mitcho Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

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.

Recent

• Revised paper, September 2022: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen
• Paper published, August 2022: “Mandarin exhaustive focus shì and the syntax of discourse congruence”, in the book Particles in German, English, and beyond (Benjamins)
• New paper, August 2022: “Pre- and post-predicate degree morphemes in Vietnamese: Heads vs phrases” with Anne Nguyen
• August 2022: NUS news feature
• Paper published, June 2022: “Revisiting the form of negation in Pangasinan” with Joey Lim and Kenyon Branan has appeared in Oceanic Linguistics
• Talk, June 2022: “Biased polar questions in Vietnamese” with Anne Nguyen at TripleA 9
• Talk, June 2022: “Restrictions on the position of exh” with Keng Ji Chow at SALT 32:
  
• Revised paper, June 2022: “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan
• Paper accepted, April 2022: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, to appear in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
• Revised paper, April 2022: “Locality and (minimal) search” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in the Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism
• Paper accepted, November 2021: “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry

Less recent but still pretty good

• “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.
• “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language, September 2018