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 (Department of English, Linguistics, and Theater 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 fieldwork on understudied languages, especially of Southeast Asia. I serve as Associate Editor at Glossa 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
- Alternatives: focus, focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation
My work has investigated:
- Austronesian: Toba Batak, Rejang (Indonesia), Bikol, Pangasinan (Philippines), and Squliq Atayal (Taiwan);
- Tibeto-Burman: Tibetan and Burmese;
- Mayan: Kaqchikel and Chuj (Guatemala);
- Mandarin Chinese; English; Japanese; Vietnamese; Singlish; Turkish…
See the Projects page for descriptions of projects and downloadable papers.
Upcoming
- June 2023: Invited talk at International Symposium on Linguistics and Language Applications (ISLLA), City University of Hong Kong (June 5–8)
- Summer 2023: talks in Japan:
- June 17–18: LSJ 166, on Malayic morphosyntax with Carly Sommerlot
- June 23: Semantics Research Group, Keio University, on Vietnamese degree construction syntax/semantics
- June 24: Waseda University, on focus particle syntax/semantics (anti-pied-piping)
- June 29: Notre Dame Seishin University, Okayama, on the verbal phase in Austronesian languages
- July 8–9: JSLS 24, on Tagalog clitic adverb syntax/semantics with Henrison Hsieh
- June 26–27: Newcastle Verbal Domains workshop (online), presenting on the verbal phase in Austronesian languages
Recent
- Talk, May 2023: “Learning the organization of the verbal phase in Philippine-type and Indonesian-type languages” at ISMIL 26
- Talk, May 2023: “Voice and pronominal forms in Uma Nyaving Kayan” (Alex Smith, Carly Sommerlot, and I/me/myself) at SEALS 32
- Paper published, May 2023: “Deriving scrambling with word order freezing” with Joey Lim has appeared in Glossa!
- Paper accepted, May 2023: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen was accepted with revisions in Asian Languages and Linguistics
- Paper published, March 2023: “Can parasitic scope-taking movement be pronounced?”, in Snippets
- Paper accepted, February 2023: “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan was accepted for publication in Language!
- Talk, January 2023: “Pre- and post-predicate degree morphemes in Vietnamese: Heads vs phrases” with Anne Nguyen at LSA 2023
- Journal special issue, December 2022: I edited the December special issue of the Journal of East Asian Linguistics on Austronesian linguistics. Read my introduction.
- Paper published, December 2022: “Restrictions on the position of exh” with Keng Ji Chow, in the Proceedings of SALT 32
- Paper online, November 2022: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, is now online, to appear in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Less recent but still pretty good
- August 2022 NUS news feature
- “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry
- “A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese” with Keely New in Semantics & Pragmatics, June 2021
- “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” talk at the ICU Linguistics Colloquium, May 2021, available on YouTube.
- “Anti-locality and subject extraction” in Glossa, August 2020
- My lectures on focus at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG) 22, August 2020, are available on YouTube.