mitcho Michael 芳貴 Erlewine

Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (Department of English Language & Literature). I study the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). Much of my work is based on fieldwork on understudied and endangered languages. I received my Ph.D. from MIT Linguistics in 2014. In a previous life, I was active in the Mozilla (Firefox) and WordPress open-source communities.

Areas of interest

• syntax and semantics of focus, movement, and scope-taking
• Alternative Semantics: focus, wh, questions, disjunction
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

My work has investigated: Mandarin Chinese; English; Japanese; Austronesian: Toba Batak (Indonesia) and Squliq Atayal (Taiwan); Mayan: Kaqchikel and Chuj (Guatemala); Tibetan; Vietnamese…

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

Current teaching

• EL3212 Field Methods in Linguistics: Kristang
• EL4203 Semantics

Upcoming

• August 2017: I am holding a “Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction” at NUS. All are welcome!
• May 11–13, 2017: I’ll give a talk at the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 27) in Padang, Indonesia.
• May 20–21, 2017: I will present on grammatical features of Kristang at the first ever Festa di Papia Kristang (Kristang Language Festival)!
• May 31, 2017: Tsing Hua National University colloquium
• June 2017: I will give a couple talks in Scandinavia:
  • “Quantifying over alternatives with Toba Batak manang” at Triple A
  • “The limits of relexification: The story of Singlish already” at the summer conference of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics.

Recent

• Talk, April 9, 2017: I presented “Quantifying over alternatives with Toba Batak manang” at AFLA 24. Comments welcome!
• Talk, April 5, 2017: I presented “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” at the Berkeley Syntax & Semantics Circle. (Also at GLOW (in Europe) 40 in March.)
• February 2017: We hosted GLOW in Asia XI 🌴 at the National University of Singapore!
• New paper, February 2017: “Focus association by movement: Evidence from binding and parasitic gaps” with Hadas Kotek, to appear in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21.
• New paper, Feburary 2017: “Constraints on constrast sluicing” with Teruyuki Mizuno, to appear in Japanese/Korean Linguistics 24.
• Paper published, February 2017: “Why the null complementizer is special in complementizer-trace effects” has appeared in A Pesky Set: Papers for David Pesetsky! I also designed the cover.
• Paper published, January 2017: “Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint” has appeared in Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26! (See also a recent talk based on this paper.)
• Talks, January 2017: I attended the LSA meeting and presented…
  • “On the unavailability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel” poster with Theodore Levin
  • “C and T in Toba Batak.”
• New paper, December 2016: “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak”, expanding on my AFLA paper. See also my most recent talk on the project.
• Paper accepted, December 2016: “Covert focus movement: Evidence from Tanglewood” with Hadas Kotek has been accepted with Linguistic Inquiry!
• Paper published, December 2016: My paper “Unifying Japanese relative clauses: copy-chains and context-sensitivity” with Isaac Gould has appeared in Glossa!
• Talk, December 2016: I presented “Triggers of fronting in Toba Batak” at the Australian Linguistic Society meeting.
• Talk, December 2016: I presented “Focus and minimality” at Macquarie University.
• Paper accepted, December 2016: “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase” has been accepted with the Journal of East Asian Linguistics!
• Paper published, November 2016: “Focus association into copies and the scope of even” is out in Proceedings of SALT 26.
• Talk, November 2016: Theodore Levin presented our joint work, “On the unavailability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel,” at Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics 4.
• Paper published, October 2016: “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions” with Hadas Kotek has appeared in Linguistic Inquiry 47:4!