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, disjunction, discourse structure
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

My work has investigated:

• Austronesian: Toba Batak (Indonesia), Bikol, Pangasinan (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 (AY2020–21 Sem 2)

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

Upcoming

• April 15–17: Co-organizing GLOW 44 with the rest of the GLOW Board, and discussing “Is there focus-marking in the syntax?” with Kenyon Branan
• May 8: ICU Linguistics Colloquium talk
• May 25–28: Co-hosting AFLA 28 with McGill!
• June 21–27: Hosting TripleA 8!

Recent

• We’re hiring a post-doc! Apply here — deadline: May 10
• Revised paper, April 2021: “A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese” with Keely New
• Talk, March 2021: Invited talk at (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ((F)ASAL) 11
• New paper, February 2021: “Binding reconstruction and two modes of copy-chain interpretation”, in the Proceedings of the LSA
• New draft, February 2021: “Locality and (minimal) search” with Kenyon Branan, for the Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism. Comments welcome!
• February 2021: I am honored to have contributed to Resources for Equity and Inclusivity in Linguistics, a guidebook for conference organization in Linguistics
• January 2021: I received the Faculty Inspiring Mentor Award!
• Talks, January 2021: At the virtual LSA:
  • “Word order and disambiguation in Pangasinan” with Joey Lim
  • “Binding reconstruction and the types of traces” with Kenyon Branan
• A pair of new papers, December 2020: on nominal interpretation in Burmese with Meghan Lim:
  • “Anti-uniqueness without articles” in the Proceedings of SALT 30
  • “Definiteness and indefiniteness in Burmese” to appear in the Proceedings of TripleA 7
• Paper published, December 2020: “Universal free choice from concessive copular conditionals in Tibetan”, and associated talk presented at the Tsinghua Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning
• Revised paper, November 2020: “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan
• Revised paper, October 2020: “Mandarin exhaustive focus shì and the syntax of discourse congruence”
• Paper published, October 2020: “Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan”, in the Proceedings of NELS 50

Less recent but still pretty good

• “Anti-locality and subject extraction” in Glossa, August 2020
• My lectures on focus at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG) 22, August 2020, are available on YouTube.
• My talk “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan”, presented at Goethe University Frankfurt, July 2020, is on YouTube
• Workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at NUS, June 2019
• “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language, September 2018