MIT Linguistics

Tenure for Oikonomou!

News has reached us that our distinguished alum Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016), currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philology at the University of Crete, has been awarded tenure. Great news, Despina, and congratulations!!

Despina's webpage:

Despina Oikonomou Linguistics

Newman & Branan published in STAR!

A paper co-authored by our colleague Elise Newman and alum Kenyan Branan (PhD 2018) of the University of Göttingen has just been published in Syntactic Theory & Research (otherwise known as STAR). Entitled “Paths: the ghosts of features past”, here is the abstract, and here is the link to the paper: https://sites.google.com/view/kbranan/home

"We discuss a set of cases where an adjunct or specifier is neither uniformly opaque nor uniformly transparent for long distance dependencies but rather its transparency is sensitive to other properties of its local context besides adjuncthood/specifierhood. These cases pose a problem for classic analyses of the Condition on Extraction Domains, as non-complements are usually taken uniformly to be islands for extraction. To describe the variable transparency effects observed, we first suggest that each exception to the Condition on Extraction Domains occurs in a multiple specifier environment, like that proposed by Jonathan Nissenbaum (2000, doctoral thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for parasitic gap constructions. We furthermore propose a theory of locality that makes fine-grained predictions about what phrases are accessible for operations external to them. The proposal features a path-based view of locality in dependency formation, where projection of a feature from the goal to the probe’s sister is necessary for a dependency to be well-formed. On our view, the feature projection algorithm allows goals to project their features only when their sisters have certain properties, predicting that complements and second specifiers but not first specifiers are transparent for long distance dependencies."

Congratulations Elise and Kenyan!

Elise's website: https://esbnewman.github.io
Kenyan's website: https://sites.google.com/view/kbranan/home

paper link: https://star-linguistics.org/article/id/23413/

Paths: the ghosts of features past We discuss a set of cases where an adjunct or specifier is neither uniformly opaque nor uniformly transparent for long distance dependencies but rather its transparency is sensitive to other properties of its local context besides adjuncthood/specifierhood. These cases pose a problem for classic ana...

Language Acquisition/LLM Grant for Hackl and Yoon

We were very excited to learn that our colleague Martin Hackl and Yoon Kim of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have been awarded a collaborative research grant from the MITHIC SHASS+ Connectivity Fund, which connects scholars in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) with colleagues from other parts of the Institute.

Their project is entitled “Landmarks of Human Language Acquisition as Benchmarks for LLMs”, described as follows:

"Children acquire their native language from remarkably limited input: roughly 20 million words by age six. This is orders of magnitude smaller than the training data of LLMs exhibiting sophisticated language abilities. How children accomplish this is not fully understood, nor is the extent to which such LLMs employ analogs of human grammatical knowledge. The project aims to establish a set of developmental landmarks of human language acquisition to be used as benchmarks for purpose-designed mini-LLMs endowed with learning biases hypothesized to enable human language acquisition. Successful models may offer clues to increase efficiency in LLMs more broadly (biomimicry)."

Congratulations Martin and Yoon!

Hackl website: https://web.mit.edu/hackl/www/
Yoon website: https://people.csail.mit.edu/yoonkim/

MITHIC announcement: https://mithic.mit.edu/mithic-announces-spring-2026-funded-projects/

MITHIC announces spring 2026 funded projects – MIT Human Insight Collaborative The projects are funded through the MITHIC SHASS+ Connectivity Fund, which connects scholars in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) with colleagues from other parts of the Institute. Many projects involve several collaborating investigators in addition to the co-PIs listed be...

Tenure for Yanovich

News has reached us that our alum Igor Yanovich (PhD 2013) has been been awarded tenure in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. Congratulations, Igor!

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On June 22, Anastasia Tsilia successfully and masterfully defended her dissertation entitled The Grammar of Defeated Expectations: the case of wh-exclamatives. Congratulations, Anastasia!

Here is the abstract:

"This dissertation investigates how the grammar expresses defeated expectations of the speaker or attitude holder through matrix and embedded wh-exclamatives, such as 'Wow, how smart Maria is!' and 'George is surprised at how smart Maria is'. It asks two central questions. First, why do wh-exclamatives morphosyntactically resemble wh-interrogatives cross-linguistically, while behaving differently from both interrogatives and declaratives? Second, what is the role of negation in wh-exclamatives when it appears redundant, not reserving the truth value of the sentence? I show that wh-exclamatives are not merely exclamatory uses of declaratives or interrogatives, and I disentangle the speech act of exclamation from the clause type of wh-exclamatives. I argue that the resemblance between wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives is not accidental: exclamatives are built from interrogatives plus surprise (or a predicate with an equivalent meaning). A wh-exclamative expresses the surprise of the speaker (for root exclamatives) or the attitude holder (for embedded exclamatives) at the answer to the question. I propose that the structure of root exclamatives is wow-type particle + Q, where wow a speaker-anchored surprise/amaze/can’t believe, and that of embedded exclamatives surprise-type predicate + Q. This accounts for their interrogative-like morphosyntax without reducing them to questions semantically: a question asks for an answer, whereas an exclamative expresses or describes surprise at an answer. The analysis has consequences for question embedding. I discuss an expanded typology of clause-embedding predicates, and I introduce a paradigm showing that declarative- and question-embedding surprise as well as matrix exclamatives all have different discourse contributions. I argue that surprise-type predicates need to have access to their prejacent set of propositions, and thus that answerhood operators should not be applied to the question complement before it composes with the predicate.

The second part of the dissertation turns to a cross-linguistically recurrent negation in wh-exclamatives, which I call Cover Negation (e.g., How often have I (not) watched this series!). Examining the phenomenon cross-linguistically, I show that this negation is not expletive and has certain cross-linguistically recurring properties: it resists stress, does not license negative polarity items, permits positive polarity items, often appears with a discourse-initial and or wh all-type material, and is blocked by relative-clause complementizers. I argue that Cover Negation contributes a coverage reading: the speaker is surprised that the actual wh-values instantiate sufficiently many contextually salient categories. Formally, it performs complementation over a contextual cover, a structured set of categories in the wh-domain. I discuss other corners of the grammar where such a wh-domain is attested, as well as open questions.

Anastasia's website: https://www.anastasiatsilia.com

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/