Michael Yoshitaka ERLEWINE (mitcho)

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine mitcho

Singapore Associate Professor National University of Singapore.

Hello!

I am an Associate Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in 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 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
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.

January 2024: LSA annual meeting, presenting a talk on Tagalog clitic adverbs with Henrison Hsieh and a poster on Malayic syntax with Carly Sommerlot
January 2024: NELS 54 at MIT, presenting a talk on Malayic syntax with Carly Sommerlot
June 2024: Hosting ISMIL (International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics) 27 and the first ISBL (International Symposium on Bornean Linguistics) at NUS!
August 2024: Workshop on Mismatches in Information Structure at the SLE annual meeting in Helsinki, co-organized with Silvio Cruschina!

Talk, November 2023: “Cross-linguistic variation in ordinary vs interrogative disjunctions” at the BUCLA8 Workshop on Logical Operators
Talks, October 2023: At AFLA 30, presented:
- “The Malayic verbal phase and Cyclic Linearization” with Carly Sommerlot
- “Interpreting clitic adverb combinations in Tagalog” with Henrison Hsieh
New paper, September 2023: “Voice and extraction in Malayic” with Carly Sommerlot; comments welcome!
Paper published, September 2023: “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan is in Language issue 99.3!
Paper accepted, August 2023: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen was accepted with Asian Languages and Linguistics
Paper published, August 2023: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim, in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Talk, August 2023: “Pronoun-voice interaction in Uma Nyaving Kayan” with Alex Smith and Carly Sommerlot at APLL 15
Talk, August 2023: “Malayic active voice meN-: One prefix or two?” with Carly Sommerlot, at the Turku affixes symposium
Paper published, July 2023: “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already” in Discourse particles in Asian languages volume 2: Southeast Asia