Michael Yoshitaka ERLEWINE (mitcho)

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine mitcho

Singapore Assistant Professor National University of Singapore.

Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (Department of English, Linguistics, and Theater Studies). 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.

Movement: (anti-)locality, (anti-)pied-piping, extraction restrictions, interactions with case and agreement, the interpretation of movement chains
Alternatives: focus, focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation

My work has investigated:

Austronesian: Toba Batak, Rejang (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.

August 2022: NUS news feature
Paper published, June 2022: “Revisiting the form of negation in Pangasinan” with Joey Lim and Kenyon Branan has appeared in Oceanic Linguistics
Talk, June 2022: “Biased polar questions in Vietnamese” with Anne Nguyen at TripleA 9
Talk, June 2022: “Restrictions on the position of exh” with Keng Ji Chow at SALT 32:
Revised paper, June 2022: “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan
Paper accepted, April 2022: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, to appear in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Revised paper, April 2022: “Locality and (minimal) search” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in the Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism
New paper, January 2022: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen
Paper accepted, November 2021: “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry