Whamit!

There are still two remaining openings for Ling-lunch this semester: 11/19 & 12/10. If you are interested in presenting your work on either of these dates, please contact Bronwyn Bjorkman (bmbjork@mit.edu) or Guillaume Thomas (gthomas@mit.edu).

There are two more incoming first-year students who have sent us brief introductions this week.

Jorie Koster-Moeller is from Corrales, New Mexico. She got her BA from Pomona College, and is currently doing a joint program through the linguistics department and the brain and cognitive science department. She’s particularly interested in semantics, both formal and experimental, and psycholinguistics. She also enjoys most anything mountain-related, such as backpacking and rockclimbing.

Edwin Martin Howard apologises that you’ve had to wait a whole week to hear about him, but he was out of email contact last weekend whilst enjoying a break in the wilds of rural Quebec - the Canadian province that he now also, in addition to his native Scotland, calls home. During his time in Montreal, he has become a proficient French speaker, and he completed a BA in Linguistics at McGill, writing an honours thesis on the semantics of superlatives and NPI licensing. The best thing that’s ever happened to him was the birth of his son, just over a year ago.

This is a periodic reminder that if you ever use the phonetics lab space or equipment, you should subscribe to the phonlab e-mail list: (it’s extremely low volume)

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/phonlab

In addition, if you are not sure about the correct way to do something in the lab, please just ask someone who knows. (This includes signing up for times to reserve the booth, recording to a file, adjusting the levels or switch mics, adjusting the fitting of the head-mounted microphone, and so on). Finally, if you know of others who use the lab but who might not be on one of the ling lists, such as RA’s/UROPs, class participants, and so on, please forward this to them, and be sure they know where to look for instructions/training, and who to go to for help.

Visiting Students (5)

Aysa Arylova: PhD student at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Aysa is investigating the morphosyntactic realization of syntactic dependency as a function of the structure building operation Merge. Her work will include an extensive typological survey and the development of a formal analysis.

Micha Breakstone: PhD student at Hebrew University, Israel. Micha is fascinated by “Universal Degrees.” Different assumptions regarding the nature of degree processing (e.g., universal density) have led him to exciting speculations about how the linguistic module in the mind/brain may interact with other cognitive modules, as well as with pragmatic knowledge about the world.

Marcus Lunguinho: PhD Student at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Marcus’s research focuses on “Auxiliary Verbs and the Theory of Grammar,” and the following two areas in particular: 1) the defective morphological paradigms of certain auxiliaries; 2) the syntax of the non-finite domains selected by auxiliary verbs.

Dimitris Michelioudakis: PhD student at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Dimitris’s current research is on the syntactic status of Inherent (“Dative”) Case in different diachronic and diatopic varieties of Greek.

Coppe van Urk: MA student at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Coppe’s research mainly concerns issues in modern generative syntax, specifically in the area of Control.

Visiting Scholars (3)

Manchun Dai: Professor at the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. Professor Dai’s interests revolve around Second Language Acquisition and Syntax.

Jeongah Kim, Researcher at the Institute of Language and Information Studies at Yonsei University, Korea. Professor Kim’s research interests are in phonetics, phonology, morphology and the phonology-phonetics interface. She is interested in recent developments in phonology, including Optimality Theory, Correspondence Theory and Sympathy Theory.

Anna Roussou: Associate Professor at the University of Patras, Greece. Professor Roussou’s main research interests are in syntax (Greek, comparative, diachronic) and its interfaces with morphology/lexicon and semantics.

[Thanks, Michel!]

Several of the incoming first year students have sent us brief introductions.

mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) grew up in Minnesota and is thus actively looking forward to the Boston winter. While at the University  of Chicago he worked on the syntax/semantics of Mandarin comparatives.  Since then, he’s lived in Taiwan and Japan, most recently working for  Mozilla.

Hadas Kotek grew up in a small town in northern Israel. Hadas reports: “My name literally means myrtle and is a shortened version of Hadassah, the Hebrew name of the biblical queen Esther. I did a BA in linguistics at Tel-Aviv university, then studied the first year of my MA at the Humboldt university in Berlin and the second year back at Tel-Aviv university. My previous work focused mainly on formal semantics and its interface with syntax. At present I am planning to continue working in these same areas.”

Junya Nomura reports: “I’m from Japan. My main interst is in syntax. I’ve studied especially Japanese syntax, but I’m planing to study other East Asian languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer, too. Apart from linguistics, I like sports, especially basketball and baseball, and shogi (Japanese chess).”

Daeyoung Sohn reports: “I am from South Korea. I have an MA in linguistics, and BAs in international relations study and English. I am interested mainly in Syntax and also have interest in Semantics. ”

Yusuke Imanishi reports: “I was born and grew up in Nara, Japan. The city is not as famous and large as cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Nevertheless, it is filled with nature preserves, forests and temples/shrines!! We also have a big Buddha, which reaches the height of approx. 50m. I completed my MA in Linguistics at Osaka University in Spring 2009. My thesis proposes that dative subjects in the Standard Japanese and some Japanese dialects are structurally Case-assigned, opposed to traditional analyses. I also extended empirical coverage to other languages and attempted to devise a unified account of dative subject constructions. My research interests include syntactic theory and comparative syntax based on a macro/micro-parametric approach. I’m also interested in the interfaces of phonology and semantics with syntax. 

Iain Giblin is from Australia. He reports: “My academic background is in music, but I’ve had a long interest in linguistics and in my postgraduate music studies I sought to apply generative models of language to music. I’m also interested in the philosophical questions that arise from the generative approach. I’m looking forward to the program here at MIT and learning all the techniques of modern linguistic theory so I won’t commit myself to one domain just yet. I still like to noodle around on the guitar and Boston is a great guitar town.”

Stay tuned for intros to the rest of the incoming class.

MITWPL has just published its 60th volume. The title of the volume is “Presuppositions and Implicatures. Proceedings of the MIT-Paris Workshop’”, edited by Paul Égré and Giorgio Magri. The volume collects 13 papers by scholars from MIT, Harvard and the École Normale Supérieure that came out of a collaboration between MIT and Paris sponsored by the MIT France Program and the MIT France Seed Fund for Collaborative Research. The abstracts of the papers are already available on the MITWPL website.

Peter Graff and T. Florian Jaeger will be presenting their talk, The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Raj Singh (MIT linguistics PhD 2008, currently postdoc in Brain & Cognitive Science at MIT) has accepted an assistant professorship at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Congratulations, Raj!

This week’s Ling Lunch features a talk by Pritty Patel, Patrick Grosz, Evelina Fedorenko and Ted Gibson (MIT)

Title: “Restrictions on E-type pronouns: Making the case for Uniqueness”
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Phonology circle resumes this week. Please note that we are returning to our usual Monday afternoon time slot!

Speaker: Hrayr Khanjian
Title: Stress-dependent vowel reduction
Time: Monday 2/9, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

The Department of Linguistics & Philosophy will hold its annual ice cream social.

When: Registration Day, February 2, 2009
Where: 32-D850 (Lounge)
Time: 2:00—4:00

Sabine Iatridou and Agustin Rayo will be hosting games starting at 3:00 PM.

Welcome Back!

There are seven colloquia scheduled for this semester:

2/27/09 - T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)
3/6/09 - Lisa Travis (McGill)
3/20/09 - Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)
4/3/09 - Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
4/17/09 - Sharon Rose (UCSD)
4/24/09 - Daniel Buring (UCLA)
5/1/09 - Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod)

Unless otherwise announced, the talks will take place at 3:30pm, in
room 32-141.

Strange VP ellipsis in the news (second email down the page).

Strange right node raising in the news.

The Music-Language reading group, which meets on Fridays at 3:30 when there is no colloquium, has a website on which readings and topics for our meetings are posted.  Last Friday, we discussed grouping and meter in the context of West African drum music (Claire Halpert led the discussion) and in the context of clave patterns and related rhythmic phenomena (Jonah Katz led the discussion).  At our meeting this Friday, we will discuss aspects of the syntax of tonal harmony.

An illustration of the effects of visual information on auditory processing.

The Modularity Reading Group has changed the time and place of their meetings.
From now on, the group will meet Friday mornings, 10am-12pm, in 24-402.

To keep up to date with what’s happening in the group, see their website at:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/modularity/

The joint NSF/NIH program for documenting endangered languages will be accepting funding applications until Saturday, November 1st.

Jeremy Hartman will lead a discussion of Phillipe Schlenker’s Expressive Presuppositions on Wednesday at 3PM in 26-310. If you would like to present a paper or would like to see a particular paper discussed, please let us know. More information can be found on the LF Reading Group’s webpage

This is a periodic reminder that if you ever use the phonetics lab space or equipment, you should subscribe to the phonlab e-mail list: (it’s extremely low volume)

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/phonlab

In addition, if you are not sure about the correct way to do something in the lab, please just ask someone who knows. (This includes signing up for times to reserve the booth, recording to a file, adjusting the levels or switch mics, adjusting the fitting of the head-mounted microphone, and so on). Finally, if you know of others who use the lab but who might not be on one of the ling lists, such as RA’s/UROPs, class participants, and so on, please forward this to them, and be sure they know where to look for instructions/training, and who to go to for help.

In preparation for Chris Kennedy’s colloquium, LF Reading Group will discuss two of his papers this week: Vagueness and Grammar (L&P, 2007) and Modes of Comparison (CLS, 2008). Reading the papers is not a prerequisite to attend. See you on Wednesday at 3PM in 26-310.

Last year we started a research group studying experimental and quantitative methods in the investigation of linguistic theory. Due to popular demand we will continue our meetings this year.

The format of the group will be similar to Phonology Circle/LF Reading group and other seminars. Participants can propose sessions which should fall roughly into one of three categories:

1. You have recently run an experiment and would like to discuss ways in which to analyze and/or make sense of your data.
2. You have a particular project and would like to talk about ways in which to experimentally test your hypotheses.
3. You stumbled upon a particular experimental or statistical method and would like to learn what it’s all about.

MathMod meets biweekly on Thursdays at 5pm in 32-D831. For details and information, please contact Peter Graff.

The first meeting of the Music Language Reading group will be this Friday, Sept. 26, from 3:30-5:00, location TBA. If you’re interested in participating, and you haven’t been receiving emails, please contact David Pesetsky or Jonah Katz to be added to the list.

One of the best-kept secrets in the department is LingWiki, a collaborative repository of general information concerning life inside and outside the department, compiled by students. It’s chock full of useful tidbits, especially for those new to the department and/or the area. Please have a look. Also, if you’re a student, please help us by adding information.

From Jonah Katz and David Pesetsky:

We are interested in starting a reading group based loosely around linguistics-inspired approaches to music cognition, especially structural approaches to music theory. The idea would be to start out by going through part or all of Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music, a foundational text in this area. We would help ‘teach’ the book to some extent, because it’s dense and difficult, and we’ve both spent a lot of time with it.  After going through GTTM, we’d like to keep meeting. Some ideas are to look at more recent literature in this area or, ideally, to encourage people to start and discuss their own projects.We want the group to be accessible to anybody with a minimal background in playing/studying music. For instance: if you can’t transpose an orchestral score on sight, don’t worry!  But if you can’t read music at all, you’d probably need some remedial study — we’d need to assume that. If you can’t analyze chord progressions, fine; if you don’t know what a ‘chord’ is, this is probably not for you. Please let us know (e-mail jkatz and pesetsk) if you have any interest in participating in such a group this semester. Our impression is that there are lots of musical people in the department and increasing interest in this topic.

[From the MIT Libraries site:]

Implemented in the fall of 2008, the Faculty Book Delivery Pilot Project offers faculty the opportunity to have books delivered to their offices upon request. The service takes 2-3 days, and is initiated using the “Your Account” feature in Barton. .

Basically, you order the book via Barton and it gets sent via campus mail. Together with the book drop on the ground floor of Stata, faculty may never have to set foot in the library again. No word yet on whether in a later phase graduate students could get this service as well.

On Tuesday, September 2, Registration Day, 3pm to 5pm, there will be a welcome party to celebrate the beginning of the fall semester in the main lounge of the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy. Everybody is welcome!

There are 8 students in the incoming class:

Samer Al Khatib, who goes by ‘Sam’, grew up in Palestine, Jordan, and Vancouver. He did his undergrad in computer science at UBC, and has just finished an MA in linguistics at Simon Fraser University. He’s interested in semantics and pragmatics (and the relationship between the two), as well as theoretical syntax, syntactic typology, historical linguistics, and Semitic languages.

Young Ah Do is from Korea, and has a B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University. Young Ah is interested in phonology.

Natasha Ivlieva is from Moscow, where she studied in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Moscow State University. She is mostly interested in syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.

Marie-Christine Meyer is from Germany. She studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Tuebingen, the University of Potsdam, and Humboldt University Berlin, where she recently completed an M.A. Although she’s interested in every area of linguistics, her main has been and most likely will be semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.

Liudmila Nikolaeva, who goes by ‘Liuda’, graduated from the Linguistics Department of the Russian State University for the Humanities a year ago, and has been a grad student there for the last year. Her main interests are syntax, semantics, and fieldwork.

Rafael Nonato reports that tendonitis makes him succinct.

Sasha Podobryaev is from Moscow, where he studied linguistics at Moscow State University. His primary area of interest is syntax.

Igor Yanovich

The start of the fall semester brings with it a bumper crop of new visitors. We offer a hearty welcome to those who have already arrived:

Visiting Scholars

• Hyunsook Kang (Professor, Hanyang University Division of English Language & Culture)

  Research interests: interface of phonology and phonetics

• Anthi Revithiadou (Assistant Professor of Comparative Linguistics, University of Aegean)

  Primary research interests: metrical theory, prosodic phonology and areas of the morphosyntax-phonology interface. She works on Standard Greek and its dialects with emphasis on those that were in contact with Turkish (e.g. Pontic, Cappadocian, Rhodian Muslim Greek, etc.). She currently explores the accentual differences among various Ancient Greek dialects.

• Hiroyuki Tanaka (Associate Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University)

  Research interests: the syntax of complementizers and its interaction with semantics and morphology.

• Chi-lin Wang (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology)

  Research interests: interlanguage phonology with a focus on phonotactics

Visiting Students

• Gaetano Fiorin (University of Verona)

  Research interests: the degree of semantic competence of dyslexic children

• Marina (Marlies) Kluck (University of Groningen)

  My research concerns the syntax and semantics of sentence amalgamation. I analyse these as paratactic construals involving multidominance (‘sharing’).

• Gary Thoms (Strathclyde University)

  I’m in second year of a PhD on literary language, specifically the unusual language of 20th century avant garde literature. The broader questions of my project are largely metatheoretical, and the specific topics which substantiate this inquiry include the semantic-pragmatic distinction, optional movement and derivational morphology.

• Stefano Versace (Universita degli Studi di Milano)

  Currently working on a dissertation project investigating the generativist approach to meter and its possible application in Italian contemporary poetry.

More visitors will be arriving in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for further announcements!

MIT Linguistics PhD alum Michela Ippolito and her husband had their first child: Martina was born in Toronto on July 4th:

Kazuko Yatsushiro and MIT Linguistics PhD alum Uli Sauerland had their third child: Mika Sauerland was born on August 1st:

Alya Asarina & Kirill Shklovsky
Title TBA
Thursday, May 8, 12:30-1:45
32-D461

Ezra Keshet has accepted a one-year visiting professorship in semantics at the University of Michigan. Congratulations, Ezra!

Stanford keeps a comprehensive list of funding opportunities available to linguistics grad students. Have a look.

[Thanks Hrayr!]

The Endangered Language Fund provides grants for ‘language maintenance and linguistic field work’. The deadline to apply for this year is Monday, April 21st. More information is available on the ELF’s website.

[Thanks Jessica!]

This one doesn’t have a deadline until November, but it looks like a rather involved application process, with potentially great rewards. The NSF, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, is offering sizable grants and fellowships to support work on endangered languages. Details can be found here.

[Thanks Jessica!]

Whamit! wishes everyone a happy spring break! We will return next week with regular updates.

We welcome two new visitors who have arrived this week:

• Nabila Louriz (Assistant Professor, English Department at Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco)
  Visiting Scholar until July
  Research interests: loanword phonology
• Georgios Spathas (PhD student, University of Utrecht)
  Post-Doctoral Fellow until December 08
  Research interests: syntax and semantics of gender features on bound pronouns, especially in Modern Greek

A special warm welcome to visiting professor Enoch Oladé Aboh, who is visiting from the University of Amsterdam this semester, until May 08.

Research interest: theoretical syntax; comparative syntax (e.g., Kwa vs. Germanic/Romance, Kwa vs. Sinitic, Kwa vs. Caribbean creoles); discourse-syntax interface; language creation and language change.

Enoch will be teaching an undergraduate seminar and co-teaching a graduate seminar with Michel DeGraff:

24.910 Topics in Linguistic Theory: Information Structure at the Edge
24.921 Special Topics in Linguistics: A transatlantic sprachbund? Gbe and Haitian Creole in a comparative-syntax perspective

The Department of Linguistics & Philosophy

ICE CREAM SOCIAL

When: Registration Day, Monday, February 4, 2008
Where: 32-D850 (Lounge)
Time: 2:00—4:00

Games will start at 3:00pm

WELCOME BACK

A warm welcome to several new visitors who have recently arrived in the department:

• Zhijun Jin (Professor, East China Normal University)
  Visiting Scholar until December 08
  Research interests: second language acquisition, language change and American second language education, including teaching methods, second language teachers formation, etc.

• Seok Han Kang (Professor, University of Incheon)
  Post-Doctoral Fellow until December 08
  Research interests: prosody, phonology, developmental structure for ESL, the relationship between production and perception

• Joan Mascaró (Professor, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catedràtic d’Universitat)
  Visiting Scholar for spring semester
  Research interests: phonology, morphology and romance languages; stress-controlled harmonic systems

More visitors will be arriving in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for further announcements!

FiLmprov
Parade: Animated Films with Musical Improvisation
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 8 PM.
Free.
Killian Hall, MIT, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

Animated films by Kate Matson with jazz improvisation by the FiLmprov Ensemble: Peter Bloom, Mark Harvey, Jay Keyser, Bill Lowe, Chris Rakowski, and Phil Scarff

Presented by MIT Music and Theater Arts

Join Kate Matson’s theatre of visual improvisation and the inspired brass band journey through time and space as FiLmprov presents Parade.

The FiLmprov Ensemble includes six renowned improvisers: Peter Bloom, flute and saxophones, Mark Harvey, trumpet, Jay Keyser, trombone, Bill Lowe, bass trombone and tuba, Chris Rakowski, accordion and saxophones, and Phil Scarff, saxophones. These musicians have performed with a wide array of artists, including the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert Ensemble, Natraj, the New Liberty Jazz Band, and Cecil Taylor.

Kate Matson has presented her animated films at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harvard University, MIT, the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, in New York City, among other venues.

http://filmprov.tripod.com

MITing of the Minds 2008
4th Annual MIT Philosophy Alumni Conference
Thu Jan 24, Fri Jan 25, 09:30am-05:45pm, 32-D461

This year’s MITing of the Minds is the Fourth Annual MIT Philosophy Alumni Conference. The conference will showcase recent work in a variety of areas in contemporary philosophy. Presentations will cover topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, and will be accessible to a broad audience. Each day will feature talks by MIT faculty members, current students, and alumni of the graduate program.

Web: http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/mm/

Stay up to date on developments in the phonetics lab — be on the phonetics lab mailing list!

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/phonlab

Publishing Smart: A Hands-on Workshop on Journal Quality Measures and Publisher Copyright Policies

Addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.

WHEN: Friday, January 18, 2 - 3 pm
WHERE: 14N-132, DIRC