mitcho Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (Department of English Language & Literature). I study the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). Much of my work is based on fieldwork on understudied and endangered languages. I received my Ph.D. from MIT Linguistics in 2014. In a previous life, I was active in the Mozilla (Firefox) and WordPress open-source communities.

Areas of interest

• syntax and semantics of focus, movement, and scope-taking
• Alternative Semantics: focus, wh, questions, QUDs, disjunction
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

My work has investigated: Mandarin Chinese; English; Japanese; Austronesian: Toba Batak (Indonesia) and Squliq Atayal (Taiwan); Mayan: Kaqchikel and Chuj (Guatemala); Tibetan; Vietnamese; Burmese…

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

This semester

• GET1036 The Logic of Language
• Syntax/semantics reading group

Upcoming

• May–June 2018: Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM) 11
• June 2018: Fieldwork (Tibetan) in Dharamsala
• July 2018: I’ll be in Japan, giving a couple talks.
  • July 14: Kwansei Gakuin University colloquium
  • July 28: Tokai Semantics Workshop
• October 2018: Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions workshop, Konstanz
• October 2018: 3rd Asian Junior Linguists conference (AJL3), University of Hong Kong

Recent

• Poster, May 2018: “The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese” with Keely New at SALT 28
• Paper published, May 2018: “Clausal comparison without degree abstraction in Mandarin Chinese”, has appeared in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.
• Talk, May 2018: “Agent extraction and topicalization in Bikol” with Cheryl Lim at AFLA 25
• Talk, March 2018: “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already”, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
• Paper accepted, March 2018: “Wh-indeterminates in Chuj (Mayan)” with Hadas Kotek has been accepted with the Canadian Journal of Linguistics
• Paper online, March 2018: “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces,” to appear in Natural Language Semantics, is now “online first”
• March 2018: We hosted a Workshop on Current Issues in Comparative Syntax, where I talked about Singlish.
• Talks, January 2018: I was at the LSA in Salt Lake City, presenting…
  • “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice languages” poster with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk
  • “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese” with Hadas Kotek
  • “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already”
• Paper accepted, December 2017: “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak has been accepted with Language! See also the associated talk.
• New paper, December 2017: “Movement and alternatives don’t mix: Evidence from Japanese” with Hadas Kotek, in the Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium
• Paper published, November 2017: “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase” has appeared in a special issue on Vietnamese syntax/semantics of the Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
• New paper, November 2017: “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese” with Hadas Kotek, in the Proceedings of LENLS 14
• November 2017: I edited the Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XI, showcasing work from the conference we held in Singapore in early 2017. It has now appeared with MIT Working Papers in Linguistics! It makes a great gift for friends and family.
• August 2017: I held a “Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction” at NUS. I also presented my own work on anti-locality approaches to quirks of subject extraction.