LSA et al. 2021

The 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is taking place online from January 7 through 10. The custom for the on-site conferences is for a number of smaller 'sister societies' to meet concurrently. However, given extenuating circumstances, many of the 'sister societies' this year are either meeting at other times or not meeting at all. The exceptions are the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS), and the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS).

Linguistic Society of America

• Naomi Nagy (faculty), Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.), and Vidhya Elango (MA) are part of a panel discussion with Maya Ravindranath Abtahian (University of Rochester): "Sociolinguistic research in the time of COVID: Methods, ethics, theory."
• Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty), Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.), and Alison Chasteen (faculty, Department of Psychology) are giving a talk: "Lifespan change and linguistic innovation: The quotative system as we age."
• Marisa Brook (faculty) and Mirva Johnson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) are giving a talk: "Substrate effects and diachrony: Back vowels during long-term language shift in a Finnish-Canadian enclave."
• Jeremy Needle (postdoc), Simon Todd (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jeanette King (University of Canterbury), and Jennifer Hay (University of Canterbury) have a presentation: "Overt speaker knowledge of reduplication patterns in te reo Māori."
• Jeremy Needle (postdoc) is part of a second talk with Simon Todd (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jeanette King (University of Canterbury), and Jennifer Hay (University of Canterbury): "Phonological influences on lexicalized compound formation in Māori."
• Breanna Pratley (MA 2020) and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a poster: "Can English idioms undergo the dative alternation? A priming investigation."
• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Justin R. Leung (MA) have a poster with Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo (University of British Columbia): "Two types of rhetorical questions: Evidence from Cantonese prosody."
• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) also has a solo poster: "Not all tag questions are alike: The case of source tags."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (Ph.D.) has a poster: "The history and internal structure of French honorifics."
• Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.) is part of a panel called "VariAsian: Contact and change in Asian North American speech communities," with Andrew Cheng (University of California, Irvine), Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (University of Michigan), and Lauretta Cheng (University of Michigan).
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) has a poster: "The problem with [proper]: Reanalyzing morphosyntactic regularization."
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is also part of a panel, "Student resources during a pandemic: Linguistic Society of America student ambassadors share their experiences and insight," with Lillian Jones (University of California, Davis) and John Powell (University of Arizona).
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) has a talk with Maxime Tulling (New York University): "The past is fake: Child comprehension of counterfactual wishes and conditionals."
• Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) and Rodrigo Ranero (University of Maryland) have a talk: "Sibilant harmony in Santiago Tz'utujil."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) has a talk with Laura Kalin (Princeton University): "Deconstructing subcategorization: Conditions on insertion versus position."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Two ways to form a portmanteau: Evidence from ellipsis."
• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) is part of a poster presentation with Juyeon Cho (University of Delaware): "The role of case in the subject advantage: Korean double nominative constructions."
• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) has a poster with Jun Gu Kang (Sogang University): "Prosody and bare nouns in Mongolian."
• Recent faculty member Aleksei Nazarov (Utrecht University) has a poster: "Learning restrictive analyses of Canadian Raising in OT using exceptionality diacritics."

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 

• Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) and Rodrigo Ranero (University of Maryland): "Vowel harmony in Santiago Tz'utujil (Mayan)."

North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics

• Jeremy Needle (postdoc) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "From 'buddy' to 'dude' to 'bro': Vocative change in Ontario English."

New paper: Denis (2020)

Derek Denis (faculty) has a new squib in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 65(4): "How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology."

New paper: Moulton (2020)

Keir Moulton (faculty) has a paper out in Theoretical Linguistics, 46(3-4): "Attitudinal and modal objects: A view from the syntax-semantics interface."

Congratulations, Yining!

Congratulations to Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at New York University), who has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the project 'Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind', co-directed by Artemis Alexiadou, Uli Sauerland, and Maria Teresa Guasti (on which one of the language consultants is our faculty member Suzi Lima). Congratulations, Yining, and all the best in Germany!

New papers: Kochetov (2020a, 2020b)

Alexei Kochetov (faculty) has a pair of papers in recent issues of Language and Linguistics Compass. The first, "Research methods in articulatory phonetics I: Introduction and studying oral gestures," is in 14(4):

This article is Part I of a general overview of current methods in articulatory phonetics research. This part deals with methods used to investigate oral gestures—speech‐related movements of the tongue, the lips, and the jaw (while Part II is concerned with methods studying laryngeal and nasal gestures, and the entire vocal tract). The focus of the article is on electropalatography, ultrasound, and electromagnetic articulography, with some attention also given to static palatography, X‐ray microbeam, and video recording. For comparison purposes, the methods are illustrated using similar articulatory data—productions of the plain‐palatalized contrast in Russian fricatives. Strengths and limitations of each method are discussed, and so are recent developments and trends.

The second, "Research methods in articulatory phonetics II: Studying other gestures and recent trends," is in 14(6):

This article is Part II of a general overview of current methods in articulatory phonetics research (which also consists of Part I “Research methods in articulatory phonetics I: Introduction & studying oral gestures”). The article begins by examining methods employed by phoneticians to investigate laryngeal and nasal gestures—speech‐related configurations of the glottis and the lowering/raising the velum for nasal/oral consonants and vowels. This is done by reviewing the methods of electroglottography, endoscopy, photoglottography, and measurements of airflow and air pressure. The article further examines magnetic resonance imaging and radiography (X‐rays)—the methods employed to investigate the entire vocal tract. The review is concluded with the methods of video recording and optical tracking, as used to study manual gestures in speech and sign language. Each methodological section contains a review of relevant journal publications illustrating the application of the method, as well as references to further readings. The article concludes with an overview of current developments and trends in instrumental articulatory phonetics, and highlight issues requiring further research.

Katharina at Linguistweets

Given the popularity of Linguist Twitter, the current constraints on conference-holding, and general interest in open-access science, ABRALIN (the Brazilian Linguistics Association) recently organized Linguistweets, the first Twitter-based linguistics conference, which was held on Saturday, December 5. Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.) gave a presentation: "Place Identity and Co-Occurrence in Northern Maine." The conference can be viewed in its entirety either at #linguistweets or via the program at the conference website.

Ai and Julie on Words to the Whys

Ai Taniguchi (faculty) has recently been featured on Word to the Whys, a podcast produced by a collective of introductory linguistics instructors in Canada. In her episode, 'Why we do semantics', Ai is interviewed by Julie Doner (Ph.D. 2019) about what semantics is, how she took an interest, what it means for languages and dialects to make sense, and why we put a plural suffix on 'zero chairs' even though there aren't any. Check it out!

BCGL 13

The thirteenth Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 13) is taking place online from December 16 to 18, hosted by the Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This year's theme is 'The syntax and semantics of clausal complementation'. Keir Moulton (faculty) is giving one of the invited talks: "Things we embed."

New paper: Becker and Jurgec (2020)

Michael Becker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Peter Jurgec (faculty) have a new paper in Phonology, 37(3): "Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian."

We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika]‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.

New paper: Bigelow, Gadanidis, Schlegl, Umbal, and Denis (2020)

Most years, the second issue of Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is a special selection of well-received papers from the previous autumn's New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference. This year, following up from last year's NWAV in Oregon, one of the papers in PWPL 26(2) is about Multicultural Toronto English and represents a collaborative effort by Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Derek Denis (faculty): "Why are wasteyutes a ting?"

This paper examines lexical enregisterment through TH/DH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect emergent in the Greater Toronto Area. Sociolinguistic interview data from young MTE speakers reveals an overall ~10% rate of stopping, with teenage males being the primary stoppers. However, despite the presence of stopping in the vernacular of most speakers, certain terms referring to character archetypes - e.g. wasteyutes, mandem - have become sites of enregisterment of TH/DH-stopping in MTE rather than enregisterment of stopping in more frequent words or of stopping itself. We argue that this is because these lexical items implement reflexive tropes, as speakers thought to be stoppers are those who might be labeled wasteyutes or mandem: young, male, suburban, typically non-white, and typically low status. As such, performance of these stereotypical personae fosters indexical linking between sound (TH/DH-stopping) and culturally salient identities (wasteyutes, mandem), cementing enregisterment of these terms in MTE.

New direct-entry Ph.D. option

We are pleased to announce that our Ph.D. program will now be dual-track. The department's regular 4-year Ph.D. program, which requires applicants to have (or will soon have) a master's degree in linguistics, will continue. Aside from this, we will also be considering applications for direct entry to a 5-year Ph.D. from the undergraduate level. This option is aimed at outstanding students who have extensive background in linguistics.

For Fall 2021, the deadline for applications to both options, as well as our MA program, is January 8, 2021. More details on the Linguist List and our department website.

New paper: Heller (2020)

Daphna Heller (faculty) has a paper out in Language and Linguistics Compass, 14(5): "The production and comprehension of referring expressions: Definite description."

This paper examines the topic of reference from the perspective of the production and comprehension of definite descriptions. We begin by reviewing evidence that the processes underlying reference production and comprehension are incremental. We then examine how the descriptive content of definite descriptions is selected and processed against a rich context that contains both visual and linguistic information, finding gradient effects that need to be combined. We also discuss the nature of referential domains, concluding that a definite description is not interpreted relative to a single referential domain and is instead influenced by two (and possibly more) domains whose influence is combined. The range of these findings calls for a probabilistic framework of reference that can accommodate gradient patterns.

Research Groups: Friday, December 11

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Dave Kush (faculty): "What to expect when you're expecting (an antecedent)."

In this talk I’ll present results from recent experiments on the processing of cataphoric dependencies in English, Norwegian, and Dutch. The goal of the studies is to determine to what extent cataphora resolution can be described as an 'active' dependency resolution process and to what extent/how far in advance active resolution strategies make predictive syntactic commitments.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Nouns, names, and the problem with [proper]."

New paper: Hussain et al. (2020)

Qandeel Hussain (postdoc) along with colleagues Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Mark Harvey (University of Newcastle) and Katherine Demuth (Macquarie University), is in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 50(2), with a phonetic profile of Punjabi (Lyallpuri variety).

Research Groups: Friday, December 4

Note that this week's meeting of the Semantics Research Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Guest speaker: Suzanne Robillard (University of Ottawa): "Implicit norms and prestige forms: Linguistic cohesion of G2 French in Victoria."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French): "Modelling early language acquisition from raw speech data."

The problem of language acquisition is key to the way questions are posed and answered in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences of language more broadly. And we now know quite a lot about the earliest stages of language acquisition, which, logically, show infants tuning into the signal, learning the sound inventory of the language and developing a small early lexicon between six and twelve months. What can recent advances in machine learning bring to the table? I will discuss how we have been able to take advantage of an interest from industry in applied problems in speech recognition, and channel the forces of modern machine learning towards cognitively interesting problems in early language acquisition. I will cover the small number of initial results that seem to come out of this line of research, which suggest that abstract phonet/emic categories are both critically important and somewhat overrated, depending on what facts need to be explained.

Guest speaker: Marija Tabain (La Trobe University)

We are very pleased to (virtually) welcome Marija Tabain, a Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is an esteemed phonetician and the current editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Her own research has encompassed a range of languages across four continents, including five indigenous languages of Australia. She will be giving a talk for our department - "The phonetics of Qaqet, a language of Papua New Guinea" - on Friday, December 4, at 3:00 PM via Zoom.

Qaqet is a Baining language of East New Britain province, Papua New Guinea. In this talk, I initially outline the phonetics and phonology of Qaqet, which has four vowels and 16 consonants, focusing in particular on phonetic variability in this small phoneme inventory. I then consider in a little more detail the voiced stops of Qaqet /b d ɡ/, which are described by Hellwig (2019) as being pre-nasalized. The issue of pre-nasalization of voiced stops has been of considerable interest in the literature on Papuan languages (cf. Palmer 2018), and their presence in Qaqet (a Papuan language) is usually attributed to contact with Oceanic languages. I present analyses of the voiced stops which suggest that any pre-nasalization is acoustically quite different from the nasal consonant phonemes of the language, and serves largely to maintain the very long voiced stop closure durations. These phonetic details may inform issues of language contact between Oceanic languages and Papuan languages, providing evidence of how a particular phonetic feature may be realized when borrowed into an existing inventory.