January at MIT is a quiet month, without regular classes and regularly scheduled events — so you might not hear from us again until the new semester begins in February 2025.  Of course, we will report any interesting events as they happen, even before the start of the new semester.  Meanwhile, we wish you a Happy New Year, and hope to welcome you back to Whamit next semester.

The MIT Linguistics community actively participated in the Amsterdam Colloquium 2024 held at University of Amsterdam on December 18-20. Our current students and faculty gave the following talks:

• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (6th year): Scalarity, information structure and relevance in varieties of Hurford Conditionals
• Jad Wehbe (5th year), Kate Kinnaird (Lab Manager), Martin Hackl (Faculty; PhD 2001): Distributivity facilitates ACD resolution

Several of our recent alumni from the past decade presented:

• Tatiana Bondarenko (PhD 2022)[Harvard], Richard Luo, Vincent Rouillard (PhD 2023)[Harvard]: Thinking Statively and Dynamically: a view from Georgian
• Patrick Elliott & Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD 2023)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg]: Ignorance under attitudes
• Paloma Jeretic, Aurore Gonzalez, Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS], Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998)[ZAS]: DUAL as a core concept and the pronounceability of alternatives
• Silvia Silleresi, Itai Bassi, Abigail Bimpeh, Imke Driemel, Anastasia Nuworsu, Maria Teresa Guasti: The interpretation of logophoric and ordinary pronouns in Ewe: an experimental study

And their predecessors as well!

• Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Kurt Erbach, Richard Breheny, Clemens Mayr, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012)[UCL]: Non-maximality effects in gestural plural predication
• Andreea Nicolae, Yasutada Sudo, Muyi Yang: On the anti-exhaustive inference of ya
• Lisa Bylinina, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Yasutada Sudo: Priming NPI Acceptability Judgments and The Bagel Problem
• Pranav Anand (PhD 2006)[UCSC], Natasha Korotkova: Facts, intentions, questions: English “come-to-know” predicates in deliberative environments
• Wataru Uegaki (PhD 2015)[University of Edingurgh]: Semantic triviality leads to ungrammaticality through iterated learning

On December 17th, Enrico Flor brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled Coarse Modality! 

The dissertation documents the existence of what Enrico calls “coarse modality”, drawing mostly on Italian data.  Much of the focus is on reducing apparent polysemy to an underspecified meaning that interacts with other modal expressions.  The central theoretical argument of the dissertation is that an insightful and natural analysis of coarse modality across speech acts relies on a novel use of certain peculiar and somewhat underutilized properties of Kratzer’s premise semantics for modals.

Here is Enrico with three members of his committee (l to r: Martin Hackl, Sabine Iatridou, Enrico Flor, Kai von Fintel).  The fourth member, Viola Schmitt, participated remotely.

Congratulations, Enrico!!