Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
mitcho
Singapore
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore.
Hello!
I am an Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Professor) in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (Department of English Language & Literature). I received my Ph.D. from MIT Linguistics in 2014. My lab investigates the structure of sentences (syntax) and how these structures map to meaning (semantics). Much of our work is based on fieldwork on understudied languages, especially of Southeast Asia. I serve as Associate Editor at Glossa and on the Editorial Boards of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
Areas of interest
- Movement: locality, extraction restrictions, interactions with case and agreement, the interpretation of movement chains
- Alternatives: focus, focus particles, questions, wh-quantification, disjunction, discourse organization (QUDs), implicature calculation
My work has investigated:
- Austronesian: Toba Batak, Rejang (Indonesia), Bikol, Pangasinan (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.
Upcoming
- June 2022: Presenting “Restrictions on the position of exh” with Keng Ji Chow at SALT 32
Recent
- New paper, January 2022: “Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá” with Anne Nguyen
- Paper accepted, November 2021: “Ā-probing for the closest DP” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry
- Paper accepted, November 2021: “Revisiting the form of negation in Pangasinan” with Joey Lim and Kenyon Branan, to appear in Oceanic Linguistics
- Revised paper, October 2021: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” with Cheryl Lim
- Revised paper, September 2021: “Locality and (minimal) search” with Kenyon Branan, to appear in the Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism
Less recent but still pretty good
- “A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese” with Keely New in Semantics & Pragmatics, June 2021
- “Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan” talk at the ICU Linguistics Colloquium, May 2021, available on YouTube.
- “Anti-locality and subject extraction” in Glossa, August 2020
- My lectures on focus at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG) 22, August 2020, are available on YouTube.
- “Extraction and licensing in Toba Batak” in Language, September 2018