academic

mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)

Fourth year graduate student in Linguistics at MIT.

• Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Recent

• I presented “Blocking in English causatives,” with Hadas Kotek, at MIT Ling Lunch.
• I presented “Ergativity without ergative Case,” a talk on Kaqchikel Agent Focus, at MIT Ling Lunch.
• New paper: “Dissociating the syntax and morphological realization of Kaqchikel Agent Focus”, to appear in Studies in Kaqchikel Grammar, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
• New manuscript with Hadas Kotek: “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions”. See also the associated NELS 43 handout: “Diagnosing covert pied-piping”.
• I presented “Locality restrictions on syntactic extraction: the case (but not Case) of Kaqchikel Agent Focus” at WCCFL 31. Handout and slides.
• Last summer (July and August) I was in Taiwan conducting fieldwork on Atayal, supported by an NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute award.

Upcoming

• I’m presenting at the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association 20 meeting (AFLA 20) at UT Austin, May 2013.
• I’m presenting at the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics 25 (NACCL 25) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, June 2013.

Areas of interest

Broad interests:

formal syntax-semantics (primarily of Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English), fieldwork, computational tools and methods

Recent interests:

syntax and semantics of Rooth-Hamblin focus alternative computation and interpretation (Principle of Lexical Association, focus movement, so-called “focus markers,” Beck (2006) intervention effects, strategies for question formation, pied-piping, etc.), morphosyntax of Mayan Agent Focus, notions of adjacency (structural vs linear, as observed affecting vocabulary insertion and linearization), quantification and movement (copy theory and trace conversion, head-internal relative clauses), comparative constructions, hypertext corpora

Downloads

Papers

• To appear: “Dissociating the syntax and morphological realization of Kaqchikel Agent Focus.” Studies in Kaqchikel Grammar, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
• To appear: “Alternative questions through focus alternatives in Mandarin Chinese.” Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 48.
• 2012: “Structurally distant haplology” in Snippets 26.
• 2012: “The Effect of ‘Only’ on Quantifier Scope: the Dake Blocking Effect.” In Proceedings of the GLOW in Asia Workshop for Young Scholars, pages 72—86.
• 2012: “Share to Compare: the Mandarin bǐ Comparative.” In Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29), Cascadilla Press, pages 54—62.
• 2010: “Sentence-Final Only and the Interpretation of Focus in Mandarin Chinese.” In Proceedings of the 22nd North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-22) and the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-18), pages 18—35.
• 2009: “Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface.” Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR 2009 Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World, pages 45—48.
• 2007: A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bi Comparative. University of Chicago Master’s thesis, May 2007.

Manuscripts

• “Syntactic composition in the Mandarin bǐ comparative”.
• “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions” with Hadas Kotek. See also the associated NELS 43 handout: “Diagnosing covert pied-piping”.

Selected presentations (handouts, slides)

• “Blocking in English causatives,” with Hadas Kotek, MIT Ling Lunch, March 2013.
• “Ergativity without ergative Case,” a talk on Kaqchikel Agent Focus, MIT Ling Lunch, February 2013.
• “Locality restrictions on syntactic extraction: the case (but not Case) of Kaqchikel Agent Focus,” WCCFL 31: handout and slides.
• “Japanese Head Internal Relative Clauses and Maximal Informativenes,” Tokyo Semantics Research Group, Keio University, Tokyo, June 15, 2012.
• “Association with Traces and the Copy Theory of Movement.” GLOW 35 Workshop on Association with Focus, Potsdam, April 1, 2012.
• “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus”. The 2nd Triennial Meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (IsLE 2), Boston University, June 2011.

Software

• Turk Tools: tools to simplify the development of experimental stimuli for running linguistic experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, including a modified version of the Turkolizer (Gibson et al, 2011). Contact me directly if you are interested in using the tools.
• Better Linguist List RSS feeds
• 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.