Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MIT Linguistics @ ThARL3

On 1st March 2025, the 3rd Theoretical Approaches to Ryukyuan Languages conference (ThARL3) was hosted by University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Cooper Roberts (2nd year student) presented a paper entitled “Another way to allocutively agree in Japonic?”, which compares and contrasts addressee honorification in Japanese and Shuri Okinawan. He suggests a way of analyzing addressee honorification in Shuri inspired by proposals from Shigeru Miyagawa and Akitaka Yamada, but crucially without affix raising (something which Japanese seems to have, but Okinawan seems to not have).

Several of our alumni also participated in the following presentations:

  • Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005)[Meiji Gakuin University]: ??????????????????????? [Comparative and Contrastive Syntax of Okinawan Shuri Dialect and Japanese Indefinite Words]
  • Yusuke Imanishi (PhD 2014)[Kwansei Gakuin University]: The right periphery of Kikai (Amami): evidentiality and complementation
  • Shinsho Miyara (former visiting scholar)[University of the Ryukyus]: ???????? [Vowel system of Okinawan language]