academic
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bi Comparative. University of Chicago Master’s thesis, May 2007.
1.1 mb - pdf
1.1 mb - pdf
Recent
- I presented “Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese.” at the International Association of Chinese Linguistics 18 conference at Harvard. Comments appreciated!
- I presented some recent results at MIT Syntax Square from my ongoing work on Mandarin comparative constructions: “Independent Dependency and the Mandarin bǐ Comparative.” Comments appreciated!
- Do you subscribe to Linguist List’s RSS feeds? Get the Better Linguist List RSS Feeds!
- I just wrote The Antisymmetrizer, an online tool which linearizes trees according to the Linear Correspondance Axiom (Kayne, 1994).
Areas of Interest
- Broad interests:
- formal syntax-semantics, cross-linguistic syntax, foreign language pedagogy
Chinese and Japanese syntax-semantics
mathematical and computational linguistics, natural language and web technology - Narrow interests:
- syntax-semantics of Mandarin comparatives, syncategorematic items in Mandarin Chinese, natural language user interfaces
- Areas of further research:
- models of syntactic representation, semantics of less-studied languages, linguistic structures on the Internet, the multilingual web
Education
- PhD student in Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 2009–
- M.A. in Linguistics, University of Chicago, June 2007.
Thesis: A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bi Comparative [PDF]
Advisors: Christopher Kennedy, Jason Merchant - B.A. in Linguistics and Mathematics, University of Chicago, June 2007.
Dean’s list 2003-2007. Phi Beta Kappa.
Software
- The Antisymmetrizer - an online tool which linearizes trees according to the Linear Correspondance Axiom (Kayne, 1994).
- A universal natural language parser for Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs - as described in this paper and in more detail in various blog posts.
Downloads
Papers
“Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface.” Proceedings of the SIGIR 2009 Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World, Boston, July 23, 2009, pp 45-48.
240 kb - pdf
“The Verbal Nature of Mandarin Comparative bi” (preprint). To appear in The Proceedings of the National Conference on Linguistics 2008, Linguistic Society of Taiwan, Taipei, Taiwan, 2008.
164 kb - pdf
164 kb - pdf
A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bi Comparative. University of Chicago Master’s thesis, May 2007.
1.1 mb - pdf
1.1 mb - pdf
Presentations (handouts, slides)
“Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese.” International Association of Chinese Linguistics 18, Harvard University, May 2010.
242 kb - pdf
242 kb - pdf
“Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface.” SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World, Boston, July 2009.
13.8 mb - pdf - [also on slideshare]
13.8 mb - pdf - [also on slideshare]
Teaching
Please visit my teaching page for my teaching experience.