Whamit!

On September 26, our department and colleagues from around the world gathered to celebrate the 60th birthday of our wonderful colleague and section head, Danny Fox!

Fox Fest, organized by his former students — themselves now eminent researchers in their own right — attracted speakers, commentators, poster presenters, and audience from just about everywhere. The Dean of our School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, philosopher Agustin Rayo, began the proceedings with ten full minutes of praise for Danny as not only a brilliant and influential researcher (which we already knew) but as a selfless and wise advisor and colleague to others across the School and Institute. Five talks with commentary followed the Dean’s introduction, and ten posters, along with lots of discussion — and of course the day was concluded with a party.

Capping the celebration was the publication and presentation of a 518-page Festschrift for Danny Fox, full of excellent papers by his peers and colleagues influenced by his work in semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and how all these areas of our field reveal the workings of the human mind.

Photo credits: Jiamu Zhu and social media accounts of Yale Linguistics and Salzburg Linguistics - thank you!
Apologies for the delayed announcement of the great day!

MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) celebrated its 75th anniversary a few weeks ago with a three-day symposium — and it wouldn’t be a celebration without linguists, would it? Two of our faculty colleagues, Norvin Richards (PhD 1997) and Elise Newman (S.B. 2016, PhD 2021), and one of our most eminent alums, Jessica Coon (PhD 2010), participated in different panels of the symposium.

Norvin talked about the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI), which he leads — what it has meant to us as a community, what we have learned about language from it, and what it has meant to its graduates and their communities — the communities for which the entire initiative was created in the first place.

Elise, who double-majored in physics and linguistics at MIT, spoke about the moment she realized that languages can be studied in much the same way physicists have studied the rest of the natural world — and then exemplified this with her own research discovering and explaining some universals of argument structure.

Jessica, a specialist in Mayan languages (and more recently, Iroquoian as well), spoke eloquently about the paths that her graduate study at MIT opened up for her, some things she has discovered in her fieldwork and theoretical investigations, and the paths that she herself now opens up for others through her own teaching and research.

These were intellectually challenging and often moving events, with talks by our colleagues and friends interspersed meaningfully with talks highlighting all the SHASS fields, followed by unusual and fascinating group discussions and Q&A. Happy birthday, SHASS!

Speaker: Nikita Bezrukov (MIT)

Title: Building New Plurals from Old Morphology: Evidence from Armenian

Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: Modern Armenian has two major productive plural suffixes, -er with monosyllabic stems and -ner with polysyllabic stems. These are commonly thought to be historically related, with -ner developing from an earlier sequence -ni-er. I use cross-dialectal evidence, especially from the Van–Shatakh area, to support this reconstruction and then ask how such a change should be modeled formally. Building on Diertani 2011, Alexiadou 2021, and Dali & Mathieu 2021, I treat the development as restructuring of Vocabulary Items over a largely stable nominal structure, involving affix migration, recutting, and changes in the distribution of competing plural exponents.

Speaker: Heidi Durresi (MIT)

Title: Phonetic and phonological sound changes in an agent-based model

Time: 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: At this Phonology Circle I will discuss Gubian et al. (2023), an exemplar-based agent model of phonetic and phonological sound change. Speech data from populations of speakers is used to implement computational agents, the interaction of which can predict shifts and mergers. The design of individual agents is grounded in principles of exemplar theory (Johnson 1997, Pierrehumbert 2001), in which phonological categories emerge in learners from the mapping between words and phonetic exemplars. I will also discuss some examples comparing the predictions of the model and real sound change data, including that of Gheg Albanian (Kapia and Riverin-Coutlée 2024).

The 57th annual meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 57) was hosted by by the City University of New York Graduate Center Linguistics Program October 16-18, 2026. Our alum Athulya Aravind (PhD 2018)[Yale University] was invited as a keynote speaker and gave a talk, entitled “Agreement, anti-agreement and the developing mind”.

The following current students and alums presented their work:

• Zhouyi Sun (5th year): Tigrinya gradable verbs: When verbalizers comparativize
• Zhouyi Sun (5th year), Vlad Orlov (3rd year), and Oddur Snorrason: Concealed pied-piping and 3/4 effects in degree questions in Russian and beyond
• Vincent Rouillard (PhD 2023)[Université Laval]: Deriving Strong Polarity Sensitivity and Locality Effects from Trivalence
• Furkan Dikmen, Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Bo?aziçi University], and Nikos Angelopoulos: Turkish passives have implicit arguments
• Suyeon Yun (PhD 2016)[Chungnam National University]: Perceptual similarity in a single grammar: Repair choice in Mongolian loanwords
• Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015)[Queen Mary University of London]: Outermost wins in Dinka and the theory of nonconcatenative morphology
• Lee Bickmore and Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011)[Princeton University]: Empty morphs in Kiwoso Chaga
• Dalina Kallulli, Ian Roberts, Ur Shlonsky (PhD 1987)[University of Geneva], and Charles Yang: Types of null subjects and the test of tolerance