Prof. Elise Newman

Elise Newman is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Her forthcoming monograph, “When arguments merge,” studies the ingredients that languages use to construct verb phrases, and examines how those ingredients interact with other linguistic processes such as question formation. By studying these interactions, she forms a hypothesis about how different languages’ verb phrases can be distinct from each other, and what they must have in common, providing insight into this aspect of the human language faculty. In addition to the structural properties of language, Newman also has expertise in semantics (the study of meaning) and first language acquisition. She returns to MIT after a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, after completing her Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT in 2021.

Professor Newman's research focuses broadly on syntactic theory, but I am also interested in semantics/pragmatics and language acquisition. In her work, Newman is especially interested in the limits of crosslinguistic variation. Some questions that she investigates include: What is the range of possible selectional properties of verbs within and across languages? What is the range of ways in which processes like
wh-movement interact with other syntactic processes, like A-movement and agreement? And what do answers to these questions tell us about the architecture of grammar?

Interactions Between wh-Movement and Voice: In some languages, wh-movement is insensitive to the Voice of a clause. For example, in English wh-questions, active Voice permits any element to wh-move without restriction. However, this is not true of all languages. In some languages, certain elements only wh-move in certain Voice contexts, suggesting that the processes that underly Voice (A-movement, agreement, selection) can at times interact with wh-movement. My work investigates these kinds of interactions in several languages and contexts, including subject-extraction in some Mayan languages, “pivot-only” restrictions in several Austronesian languages, and wh-questions built from passives of ditransitives crosslinguistically. I argue that these kinds of interactions are best understood by examining what it means to be a wh-phrase. On the assumption that wh-phrases have more features than their non-wh-counterparts, I explore how these additional features might disrupt syntactic processes earlier in a derivation, such as selection and A-movement.

Argument Structure: It has often been observed that verb phrases contain limited numbers and configurations of arguments. More specifically, verbs never select more than four arguments crosslinguistically, and having more than two DPs in a verb phrase usually requires extra functional structure (applicative heads, prepositions, etc.). These limits on verb phrases are somewhat surprising on the view that structure-building proceeds from instructions from the lexicon. If lexical items can vary in every imaginable way, why are their structural contexts so limited? I address this question by investigating the distribution of DP vs. non-DP phrases, as well as selected vs. unselected elements in the verbal domain. Some specific topics include obligatory adjuncts in middle constructions, profiles of c-selection, and the dative alternation.

Tense in Adjunct Clauses: Tensed adjunct clauses often display different restrictions on their tense and tense interpretation compared to matrix and embedded clauses. I investigate these restrictions in temporal adjunct clauses such as before/after/when/since. These adjuncts provide a unique testing ground in which to investigate tense because they have tense-like properties themselves: they encode a temporal ordering between adjunct and matrix events. I show that the meanings of the adjunct heads sometimes conflict or are redundant with the meanings adjunct tense operators, which accounts for the unusual properties of adjunct tenses.

The LASER Project: For the past two years, I have been working on a team project with Kenyon Branan, Thomas McFadden, Sandhya Sundaresan, Rob Truswell, and Hedde Zeijlstra, which studies locality conditions on syntactic dependencies in several contexts. The goal of the project is to find a unified way of discussing several kinds of locality restrictions, such as intervention effects, successive cyclicity, and island effects. In this project, I have been focusing on the distribution of phi-features on nominals, exceptions to the CED (with Kenyon Branan), and the typology of adjunct clauses (with Caroline Heycock and Rob Truswell).

Aquisition of Even: Focus particles raise interesting questions about the acquisition process, given that their contribution is entirely not-at-issue. A child must therefore use indirect reasoning to understand the utility of these words, leading to questions about what constrains learning. What makes even additionally interesting, and useful for an acquisition study, is that its inferences interact with negation, despite being not-at-issue. This makes the profile of adult-like competence with even more finegrained than is typical for other presupposition triggers.