News

BUCLD and Friendsgiving

November 11, 2022
Colorful November in New England has been busy: at the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development we had a great volunteer turnout by lab folks (Hande, Hao, Yuhan, Mikaela, and Irene) and a poster on children's acquisition of negative polarity items with colleagues at Brown ("Negative polarity or negative concord? Some children think ’any’ means ’no’."), and the following week we had a lab Thanksgiving at Kate's place. Happy fall!

Nozomi, Hao, Annemarie, and Kate at TISLR14

September 28, 2022
Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR) 14 was held this week in Osaka, Japan, in a hybrid format. Nozomi Tomita presented her poster "A pointing sign like fillers: One JSL user's discourse journey over time," Hao Lin was a coauthor on a talk with Valentina Aristodemo and Mirko Santoro on "Comparative constructions in sign language: A comparative study between LIS and CSL," and Kate Davidson presented a poster with Annemarie Kocab and (lab alum!) Dorothy Ahn on "Embracing optionality: pragmatic... Read more about Nozomi, Hao, Annemarie, and Kate at TISLR14

Annemarie to Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science

September 23, 2022
We're beyond thrilled to see postdoc Annemarie Kocab head to Johns Hopkins next fall as an assistant professor in their Cognitive Science department! Watch her lab closely in the coming years to understand how human minds give rise to language, and provide answers to the biggest questions in language and cognition informed by sign languages and their origins. Huge congratulations to both JHU and Annemarie! Read more here. Read more about Annemarie to Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science

Hayley at Sinn und Bedeutung

September 16, 2022
Hayley Ross presented the paper "Quantifying weak and strong crossover for wh-crossover and proper names" (with Gennaro Chierchia and Kate Davidson) at the 27th Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Prague.

Dr. Ricciardi!

August 31, 2022

Guiseppe Ricciardi defended his dissertation On the Linguistic Encoding of the Notion of Inference, which takes on the problem of epistemic modals from a new experimental and theoretical angle and makes the case for their encoding as evidentials (his committee was Kate Davidson, Ted Gibson, Susi Wurmbrand, and Manfred Krikfa). We're thrilled to hear that Giuseppe is taking up a position with Frontiers publishing upon graduation - huge congratulations, Giuseppe!!

Read more about Dr. Ricciardi!

Dr. Bryant!

July 29, 2022

Shannon Bryant defended her dissertation Lost in space: Pronoun choice in English locative prepositional phrases, which takes up one of the thorniest puzzles adjacent to Binding Theory, the distribution of reflexives and personal pronouns in locative prepositional phrases, through a theoretical syntactic and experimental semantic lens (her committee was Isabelle Charnavel, Kate Davidson, and Jesse Snedeker). Shannon is headed to Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science as a postdoc (...

Read more about Dr. Bryant!

Congratulations to our graduates!

May 26, 2022
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)!
Lecture hall with roughly 30-40 attendees in masks, woman presenting is shown on screen (hybrid conference)

Shannon, Giuseppe, and Kate at ELM

May 20, 2022
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 "The information structure of word order alternations" and Kate presented joint work with Masoud Jasbi and Natalia Bermudez on "Logical connectives: An extendable... Read more about Shannon, Giuseppe, and Kate at ELM
Three people smiling: one white man with glasses and brown jacket, one white man with glasses and black jacket, white woman with black top and skirt and brown hair

Dr. Martin!

May 5, 2022
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!!
Three people smiling, one white man with glasses and white shirt, one white man with white shirt and brown hair, white woman with pink shirt and brown hair

Dr. Wilcox!

May 4, 2022
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 (check out his semantics and computational psycholing research... Read more about Dr. Wilcox!