Summary
Michael Wilson investigates the relationship between structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics) in language. His projects have focused on how the meanings that verbs assign to their arguments relate to the structures they can occur in, and on how systematicity in this domain influences linguistic productivity, language processing and language acquisition. His work makes use of a variety of methodological approaches, including the use of computational and psycholinguistic experiments as well as the tools of generative grammar.
Research interests
- Computational linguistics
- Argument structure
- Sentence processing and production
- Linguistic productivity
- Syntax-semantics interface
- Language acquisition
Selected publications
- Michael Wilson, Jackson Petty, & Robert Frank. 2023. How abstract is linguistic generalization in large language models? Experiments with argument structure. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11, 1377–1395.
- Michael Wilson, & Robert Frank. 2023. Inductive bias in the eye of the beholder. In Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Koustuv Sinha, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Ryan Cotterell, & Elia Bruni (Eds.) Proceedings of the 1st GenBench Workshop on (Benchmarking) Generalization in NLP, (pp. 152–162). Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Michael Wilson, Zhenghao Zhou, & Robert Frank. 2023. Subject-verb agreement with Seq2Seq transformers: Bigger is better, but still not best. In Tim Hunter, & Brandon Prickett (Eds.) Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, vol. 6, (pp. 278–288). Amherst, Massachusetts: Society for Computation in Linguistics.
- Michael Wilson, & Tom Roeper. 2024. (Re)sultatives. In Marcel den Dikken, & Hideki Kishimoto (Eds.) Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication, vol. 8 of the Mouton-NINJAL Library of Linguistics, (pp. 195–232). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Michael Wilson. 2022. P-conflation in the English spray/load alternation. In Özge Bakay, Breanna Pratley, Eva Neu, & Peyton Deal (Eds.) Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 2, (pp. 221–230). Amherst: Graduate Linguistics Student Association.
- Michael Wilson, & Brian Dillon. 2020.Alignment between thematic roles and grammatical functions facilitates sentence processing: Evidence from experiencer verbs.
- Daoxin Li, Xiaolu Yang, Thomas Roeper, Michael Wilson, Rong Yin, Jaieun Kim, Emma Merritt, Diego Lopez, & Austin Tero. Acquisition of recursion in child Mandarin. In Megan M. Brown, & Alexandra Kohut (Eds.) Proceedings of the 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, vol. 1, (pp. 294–307). Somerville, ma: Cascadilla Press.
- Michael Wilson. 2021. The Syntactic and Semantic Atoms of the Spray/load Alternation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Courses taught
- ENG 281: Introduction to Language
- ENG 411D/611D: Theories of Syntax
- ENG 412A/612A: Linguistics
- ENG 417A/617A: Introduction to Computational Linguistics
Education
- Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2021
- B.A., Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, 2013
- B.A., Spanish (in Hispanic Linguistics), University of Texas at Austin, 2013