mitcho Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

Linguist, University of Helsinki and National University of Singapore

mitcho mitcho
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine mitcho Singapore Associate Professor National University of Singapore.

Hello!

I am an Associate Professor of English Language & Linguistics at the National University of Singapore and currently a Core Fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. I received my Ph.D. from MIT in 2014. My work investigates the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics), based on the study of English as well as cross-linguistically, with an emphasis on languages of Asia. I serve as Associate Editor of the Journal of Semantics and on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.

Areas of interest

  • Syntax, semantics, and their interface; grammatical variation, learning, and change; English and languages of (Southeast) Asia
  • Movement: (anti-)locality, (anti-)pied-piping, extraction restrictions, interactions with case and agreement, the interpretation of movement chains
  • Focus and alternatives: focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation

My work has investigated:

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

Upcoming talks

  • June: Talks in Tokyo
    • June 8: Sophia University, presenting on voice syntax
    • June 13: Tokyo Semantics Research Group, presenting on interrogative disjunction
    • June 20: Tsuda University
    • June 26: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, presenting on the diachrony of passives with Alex Smith
    • June 28: Aoyama Gakuin University, presenting on Tagalog clitics with Henrison Hsieh
  • July 8–10: Plenary talk at the 38th Journées de linguistique d’Asie orientale (JLAO), Paris
  • July 21: Goethe University Frankfurt syntax colloquium

Recent

Less recent but still pretty good