mitcho Michael Yoshitaka 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 languages, especially of Southeast Asia. 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, questions, wh-quantification, QUDs, disjunction
• the syntax of movement, case, and agreement

My work has investigated:

• Austronesian: Toba Batak (Indonesia), Bikol (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

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

Upcoming

• February 27–28: Presenting “Wh-quantification in Alternative Semantics” at Focus Alternatives: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, Berlin
• March 2: ZAS Semantics Circle
• March 14–15: Presenting “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen at the Workshop on the Comparative Syntax and Semantics of Comparatives, Seoul
• March 27: Tokyo Semantics Reading Group
• April 10–12: Presenting “Universal free choice from concessive conditionals” at the Second Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning
• Summer 2020:
  • AFLA 27 at NUS, June 4–6, 2020! Abstracts due January 15
  • Teaching at the Beijing International Summer School of Linguistics (details TBA)
  • Invited talk at Triple A 7: The semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian languages, July 10–12

Recent

• Talks, January 2020: I was at the LSA and presented…
  • “Anti-pied-piping” with Kenyon Branan, and
  • “Counterexpectation, free choice, and concessives in Tibetan and beyond,”.
• Talk, December 2019: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” at the Workshop on Comparative Syntax in East and Southeast Asia, Sogang University
• Revised paper, December 2019: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim
• Poster, October 2019: I presented “Counterexpectation, free choice, and concessives in Tibetan” at NELS 50
• New paper, October 2019: “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice system languages” with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk, to appear in Proceedings of AFLA 26
• Talks, October 2019: Kenyon Branan and I presented our joint work on “Anti-pied-piping” at two different venues: the University of Southern California and at the Stress-Free Focus Workshop in Vienna
• Talk, September 2019: “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” at the University of Helsinki
• New paper, September 2019: “Long-distance dependencies in continuation grammar” with Cara Su-Yi Leong, presented at PACLIC 33
• Paper accepted, September 2019: “Philippine clitic pronouns and the lower phase edge” with Ted Levin, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry!
• New paper, September 2019: Anti-locality and subject extraction. Comments welcome!

• Talk, August 2019: I presented new work in progress, “Wh-quantification in Alternative Semantics” at GLOW in Asia XI in Seoul. Comments welcome. Now with video!

• New paper, July 2019: A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese with Keely New. Comments welcome!
• July 2019: We organized the first (and not last) Singapore Summer Meeting, an informal meeting for fieldworkers. I presented on a focus particle in Tibetan.
• June–July 2019: Fieldwork in Dharamsala, India
• June 2019: I began serving on the Editorial Board of Glossa. Send us your best work!
• June 2019: Kenyon Branan and I held a workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at NUS.

Less recent but still pretty good

• “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces: A reply to Nakanishi 2012” in Natural Language Semantics, December 2018
• “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language, September 2018
• “Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood” with Hadas Kotek in Linguistic Inquiry, July 2018
• “Clausal comparison without degree abstraction in Mandarin Chinese” in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, May 2018
• Workshop on Current Issues in Comparative Syntax at NUS, March 2018
• “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase” in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, November 2017
• Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction at NUS, August 2017