Alexei Kochetov is sending his season's greetings from Mysore, India, where he is currently a visiting scholar at the All-India Institute ofSpeech and Hearing (AIISH). He recently went on a trip to Nilgiri Hills, Tamilnadu, a remote mountainous area which is home to several indigenous tribes speaking distinct Dravidian languages. These pictures are from a village of the Toda, whose language is known for a typologically unique series of consonant place contrasts (as studiedby Peter Ladefoged some 20 years ago). More pictures are available at Alexei's website.
Print Page
November 11th saw a wonderful SGS convocation, with a record number of linguistics MA and PhD graduates. Not everyone could attend but here are some photos of those who did: Elise, Holly, James, Maddie, Marisa, and Radu (MA), and Jaehee, Maria, and Marina (PhD), with faculty members Elizabeth, Alana, Ana Teresa, and Diane. Here are some of the great photos of the happy graduates.
Print Page
Britanni Fubler wants anyone interested in how Islanders speak to attend ‘How You Hanlin’ Me? A Presentation on the Lexical, Phonological and Phonetic Properties of the Bermudian Dialect’ at Bermuda College’s North Hall Lecture Theatre on November 3 at 6.30pm.
The University of Toronto graduate is advertising the session with a flyer which asks: “Have you or your friends ever thought that the Bermudian dialect was uneducated? Sounded ignorant? Was inappropriate in public settings?
“Or are you of the persuasion that it is beautiful and unique and should be a celebrated part of our culture?” [excerpt from the linked article in The Royal Gazette Online, Oct. 25, 2011]
[Chart from Brittani Fubler's U of T manuscript, "Acoustic analysis of Bermudian English", Mar. 16, 2011]
Last weekend, I managed to work out my plan of attack for a SSHRC grant while hiking in a beautiful park with an unlikely name: Mono Cliffs. It boasts over 400 kinds of plants and, while I didn't stop to count them, all, I believe it. Plus, great scenery. Here's me going into a tunnel of trees. I came out the other side with a 1-page summary ready to go. Then I watched reflections in this lake and more and more became clear.
It's the best place I've hiked near Toronto, and if you want to try it, I posted a map.
We have a visitor from Italy for Fall 2011. She writes:
"I'm Maria Parascandolo, a PhD student from Italy.
I graduated in 2009 in Modern Literature at University of Naples "Federico II". My thesis concerned Computational Linguistics, specifically I compared three syntactic annotation tagsets developed for the Italian language (TUT: Turin University Treebank, AN.ANA.S.: Annotazione e analisi sintattica and TreSSI: Treebank sintattico-semantica dell'italiano) and then I chose a solution to combine them into a unique approach.
Now I'm taking my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Salerno and my supervisor is prof. Miriam Voghera. My research project concerns linguistic attrition in the Italian community of Toronto. During my time in Canada I am both going to take advantage of the data in the HLVC corpus and to collect more samples aimed at studying this specific phenomenon. I am particularly interested in the loss of verbal morphology and I plan to structure my interviews in such a way that different verbal tenses can be elicited. From my experience at University of Toronto I hope to gain more insight into language attrition and also to gain experience with work "in the field" by means of interviews."
Maria has been exploring the area and learning about local inhabitants:
Many U of T linguists (Ailis, Cathleen, Joanna, Jack, Keren, Naomi, Sali & Sandrine) and alumni (Laura Baxter, Alex D'Arcy, Carrie Dyck, David Heap, Nicole Rosen, Jacqueline Peters, Jeff Tennant) presented at Methods XIV the first week of August, 2011. We dined well (Budapest in London), caught up on our reading at The Pinery, and, yes, even presented some research findings.
