September 30, 2021

NWAV 49 (Sociolinguistics conference)

NWAV is the biggest variationist sociolinguistics conference. 

It's coming up, virtually, Oct. 19-24. You can already check out the program at https://www.nwav49.org/

Many UofT students are presenting: Abram, Justin, Kaleigh, Katharina, Lauren, Lisa Schlegl, Pocholo and Vidhya plus Derek, Marisa, Jeremy, Naomi and Sali. You can preview some of these talks at LVC Group on Friday, Oct. 1 at 10am. Ask Kaleigh for the Zoom link. 

NWAV is offering a "group registration" at a reduced rate for classes this year. Please let Naomi (or your sociolinguistics instructor) know if you'd be interested, ASAP. The amount of the reduction depends on how many of you register. Full student rate before Oct. 5 is $32. 

How the conference works this year: Talks will all be pre-recorded by Oct. 10 (and posters by Oct. 18), for you to watch at your leisure (if registered). Then there will be discussion only during the conference days, 9-1 Texas time, so 10-2 in Toronto.

Hope to see many of you there!

UofT @ Sensus 2


The Sensus 2 workshop will be held virtually this year from Oct 1-2 and will be hosted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The following UofT linguists will present:

We're excited to see our linguists out in force this weekend and we wish them all the best.


September 29, 2021

Annual Meeting on Phonology!

 It is that time of year again! The Annual Meeting on Phonology will be taking place virtually from October 1st - 3rd. The UofT Linguistics department is among the organizers and sponsors for the event and you are sure to see some familiar names as chairs and presenters!

From our faculty, we have, Nathan Sanders, Keren Rice, Phil Monahan, Avery Ozburn, Alexei Kochetov, and Ewan Dunbar (Department of French) serving as chairs throughout the event. 

Keep your eyes out for Alumni Christina Bjorndahl's presentation on (Re)conceptualizing Phonological Pedagogy using Evidence-based Practices.

Additionally, the following UofT students, faculty and alumni will be presenting their posters:

Can't wait to hear about the success of this meeting!

September 28, 2021

Colloquium Survey Deadline!

Friendly reminder to those who have not voted yet, there are only two days left to vote in the Colloquium Survey! You will be voting on your preferred UofT-internal colloquium speakers. The survey closes on September 30th so please vote NOW!

September 22, 2021

Congratulations Paul and Piper!

We would like to congratulate Paul Poirier (MA) and his athletic partner Piper Gilles for winning this year's Ice Dance title at the ISU 2021 Autumn Classic International. The full video of their spectacular performance can be found at this link.

September 9, 2021

Interview with Tahohtharátye Joe Brant!

    We had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Tahohtharátye Joe Brant, one of our newest faculty members who is also cross-appointed in the Centre for Indigenous Studies. Keep reading to learn more about him!

What attracted you to UofT?    

UofT is a world-class facility with world-class people. I know Professor Ryan Decaire and the great work that he, and others, do at the Centre for Indigenous Studies and Department of Linguistics. When the opportunity to join UofT came up, it seemed like a really good fit. I get the opportunity to be surrounded by smart, like-minded people who can help in my community's language revitalization journey. 

 

Do you have any expectations about coming to UofT?   

I have high expectations for my work at UofT. I want to provide the best opportunities for students to learn and support them in reaching their goals. I especially want to inspire students to in Linguistics and Indigenous Studies to support communities and help the next generation of minority and Indigenous language learners. Being at UofT gives me great opportunities to learn with, and from great people.

 

You were a teacher, a principal, and a vice-principal at an Indigenous institution. What inspired you to work as an educator?   

I was born, raised, and reside on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, this will be my first job off the Territory. As I was grew up and went through school, I always wanted to be at home, in my community, to support our children. During my undergrad at the University of Ottawa, I was studying criminology, I thought that this was a good way to help. But, I realized there are ways to reach kids earlier, through the education system. For almost 20 years, I did what I could in education on the territory and now wish to follow another passion, Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk language) revitalization practice and research. I’m now going on a limb, moving to work outside of the Territory, but in this position, I am able to engage with my community and nation's language work. 

 

What did you enjoy most being an educator working with children / young adults?   

               

      Children and young adults often don’t get enough credit for how brilliant they are. They have an energy that desire to learn, question, and experience. I enjoy helping students in their learning journey and guiding them through the experience of learning. Normally, around this time of year, I would be at the elementary school, it would just be myself with a few other staff members. The school seemed so eerie without the children. Once the students, families, and teachers enter on the first day, the school would truly come to life. Seeing, hearing, and supporting that energy, the desire to learn and do, was what I enjoy most.    

 

What drew you into the field of linguistics? What made you go from elementary education to U of T?   

              When I was  growing up, I rarely heard the Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk language) in my family or throughout the community. There are many reasons for the current generational gap in Kanyen'kéha speakers. I started learning Mohawk in elementary school and in the 90s while there was huge surge Mohawk nationhood and sovereignty. I believe one of the greatest things that help perpetuate the vitalization of Mohawk nationhood and sovereignty comes in the normalization and active use of our language. When I was teaching, I strived for culturally inclusive learning and felt like I couldn’t teach this class properly without further knowledge of the language. That’s when I began to learn Kanyen'kéha as an adult. That’s what inspired me learn more about linguistics. I learned the language from amazing people and I have had many great mentors along the way. Now Mohawk is the primary language my family and I speak at home. When raising my children, I wanted to show them how important our language is. It ensures that we have a connection to each other as people and all natural elements of the world. We need to speak our language because language shapes our thoughts and actions. Tahohtarátye is the name, I was given in as a young adult. It translates to, "He comes along in conversation". Your name can be based on birth events, family tradition or as a match of personality or characteristics. Sometimes too, a name fits what you'll do throughout your life. I feel like I keep moving to fulfilling the responsibilities that come with my name.  

 

What makes learning / researching Indigenous languages unique?   

             There is a correlation between language revitalization, and the health and well-being of a person, community, and nation. There’s great strength in how languages perpetuate the living culture of a people. Learning Indigenous languages is a way forward. A way for people, communities, and nations to reconcile with the past and develop a brighter future. Working with Indigenous languages is more than learning sounds, it is about connecting with our people, our lands, and our ways of knowing and being in this world.   

 

What challenges do you face when researching Indigenous languages? What do you think can be done to ease these challenges?   

                The biggest challenges in learning comes from acknowledging where we are and making the best choices possible in moving forward.  What's interesting is that institutionalized education was used to take away language and now, we are relying on them to help our people learn. We, in Indigenous language revitalization, need to consider how language is and has been transmitted intergenerationally, for millennia. It’s important to look at the home and family as the base for language vitality. Having access to Indigenous languages is difficult. At home, there was a 60-year gap between first-language speakers of Mohawk. Ultimately, we need greater focus and development of informal language learning opportunities and to have access to hearing, seeing, and doing, in our language.   

             In terms of research, another challenge comes from sharing knowledge and resources. There are amazing people doing important work in many different communities, often accessing such great work is difficult. I feel that we are often quite protective of our resources, knowledge, and experience. Right now, we are in a time crunch. We need to accelerate Mohawk language acquisition, transmission, and learning. We need to come together to find what works and take steps to ensure our language is used for generations to come.

 

Since you have much experience as an educator, what advice would you give your incoming students? 

  

Come into class with an open mind, open ears, and an open heart. We need to listen, and read, to understand, not to simply respond. Take in the information and bring it into your world. Ask yourself how the material you are learning impacts you, your family, or your community. Never stop asking questions, but also, put your answers into action. I want my students to know that I also am a learner, I am coming into this new just like how my first-year students.

 

As the world is re-opening, what are you most looking forward to doing/trying?   

I am a BIG sports fan! Racetracks, golf, and lacrosse are open and hockey will be back soon. I want to go to sporting events. I have always had a love for sports and trying different sports. The love might not have been the sports themselves but the comradery that comes with sports. Even when you’re not playing and you’re just watching, there is just a great environment. I’m hoping everything goes well so we can get back being fans and spectators. 

 

 

We'd like to thank Tahohtharáte Joe Brant for taking the time to be interviewed and for sharing his experiences with us. The Department of Linguistics is excited to welcome you and we all wish you the best of luck here at UofT! Say tuned in to check out our other interviews to learn more about our faculty members! 

September 7, 2021

Welcome Graduate Students!

We are excited to welcome our new graduate students who will be joining us for the 2021-2022 academic year! We know you all are capable of the best and cannot wait to see all your achievements and learning moments while you're here at UofT!


    Joining us as MA students, we have:

    • Maya Blumenthal

     Emma Bornheimer

     Abram Clear

     Heidi DeWitte

     Zachary Feldcamp

     Akil Ismael

     Ryan MacDonald

     Parker Robbins

    • Mikenzie Sandy

     Hanna Zhang


    Our new PhD students include:

    • Crystal Chen

    • Justin Leung

    • Christiana Moser

     Gabriel Palmieri

    • Martin Renard

 

Once again, we send the warmest welcome to all our new graduate students! Wishing you all the best of luck for your journey here at UofT!

Here is a matching game to get to know our incoming graduate students. You'll have to check with the students to see if you guess correctly! (Faculty, you can check the bios you received, but no cheating!)

Get to Know the Graduate Student Matching Game

Incoming Graduate Student Bios
a. Heidi DeWitte 1. Current areas of research include the structure of spell-out, second-position clitics, scrambling, and the functional structure of the extended noun phrases
b. Hanna Zhang 2. Double majored in statistics and linguistics, interested in computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics
c. Zachary Feldcamp 3. Foremost research interest is the revitalization and stabilization of Hodinohso:ni languages with second language-acquisition training during the formative years
d. Ryan MacDonald 4. Graduated from Queen’s University with a major in linguistics and a minor in English literature
e. Justin Leung 5. Have experience working as an RA on a psycholinguistic research project at the Language and Cognitive Development Lab at UC Berkeley
f. Abram Clear 6. Have spent two years working as a lab manager and research assistant at the University of Delaware and Boston College
g. Crystal Chen 7. Hope to dust off the statistical skills and use them in experimental (especially in psycholinguistics or language acquisition) research
h. Emma Bornheimer 8. Interested in areas of online communication, Autism allyship and Deaf culture
i. Akil Ismael 9. Interested in Georgian argument structure and case, and Japanese and Korean verbal morphology
j. Gabriel Palmieri 10. Interested in sociophonetics and how phonological theory and models of speech perception can be informed by the processing of dialectal variants
k. Parker Robbins 11. Love all areas of linguistics but favourite subfields are syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
l. Maya Blumenthal 12. Minored in French and have worked as a public school teaching assistant in France
m. Mikenzie Sandy 13. Mostly worked on Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk) which this person has been learning for 4 years
n. Martin Renard 14. Passions lie in fieldwork, community linguistics, language revitalization, and descriptive work on indigenous language in the brain (e.g. acquisition)
o. Christina Moser 15. Speaks English, Cantonese and Mandarin, also learning French, Hokkien, Hakka and Vietnamese

New College Online Program Instructor Hiring Opportunity

     The International Programs of New College is hiring 2 teachers for a 1-week long online course. If you are interested to get involved in the program, please read the following information:


   "Now in its 26th year, International Programs at New College offers pre-university academic, Global Citizenship and language courses for international students. For more information about our pre-university programs, please visit internationalprograms.utoronto.ca. We are currently seeking up to two instructors to teach a 1-week online course, Global Citizenship Challenge: Housing Insecurity, for international high school students (15–17 years old)."


Course Overview:

The Global Citizenship Challenge is a 15-hour course in critical communication skills for international high school students aged 15-17 whose first language is not English. Working within a Global Citizenship Educational framework, participants use design thinking to explore and generate solutions to a complex problem affecting our global community. The September 2021 session theme is housing insecurity: Who is affected? What are the causes and solutions? 


Contract Overview (contract details are as follows):

Delivery mode: Online 

Contact hours: 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM (Sep 22nd, 23rd, 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th), 8:00AM to 11:00AM (Sep 29th) 

Paid hours: 25 

Salary: $ 48.00 hour 

Enrolment: Estimated 18 students per section. Enrolment is capped at 20 students per section. 


Qualifications:

Applicants should have a graduate degree in applied linguistics or a related discipline (preferred) or a bachelor’s degree with equivalent professional experience and TESL training (TESL Canada Standard 2 or equivalent). The following will be considered strong assets: 

  • Documented experience working with high school students 
  • Teaching experience and/or training in one or more of the following: English for Academic Purposes (EAP); Global Citizenship Education (GCE); subject areas related to the course theme (housing insecurity, homelessness) 
  • Training and/or experience delivering online synchronous courses 

 

General Responsibilities 

  • Planning and teaching a weekly 2-3 hours interactive online class(materials and activities will be provided) 
  • Liaising with program staff and the Online Program Coordinator as required 
  • Documenting attendance and completing feedback forms for each student 

 

If you are interested in this opportunity, please submit a letter of application and updated résumé to Bruce Russell, Director (Academic) (bruce.russell@utoronto.ca), copying Çağrı Bilgin, Online Program Coordinator (cagri.bilgin@utoronto.ca), by 13 September 2021. 

September 1, 2021

Interview with PhD Candidate Angelika Kiss

      This time we are pleased to feature Angelika Kiss (PhD Candidate). She has been working on semantics and pragmatics of biased questions in various languages, looking at the meaning of questions and the relation between form and meaning. If you are also interested in this area of study, you don't want to miss out on her interview!

 


What are you currently working on in the summer?

    Summer is the time when I'm submitting abstracts, but it is also a time to run experiments. I am working on a Cantonese production experiment on rhetorical wh-questions with a subject wh-phrase, which I co-author with an MA student in our department, Justin Leung, and Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo, a PhD candidate from UBC. We are also working on a similar study on Mandarin, but in this case, the wh-word is the object, not the subject (we've run this experiment with subject wh-words before). For both studies, we are looking at the question: are rhetorical questions produced differently from genuine questions? I've run a production experiment on the meaning and prosody of Russian declarative questions with Andrei Munteanu, who is also a UofT PhD candidate, and a perception experiment on Hungarian declarative questions with Ádám Szalontai from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Last but not least, I am part of a project on the semantics and pragmatics of the Italian discourse connective ma 'but' with my supervisor, Michela Ippolito and Will Williams (PhD student at UofT), this is something that is related to but not part of my thesis.

  I also have a side project that is dear to my heart, which is a psycholinguistic study involving silent gestures. It is related to word order (which was the topic of my second GP). And of course, I am also teaching LIN241 (Introduction to Semantics). 


What do you think about teaching at UofT under the online environment?

    Since I teach LIN241 asynchronously, I don't really get to see my students and their reactions, however, I think it goes well. It takes a lot of time to record and prepare the class material, it keeps me busy and I barely have a single moment of free time but I still enjoy it. As a semanticist, it is good to teach something that I am actually interested in!


How do you deliver content to your students? Would that be different if it is in person?

    I record myself in advance, I think this is more accessible for students that are located around the world, it would be harsh to make them wake up in the middle of the night or really early in the morning. I also set up discussion boards and office hours for my students, but they don't really use it/come. I expected more and thought it would be easier for students to get involved, but it is understandable too, because they might be shy to come and some of them are working in the summer, so it is not as easy as I thought it would be.

    I think an in-person class would probably be different. Seeing someone's face on a prerecorded video may not be enough to create the right atmosphere and does not necessarily make one approachable for them. I hope when it is in person, I could make students engage more in class.


Do you see any trend in your students?

    I can tell which students care about semantics based on their assignments and quizzes. I can tell who cared to do the readings by the questions they approach me with (some even ask for additional materials on a certain topic). It is really encouraging to see that because it shows that at least some of them can and are willing to do the work successfully. As for those who are not doing too well in class, I am not sure if it is the difficulty of the course or they are just too busy to put effort into this class to do well.


What attracted you to the UofT Linguistics Department?

    When I was applying for grad school, I was going to work on syntax (even though I switched to semantics now) and I knew that the UofT Linguistics Department is strong in syntax, that is why I came here. Also, I love that we can start the PhD program with a blank slate here in Canada, not necessarily knowing our thesis topic. This allowed me to explore other areas of linguistics.


What makes your experience in UofT different from the past?

    I am originally from Hungary and I found that PhD programs in North America are so different from the ones in Europe. In Europe, universities would tell what grad students can work on, so those programs are mostly thematic. The PhD supervisors will tell you the topic. But at universities in Canada, students do not necessarily have to know what exactly they want to work on when they apply, it is so different from European universities. On the other hand, I think that courses here are way more intense than what I did before in Hungary (MA in theoretical linguistics) or in the Netherlands (MA in Chinese linguistics), however, it is a good kind of challenge. Students in Europe are left alone (e.g. reading the textbook or essay and write a paper on it), while in Canada, it is more hands-on and may involve fieldwork. I like the involvement we got here, like having to present several times in the same class and doing assignments during the term.


You have released a few papers in the past, what did you gain from writing them?

    Writing these papers was useful in the development of my thoughts and projects, so I'm grateful that they are out, regardless of their actual quality or weight on the market.


After COVID, what do you want to accomplish or hope to do?

   There is nothing specific that I want to accomplish but I hope to visit home when things are back to normal. I am also hoping to do in-person experiments! I could not continue to do any due to COVID. For example, I'd really like to do an eye-tracking study using the visual world paradigm to work on  questions, common ground and word order.


    We would like to say thank you to Angelika for taking her time in this busy summer for our interview! It is our pleasure to hear a lot about her ongoing experiments and studies. To learn more about her and her work, please check her website.