mitcho Michael 芳貴 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, disjunction
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

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

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

Upcoming

• October 2016: Teruyuki Mizuno will present our joint work on contrast sluicing at Japanese/Korean Linguistics 24.
• October 14, 2016: I will present “The locus of Mandarin sentence-final particles and the Final-over-Final Constraint” at the Workshop on Word Order of Heads 中心語詞序研討會 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• December 7–9, 2016: I plan to present “Triggers of fronting in Toba Batak” at the Australian Linguistic Society meeting at Monash University, Melbourne.
• February 2017: The National University of Singapore will be hosting GLOW in Asia XI!

Recent

• New paper, September 2016: “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces: A reply to Nakanishi 2012”.
• Talk, September 2016: I presented “C-T head splitting: Evidence from Toba Batak” at MIT Ling Lunch.
• Talk, September 2016: Hadas Kotek presented our joint work on focus association and Tanglewood constructions at Sinn und Bedeutung 21. See our recent manuscript.
• Talks, August 2016: I presented two talks at Theoretical Linguistics at Keio (TaLK) semantics workshop:
  • “Encoding QUD congruence in Mandarin Chinese”
  • “Contrast sluicing and complementary questions” with Teruyuki Mizuno.
• Paper accepted, August 2016: “Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint,” accepted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
• Paper accepted, July 2016: “Unifying Japanese relative clauses: copy-chains and context-sensitivity” with Isaac Gould, accepted for publication in Glossa, pending minor revisions.
• New paper, July 2016: “Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood” with Hadas Kotek. See also the associated SALT proceedings paper.
• Interview: I was interviewed in the latest issue of Unravel, the accessible linguistics magazine.
• Talk, June 2016: “Multiple extraction and voice in Toba Batak” at Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) 23
• New review, June 2016: My invited book review of Minimalist Interfaces: Evidence from Indonesian and Javanese by Yosuke Sato appeared in Oceanic Linguistics 55(1).
• New paper, May 2016: “Unifying definite and indefinite free relatives: Evidence from Mayan” with Hadas Kotek, to appear in Proceedings of NELS 46.
• Talks, May 2016: Two posters at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 26:
  • “Focus association into copies and the scope of even”;
  • “Untangling Tanglewood using covert focus movement” with Hadas Kotek

Teaching

• 2016–2017 Semester 1: EL5101 Grammatical Analysis