ITO AND MESTER AT MIT CONFERENCE

Junko Ito and Armin Mester attended M@90 (a conference on metrical structure: text-setting and stress) (Sept. 20-21), a celebration of Morris Halle’s 90th birthday organized by Mike Kenstowicz and Donca Steriade, where they presented some of their recent work on the role of supersized units in prosody (like superheavy syllables or HL trochees). Armin reports:

Besides the many fascinating talks and the sheer enjoyment of a splendidly organized conference, there was a whole group of UCSC-related folks to catch up with (Adam Albright, Ryan Bennett, Lev Blumenfeld, and Takashi Morita). The high point of the conference was Morris Halle’s closing presentation (on the morphophonology of the Latin verb). The speaker was not only very graciously introduced by Noam Chomsky (with touching reminiscences going back to their days as graduate students at Harvard many years ago), but went on to give a very lucid and well-argued talk, and defended his position very well in the ensuing question period. An amazing performance “@90”!
Some pictures here.