mitcho Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (Department of English Language & Literature). 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

• 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.

Next semester (AY2020–21 Sem 1)

• EL5101: Grammatical Analysis (aka grad syntax)
• EL4203: Semantics
• Syntax/semantics reading group

Upcoming

• “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan at CLS 56
• Teaching at the Beijing International Summer School of Linguistics
• July 14: Goethe University Frankfurt remote invited talk: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan”
• July 20–26: Triple A 7: The semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian languages, online!
  • Invited talk: “Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan”
  • “Definiteness and indefiniteness in Burmese” with Meghan Lim
• August 12–14: Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG) 22
  • Invited lectures on focus
  • “Word order and disambiguation in Pangasinan” with Joey Lim
• August 17–20: “Anti-uniqueness with and without articles” with Meghan Lim at SALT 30
• August 20–22: We’re hosting AFLA 27 around the world!
• September: “Universal free choice from concessive conditionals” at Sinn und Bedeutung 25 online

Recent

• New paper, June 2020: “Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan”, to appear in the Proceedings of NELS 50
• June 2020: I began serving as Associate Editor of Glossa. Send us your best work!
• Paper accepted, May 2020: Anti-locality and subject extraction, to appear in Glossa!
• New draft, May 2020: Ā-probing for the closest DP
• Paper published, May 2020: “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice system languages” with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk, in the Proceedings of AFLA 26
• New draft, May 2020: Universal free choice from concessive conditionals
• New paper, April 2020: Mandarin shì clefts and the syntax of discourse congruence
• Revised paper, March 2020: “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already”
• Talk, February 2020: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” at the University of Edinburgh
• Talks, January 2020: I was at the LSA and presented…
  • “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan, and
  • “Counterexpectation, free choice, and concessives in Tibetan and beyond.”
• Talk, December 2019: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” at the Workshop on Comparative Syntax in East and Southeast Asia, Sogang University
• Revised paper, December 2019: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim
• Poster, October 2019: I presented “Counterexpectation, free choice, and concessives in Tibetan” at NELS 50
• 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!

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

Less recent but still pretty good

• Workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at NUS, June 2019
• “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