Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine mitcho Singapore Associate Professor National University of Singapore.

Hello!

I am an Associate Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore and currently a Core Fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. I received my Ph.D. from MIT Linguistics in 2014. My lab investigates the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). Much of our work is based on the study of historically understudied languages, especially of Southeast Asia. I serve as Associate Editor at Glossa and Journal of Semantics and on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.

Areas of interest

  • Movement: (anti-)locality, (anti-)pied-piping, extraction restrictions, interactions with case and agreement, the interpretation of movement chains
  • Focus and alternatives: focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation

My work has investigated:

See the Projects page for descriptions of projects and downloadable papers.

Upcoming

  • August 2024: Workshop on Mismatches in Information Structure at the SLE annual meeting in Helsinki, co-organized with Silvio Cruschina!
  • September 2024: Sinn und Bedeutung 29, presenting “On the unity of wh and focus alternatives”

Recent