MIT Linguistics

Our summer hiatus

With this issue, our page and its sister publication Whamit! announces its usual summer hiatus. We will resume weekly posts in the Fall — but, as always, we will be here all summer with any breaking news from MIT Linguistics that may reach us. Have a great summer!

The student editors of Whamit:
Bingzi Yu and Alma Frischoff

Whamit→Facebook transfer editor
Zachary Feldcamp

Faculty editor:
David Pesetsky
(who thanks Bingzi, Alma, and Zack for their great work throughout the year — and MIT Linguistics as a whole, for giving us such great stuff to write about)

https://whamit.mit.edu

Commencement 2026!

On May 28, MIT held its Commencement ceremonies. We could not be more proud of our students who received their diplomas at this year’s ceremonies!

→ Congratulations to our undergraduate majors Miguel Buitrago, Ellie Bultena, and Olivia Honeycutt, who were awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science (S.B.) in Linguistics!

→ Congratulations to Ukhengching Marma, William Pacheco, and Ogloo Jurkhaichin, who were awarded the degree of Master of Science (S.M.) in Linguistics for their work in the MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative program!

→ And congratulations to Omri Doron, Adele Mortier, Giovanni Roversi, and Yash Sinha, who were awarded the degree of PhD in Linguistics!

A remarkable group even by the standards of our remarkable field. We rejoice in your achievements at MIT and cannot wait to see what you all do next!!

Benbaji-Elhadad to Tübingen

Congratulations to our dissertating student Ido Benbaji-Elhadad, who will be starting a post-doc position this summer at the University of Tübingen, in the DFG-funded project on “The Common Ground” led by Prof. Michael Franke and Dr. Todd Snider!

https://idobenbaji.github.io/

the project: https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/core-research/collaborative-research-centers/crc-common-ground/

Ido Benbaji-Elhadad Research in semantics and its interfaces with syntax and pragmatics.

Benbaji-Elhadad defends!

Last Friday, June 5, Ido Benbaji-Elhadad brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation, entitled "Worlds, Times and the fate of Ontological Symmetry".

Here is the abstract:

"Thanks to a dedicated set of intensional operators—e.g., modals, attitude predicates, tense operators, and temporal adverbials—natural language is able to convey information about things beyond the concrete here and now; a feature famously termed displacement (Hockett 1960). In model-theoretic semantics, modal and temporal displacement are standardly cashed-out by treating declarative utterances as functions from worlds and times to truth values. Intensional operators like modals are then taken to quantify over possible worlds, while tense operators quantify over time intervals. Despite these operators’ distinct domains, a long-standing semantic assumption holds that worlds and times should receive parallel formal representations; namely, that the same grammatical machinery, whatever it may be, governs both world-dependence and time-dependence in natural language.

"Recently, Schmitt (2023) observed that worlds are special in that they do not seem to pluralize and partake in cumulative relations. In my thesis, I show that Schmitt’s claim is necessary to account for an earlier observation, that DPs cannot scope above a modal operator that in turn determines the evaluation domain of their restrictor. The reading that would be derived from this unavailable scopal configuration, I argue, can also be derived without it, as a cumulative reading with a plurality of worlds. Hence, without Schmitt’s ban on cumulative readings with worlds, a reading long thought to be unavailable is predicted to be attested for certain modal sentences.

"Building on observations by Szabo (2010,2011), I then show that the same reading that is unattested with modal operators is attested with temporal ones, and furthermore, that it is attested exactly because the way time intervals are introduced into the semantic derivation is not subject to a constraint similar to the one we must posit to prevent overgeneration in the modal case. I explore the implications of this disanalogy between worlds and times for the design of the semantic formalism and its representation of the world and time dependence of utterances."

Congratulations, Ido!!

Ido's website: https://idobenbaji.github.io/

Wehbe defends!

Last Tuesday, June 2, Jad Wehbe superbly and successfully defended his dissertation, entitled "Plural Predication and Scope".

Here is the abstract:

"A central question in formal semantics concerns the division of labor between lexical semantics and the compositional system. Given a particular inference pattern, we can ask whether this inference is encoded in the lexicon or whether it arises from a particular syntactic interaction between different compositional ingredients. This question is especially important in the domain of plural predication, where prominent accounts attribute different types of phenomena to generalizations over the lexical meanings of predicates. This thesis addresses this question through three case-studies: (i) cumulative inferences, (ii) reciprocal alternations, and (iii) the contribution of together. I argue for a framework for plural predication in which these different phenomena result from scope interactions between a limited set of syntactic operators, including pluralization operators and other scope-taking elements. Thus, I argue for a more impoverished lexicon and a richer syntax in the domain of plural predication.

"The scope-based account I argue for faces an immediate explanatory challenge: while lexical analyses can appeal to lexical stipulations to capture the distribution of readings in each construction, the scope-based account appears to overgenerate unattested readings. I argue that these lexical stipulations can be replaced by independently motivated grammatical constraints that cut across different constructions. More specifically, I propose that two such constraints play a key role in plural predication: (i) a generalized economy constraint, inspired by Fox’s (2000) scope economy, which rules out LFs when they can be proven to be equivalent to simpler LFs and (ii) a constraint that requires implicit arguments to take lowest scope (Fodor and Fodor, 1980). The result is a framework where the different ingredients of plural predication are in principle free to take scope in different positions, as long as they don’t violate these independently needed constraints.

"Finally, the scope-based account I argue for has some broader architectural consequences. The first consequence concerns the nature of economy constraints in the grammar. I show that in order to predict the desired distribution of readings, the generalized economy constraint has to be evaluated relative to an encapsulated system which only has access to some of the information that is needed to compute truth-conditions. My account therefore provides a new domain where we see evidence for a modular deductive system (following Fox, 2000; Gajewski, 2002; Fox and Hackl, 2006, a.o.). The second consequence concerns universal constraints that determine what kinds of meanings can be lexicalized in a single lexical item. I explore the idea that there is an economy constraint on lexicalization, which optimizes the expressive power of the lexicon, relative to its size. This constraint essentially predicts that inferences which can be generated independently in the syntax can’t be encoded in the lexicon.

Congratulations, Jad!!

Jad's website: https://jadwehbenet.wordpress.com/

New journal announcement: Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL) — includes paper by Aonuki in first issue!

A new journal in semantics is here: Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL), a diamond open-access journal dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages and the scholar-owned, scholar-led successor to Natural Language Semantics.

There are several MIT connections to the launch:

→ Irene Heim, founding co-editor of Natural Language Semantics, is one of the signers of the open letter

→ Danny Fox and Kai von Fintel are on the editorial board

→ Three of the first five accepted articles are MIT-connected:
• Yurika Aonuki (4th year): Scale-sensitivity of comparatives and measure phrase interpretations in Gitksan
• Keny Chatain (PhD 2021) & Philippe Schlenker (PhD 1999): ­Local Pragmatics Redux: Presupposition Accommodation Without Covert Operators
• Jingyi Chen & Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006): Being pragmatic about anankastic conditionals

journal site: https://snl-journal.org
Yurika's paper:https://snl-journal.org/media/journals/58/Aonuki-SNL-preprint.pdf

snl-journal.org

Congratulations to the amazing William Pacheco! We celebrated his thesis in the department today. We're all looking forward to seeing what he does next, as he enters the linguistics program at the University of New Mexico. He's promised to stay in touch, which is good news for all of us. What new complexities of his language will he illuminate? And how many new software apps will he create while he's doing it? We can't wait to find out.

Congratulations to Devon (S.M. 2022), a graduate of our MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative Master’s Program (MITILI) program!

Devon Denny, a 3rd year graduate student in our Ph.D. program, was just awarded a "Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research" grant from the American Philosophical Society to develop his "Diné Bizaad Language Project", which will involve working with speakers of the Navajo Nation to better understand aspects of questions in Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Congratulations, Devon!

Prof. S***a Momma to join MIT Linguistics faculty!

We are as delighted as can be to announce that S***a Momma will be joining our faculty as Associate Professor of Linguistics this Fall. Prof. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production, an area in which he is a true pioneer.

S***a comes to us from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has been an Assistant Professor since 2019. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2016, with a dissertation directed by our alum Colin Phillips (PhD 1996), and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego with Vic Ferreira. Asked about his thoughts and plans as our newest faculty member, S***a wrote:

”I’m deeply honored and excited to be joining the MIT linguistics department, which has been home to so many people I deeply respect, past and present. I’m looking forward to learning from my future colleagues and to building a vibrant intellectual community together. My research aims to understand how people construct sentences in their minds during both comprehension and production, drawing on insights from linguistics and cognitive science more broadly. I’m confident that exciting new research directions will emerge at MIT - something I already began to experience during my visit in 2023.”

Welcome! We can’t wait for you to join us!

https://websites.umass.edu/snegishi/research/

Phonology Circle - Hani Al Naeem (MIT)

Speaker: Hani Al Naeem (MIT)
Title: On the nature of emphasis spread in Jordanian Arabic
Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: The phenomenon of emphasis spread (ES), a type of tongue root harmony in Arabic, is triggered by emphatics, coronal obstruents with a secondary posterior articulation near the upper pharyngeal wall. The most salient effect of ES is the backing of adjacent low vowels, with notable directionality differences in the extent and magnitude of this effect. While previous works agree that leftward ES is more robust (i.e. has a uniform effect and broader span) than rightward ES, there have been differences in the descriptions of the two patterns of spreading and in the analyses thereof. This work reconsiders the empirical description of ES in Jordanian Arabic (JA) based on data from a production experiment and provides a novel analysis of the phenomenon. The JA data reaffirm that ES uniformly lowers F2 in all leftward low vowels within a stem, while the effect gradually fades out to the right. I argue that this asymmetry reflects two distinct underlying mechanisms, feature harmony and coarticulation. Following Hayes & Londe (2006), feature changing effects are modeled through a distal constraint targeting leftward segments non-locally and a local constraint iterating to a right-adjacent vowel. Once those effects are accounted for, a model of coarticulation that is informed by the locus equation and vowel undershoot (Flemming 2001) is proposed as a basis for the residual coarticulatory rightward effects. I claim that the present analysis provides an explanation of the directional asymmetry in ES and clarifies the nature of the long-distance rightward effects by attributing them to a phonetic mechanism, explicitly modeled.

Phonology Circle - Hani Al Naeem (MIT) Speaker: Hani Al Naeem (MIT) Title: On the nature of emphasis spread in Jordanian Arabic Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: The phenomenon of emphasis spread (ES), a type of tongue root harmony in Arabic, is triggered by emphatics, coronal obstruents with a secondary posterior articula...