Research

See research by project or publications by year.

Dissertation

• 2014. Movement Out of Focus.  
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation.

Journal articles

27. Accepted with revisions. “Toba Batak manang: Notes on its uses and form.”
    Studies in Language.
26. Accepted with revisions. “Interrogative and standard disjunction in Mandarin Chinese.”  
    Journal of Semantics.
25. Smith, Erlewine, and Sommerlot, 2024. “Voice and pronominal forms in Kayan (Uma Nyaving).”  
    Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 17:1, pages 81–104. DOI: 10524/52527
24. Branan and Erlewine, 2024. “Ā-probing for the closest DP.”  
    Linguistic Inquiry 55:2, pages 375–401. DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00459
23. Erlewine and Nguyen, 2024. “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá.”  
    Asian Languages and Linguistics 5:1, pages 1–33. DOI: 10.1075/alal.23002.erl
22. Branan and Erlewine, 2023. “Anti-pied-piping.”  
    Language 99:3, pages 603–653. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2023.a907013
21. Erlewine and Lim, 2023. “Deriving scrambling with word order freezing.”  
    Glossa 8, pages 1–31. DOI: 10.16995/glossa.8364
20. 2023. “Can parasitic scope-taking movement be pronounced?.”  
    Snippets 44, pages 1–3. DOI: 10.7358/snip-2023-044-erle
19. Erlewine and Lim, 2023. “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction.”  
    Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:3, pages 911–960. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-022-09555-0
18. 2022. “Introduction to the special issue on Austronesian linguistics.”
    Journal of East Asian Linguistics 31:4, pages 439–440. DOI: 10.1007/s10831-022-09245-3
17. Erlewine, Lim, and Branan, 2022. “Revisiting the form of negation in Pangasinan.”  
    Oceanic Linguistics 61:1, pages 166–184. DOI: 10.1353/ol.2022.0015
16. Erlewine and Levin, 2021. “Philippine clitic pronouns and the lower phase edge.”  
    Linguistic Inquiry 52:2, pages 408–425. DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00374
15. Erlewine and New, 2021. “A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese.”  
    Semantics & Pragmatics 14:7, pages 1–54. DOI: 10.3765/sp.14.7
14. 2020. “Anti-locality and subject extraction.”  
    Glossa 5:84, pages 1–38. DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1079
13. Kotek and Erlewine, 2019. “Wh-indeterminates in Chuj (Mayan).”  
    Canadian Journal of Linguistics 64:1, pages 62–101. DOI: 10.1017/cnj.2018.25
12. Erlewine and Kotek, 2018. “Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood.”  
    Linguistic Inquiry 49:3, pages 441–463. DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00263
11. 2018. “Even doesn’t move but associates into traces: A reply to Nakanishi 2012.”  
    Natural Language Semantics 26:3–4, pages 167–191. DOI: 10.1007/s11050-018-9142-6
10. 2018. “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak.”  
    Language 94:3, pages 662–697. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2018.0039
9. 2018. “Clausal comparison without degree abstraction in Mandarin Chinese.”  
   Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36:2, pages 445–482. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-017-9383-y
8. 2017. “Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint.”  
   Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26:1, pages 37–75. DOI: 10.1007/s10831-016-9150-9
7. 2017. “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase.”  
   Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26:4, pages 325–349. DOI: 10.1007/s10831-017-9156-y
6. Erlewine and Kotek, 2016. “Even-NPIs in Dharamsala Tibetan.”  
   Linguistic Analysis 40:3–4, pages 129–165.
5. Erlewine and Gould, 2016. “Unifying Japanese relative clauses: copy-chains and context-sensitivity.”  
   Glossa 1:51, pages 1–40. DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.174
4. 2016. “Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel Agent Focus.”  
   Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 34:2, pages 429–479. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-015-9310-z
3. Erlewine and Kotek, 2016. “A streamlined approach to online linguistic surveys.”  
   Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 34:2, pages 481–495. Tools available at turktools.net. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-015-9305-9
2. Kotek and Erlewine, 2016. “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions.”  
   Linguistic Inquiry 47:4, pages 669–693. DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00226
1. 2012. “Structurally distant haplology.”  
   Snippets 26, pages 7–8. DOI: 10.7358/snip-2012-026-erle

Book reviews

2. 2016. “Review of Yosuke Sato Minimalist Interfaces: Evidence from Indonesian and Javanese.”  
   Oceanic Linguistics 55:1, pages 298–306. DOI: 10.1353/ol.2016.0000
1. 2016. “Review of Yoad Winter Elements of Formal Semantics: An Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Meaning in Natural Language.”  
   Computational Linguistics 42:4, pages 837–839. DOI: 10.1162/COLI_r_00271

Papers in edited volumes

8. Branan and Erlewine, to appear. “Locality and (minimal) search.”  
   Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program.
7. 2023. “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already.”  
   Discourse Particles in Asian Languages, volume 2: Southeast Asia, pages 91–120. DOI: 10.4324/9781351057752-5
6. 2022. “Mandarin exhaustive focus shì and the syntax of discourse congruence.”  
   Particles in German, English, and beyond, pages 323–354. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.224.12erl
5. 2020. “Universal free choice from concessive copular conditionals in Tibetan.”  
   Monotonicity in Logic and Language, pages 13–34. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-62843-0_2
4. Erlewine and Levin, 2018. “Clitic pronouns and the lower phase edge.”
   Heading in the Right Direction: Linguistic Treats for Lisa Travis, pages 136–145.
3. 2017. “Why the null complementizer is special in complementizer-trace effects.”  
   A Pesky Set: Papers for David Pesetsky, pages 371–380.
2. Erlewine, Levin, and Van Urk, 2017. “Ergativity and Austronesian-type voice systems.”  
   Oxford Handbook of Ergativity, pages 373–396. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.16
1. 2013. “Dissociating the syntax and morphological realization of Kaqchikel Agent Focus.”  
   Studies in Kaqchikel Grammar, pages 25–50.

Proceedings papers

37. Hsieh and Erlewine, to appear. “Interpreting Tagalog clitic cluster combinations.”  
    Proceedings of TripleA 11.
36. Erlewine and Levin, to appear. “On the unavailability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel.”  
    Proceedings of Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics 4.
35. To appear. “Sentence-final particles at the vP phase edge.”  
    Proceedings of the 25th North American Conference of Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 25).
34. Hsieh and Erlewine, 2023. “On the scope and position of Tagalog clitic adverbs.”  
    Handbook of the 24th meeting of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences, pages 109–112.
33. Lim and Erlewine, 2023. “Definiteness and indefiniteness in Burmese.”  
    Proceedings of TripleA 7, pages 34–50.
32. Chow and Erlewine, 2022. “Restrictions on the position of exh.”  
    Proceedings of SALT 32, pages 522–542. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v1i0.5403
31. Branan and Erlewine, 2021. “Binding reconstruction and two modes of copy-chain interpretation.”  
    Proceedings of LSA 6, pages 734–745. DOI: 10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5008
30. Erlewine, Levin, and Van Urk, 2020. “The typology of nominal licensing in Austronesian voice system languages.”  
    Proceedings of AFLA 26, pages 71–87.
29. Erlewine and Lim, 2020. “Anti-uniqueness without articles.”  
    Proceedings of SALT 30, pages 430–449. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v30i0.4848
28. 2020. “Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan.”  
    Proceedings of NELS 50, volume 1, pages 227–236.
27. Leong and Erlewine, 2019. “Long-distance dependencies in continuation grammar.”  
    Proceedings of the 33rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 33), pages 114–122.
26. Kotek and Erlewine, 2018. “Non-interrogative wh-constructions in Chuj (Mayan).”  
    Proceedings of the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) 21, pages 101–115.
25. New and Erlewine, 2018. “The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese.”  
    Proceedings of SALT 28, pages 271–288. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v28i0.4442
24. Erlewine and Kotek, 2018. “Focus association by movement: Evidence from binding and parasitic gaps.”  
    Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, pages 399–407.
23. Mizuno and Erlewine, 2018. “Constraints on contrast sluicing.”  
    Japanese/Korean Linguistics 24, pages 201–214.
22. Erlewine and Kotek, 2017. “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese.”  
    Proceedings of LENLS 14.
21. Erlewine and Kotek, 2017. “Movement and alternatives don’t mix: Evidence from Japanese.”  
    Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, pages 245–254.
20. Erlewine and Kotek, 2016. “The structure and interpretation of non-restrictive relatives: Evidence from relative pronoun pied-piping.”  
    Proceedings of the 51st Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 51), pages 149–163.
19. Kotek and Erlewine, 2016. “Intervention effects in relative pronoun pied-piping: experimental evidence.”  
    Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20, pages 448–461.
18. 2016. “Focus association into copies and the scope of even.”  
    Proceedings of SALT 26, pages 855–873. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v26i0.3940
17. 2016. “Multiple extraction and voice in Toba Batak.”  
    AFLA 23: The Proceedings of the 23rd Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, pages 81–95.
16. 水野 輝之、アーリーワイン マイケル芳貴 [Mizuno and Erlewine], 2016. “多重wh疑問文のペアリスト解釈とスルーシング [Sluicing and the pair-list interpretation of multiple wh-questions].”  
    日本言語学会第152回大会予稿集 [Proceedings of the 152nd meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan], pages 204–209.
15. Erlewine and Kotek, 2016. “Tanglewood untangled.”  
    Proceedings of SALT 26, pages 224–243. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v26i0.3785
14. Kotek and Erlewine, 2016. “Unifying definite and indefinite free relatives: Evidence from Mayan.”  
    Proceedings of NELS 46, volume 2, pages 241–254.
13. Erlewine, Levin, and Van Urk, 2015. “What makes a voice system? On the relationship between voice marking and case.”  
    AFLA 21: The Proceedings of the 21st Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, pages 51–68.
12. 2015. “Minimality and focus-sensitive adverb placement.”  
    Proceedings of NELS 45, volume 1, pages 193–202.
11. 2014. “Explaining leftward focus association with even but not only.”  
    Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 18, pages 128–145.
10. 2014. “Anti-Locality and Kaqchikel Agent Focus.”  
    Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 31), pages 150–159.
9. Erlewine and Gould, 2014. “Interpreting Japanese Head-Internal Relative Clauses.”  
   Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 31), pages 160–169.
8. Erlewine and Kotek, 2014. “Intervention in focus pied-piping.”  
   Proceedings of NELS 43, volume 1, pages 117–130.
7. 2014. “Subject marking on non-subjects in Squliq Atayal.”  
   Proceedings of the 20th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 20).
6. 2014. “Alternative questions through focus alternatives in Mandarin Chinese.”  
   Proceedings of the 48th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 48), pages 221–234.
5. 2012. “Share to Compare: the Mandarin bǐ Comparative.”  
   Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29), pages 54–62.
4. 2012. “The effect of ‘only’ on quantifier scope: the dake blocking effect.”  
   Proceedings of the GLOW in Asia Workshop for Young Scholars, pages 72–86. DOI: file:///Users/mitcho/Dropbox/academic/projects/dakeshika/glowyoungscholars/06Erlewine.pdf
3. 2010. “Sentence-final only and the interpretation of focus in Mandarin Chinese.”  
   The Proceedings of the 22nd North American Conference of Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 22) and the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL 18), pages 18–35.
2. 2009. “Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface.”  
   Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR 2009 Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World, pages 45–48.
1. 2008. “The verbal nature of Mandarin comparative bǐ.”
   Proceedings of the National Conference on Linguistics 2008.

Edited volumes

3. Edited by Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2017. Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XI, volume 1.  
   MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
2. Edited by Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2017. Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XI, volume 2.  
   MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
1. Edited by Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka and Yasutada Sudo, 2014. Proceedings of the MIT Workshop on Comparatives.  
   MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.

MA thesis

• 2007. “A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bǐ Comparative.”  
  University of Chicago MA thesis.

Manuscripts

• Erlewine and Sommerlot, 2024. “Voice and extraction in Malayic.”  
  Manuscript, University of Helsinki and National University of Singapore.
• Hsieh and Erlewine, 2024. “Determining the scope of Tagalog clitic adverbs.”  
  Presented at LSA 100.
• Erlewine and Nguyen, 2022. “Pre- and post-predicate degree morphemes in Vietnamese: Heads vs phrases.”  
  Manuscript, National University of Singapore.
• Erlewine and Kotek, 2018. “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese.”  
  Manuscript, National University of Singapore and Yale University.
• 2015. “In defense of Closeness: focus-sensitive adverb placement in Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese.”  
  Manuscript, McGill University.
• Kotek and Erlewine, 2015. “Relative pronoun pied-piping in English non-restrictive relatives.”  
  Manuscript, National University of Singapore and McGill University.
• Kotek and Erlewine, 2013. “Blocking effects in English causatives.”  
  Manuscript, MIT.

Selected talks

• Smith and Erlewine, 2024. “Emergence of passive voice in Central Borneo.”  
  Presented at the SLE 57 workshop on passivization.
• Erlewine and Sommerlot, 2024. “The Malayic verbal phase and Cyclic Linearization.”  
  Presented at AFLA 30, LSA 100, NELS 54.
• Erlewine and Smith, 2024. “On the syntax of the analytic passive in Kenyah.”  
  Presented at the First International Sympsium on Bornean Linguistics (ISBL1).
• 2023. “Cross-linguistic variation in ordinary vs interrogative disjunctions.”  
  Presented at the 14th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation (TbiLLC 14) and Workshop on Logical Operators at the 8th Bucharest Colloquium of Language Acquisition (BUCLA 8).
• 2023. “Learning the organization of the verbal phase in Philippine-type and Indonesian-type languages.”  
  Presented at the 26th International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 26) and the Workshop on Verbal Domains, University of Newcastle.
• Erlewine and Sommerlot, 2023. “Malayic active voice meN-: One prefix or two?.”  
  Presented at the Linguistic Society of Japan and the Affixes symposium, University of Turku.
• Nguyen and Erlewine, 2022. “Biased polar questions in Vietnamese.”  
  Presented at TripleA 9.
• Branan and Erlewine, 2021. “Is there focus-marking in the syntax?.”  
  GLOW 44 targeted collaborative debate.
• Lim and Erlewine, 2021. “Argument apposition in Pangasinan.”  
  Presented at AFLA 28.
• 2020. “Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan and beyond.”  
  Invited talk at TripleA 7.
• 2020. “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan.”  
  Presented at the University of Helsinki, the Workshop on Comparative Syntax in East and Southeast Asia at Sogang University, the University of Edinburgh, and Goethe University of Frankfurt.
• 2019. “Long-distance relativization in Tibetan.”  
  Presented at LSA 93.
• 2019. “Wh-quantification in Alternative Semantics.”  
  Presented at GLOW in Asia XII, Dongguk University, Seoul.
• Erlewine and Kotek, 2018. “Intervention tracks scope-rigidity in Japanese.”  
  Presented at LSA 92.
• 2017. “Quantifying over alternatives with Toba Batak manang.”  
  Presented at AFLA 24, TripleA 4.
• 2016. “Encoding QUD congruence in Mandarin Chinese.”  
  Presented at European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL) 9 (2015) and Theoretical Linguistics at Keio 2016.
• 2016. “The locus of Mandarin sentence-final particles and the Final-over-Final Constraint.”  
  Invited talk at the Workshop on Word Order of Heads, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• 2011. “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus.”  
  Presented at the International Society for the Linguistics of English (IsLE 2), Boston University.

Software

• turktools: tools to simplify the development of experimental stimuli for running linguistic experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Described in this paper.
• A universal natural language parser for Ubiquity, an experimental multilingual natural language interface, as described in this paper.

See other software.