Here I list a number of earlier projects.

Blocking effects in English analytic causatives

“Blocking” of productive, analytic causative forms by the existence of listed, lexical causative forms has been well studied in Japanese, but has been previously thought to not exist in English. In joint work with Hadas Kotek, we have identified an environment where causative blocking effects do in fact appear in English. We argue that the blocking effect is sensitive not to structural adjacency, as previously argued for Japanese (Harley, 2008), but instead to linear adjacency. The sensitivity to linear adjacency shows that the operations relevant to the blocking effect must occur post-linearization, and therefore contributes to our understanding of the timing of post-syntactic operations.

• Kotek and Erlewine, 2013. “Blocking effects in English causatives.”  
  Manuscript, MIT.

Semantic fieldwork on definiteness

I have recently advised and collaborated with some students on projects related to nominal interpretation in understudied languages of Southeast Asia, specifically Burmese and Bikol (Austronesian). One such project, with my student Meghan Lim, investigates the interpretation of different forms of nominal arguments in Burmese, an article-less language. We show that Burmese morphologically distinguishes anaphoric and uniqueness definites, and forms singular indefinites with the numeral ‘one.’ In our SALT paper, we propose that the antiuniqueness inference of indefinites derives from a Non-Triviality constraint on the adjunction of ‘one,’ rather than a more traditional explanation based on Maximize Presupposition.

• Lim and Erlewine, 2023. “Definiteness and indefiniteness in Burmese.”  
  Proceedings of TripleA 7, pages 34–50.
• Erlewine and Lim, 2020. “Anti-uniqueness without articles.”  
  Proceedings of SALT 30, pages 430–449. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v30i0.4848