are singular […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:07 am

On July 16th, Adele Mortier successfully and briliantly defended her dissertation Oddness under Discussion! Here is Adele’s abstract: At a broad level, this dissertation’s main claim is that many cases of pragmatic oddness, do not stem from assertions alone, but rather from their interaction with the questions they implicitely evoke. Felicitous assertions, must evoke felicitous […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:06 am

Congratulations to Giovanni Roversi, who successfully defended his fascinating dissertation on Locality: a case study from Äiwoo on July 15th!! Here is Giovanni’s abstract: This dissertation focuses on the notion of locality in syntactic theory, using as its empirical base a case study from Äiwoo (Solomon Islands; Oceanic < Austronesian). In this language, word order […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:05 am

On July 10th, Yash Sinha successfully and excellently defended his dissertation, titled Plurals of politeness and the morphosyntax of number! Congratualtions, Yash!! You can read the abstract below: Many languages use plural pronouns to address (and refer to) single individuals with politeness or honorification. In some languages, these plurals of politeness (PoPs) show mixed agreement, […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:03 am

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)Title: Long-distance agreement on Procrustes’ bed: a revival of spec-headTime: , 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Long-distance agreement (LDA) refers to the phenomenon where a matrix verb may (optionally) agree in φ-features with an embedded argument of its complement clause, otherwise showing default agreement with the entire complement clause. Spanning a clausal boundary […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 10:02 am

Two pieces of great news about our recent alums Danfeng Wu (PhD 2022) and Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018). We’ve just received the great news that Danfeng Wu has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at the University of Geneva (en français: “professeure assistante avec prétitularisation conditionnelle”). A specialist in syntax and semantics, and especially their interaction […]

Posted: September 8, 2025, 9:00 am

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT) and Magdalena Lohninger (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg) Title: Austronesian pivots: topics or subjects? A Malayo-Polynesian typology Time: Thursday, September 4, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: A long standing debate on the Austronesian voice system is whether pivots–the pragmatically and syntactically most salient clausal argument- are V2-like topics or derived subjects. […]

Posted: September 2, 2025, 10:02 am

Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus over the summer, as usual. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall. Thanks to our editors, contributors, and of course all our readers! See you all in the Fall!

Posted: June 9, 2025, 11:00 am

We are delighted to announce the open-access publication of the paper “Hidden Causality on Modern Greek” by fourth-year grad student Anastasia Tsilia in the journal Natural Language Semantics. Congratulations, Anastasia!! Anastasia’s website: https://www.anastasiatsilia.com link to paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11050-025-09235-w

Posted: June 9, 2025, 10:11 am

Congratulations to finishing student Omri Doron, who has accepted a position as Visiting Faculty in semantics at UMass Amherst for next year!!   

Posted: June 9, 2025, 10:10 am

Congratulations to our wonderful advanced degree recipients who marched in MIT’s commencement ceremony on May 29 and received their well-deserved diplomas! Eunsun Jou and Enrico Flor, receiving the degree of Doctor of Science in Linguistics Soledad Chango and Renhard Saupia, receiving the degree of Master of Science in Linguistics — graduates of our Indigenous Language […]

Posted: June 9, 2025, 10:00 am

Last week, Ruoan Wang successfully defended her dissertation entitled Proxies and Social Meaning! Below is Ruoan’s abstract: This dissertation presents an analysis of polite meaning as part of a pragmatic calculus, without dedicated features in the core grammar. I present a purpose-built typology (n>200) showing that polite pronouns often have no inherent form of their […]

Posted: June 2, 2025, 10:01 am

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory was held at Harvard University on May 20-22, 2025. MIT linguistics was well represented by current students, faculty and visitors: Johanna Alstott (student): On aspectual coercion in ‘before’-clauses: Evidence from processing Danny Fox (faculty and alum!) & Yusutada Sudo (PhD 2012): Nested ‘which’-phrases and degenerate questions Nina […]

Posted: May 27, 2025, 10:01 am

Sad news has reached us of the death on May 10 of John Frampton, an important figure in linguistic research on both syntax and phonology for several decades, and a beloved member of the MIT Linguistics community — though he was neither faculty nor an alum of our department. John was an Associate Professor of […]

Posted: May 27, 2025, 10:00 am

Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as “Haj Ross”, his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many — one might even say “most” […]

Posted: May 19, 2025, 11:00 am

Speaker: Soledad Chango (MIT) & William Pacheco (MIT) Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa & Developing Inquiry and Research in Eastern Keres Ki:wa-Dialect Time: Thursday, May 15th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This week’s LingLunch will consist of two presentations by MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI) students: Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa (Soledad Chango, MIT) […]

Posted: May 12, 2025, 10:05 am

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT) Title: Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study Time: Monday, May 12th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: In a controversial analysis, Chomsky and Halle (1968) proposed that the underlying representation of the English word “nightingale” contains /x/, a velar fricative that never surfaces in the language. This state of […]

Posted: May 12, 2025, 10:04 am

The 61st annual meeting of the Chicago Lingusitic Society (CLS61) was held on May 9—May 11, 2025. The following members of the department presented at the conference: Haoming Li (3rd year) & Yizhen Jiang (2nd year): Modal presupposition and probability-sensitivity of negated indefinites Norvin Richards (faculty): Agreement by proxy (invited talk) Michael Kenstowicz (faculty): The replacement of […]

Posted: May 12, 2025, 10:01 am

We are ecstatic to announce that Viola Schmitt will be joining our faculty next academic year as Associate Professor of Linguistics with tenure! Most of Viola’s research focuses on semantics, but with deep connections to syntactic and philosophical issues as well. Viola comes to us from the Humboldt University, Berlin, and has also taught at […]

Posted: May 5, 2025, 10:30 am

We are delighted to announce that Peter Grishin (PhD 2023) has accepted a position as Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Brown University for the next two academic years! Congratulations Peter, and congratulations Brown as well! Peter’s website: https://www.petergrishin.com

Posted: May 5, 2025, 10:25 am

Speaker: Jad Wehbe (MIT)Title: Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustificationTime: Thursday, May 8th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Recent work has argued that different truth-value gaps, such as homogeneity and implicatures, are in fact presuppositions, based on similarities in their pragmatic status and their projection properties (Fox, 2018; Bassi et al., 2021 a.o.). Nevertheless, these inferences seem to […]

Posted: May 5, 2025, 10:02 am

Speaker: Hani Na’eem (MIT) Title: The Nature of Emphasis Harmony in Jordanian Arabic Time: Monday, May 5th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Most varieties of Arabic retain a set of uvularized or pharyngealized coronals (e.g. /tˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/) – called emphatics – which contrast with their non-uvularized – or plain – counterparts (e.g. /t, […]

Posted: May 5, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Nadine Bade (University of Konstanz) Title: Shared Mechanisms Behind Local and Global Implicatures: Evidence from Priming Time: Friday, May 2nd, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The mechanisms underlying implicature derivation remain a topic of active debate. Competing theoretical accounts make distinct predictions about the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. […]

Posted: April 28, 2025, 10:09 am

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass Amherst/MIT) Title: Toward a simpler binding theory Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Classical Binding Theory has been successful at capturing basic facts about the distribution of DPs. It has also raised some long standing concerns at the empirical and conceptual level. These include high-profile violations of […]

Posted: April 28, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Cooper Roberts (MIT)Title: Agreement determines the interpretation of fraction partitives in some languages, but why?Time: Wednesday, April 30th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: This LFRG presents in-progress work on the syntax-semantics of fraction partitives (e.g., one-third of the cakes). In several Indo-European languages (but not American English), FPs are ambiguous between two readings if the […]

Posted: April 28, 2025, 10:06 am

Speaker: Cynthia Zhong (MIT)Title: Coronal consonant typology in JapaneseTime: Monday, April 28th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: In Japanese, the voiced coronal consonants /z/ and /d/ used to contrast before high vowels /i/ and /u/, forming a 4-way distinction among /zi, di, zu, du/. A merger that began around the 16th century neutralized these contrasts to […]

Posted: April 28, 2025, 10:04 am

This year, the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place at University of Washington on April 25-27. MIT was well-represented by the following current and very recently graduated students with their work: Yiannis Katochoritis (2nd year), Magdalena Lohninger: Same but Different: Balinese vs. Malagasy Pivots Giovanni Roversi (5th year): “Non-local A-movement” is […]

Posted: April 28, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT) Title: Concord as Insatiable Agree Time: Thursday, April 24th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present an analysis of concord – nominal agreement in case and phi features – as insatiable Agree (e.g., Deal 2023, 2024; Clem and Deal 2024). On this […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:09 am

Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp and Ido Elhadad-Benbaji (MIT)Title: Structure matters: missing implicatures and their consequence for the theory of alternativesTime: Wednesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: A central component to theories of conversational implicature is the delimitation of the set of alternative sentences that could have been uttered, but were not. Yet there is considerable […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:06 am

Speaker: Philip Shushurin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) Title: How to do voice restructuring in a language without voice: Transitivity Concord in Chechen. Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The paper presents an analysis of a construction known as Transitivity Concord in Chechen. I argue that this construction presents a novel […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:05 am