Huge congratulations to M&M lab members who celebrated their graduations this week, including Natalia Bermudez (AB '22), Joanna Alstott (AB '22), Josh Martin (PhD '22) and Ethan Wilcox (PhD '22)!

Shannon Bryant, Giuseppe Ricciardi, and Kate Davidson recently visited UPenn to present short talks at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 2. Shannon presented some of her dissertation work in the MM Lab on "Are they touching? Contact and pronoun choice in English prepositional phrases", Giuseppe presented joint work with Ted Gibson on "Are they touching? Contact and pronoun choice in English prepositional phrases" and and Kate presented joint work with Masoud Jasbi and Natalia Bermudez on "Logical connectives: An extendable experimental paradigm". Shannon and Kate even got to take the train to Philadelphia!

Josh Martin defended his dissertation on Compositional routes to (non)intersectivity, which investigates how adjectival/nominal modification works on the morphosyntactic, syntactic, syntactic/semantic, and semantic/conceptual levels, by paying special attention to edge cases such as privative adjectives (his committee was Kate Davidson, Jonathan Bobalijk, and Gennaro Chierchia). We're very lucky that Josh will still be near Cambridge next year, in his new position working at Spotify's Boston offices. Huge congratulations, Josh!!

Ethan Wilcox defended his dissertation, titled Informative presupposition and accomodation (committee co-chaired by Roger Levy and Kate Davidson, with Gennaro Chierchia). Ethan's project involved extensive quantitative data collection on presupposition accommodation across wide varieties of contexts, and a theoretical proposal for what accounts for such variation in accommodation across triggers. Next year he'll be doing a postdoc at ETH in Zurich. Huge congratulations, Ethan!!

Kate Davidson and Yuhan Zhang recently returned from Chicago to present at the 58th annual conference of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Yuhan presented her work with Kate on "Competing de dicto terms reduce de re acceptability" (pictured) and Kate presented an invited talk on "Semiotic distinctions in compositional semantics".

Josh Martin (PhD class of 2022) accepted a job to start this summer as a User Research Analyst witb Spotify - huge congratulations!!! And lucky us, he'll be working at the Spotify offices right here in Boston!

The Human Sentence Processing (HSP, formerly CUNY) conference will have several presentations by lab members and friends of the lab, including a poster by Shannon Bryant on "Expectation as a predictor of pronoun acceptability in English prepositional phrases", a poster by Ethan Wilcox, Roger Levy, and Kate Davidson on "How anaphoric are presupposition triggers? Evidence from cataphora", and an invited talk by Kate Davidson on "A framework for parallel sources of sentence meaning".

Congratulations to Ankana Saha, who recently received a graduate student award from the Mind, Brian, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard to support her participation in NASSLLI this summer at the University of Southern California! 

Several folks in the lab are giving presentations at the LSA this January: "Accounting for variability in the truth-evaluation of bare epistemic possibility statements" by Giuseppe Ricciardi and Josh Martin, "Privatives across phases: disambiguating the sources of adnominal modification," by Josh Martin, "Location, Location, Location: Anaphora selection in English locative prepositional phrases," by Shannon Bryant, "Narrow Scoping Content Question Items in Shifty Contexts: A Case of Surprising Non-Quotation in Uyghur," by Jack Rabinovitch, "Demonstrative Shift and Proximal Markedness," by Tess Monks and Kate Davidson, and "Depictive versus patterned iconicity and dual semantic representations," by Kate Davidson

A recent beautiful New England fall day near our lab meant some turkey visitors, a bubble tea break, and urban breakthrough blooms