News and Events

Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp (MIT)  Title: Generalization X under Movement Time: Wednesday, September 23, 1-2 p.m. Location: 32-D461 Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92053685079   Abstract: Noun phrases may often be interpreted either de re or de dicto with respect to an intensional operator, while predicates are obligatorily interpreted de dicto (Percus’s 2000 Generalization X). Existing accounts capture this asymmetry by constraining the relation between a predicate’s […]

Posted: September 21, 2026, 10:08 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)Title: Representation and Computation in Phonological Theory: Faust and Scheer (2025)Time: , 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Before asking what rules or constraints a grammar needs, we need to know what kind of representations those computations should be operating over in the first place: “If the representations are right, then the rules will […]

Posted: September 21, 2026, 10:04 am

Speaker: Eyal Marco (MIT), Roni Katzir (Tel-Aviv University), Ezer Rasin (Tel-Aviv University)Title: The complementary-distribution challenge for phonological learning: The case of [h] and [ŋ] in EnglishTime: , 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: The distribution of [h] and [ŋ] in English poses a well-known challenge for the structuralist assumption that segments in complementary distribution are allophones of […]

Posted: September 21, 2026, 10:02 am

A paper co-authored by our 3rd year student Rotsuprit (Ford) Saengthong and John Gluckman (University of Kansas), entitled “Thai Tough-Constructions and the Tough Signature”, has been accepted for publication by Syntactic Theory & Research (STAR). Below is the abstract: We investigate the tough-construction in Thai, focusing on two exceptional properties. First, Thai tough-constructions may involve a potentially unconstrained dependency, […]

Posted: September 21, 2026, 10:00 am

Speaker: Jonah Katz (UCLA)  Title: “Template structure in musical textsetting: Evidence from early hip-hop“  When: Friday, September 18th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141   Abstract: This talk describes the setting of lyrics to musical rhythms (‘flow’) in mid-1980s hip-hop. I argue based on the distribution of musical and linguistic features that the genre makes use of abstract […]

Posted: September 14, 2026, 10:07 am

Speaker: Jonah Katz (UCLA) Title: “Synchronic lenition” When: Wednesday, September 16th, 1pm-2:30pm (Day 1) + Thursday, September 17th, 12:30-2pm (Day 2)   Where: 32-D461   Abstract:  In this mini-course, I’ll give an overview of several different frameworks for thinking about synchronic lenition (and fortition) patterns, then review some of my own work in the area as […]

Posted: September 14, 2026, 10:06 am

Speaker: Giovani Roversi (MIT) Title: Applicative left behind? Time: Tuesday, September 15, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461  I will present you some curious data from Äiwoo that I’ve been banging my head on for a while. We will see a construction that functionally speaking seems to be a relative clear case of an applicative (i.e., […]

Posted: September 14, 2026, 10:01 am

The 19th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 19) was held from June 30 to July 2, 2026 at ZAS. Two of our alumns gave an invited talk: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD 2014)[CNRS / Nantes University]: Word order and interpretation order in Japanese scrambling Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Boğaziçi University]: Toward a typology of implicit arguments: […]

Posted: September 14, 2026, 10:00 am

Šišóka Bendickson: Háu Mitákuyepi. Šišókaduta emákiyapi dó. Hello my relatives. I am called Šišókaduta. You can shorten that to Šišóka. I am a first year student in the MITILI program. I am an enrolled tribal member from the Lake Traverse Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. I am an L2 speaker of the Santee Dakota dialect. There are […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:12 am

A new meeting group for people in the department who are engaged in experimental or computational work, or who are interested in learning more about these approaches: the (provisionally named) Experimental & Computational Methods in Linguistics group, or ECML! The meetings will be largely informal and fairly unstructured, with more formal presentations or talks being […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:11 am

Speaker: Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago) Title: “Coordination as Aggregation (or, When Meaning Is Like Voting)”  When: Friday, September 11th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141   Abstract: The philosopher Crispin Wright says a predicate P is ‘tolerant’ with respect to a dimension D just in case “there is some positive degree of change in respect of D that is […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:10 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Some Aspects of Bantu Morphology, featuring Leland Paul Kusmer (2019) Time: Thursday, September 10th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Discussion on verbal morphology in Bantu, focusing on the conjoint/disjoint alternation, where a verb’s surface realization depends on its syntactic, information-structural, or prosodic relation to what follows it. I’ll walk […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:10 am

Course announcements in this post: Special Topics: “Doing Experimental Linguistics” (24.S95) More Advanced Syntax (24.955) Topics in Phonology: Phonetics and phonology in generative grammar (24.964) Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981) Topics in Semantics: Presupposition, Anaphora, and Reference (24.979) 24.S95: Special Topics: “Doing Experimental Linguistics” Instructor: Shota Momma Time: Tuesday, 2pm-5pm Room: 32-D461 As the title […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:09 am

Our recent MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI) graduate Will Pacheco has joined the University of New Mexico’s Linguistics program, pursuing a PhD by way of an MA in Linguistics. UNM has a strong language documentation program, and Will is excited to be home to continue his research on Kewa Keres with the community, building on […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:05 am

The 36th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) was held at the University of Buenos Aires on July 29 – 31, 2026.  Current and former members of our department at the conference included: Faculty:  Viola Schmitt gave an invited talk: Individuation, generalized Students: Haoming Li & Yizhen Jiang: Infelicity of negated bare plurals: Not […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:05 am

MIT Linguistics was represented at the 4th Paris Workshop on Game Theory and Language from June 11-12, by first-year student Orr Well, who gave a talk entitled “Ineffability Follows from a Question-Based Approach to Focus”, and third-year student Alma Frischoff, who gave a talk entitled “A General Account of Exhaustification with an Iterated Rationality Model”.

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:04 am

Our 4th-year student Paul Meisenbichler gave a colloquium talk at University of Vienna on June 3rd, 2026, entitle “ Constraining reference to individuals in the modal and temporal dimension”. Here is the link to the homepage with details: TLC VIENNA - 2026-06-Meisenbichler. You can read the abstract below:   The mechanism for indexing worlds is […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:04 am

On June 23, 2026, the 33rd meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 33) at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand. Our first-year student Joseph Sarmenta presented a poster entitled Ng is n- + ang: A Reanalysis of Tagalog Argument Markers.

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:03 am

Our dissertating student Christopher Legerme spent part of the summer presenting some of his dissertation research on Contextual Morphology and the Syntax-Phonology Interface, from Bantu to French Creole. He presented a poster at LingO 2026 in Oxford, London in June and a talk at SPCL 2026 in Aarhus, Denmark in August. His work compares contextual […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:02 am

Congratulations to Adam Chong (University of Oxford), our student Bingzi Yu, and our alum Youngah Do (PhD 2013)[HKU], whose paper “Conservativity in the scope of phonological generalization learning” has been accepted to Linguistic Vanguard and published online. You can read the paper here. Below is the abstract: Phonological alternations that arise due to morphological concatenation […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:02 am

We are delighted to announce the publication of our colleague Elise Newman’s paper, “On Projection and the Shadow of [Wh]”, in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations, Elise! Here is the abstract:  Much work has shown that wh-movement is subject to several kinds of locality restrictions cross-linguistically. I propose that these restrictions arise when [wh] projects past the maximal projection […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:01 am

We are pleased to share that Nikos Angelopoulos (CNRS) and our student Anastasia Tsilia have published a paper in Snippets, entitled “No two complementizers are the same: Insights from Greek”! You can read the paper here.

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:01 am

The 20th meeting of Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 20) was held in Montréal, Québec, Canada from June 26–28, 2026, with satellite workshops on June 25 and 29, and a keynote lecture on June 25. MIT linguistics was well represented by the following current students and faculty: Edward Flemming (Faculty) & Amy Li (3rd year): Deriving phonetic […]

Posted: September 9, 2026, 10:00 am

A paper co-authored by our colleague Elise Newman and alum Kenyan Branan (PhD 2018) of the University of Göttingen has just been published in Syntactic Theory & Research (otherwise known as STAR).  Entitled “Paths: the ghosts of features past”, here is the abstract, and here is the link to the paper: https://sites.google.com/view/kbranan/home We discuss a […]

Posted: July 27, 2026, 10:10 am

News has reached us that our distinguished alum Despina Oikonomou, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philology at the University of Crete,  has been awarded tenure.  Great news, Despina, and congratulations!!

Posted: July 27, 2026, 10:00 am

We were very excited to learn that our colleague Martin Hackl and Yoon Kim of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have been awarded a collaborative research grant from the MITHIC SHASS+ Connectivity Fund, which connects scholars in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) with colleagues from other parts of […]

Posted: July 20, 2026, 10:00 am

On June 22, Anastasia Tsilia successfully and masterfully defended her dissertation entitled The Grammar of Defeated Expectations: the case of wh-exclamatives. Here is the abstract: This dissertation investigates how the grammar expresses defeated expectations of the speaker or attitude holder through matrix and embedded wh-exclamatives, such as Wow, how smart Maria is! and George is […]

Posted: July 6, 2026, 10:00 am

News has reached us that our alum Igor Yanovich (PhD 2013) has been been awarded tenure in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna.  Congratulations, Igor!

Posted: July 6, 2026, 10:00 am

With this issue, Whamit announces its usual summer hiatus.  We will resume weekly publication in the Fall — but, as always, we will be here all summer with any breaking news from MIT Linguistics that may reach us.  Have a great summer! The student editors: Bingzi Yu and Alma Frischoff The faculty editor: David Pesetsky […]

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:13 am

On May 28, MIT held its Commencement ceremonies. We could not be more proud of our students who received their diplomas at this year’s ceremonies! Congratulations to our undergraduate majors Miguel Buitrago, Ellie Bultena, and Olivia Honeycutt, who were awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science (S.B.) in Linguistics! Congratulations to Ukhengching Marma, William Pacheco, […]

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:10 am

Congratulations to our dissertating student Ido Benbaji-Elhadad, who will be starting a post-doc position this summer at the University of Tübingen, in the DFG-funded project on “The Common Ground” led by Prof. Michael Franke and Dr. Todd Snider!

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:09 am

Last Friday, June 5, Ido Benbaji-Elhadad brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Worlds, Times and the fate of Ontological Symmetry.  Here is the abstract: Thanks to a dedicated set of intensional operators—e.g., modals, attitude predicates, tense operators, and temporal adverbials—natural language is able to convey information about things beyond the concrete here and now; […]

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:08 am

Last Tuesday, June 2, Jad Wehbe superbly and successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Plural Predication and Scope. Here is the abstract: A central question in formal semantics concerns the division of labor between lexical semantics and the compositional system. Given a particular inference pattern, we can ask whether this inference is encoded in the lexicon […]

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:05 am

A new journal in semantics is here: Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL), a diamond open-access journal dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages and the scholar-owned, scholar-led successor to Natural Language Semantics. There are several MIT connections to the launch: Irene Heim, founding co-editor of Natural Language Semantics, is one of the signers […]

Posted: June 8, 2026, 10:01 am

We are as delighted as can be to announce that Shota Momma will be joining our faculty as Associate Professor of Linguistics this Fall!  Prof. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production, an area in which he is a […]

Posted: May 11, 2026, 10:15 am

Speaker: Hani Al Naeem (MIT) Title: On the nature of emphasis spread in Jordanian Arabic Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: The phenomenon of emphasis spread (ES), a type of tongue root harmony in Arabic, is triggered by emphatics, coronal obstruents with a secondary posterior articulation near the upper pharyngeal wall. The most […]

Posted: May 11, 2026, 10:04 am

Speaker: Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford) Title: LLMs can pass the Turing Test — are they intelligent? Time: Thursday, May 14, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In 1950, Turing proposed that if a person can not tell whether they are in conversation with another person or a computer algorithm, we can consider the algorithm […]

Posted: May 11, 2026, 10:02 am

This year, the 44th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL44) was held at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City on May 6-8. Some of our current students, faculty and alums presented their work: Tamari Berulava (2nd year): Shifting Identity: the Interaction of phi-features, Honorification and Indexical shift Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002)[University of Toronto] & […]

Posted: May 11, 2026, 10:00 am

Speaker: Daniar Kasenov (NYU) Title: Salvation by deletion in Russian LBE Time: Tuesday, May 12, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Russian does not allow left branch extraction from NPs that are complements of P. Sluicing alleviates this restriction. I argue that the pattern is best explained by the Cyclic Linearization view of “island repair”: ungrammaticality […]

Posted: May 11, 2026, 10:00 am

Speaker: Thomas Truong and Karolin Kaiser (MIT) Title: Age is not just a number Time: Wednesday, May 6th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: We start from constructions where a proper name modifies a gradable adjective, as in (1). Eyal is Joe Biden old. While these examples initially may suggest a simple degree interpretation, […]

Posted: May 4, 2026, 10:25 am

Speaker: Christopher Bader (MIT)Title: Front Vowels are Palatal: Phonetic and Phonological EvidenceTime: , 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Clements (1991) and Hume (1992) proposed that front vowels are coronal, rather than dorsal (Sagey 1986). But this is the wrong generalization, since it fails to explain the following contrast in Mandarin Chinese: *si, *ʂi, ɕi ‘west’ (西) […]

Posted: May 4, 2026, 10:04 am

Speaker: Haoming Li (MIT) Title: Conditional semantics for permission and weak necessity Time: Thursday, May 7, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The classic analyses of permission and weak necessity view them as existential and universal quantification over a modal base with one or two ordering sources. In this talk, I will advance the alternative […]

Posted: May 4, 2026, 10:02 am

The 35th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slaviv Languages was hosted by the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz from May 1-3, 2026. The following students and alums presented their work: Vlad Orlov (2nd year): Existential wh-words are still a question in Russian  Marijana Marelj & Ora Matushansky (PhD 1998)[CNRS]: Against length-determined […]

Posted: May 4, 2026, 10:00 am

Speaker: Edward Flemming (MIT) and Amy Li (MIT) Title: An optimization-based approach to phonetic grammar Time: Thursday, April 30, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: A phonetic grammar maps phonological representations onto acoustic or articulatory trajectories. In the tonal domain, this involves mapping tone categories onto f0 trajectories that are aligned to the segmental string […]

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:05 am

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT) Title: Hurford Disjunctions without Entailment: A Mereological Approach Time: Wednesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: I present part of my ongoing work on Hurford disjunctions and the role of parthood in meaning. In the first part of the talk, I introduce novel data showing that predicates vary […]

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:04 am

Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT) Title: To Unlock is to (Re)Merge: Locality Domains, Intervention and Minimal Compliance Time: Tuesday, April 28, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 This is Part II of a distant mid-March syntax square. Some things in the world have changed in-between, but not the need to undo locality domains. Recall:    Rackowski and […]

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:03 am

Speaker: Jian-Leat Siah (UCLA) Title: How Language Experience Reshapes the P-Map: The Case of Final Nasalization in Serudung Murut Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: In this talk, I present my dissertation research testing Steriade (2001/2008)’s P-Map hypothesis, which posits that learners are biased toward alternations that minimize perceptual deviations between input and […]

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:02 am

The 48th meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW48) was held at the University of Siena on April 21-23, 2026. MIT linguistics was well respresented by the following current students and alums: Giovanni Roversi (Postdoc; PhD 2025) & Jéssica Mendes: Light attitudes, heavy complements: evidence from Äiwoo Eyal Marco (1st year), Ezer Rasin […]

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Norvin Richards (MIT) Title: Long-distance agreement by proxy in Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey Time: Tuesday, April 21, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey has long-distance agreement: the verb of a matrix clause can (optionally) agree with nominals in a complement clause, even if the complement clause appears to be a full-fledged tensed clause.  I will argue that […]

Posted: April 20, 2026, 12:20 pm

LEAP Workshop – Cora Lesure and Maya Honda Title: Communicating Your Research Time: Tuesdays  5pm – 6pm Location: 32-D461 We invite you to the LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy) workshop on Communicating Your Research. Here is the complete schedule of the four-session workshop: April 14th (last week): Defining the knowledge gap What does your audience know, and […]

Posted: April 20, 2026, 10:11 am

Speaker: Paul Smolensky (Microsoft/Johns Hopkins University) Title: Do the syntactic abilities of generative AI systems falsify fundamental principles of generative linguistics When: Friday, April 24th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141  Do the impressive abilities of neural-network Large Language Models in generating rich, well-formed syntax falsify fundamental principles of generative linguistic theory? The answer I will argue for […]

Posted: April 20, 2026, 10:05 am

Speaker: Paul Smolensky (Microsoft/Johns Hopkins University) Title: “Generative Linguistics meets Generative AI” When: Wednesday, April 22nd, 1pm-2:30pm (Day 1) + Thursday, April 23rd, 12:30-2pm (Day 2)   Where: 32-D461   Abstract: Do the unprecedented syntactic abilities of modern generative AI systems — Large Language Models (LLMs) — falsify traditional generative principles of linguistic knowledge, given that […]

Posted: April 20, 2026, 10:03 am

The 62nd annual meeting of the Chicago Lingusitic Society (CLS62) was held on April 17-19, 2026. The following members of the MIT Linguistics community presented at the conference: Tamari Berulava (2nd year) & Paul Meisenbichler (3rd year): Parasitic Binding into Nested Definites Johanna Alstott (4th year): Next Bergül Soykan (4th year): Limitations on Meta Questions: […]

Posted: April 20, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT) & William Pacheco (MIT) Title: Questions and conditionals with disjunction in Gitksan & My Language, My Tools: AI-Assisted Documentation of Kiːwɑ Keres Time: Thursday, April 16, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 This week’s LingLunch will consist of two talks. Talk 1: Questions and conditionals with disjunction in Gitksan (Yurika Aonuki, MIT) […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:06 am

Speaker: Vlad Orlov (MIT) Title: Observations on the Existential Uses of Interrogative Pronouns in Russian Time: Wednesday, April 14th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: Some of the interrogative pronouns in Russian can be used as indefinites in certain environments, which makes them quexistentials in the terminology of Hengeveld et al. 2023. The interrogative […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:05 am

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT) & Jéssica Mendes (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) Title: Light-ish attitudes, heavy complements: the view from Äiwoo” (GLOW practice talk, LFRG take-over) Time: Tuesday, April 14, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Some attitude predicates in various unrelated languages have been reported to have variable flavor interpretations, covering doxastic (“think”), assertive (“say”), and bouletic […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:04 am

LEAP Workshop 4/14 - Cora Lesure and Maya Honda Title: Communicating Your Research: Defining the Knowledge Gap Time: Tuesday April 14, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D461 We invite you to the first-ever LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy) workshop on Communicating Your Research. Across four one-hour sessions, we will explore how the task of communicating key […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:04 am

On behalf of LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy), the department’s outreach effort to K-12 students, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chem E), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics) designed and team-taught a Saturday high school linguistics course at Spring HSSP, an initiative of the student-run MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program). The six-week-long course, An […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:03 am

The book entitled The Acquisition of Relativization by Suzanne Flynn and colleagues was recently published by Cambridge University Press in the series of Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Congratulations, Suzanne! You can find the book here.

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:01 am

We are excited to announce that the paper “Optimal Paradigms: A Challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic” by our first-year student Eyal Marco and alum Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018)[Tel Aviv University] was accepted to Linguistic Inquiry and published online. Congratulations, Eyal and Ezer! Here is the abstract: This paper reevaluates Optimal Paradigms (OP), an extension to Optimality […]

Posted: April 13, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Amy Li (MIT) Title: The potential effect of phoneme inventory crowding on phonetic variation Time: Monday April 6, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Does the crowdedness of a phoneme inventory affect the variability of the realizations of its phonemes? In particular, does a more crowded phoneme inventory reduce the variability of its phonemes? […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:12 am

Speaker: Joseph Sabbagh (University of Texas Arlington) Title: The Dynamic Existential in Tagalog Time: Tuesday, April 7, 1:00pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This presentation discusses existential sentences based around a verbal existential predicate (magkaroon) in Tagalog. Such sentences are peculiar because, while they appear to be unaccusative, with a single DP argument projected as […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:11 am

Speaker: Veneeta Dayal (Yale University) Title: “(In)definiteness Across Languages” When: Wednesday, April 8th, 1pm-2:30pm (Day 1) + Thursday, April 9th, 12:30-2pm (Day 2)   Where: 32-D461   Abstract: Given the complexity of article systems, the fact that as many languages lack either one or both articles poses interesting questions for universal grammar. Do article-less languages have […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:10 am

Speaker: Veneeta Dayal (Yale University) Title: A Sortability-based Account of Anti-singularity in Questions When: Friday, April 10th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  This talk addresses three cases of anti-singularity in questions, illustrated in (1a)-(1c). They all convey that the speaker expects that the answer will name more than one individual: (1)   a. Which books did […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:05 am

Event name: TU+11 (11th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic) Dates: April 11-12 Place: 56-114 Organizers: Bergül Soykan, Cynthia Zhong, Juan Cancel, Taieba Tawakoli, and Vladislav Orlov Link to the Program: https://turkicworkshop.github.io/tu11/program.html   Brief Introduction: TU+ is an annual workshop focusing on all aspects of linguistic research on Turkic languages, as well as on languages […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:03 am

Congratulations to David Pesetsky on being named a 2026–27 SHASS Faculty Fellow! David is one of 12 professors selected for the new SHASS Faculty Fellows cohort: During his fellowship, [David Pesetsky will] investigate why there’s more than one kind of clause in the world’s languages. While linguists and researchers assume that clauses in most of […]

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:01 am

We hear that our distinguished alum Abdul-Razak Sulemana (PhD 2021) has been promoted to the academic rank of Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana.  Congratulations, Abdul-Razak!

Posted: April 6, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Darya Kavitskaya (UC Berkeley)  Title: Vowel harmony domains in Turkic and Uralic: There and back again When: Friday, April 3rd, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  Drawing on the architectural underpinnings of Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982; Mohanan 1986), a body of research on the diachrony of phonological patterns has proposed that such patterns are unidirectional: […]

Posted: March 30, 2026, 10:10 am

Speaker: Weichao Yan (Beijing Foreign Studies University) Title: When Do Mandarin Conditionals Receive Counterfactual Readings? A Domain-Widening Perspective Time: Wednesday, April 1st, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: In the spirit of von Fintel and Iatridou’s (2023) discussion of X-marking, this talk examines counterfactual interpretations in Mandarin conditionals from a domain-widening perspective. In Mandarin […]

Posted: March 30, 2026, 10:07 am

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT) Title: Birth of a Language in the Backlands of Brazil Time: Thursday, April 2, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: It is assumed that in order to acquire a language, children must be exposed to a language during the critical period, which generally lasts until puberty. Here, we report on Cena, […]

Posted: March 30, 2026, 10:02 am

Speaker: Haoming Li (MIT) Title: Assertion and presupposition of change-of-state verbs across different aspects (Part 2) Time: Wednesday, March 18th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: Sudo (2012); Zehr & Schwarz (2018), among others, have drawn attention to the different discourse and projection behaviors of presuppositions that are entailed by the assertion (e.g., the […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 12:34 pm

Title: To Unlock is to (Re)Merge: Locality Domains, Intervention and Minimal Compliance Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT) Time: March 17, 2026,  1 pm - 2 pm  Place: 32-D461 Rackowski and Richards (2005) propose a Phase Unlocking operation: phases can be made transparent for extraction if they first Agree with a higher probe, which may then attract […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 11:00 am

Speaker: Eyal Marco (MIT), joint work with Ezer Rasin (Tel-Aviv University) Title: On the nature of phonological cyclicity: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic Time: Monday, March 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: We present new evidence supporting the cycle as a grammatical mechanism in phonology. The evidence comes from the distribution of stress and vowel […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 10:18 am

The semantics conference Theoretical Linguistics at Keio was held at Keio University on March 14-16, 2o26.  The following members of our community presented at the conference: Cooper Roberts (3rd year): Part is part (plus pragmatics) Viola Schmitt (faculty): Individuation across categories Adèle Hénot-Mortier (PhD 2025): “Remind-me” presuppositions with iterated Speech Acts Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012)[UCL], Chris Davis […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 10:08 am

The GLOW in Asia 2nd Workshop for Young Scholars was held at Nanzan University on March 13-15, 2026. Third-year student Cooper Roberts gave a talk titled “Honor omnivorously: The syntax of politeness in Kikai Amami”.  Second-year student Vlad Orlov presented a poster with Daria Belova (Institute of Linguistics RAS/HSE University, Moscow) titled “Detransitivization as agreement […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 10:05 am

“Rujul Gandhi graduated from MIT in 2022, where she was a double major in Linguistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She’s currently researching speech at Harvard University, where she’s pursuing doctoral study in Speech & Hearing Bioscience. ‘I’m interested in the neural computations that underlie speech processing and perception,’ she says. […] “Was there […]

Posted: March 16, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Rutgers University) Title: Function alternations of the Mandarin particle ye: from ‘also’ to ‘even’ Time: Thursday, March 12, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The Mandarin adverb ye exhibits both a simple additive use (‘also’) and a scalar additive use (‘even’). This alternation is unlikely to be accidental: across genetically and typologically […]

Posted: March 9, 2026, 3:00 pm

Speaker: Haoming Li (MIT) Title: Assertion and presupposition of change-of-state verbs across different aspects Time: Wednesday, March 11th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: Sudo (2012); Zehr & Schwarz (2018), among others, have drawn attention to the different discourse and projection behaviors of presuppositions that are entailed by the assertion (e.g., the prior negative […]

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:15 am

Speaker: Jordan Lachler (University of Alberta)  Title: “The Evolving Challenge of Skills Training for Intergenerational Language Sustainability”  When: Friday, March 13th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  The global language endangerment crisis has unfolded against a backdrop of accelerated and unprecedented changes to society, technology and the planet itself. These ever-shifting realities challenge linguists’ understanding of […]

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:11 am

Speaker: Jian-Leat Siah (UCLA), joint work with Sam Zukoff and Feng-fan Hsieh Title: Resolving Reduplicative Opacity in Malay Nasal Spreading: An Argument for Base–Reduplicant Correspondence Theory Time: Monday, March 9th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: In Malay (Austronesian), nasality spreads iteratively and rightward from nasal consonants to following vowels and glides, but is blocked […]

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:04 am

Congratulations to our very recent alum Omri Doron (PhD 2025), who has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship!  He will be leading a two-year project titled “Mapping complexity in Language” under the supervision of Pavel Caha at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic,  Omri is currently a visiting lecturer at UMass Amherst.

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:03 am

Congratulations to finishing student Anastasia Tsilia, who has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in semantics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! 

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:03 am

Congratulations to our alum Vincent Rouillard (PhD 2023), on his new position as Assistant Professor (Professeur adjoint) in the Département de langues, linguistique et traduction at Université Laval in Québec!!

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:03 am

We are delighted to announce that two projects from MIT Linguistics have been selected for funding under the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) initiative, a new program in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Elise Newman and Norvin Richards have received funding for a project entitled “Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey Research, Revitalization and Documentation” (PWRRD, pronounced […]

Posted: March 9, 2026, 10:01 am

Speaker: Alma Frischoff (MIT) Title: Non-maximal readings of definite plurals with positive and negative predicates Time: Wednesday, March 4th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: I discuss the availability of non-maximal readings of sentences with definite plurals, focusing on antonym pairs of predicates. First, I draw attention to the observation that antonyms like clean/dirty and healthy/sick […]

Posted: March 2, 2026, 11:10 am

Speaker: Dean McHugh (University of Edinburgh) Title: Conditional Modality with Alternatives Time: Thursday, March 5, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This talk brings together two ideas. First, that statements under a modal are interpreted as conditional antecedents. ‘Possibly A’ states that if A were true, there would be some case where the relevant ideals […]

Posted: March 2, 2026, 11:02 am

MITILI celebrates International Mother Language Day with an online panel featuring Indigenous scholars and practitioners reflecting on learning, teaching, and practice in linguistics and Indigenous language education. Short presentations will be followed by moderated and open Q&A.   Featured speakers include: Devon Denny (Diné Bizaad / Navajo), MITILI alum (SM ’22) and PhD student at UC […]

Posted: February 23, 2026, 11:06 am

Speaker: Junshu Jin and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)Title: Perception of English Lexical Stress by 2nd-Language LearnersTime: Monday, February 23rd, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: In this presentation we briefly review two earlier studies on the perception of lexical stress contrasts in English by native Mandarin speakers. We then discuss the findings of Jin & Zheng’s (2025) study comparing […]

Posted: February 23, 2026, 11:04 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme Title: Transitive alternations and the syntax-phonology interface of Haitian Creole and Mauritian Creole Time: Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.  1 pm - 2 pm Location: 32-D461   Abstract: The verbal morphology of French Creoles is systematically sensitive to transitive argument alternations; the LONG FORM of transitive verbs is generally required when their internal […]

Posted: February 23, 2026, 11:00 am

Speaker: Jessica Coon (McGill University)  Title: “Reconsidering animacy hierarchy effects in Mayan: Experimental evidence from Ch’ol” (presenting joint work with Stefan Keine (UCLA), Juan Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM), and Michael Wagner (McGill)) When: Friday, February 20th, 3:30-5pm  Where: 32-141    Abstract:  Like many other Mayan languages, Ch’ol has been described as restricting the combination of 3rd […]

Posted: February 17, 2026, 11:05 am

Speaker: David Pesetsky (MIT) Title: A Sparse Theory of Argument Alternations Time: Thursday, February 19th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Argument alternations such as active~passive are common in the languages of the world, with several stable properties. Consequently, we should seek a maximally sparse account of such alternations that does not stipulate their existence […]

Posted: February 17, 2026, 11:02 am

  Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT), Despina Oikonomou (University of Crete), Onur Özsoy (University of Cologne), Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh), Giorgios Vardakis (University of Padova), Rumeysa Bektaş (Tokat University) Title: Condition C amelioration effects in wh-movement: An interaction between pronominal type and d-linking Time: Tuesday, February 10th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: While wh-movement […]

Posted: February 9, 2026, 11:08 am

Speaker: Amir Anvari (MIT)Title: How to be ignorantTime: Wednesday, February 11th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: I discuss two observations that are puzzling for a rather plausible, pragmatic conception of the etiology of ignorance inferences. The first is that certain sentences do not trigger certain ignorance inferences even in highly favorable contexts (Feinmann 2023). The second […]

Posted: February 9, 2026, 11:06 am

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)Title: Category mergers are irrecoverable even with robust distributional evidenceTime: Monday, February 9th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Can a covert phonological category be learned based on the distribution, without phonetic evidence? Although this idea was debated extensively, it has yet to be tested whether individual speakers have successfully acquired covert categories. I […]

Posted: February 9, 2026, 11:04 am

On 21 January, 2026, our 4th-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk at UCL. You can read the abstract here. See below for pictures of Bergül with some of our alums (The top photo from right to left: Yasu, Margaret, Adèle and Bergül)!

Posted: February 2, 2026, 11:05 am

Later in January, Vlad Orlov, Cooper Roberts and Norvin Richard went to Maine for the winter Passamaquoddy group trip!

Posted: February 2, 2026, 11:03 am

Course announcements in this post: Topics in Syntax (24.956) Topics in Experimental Phonology (24.967) Topics in Semantics (24.979) 24.956: Topics in Syntax Modeling phonological typology Instructor: Sabine Iatridou, Elise Nerman, David Pesetsky Time: Monday, 2pm-5pm Room: 32-D461 This class will explore what is known and what is unknown about the internal and external syntax of nominals. We […]

Posted: February 2, 2026, 11:01 am

This year, the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America was held in New Orleans from January 8-11, 2026. Several MIT students and alums gave presentations: James Cooper Roberts (3rd year): An Agreement-interpretation puzzle concerning Indo-European fraction partitives Adèle Hénot-Mortier (PhD 2025)[Queen Mary University of London]: Oddness, logical compatibility and granularity Devon Denny (SM 2022)[UCSD]: […]

Posted: February 2, 2026, 11:01 am

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