MIT Linguistics

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/

MIT Linguistics @ WCCFL 44

This year, the 44th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL44) was held at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City on May 6-8. Some of our current students, faculty and alums presented their work:

• Tamari Berulava (2nd year): Shifting Identity: the Interaction of phi-features, Honorification and Indexical shift

• Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002)[University of Toronto] & Anastasia Tsilia (5th year): What if and its kin

• Norvin Richards (Faculty; PhD 1997): Long-distance agreement by proxy in Passamaquoddy

• Jessica C**n (PhD 2010)[McGill University], Stefan Keine,

• Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez & Michael Wagner (PhD 2005)[McGill University]: Reconsidering Animacy Hierarchy Effects in Mayan: Experimental Evidence from Ch’ol

• Adam Singerman, Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005)[UCL], Susana Bejar, Maka Tetradze: Suppletion as inflection: insights from two endangered languages

• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005)[Meiji Gakuin University], Kimiko Nakanishi: Japanese Free Choice Items at the Syntax–Semantics–Phonology Interface

• Anna Carolina Almeida, Raimundo Cox-Casals, Michael Wagner (PhD 2005)[McGill University]: Adjectival agreement is interpretable: Evidence from summative agreement in Mexican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

• Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013)[CUNY], Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2014)[HSE]: On the (non-) vacuity of the Russian participial present