UofT Linguists Impress at the 2024 CLA Conference

From June 17-19, 2024, UofT Linguists trekked to Carleton University to attend the 2024 Canadian Linguistics Association (CLA) Conference. 

Will Williams, PhD student, shared this list of talks and posters by UofT people. Bolded names indicate University of Toronto affiliation.

Looking forward to CLA 2025, and the presentation of more incredible presentations such as the ones below!

Posters

Thales Buzan, Cristina Name & Laura Colantoni (Faculty)

Native English Speakers’ Perception of Questions Produced by L1 Brazilian Portuguese and L1 English Speakers

Caroline Mekhaeil (PhD student, UTM)

Could Individual Language Dominance Explain the Transfer to L3 French?

Caroline Mekhaeil presents poster

Samuel Akinbo (Faculty), Tongpan Fwangwar & Michael Bulkaam

Morphophonological Polarity in West Chadic Languages

Rim Dabbous, Marjorie Leduc (MA Alumna), David Ta-Chun Shen & Charles Reiss

Locality in phonology is epiphenomenal

Radu Craioveanu (Alum)

Long and short diphthongs in North Saami

Radu Craioveanu presents poster

Liam McFadden (Undergrad), Avery Ozburn (Faculty) & Samuel Akinbo (Faculty) - Best Poster!

Language mapping for linguists

Liam McFadden presents poster

Talks

Ash Asudeh, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Neil Myler, Daniel Siddiqi & Lisa Sullivan (Alum)

Metasyncretism and secondary exponence in LRFG

Samantha Jackson (incoming Faculty, ex-postdoc) & Derek Denis (Faculty)

Speaking of immigrants: Commentary on the aural employability of (non-)Canadian English

Samira Ghanbarnejadnaeini (MA Alum)

“Woman, Life, Freedom:” A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender and Political Activism

Laurestine Bradford (MA Alum)

A Source of Conativity in Tlingit Pluractional Verbs

Angelika Kiss (PhD student), Jianing Zhou, & Justin Leung (PhD student)

Declarative questions in Shanghainese and Cantonese

Yawovi Godo, Lydia Mei, Andreea Cristina Nicolae & Lyn Tieu (Faculty)

Étude expérimentale des propriétés d’exhaustivité de la disjonction en français : L’interaction de l’exclusivité, du libre choix, et des implicatures ad hoc

Lisa Sullivan (Alum) & Nicole Rosen (Alum)

/e/-/i/ overlap in Manitoba English

Calvin Quick (PhD Student)

Agreement with nominal antecedents in Welsh

Simone Diana Zamarlik (Alumni)

Preposition stranding in a non-preposition-stranding language: The puzzle of optional preposition omission under sluicing in Polish

Crystal Chen (PhD Student), Lyn Tieu (Faculty) & Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (Faculty)

Investigating the role of gaze and the semantics of demonstratives in referent identification

Samuel Jambrović (PhD Student), Awarded "Honorable Mention"

Defending predicativism: Lessons from Barbie

Nadia Takhtaganova (PhD Student) & Barend Beekhuizen (Faculty)

Variation in the Morphosemantics of Postnominal Prepositions: The Case of Romance A

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Faculty) & Sahar Taghipour (Alumni)

Ezafe in the context of PPs

Justin R. Leung (PhD Student)

I’m like, “Like is not a complementizer, it seems like”

Dionatan Cardozo (Visiting student)

Quantified Phrases in Brazilian Portuguese: Preliminary Experimental Results

Christiana Moser (PhD Student), Bahar Tarakcı, Ercenur Ünal & Myrto Grigoroglou (Faculty)

Multimodal recipient mentions in possession-transfer event descriptions: language-specificity outweighs conceptual peripherality

Patrick Kinchsular (Undergrad)

External Possession in Kinyarwanda: A Tale of Two Applicatives

Annie Chong, Avery Ozburn (Faculty) & Tamam Youssouf

Phonologically-conditioned allomorphy in Oromo plurals

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (Faculty), Laura Colantoni (Faculty), Danielle Thomas (alum) & Crystal Chen (PhD Student)

Gender in Toronto Heritage Spanish

Anissa Baird (PhD Student) & Emily Atkinson (Faculty)

Five- & Eight-Year-Olds’ Interpretation of Ambiguous They

PhD Candidate Angelika Kiss Successfully Completes Thesis Defense - Congratulations, Doctor!

On Thursday, June 20th, 2024, Angelika Kiss of the Department of Linguistics completed her last step toward officially becoming Dr. Kiss! Congratulations!

Completing her thesis defense of Form-meaning relations in non-canonical questions, Dr. Kiss impressed her committee consisting of Professors Guillaume Thomas, Laura Colantoni, and Keir Moulton, as well as her supervisor, Professor Michela Ippolito. Also in attendance at the defense was Fatima Hamlaoui, who performed internal/external reviews.

Dr. Kiss' Thesis Defense Reception, featuring Guillaume Thomas, Fatima Hamlaoui, Michela Ippolito, Angelika Kiss, Hans-Martin Gaertner, Keir Moulton (L-R)

Dr. Michela Ippolito and Dr. Angelika Kiss

The Department of Linguistics congratulate her on the successful completion of her dissertation, and are excited to see her future works.

Our Newest Alumni: Linguistics PhDs at Convocation

Announcing the newest PhDs from the Department of Linguistics! They were conferred their degrees at convocation on June 5th.

Sahar Taghipour: Case and Phi-agreement in Laki: Parametrizing split-ergativity in Kurdish

Sahar with her supervisor, Professor Arsalan Kahnemuyipour.

Andrei Munteanu: Probabilistic Evaluation of Comparative Reconstructions 

Kiranpreet Nara: An acoustic study of Punjabi tones and an investigation of ongoing tonal changes

The Graduate Office congratulates and welcomes their newest alumni into this exciting next chapter of their journeys. 

Elaine Gold Receives the Governor General's Meritorious Service Award

Director Elaine Gold at Glendon Hall

Elaine Gold, retired from the Linguistics Department, and head of the Canadian Language Museum (CLM) has been awarded the Governor-General's Meritorious Service Award. Congratulations!!

The co-Chair of the International Network of Language Museums has seen her museum's exhibits touring across the world, including and especially those pertaining to Indigenous languages. 

Director Gold's star-studded career since retirement from our Department includes speaking about Canadian Indigenous Language policies at the Austronesian Languages Revitalization Forum in Taipei, September 2023.

She and the CLM are now collaborating with the Indigenous Languages Research Foundation to translate their booklet, Indigenous Languages in Canada, into Mandarin. 

The CLM also hosted the art exhibit Anthem: Expressions of Canadian Identity during the fall, which will be presented from May to September at the Canadian Embassy's Prince Takamado Gallery in Tokyo. On June 20th, she, her team, and four artists, will attend the exhibition's reception. 

Director Gold giving her presentation in Taipei, September 2023.

Currently on display in the CLM is "Toronto Voices," an exhibit created as part of community outreach, exploring and detailing the identity of young Torontonians through their vocabulary in collaboration with The Spot, a drop-in center in the Jane-Finch area. 

This recognition of Gold's tireless devotion to languages of Canada, and especially of Toronto, is a fantastic credit to her work in both national and international linguistic communities.

We are so inspired by Gold's impact on reconciliation and language revitalization, especially in the field of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Prof. Naomi Nagy & MA alum Julia Petrosov published in Languages

Congratulations to Prof. Naomi Nagy and former MA student Julia Petrosov who have published a new paper entitled (Heritage) Russian Case Marking: Variation and the Paths of Change in the Journal Languages. The paper adjudicates between conflicting claims regarding the prominence of morphological levelling in Heritage Russian case marking.

We have included the abstract below: 

Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. One study from 2006 showed that Heritage Russian speakers in the USA produced canonical or prescribed markers for only 13% of preposition+nominal sequences. Conversely, another study from 2020 found that Heritage Russian speakers in Toronto produce a 94% canonical case marker rate in conversational speech. To explore the effects of methodological differences across several studies, the current paper circumscribes the context to preposition+nominal sequences in Heritage Russian speech from the same Toronto corpus as used by the 2020 study but mirroring the domain investigated by Polinsky and including a Homeland comparison to consider changes in both the rates of use of canonical case marking and distributional patterns of non-canonical use. Regression models show more canonical case marking in more frequent words, an independent effect of slightly more mismatch by later generations, but less morphological levelling than reported by Polinsky. Lexicon size does not predict case marking rates as strongly as language usage patterns do, but generation, since immigration, is the best-fitting social predictor. We confirm (small) rate changes in Heritage (vs. Homeland) Russian canonical case marking but not in patterns of levelling.

Congratulations Naomi and Julia!

Congratulations to Lex Konnelly!

The SGS Awards Committee has selected Lex Konnelly (PhD 2023) as the sole winner of the University of Toronto’s 2024 John Leyerle-CIFAR Prize for Interdisciplinary Research. This award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research and significant contributions to both the academic community and to Canadian society. Note that the award is open to candidates from all SGS programs, not just Social Sciences and Humanities. Many thanks to Lex for putting Linguistics in the spotlight among all these disciplines!

 

Lex’s dissertation (committee members: Prof. Atiqa Hachimi, Prof. Susan Ehrlich and Prof. Derek Denis) explores the linguistic strategies employed by non-binary patients to negotiate medical expectations while expressing their gender identities authentically, highlighting the interplay between language, identity, and healthcare access. Lex’s work not only puts in conversation the fields of linguistics, (trans)gender studies,  and studies of health communication, but also identifies barriers to accessing competent, truly affirming healthcare [quoted from the dissertation].

 

Please join me in congratulating Lex for their distinguished work!

Thanks to Guillaume for the text.

Julien Carrier goes to Kentucky

Dr. Julien Carrier, who earned his PhD in our Department in 2021, and then held a postdoc position at UQAM (working with former UofT student Richard Compton), is excited to be starting a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky.  

He says, "This is a great place for me because people there really like the fact that my research is in socio-syntax."

We wish him all the best in his new job!  Félicitations!

Linguist Kathleen Wynne on Aging

 You might enjoy this article, written by former Premier and linguistics student, Kathleen Wynne.

Anujin & Sable at Altaic Formal Linguistics, Mongola

Toronto Linguistics was well represented recently at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 17) at the National University of Mongolia, in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Sept 27-29. Anujin and Sable presented their own work, as well as their joint work. And a UofT alum - Mike Barrie - was there too.  

Anujin Munkhbat (University of Toronto)
Tense, Aspect, and Evidentiality in Khalkha Mongolian

Anujin Munkhbat (University of Toronto), Sable Peters (University of Toronto)
Selection and Directedness in Mongolian Causatives

Sable Peters (University of Toronto)
The External Syntax of Mongolian Converbs

Michael Barrie (Alumnus, now at Sogang University)
Contiguity, PNI, and DOM

Michael Barrie, Sable Peters, Anujin Munkhbat

 

Marshall Chasin featured in Giants of Audiology

We are proud to announce that Marshall Chasin, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Linguistics, has been featured in Giants of Audiology, a segment of hearinghealthmatters.org. 

Marshall received a BA in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and a Doctorate in Audiology from the Arizona School of Health Sciences. Throughout his career, he has published over 200 articles and 8 books. He is now Associate Professor at Western University and also teaches students at his alma mater (in our Department). 

Navigate to the video below to learn more about Marshall's life and career.

 https://hearinghealthmatters.org/thisweek/2023/giants-audiology-marshall-chasin

Also, for those interested in the intersection between music, culture, and mathematics, Marshall has appeared in another short segment detailing his work on technology. It's being exhibited at Munich airport for Oktoberfest 2023. Check out the fun acoustics in the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGgMl6S8h3U 

Reunited at DiGS 23!!

From right to left: Erin Hall, Ana Pérez-Leroux, Ailis Cournane

 

 

 

The Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference, held at NYU,  took place June 8-10.  DiGS 23 had a special workshop on "Child learners in syntactic change: Theory and methods"! This workshop hosted presentations and discussions on topics combining theoretical syntax, child language acquisition, variationist sociolinguistics and computational modelling of language change.

Erin Hall (PhD Alum 2020, now assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino) and Ana Pérez-Leroux (Faculty) presented their work entitled "Children take steps toward cyclic and non-cyclic diachronic changes". The pair examine the role of child language acquisition in systematic, cyclic processes of grammaticalization, and non-cyclic changes in progress. They propose that there are 2 different processes involved in child language acquisition.

Not only did this workshop allow for Hall and Pérez-Leroux to share their amazing work, but they also got to reunite with Ailis Cournane! Cournane is a PhD alum, class of 2015, and is now an assistant professor at NYU! 

Overall, UofT faculty and alum had a successful time at DiGS 23! 

New Publication: Licensing Unergative Objects in Ergative Languages: The View from Polynesian

Rebecca Tollan (University of Delaware) and Diane Massam (Emerita Faculty) have published "Licensing Unergative Objects in Ergative Languages: The View from Polynesian" in Syntax! 

They examine how objects of unergative verbs are case licensed when they are present, focusing on a contrast between Samoan and Niuean, two related Polynesian languages. Their comparative analysis highlights the salients of considering unergative constructions when determining the underlying syntax of any given case system. 

Tollan, R., & Massam, D. Licensing unergative objects in ergative languages: The view from Polynesian. Syntax.

Daphna & Breanna at the 2nd Experiments in Linguistic Meaning Conference!

The 2nd Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) Conference was hosted by the University of Pennsylvania from May 18-20 2022. 

Si On Yoo, Breanna Pratley (former MA student now at UMass) and Daphna Heller  (Faculty) presented their work on "Referential domains, priming and the effect of invisible objects".  This study examines whether unmentioned earlier objects can also be part of the referential domain and whether earlier and current objects are part of a single referential domain.

For those who did not attend, be sure to check out their abstract!

New Publication on Language Dominance and Order of Acquisition in Translation Priming!

Rachel Soo (Undergrad and MA alum) and Philip Monahan (Faculty) have published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 

"Language dominance and order of acquisition affect auditory translation priming in heritage speakers" tests Cantonese heritage speakers and native speakers in an auditory translation priming paradigm. Their results suggest that both language dominance and order of language acquisition can help to explain translation priming findings and bilingual lexical processing. Soo and Monahan invite a rethinking of the role of both variables in bilingual lexical access for speakers with different language dominance profiles. 

Great job Soo and Monahan!! 

Soo, R., & Monahan, P. J. (2022). Language dominance and order of acquisition affect auditory translation priming in heritage speakers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17470218221091753.

Traditional Ukrainian Song Performed by F-Zero

To show our solidarity to Ukrainians, we want to share a recording for the Waltz from Levkivka, a traditional Ukrainian song covered by our favourite band of linguists F-Zero. 

This was recorded in June 2002 for The Olive Sessions CD. It includes an original cello part by Daniel Currie Hall (B.A, M.A, and Ph.D Alum) .

Hunt Gardner to work at Oxford U

Matthew Hunter Gardner (PhD Alum) has accepted a departmental lecturer position at the University of Oxford! Gardner will be joining the company of sociolinguists  Deborah Cameron, Miriam Meyerhoff and Rosalind Temple over the course of the next two years! 

Gardner was at UofT from 2010-2017 working on his PhD on variation and change in Canadian English. Gardner used methods of theoretical phonology, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and variationist sociolinguistics to study how dialects of Eastern Canada fit into the broader Canadian English Dialect.  Gardner was also an instructor for LIN100, LIN201 and LIN256 as well as a TA for LIN228, LINA01, LINA02, LIN351, LIN204 and LIN362  

Best of luck in your new position! 

LIN Alum Spotted in Grocery Store...

 ... on a box of cereal!

Paul Poirier (MA) has really hit the big time!

Rooting for Paul & Piper at the Olympics!

LSA Meet the Authors Webinar!

The LSA is hosting a "Meet the Authors" webinar and our very own  Katharina Pabst (PhD Candidate) and co-authors will be there to discuss their recent article in Language entitled "Gender Bias in Linguistics Textbooks".

The webinar will take place Friday January 28th, 2022 from 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM EST. Register ASAP as this is not an event you will want to miss!

Alumna Publication: Nominal types on Gitksan split absolutive agreement

Clarissa Forbes (PhD 2018) has a paper in the most recent volume of Natural Langauge and Linguistic Theory! The paper is entitled  "Nominal types on Gitksan split absolutive agreement" and it studies a split absolutive-nominative agreement pattern found in Gitksan (Tsimshianic) that co-occurs with ergative agreement.

Is this ringing a bell for anyone? Forbes' PhD thesis offered a morphosyntactic analysis of the agreement patterns in the Tsimshanic language family, with a primary focus on Gitksan. 

We love seeing how projects that began at UofT expand! Be sure to check out both her thesis and her new publication! 

2021 MA students Sweep Stueber Prize at NWAV49!!

Huge congratulations to  Justin Leung (PhD Student) and Christopher Legerme (former MA student) for sweeping the runner up category for the Stueber Prize at NWAV49! 

Leung presented work regarding variation in path encoding in motion events in Toronto Heritage Cantonese. He defined and described a new variable for Chinese languages and gave a thoughtful interpretation of the outcomes. 

Legerme, who is now at MIT for his PhD,  presented work regarding phonological variation and change in Haitian determiners. Sounding familiar? Legerme also won the NWAV student abstract award this year for his presentation! 

Congrats to both Leung and Legerme for this excellent work! 

We also want to give a shout-out to the winners:

Sadlier-Brown, Salles & Salomon, Exploring variation & change in a small-scale indigenous society: the case of (s) in Pirahã.

They did an excellent job grappling with the issue of determining how to interpret language variation and change in a context where no information on standards or norms is available, as well as countering reported descriptions of the language. They also contribute to ongoing debate about the reasons behind the generalization that women often lead linguistic change.