academic
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
Recent
- Just presented “Mandarin háishi and the analysis of alternative question disjunction” at the 7th meeting of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics. Comments welcome!
- Just presented “Focus interpretation and covert movement: the dake blocking effect” at the GLOW in Asia Workshop for Young Scholars. Comments welcome!
- My slides from the 2nd International Society for the Linguistics of English conference at BU: “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus”. Comments welcome!
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Areas of Interest
- Broad interests:
- formal cross-linguistic syntax-semantics
Syntax and semantics of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese
computational tools for theoretical linguistics - Narrow interests:
- Mandarin comparatives, focus interpretation, disjunction and alternative questions, hypertext corpora, morphosyntax of Mayan Agent Focus
- Areas of further research:
- semantics of less-studied languages, multidominance and linearization
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 bǐ Comparative [PDF]
Advisors: Christopher Kennedy, Jason Merchant - B.A. with Honors in Linguistics and Mathematics, University of Chicago, June 2007.
Dean’s list 2003-2007. Phi Beta Kappa.
Downloads
Selected papers
“Share to Compare: the Mandarin bǐ Comparative” (preprint) To appear in Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29), Cascadilla Press.
“Sentence-Final Only and the Interpretation of Focus in Mandarin Chinese” (preprint) To appear 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).
“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.
Selected presentations (handouts, slides)
“Mandarin háishi and the analysis of alternative question disjunction”. 7th meeting of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL 7), University of Venice, September 2011.
“Focus interpretation and covert movement: the dake blocking effect”. GLOW in Asia Workshop for Young Scholars, Mie University, Japan, September 2011.
“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.
“On the scope and position of Mandarin sentence-final éryǐ.” Rencontres d’Automne de Linguistique Formelle (RALFe 1) [1st Fall Meeting on Formal Linguistics], University of Paris 8, October 2010.
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.
Teaching
Please view my cv for my teaching experience.