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, wh, questions, 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
• EL4212: Field Methods in Linguistics (Burmese)
• Syntax/semantics reading group

Upcoming

• March 2019: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen at the International Workshop on Degrees and Grammar: An East Asian Perspective
• May 2019: “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice languages” with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk at AFLA 26 at Western University
• June 2019: A workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at NUS, co-organized with Kenyon Branan
• June–July 2019: Hadas Kotek and I will teach a course on Locality in Syntax at the LSA Summer Institute at UC Davis!

Recent

• Paper published, February 2019: “Wh-indeterminates in Chuj (Mayan)” in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics.
• January 2019: I began serving on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Send us your best work!
• January 2019: I was at the LSA and presented:
  • “Long-distance relativization in Tibetan”
  • “Understanding the Austronesian subject-only extraction restriction: Evidence from Bikol topics” with Cheryl Lim
• Paper published, December 2018: “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces: A reply to Nakanishi 2012” in Natural Language Semantics
• Talk, December 2018: University of Tübingen colloquium
• New paper, November 2018: “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already”; comments welcome!
• Talk, November 2018: University of Chicago colloquium
• New paper, October 2018: “The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese” with Keely New, in the Proceedings of SALT 28.
• Talks, October 2018: I gave two invited talks:
  • Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions, University of Konstanz, with Hadas Kotek;
  • 3rd Asian Junior Linguists conference (AJL3), University of Hong Kong.
• New paper, October 2018: “Focus association by movement: Evidence from binding and parasitic gaps” with Hadas Kotek, in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21.
• Paper published, September 2018: “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language!
• New paper, September 2018: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian subject-only extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim
• Talks, July 2018: I gave a couple of talks in Japan:
  • “Agent extraction and topicalization in Bikol” (joint work with Cheryl Lim), Kwansei Gakuin University colloquium
  • “Wh-quantification in Alternative Semantics,” Tokai Semantics Workshop
• New paper, July 2018: “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese” with Hadas Kotek
• Paper published, July 2018: “Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood” with Hadas Kotek in Linguistic Inquiry
• June 2018: I was in Dharamsala for one month, working on Tibetan
• May–June 2018: I taught a course on syntax and semantics of focus particles at the Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM) 11

Less recent but still pretty good

• “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.
• “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice languages” poster with Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk, LSA 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. I also presented my own work on anti-locality approaches to quirks of subject extraction.