Whamit!

Sad news has reached us of the passing of our very distinguished alum Stephen R. Anderson (PhD 1969), a foundational contributor to many areas of linguistics, especially phonology and morphology. Steve belonged to one of the first generations of graduate students in our department, and had a a long and illustrious career serving our field in many capacities: research, teaching, administration, popularization. He held professorships at Harvard, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins — and finished his career as the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics (and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science) at Yale from 1994 to his retirement in 2017, serving as Linguistics department chair for many years, and helping to revitalize the department in many ways.

Throughout his long career, Steve worked on foundational issues in phonology and morphology — focusing on the ways in which underlying grammatical structure is revealed and expressed in phonological form, but also on important issues in syntax and the place of human language in human cognition and across species more generally. Steve also conducted original fieldwork on a variety of languages including Kwakiutl and Abkhaz. To name just a few of his contributions to the most basic questions of the field:

1. the interaction or separation between basic grammatical modules (morphology and phonology (below b); phonology and phonetics (LI 1981:493ff); morphology and syntax: LI 1982:571ff; Amorphous Morphology CUP 1992)
2. a broad classification of phonological rules by the amount of morpho-syntactic information they must refer to: J.Linguistics 1:181ff
3. the principles that govern rule ordering (thesis and papers on ‘local ordering’ in the 1970s: LI 1970:387ff; LI 1972:253ff; and his groundbreaking first book The Organization of Phonology Academic Press 1974). This line of research later led to the realization that the phonological cycle applies to segmental processes, not just to stress rules.
4. what properties define human language and how animal communication differs, or doesn’t: Dr.Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language 2004 Yale U Press
5. whether languages with ergative morphological patterns (treating subject of intransitive verbs on a par with direct objects) differ deeply in syntax from languages that lack this property (his answer: “no!”); “On the notion of subject in ergative languages” in Charles Li. (ed) Subject and Topic) 1976 Academic Press
6. whether language universals are or could be emergent consequences of factors unrelated to a human language organ: Yearbook of Morphology 2004, 1–17

Two of Anderson’s ideas are now part of the background knowledge most linguists share, without always associating his name with them:

7. autosegmental behavior is not limited to tone but extends to segmental features, including [±nasal] and [±continuant] (Language 1976:326ff);
8. the morphosyntactic functions of inflectional morphemes are not underlyingly linked exclusively to any specific exponent: Amorphous Morphology 1992 CUP.

Alongside his many research contributions, Steve was a superb citizen of the field, serving as President of the Linguistic Society of America and in leadership capacities in many other organizations, including the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes and the AAAS. Alongside his many publications that expanded our understanding of language itself, he was a pioneering historian of the field, with an abiding interest in the different ways a given phenomenon could be viewed—pursued in his masterful Phonology in the 20th Century. Never a follower (or promoter) of fashion, Steve Anderson was universally respected as a scholar’s scholar and linguist’s linguist. We miss him and honor his memory.

Webpage: https://www.sranderson.net
MIT dissertation: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12964
Yale tribute on the occasion of his retirement: https://fas.yale.edu/…/faculty…/stephen-r-anderson

Speaker: Filipe Kobayashi (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg)

Title: Syntactic constraints on fake indexicals in relative clauses (joint work with Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl and Susi Wurmbrand)

Time: Thursday, October 23rd, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: Fake indexicals (i.e., bound occurrences of 1st and 2nd person pronouns) have a much more restricted distribution when they are bound by relative pronouns than when they are directly bound by an indexical pronoun (Kratzer 2009; Charnavel, Meadows and Sportiche 2025). Contra previous claims that the licensing of fake indexicals in these sentences is tied to verbal agreement or subjecthood, we argue for a new generalization: a relative pronoun can bind a fake indexical only if it is the highest argument in its clause. We then propose an account of this generalization grounded on a particular theory of how relative pronouns are able host person features.

Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Micro-variation is a conspiracy: Condition C, Case and Wholesale Late Merge in Balinese vs. Malagasy
Time: Tuesday, October 21st, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: (joint work with Lena Lohninger)

This talk aims to illustrate the idea that microvariation is an epiphenomenonal conspiracy of the derivation. The focus will be two Malayo-Polynesian languages, Balinese and Malagasy, which share the Austronesian voice/pivot system: one (any) argument per clause is promoted to a syntactically and pragmatically salient status by becoming the so-called pivot.

When the internal argument becomes the pivot, the so-called Object Voice forms a non-canonical passive: the internal argument A-moves high to map into the surface subject, while the agent is not demoted to oblique, but remains a syntactically core argument that is licensed via strict right-adjacency to the verb.

However, the two languages differ with respect to Condition C: while Balinese pivot movement obligatorily reconstructs, and thus feeds connectivity, Malagasy pivot movement does not obligatorily reconstruct, and can thus bleed connectivity. To account for this apparent microparameter, we suggest that, while Malagasy allows Wholesale Late Merge (Takahashi & Hulsey 2009) of the pivot’s restrictor to the high landing site, Balinese does not.

We then provide two possible reasons for this: first, Balinese Object Voice still assigns accusative case to its internal argument, while Malagasy has lost this capacity, with the pivot being only licensed with nominative at the landing site; this forces pivots in the former, but not in the latter, to be early merged entirely at their base position. Evidence will come from asymmetries in multiple extraction, resumptive pronouns, quantifier scope and the inventory of Object Voice morphemes. Second, Balinese, but not Malagasy, exhibits DP-internal head movement to derive the suffixal nature of its determiner, which would be completely countercyclic under any tenable formulation of the Extension Condition.

Speaker: Giuseppe Varaschin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Title: From descriptions to epithets: A structurally uniform account of definites
Time: Wednesday, October 22nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Slurs are nominal expressions that contribute meaning on both the truth-conditional (TC) and use-conditional (UC) dimensions, functioning as constraints on utterance contexts (Kaplan 1999; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2015, i.a.). When such expressions appear as complements of definite determiners, as in the Brazilian Portuguese example in (1), they exhibit a systematic ambiguity (Saab 2022). On one reading — the definite-description reading — the DP refers to the unique individual satisfying the property denoted by the NP (in this case, being rural). On the other — the epithet reading — the descriptive property need not hold; it suffices that the referent have epistemically accessible properties that are contextually inferable from that property (e.g. driving a tractor, having a rural accent, wearing rural clothes).
(1) O jeca chegou.
??the JECA arrived
??‘The hillbilly arrived.’

Prior analyses derive this split via structural ambiguity inside the DP (Patel-Grosz 2014; Orlando & Saab 2020, i.a.). In this talk I defend a structurally uniform alternative, where the interpretive differences between descriptive and epithet readings follow from two main ingredients: (i) an optional type-shifting operation — encoded by a syntactic EX feature (Gutzmann 2019) and correlated with prosodic deaccenting (Umbach 2002) — that moves NP content from the TC to the UC dimension; and (ii) the presence or absence of a pronominal index associated with the D head (Schwarz 2009; Jenks & Konate 2022). Under the epithet derivation, the NP property is mapped to a contextually determined superset that serves as a constraint on assignments for the index introduced by D; this mapping to a superset (defined by epistemically accessible properties) accounts for the misdescription tolerance characteristic of epithet readings. Because the property is shifted from the TC to the UC dimension where it is a function on contexts, it cannot address relevant QUDs. I show that the same interpretive mechanism also accounts for referential readings of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1966; Gutzmann & McCready 2014, i.a.). Drawing on novel Brazilian Portuguese data involving modification, iteration, binding, and ellipsis, I argue that this analysis is not only conceptually simpler but also more empirically adequate than structural-ambiguity accounts. A key consequence is that DP structure is essentially uniform across definites of all types (slurs, ordinary definites, epithets, and referential pronouns), with variation reducible to fully interpretive lexically-anchored features: whether D supplies a pronominal index, and whether triggers of UC-shifting (correlated with deaccenting) are present on NP nodes.

Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Title: Tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin

Time: Monday, October 20th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: Chengdu Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in southwestern China. Like Standard Mandarin, it has four citation tones, but the tone contours and sandhi patterns differ notably. The table below summarizes the etymological correspondences between tones in the two dialects:

In this talk, we will present acoustic description of both the citation tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin based on recent recordings and propose a constraint-based account that captures most of the observed sandhi patterns. In addition, we raise some interesting yet unsolved puzzles. Among them, we will focus on the phonological representation of the Chengdu dipping tone (T4 in the table above) and its unusual sandhi behavior.

MIT Linguistics was well-represented at NELS 56, held at New York University from October 17–19, 2025. Two of our alums were invited speakers: Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013) of  CUNY, gave a talk titled “Embedded tense: how to learn what some things can(not) mean (joint work with Spencer Caplan)”; and Tanya Bondarenko (PhD 2020), now a Harvard University, gave a talk titled “Selective opacity and clausal embedding”.

Here are the talks and posters presented by our faculty, current students and graduates in recent 10 years:

• Yiannis Katochoritis (3rd year): How I learned to stop worrying about distance and love the covert spec-head
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student), Omri Doron (PhD 2025)[UMass]: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion
• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (dissertating student): Non-de dicto belief: Revision vs replacement
• Si Berrebi (Postdoc): Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study
• Peter Grishin (PhD 2023)[Brown University]: Could the Ban on Improper Movement be about binding after all?
• Tue Trinh (PhD 2011)[University of Nova Gorica], Danny Fox (Faculty, PhD 1998), Itai Bassi (PhD 2021)[ZAS; Ben Gurion University]: A unified theory of meta-questions
• Metehan Ery?lmaz, Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Bo?aziçi University], Ya?mur Sa?: From Numeral to Indefinite: A Kind-Sensitive Pathway in Turkish
• Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018)[UCLA], Gabriela Caballero, Claudia Juárez Chávez: Clitic coalescence in San Juan Piñas Mixtec at the syntax-phonology interface
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016)[University of Crete], Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Onur Özsoy, Caroline Heycock, Georgios Vardakis, Rümeysa Bekta?: Condition C amelioration effects in wh-movement: An interaction between pronominal type and d-linking
• Shigeru Miyagawa (Faculty), Nozomi Moritake, Ken Wexler (Faculty): The Optional Infinitive Stage in Japanese

And more from our alums:

• Terrance Gatchalian, Jessica Coon (PhD 2010)[McGill], Lefteris Paparounas: A unified syntax and semantics of Kanien’kéha statives
• Idan Landau (PhD 1999)[Tel Aviv]: Silent Resumption: A New Test for Ellipsis
• Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD 2023)[Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg], Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl: Fake indexicals in relative clauses: licensing by phase
• Ryan Walter Smith, Mark Baker (PhD 1985)[Rutgers University]: Agentless Presuppositions of again: Meet Obligatory Control
• Jonathan David Bobaljik (PhD 1995)[Harvard]: The Itelmen Inclusive Imperative: Treetops, Clusivity, Allomorphy