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 languages, especially of Southeast Asia. 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, questions, wh-quantification, QUDs, disjunction
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

My work has investigated:

• Austronesian: Toba Batak (Indonesia), Bikol (Philippines), and Squliq Atayal (Taiwan);
• Tibeto-Burman: Tibetan and Burmese;
• Mayan: Kaqchikel and Chuj (Guatemala);
• Mandarin Chinese; English; Japanese; Vietnamese; Singlish…

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

This semester

• EL5101: Grammatical Analysis
• EL4203: Semantics
• Syntax/semantics reading group

Upcoming

• Late October 2019: NELS 50, presenting the poster “Counterexpectation, free choice, and concessives in Tibetan”
• Mid-December 2019: Workshop on Comparative Syntax in East and Southeast Asia, Sogang University, Korea
• January 2020: LSA
• June 2020: AFLA 27 at NUS, June 4–6, 2020!

Recent

• Postdoc opening! I’m hiring a post-doc in syntax and/or semantics. Come join us and do some great work in Singapore!
• Talks, October 2019: Kenyon Branan and I presented our joint work on “Anti-pied-piping” at two different venues: the University of Southern California and at the Stress-Free Focus Workshop in Vienna
• Talk, September 2019: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” at the University of Helsinki
• New paper, September 2019: “Long-distance dependencies in continuation grammar” with Cara Su-Yi Leong, presented at PACLIC 33
• Paper accepted, September 2019: “Philippine clitic pronouns and the lower phase edge” with Ted Levin, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry!
• New paper, September 2019: Anti-locality and subject extraction. Comments welcome!

• Talk, August 2019: I presented new work in progress, “Wh-quantification in Alternative Semantics” at GLOW in Asia XI in Seoul. Comments welcome. Now with video!

• New paper, July 2019: A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese with Keely New. Comments welcome!
• July 2019: We organized the first (and not last) Singapore Summer Meeting, an informal meeting for fieldworkers. I presented on a focus particle in Tibetan.
• June–July 2019: Fieldwork in Dharamsala, India
• June 2019: I began serving on the Editorial Board of Glossa. Send us your best work!
• June 2019: Kenyon Branan and I held a workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at NUS.
• Talk, May 2019: I presented “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice languages” with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk at AFLA 26.
• Talks, March–May 2019: Anne Nguyen and I presented “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” at SALT 29 and the International Workshop on Degrees and Grammar
• March 2019: I received the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Award for Promising Researcher! And they wrote a profile.
• Paper published, February 2019: “Wh-indeterminates in Chuj (Mayan)” in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics.
• January 2019: I began serving on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Send us your best work!
• January 2019: I was at the LSA and presented:
  • “Long-distance relativization in Tibetan”
  • “Understanding the Austronesian subject-only extraction restriction: Evidence from Bikol topics” with Cheryl Lim

Less recent but still pretty good

• “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces: A reply to Nakanishi 2012” in Natural Language Semantics, December 2018
• “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language, September 2018
• “Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood” with Hadas Kotek in Linguistic Inquiry, July 2018
• “Clausal comparison without degree abstraction in Mandarin Chinese” in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, May 2018.
• Workshop on Current Issues in Comparative Syntax at NUS, March 2018.
• “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase” in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, November 2017.
• Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction at NUS, August 2017. I also presented my own work on anti-locality approaches to quirks of subject extraction.