Linguistics Coffeehouse Recap!

During March of 2024, Jack Mahlmann, Claudia Raihert, and Mechelle Wu, graduate students of our department, organized a coffeehouse fundraising event. 

Raising over $1400 for Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa, Mahlmann, Raihert, and Wu wanted to bring this event to the attention of the wider UofT Linguistics community to surpass that amount next year. 

A community organization on the territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa works as a school to support the vitality of Kanien'kéha, a Mohawk language. Earlier in May, this blog covered WSCLA, at which several speakers gave presentation concerning the revitalization of this language. 

For all those interested in supporting the goal of revitalizing the Mohawk language at Grand River, feel free to visit their Donate page, or look out for more events such as these next year. 

Congratulations to this trio and all those who donated!

AI-Driven Hype in Classrooms: Navigating Ethical Issues - Presented!

During the summer of 2023, Lex Konnelly and Nathan Sanders presented on AI "hype" in classrooms to help instructors address issues bubbling to the surface as ChatGPT's range broadens with each question it is asked by some unsuspecting student. 

Addressing ethical and pedagogical considerations for AI-driven text generation in classrooms, particularly of linguistics, they presented a foray into the ever-changing landscape evolving at a rate "faster than scholars can publish work on them" (Sanders).

Though some faculty members with whom the researchers partnered focused on ways they could Chat-GPT-proof their assessments, others were interested in integrating such tools into their classwork.

Importantly, the researchers' approach is not punitive, but rather, constructive - an approach to merging of AI tools with educational models which will benefit not only morale in the classroom, but student media and technology literacy in a world rapidly going wireless.

Perhaps today's students can benefit from learning how to hack tools such as chatbots to maximize their potential for learning. 

Perhaps future integration of artificial intelligence brings with it the potential of a rapid decline or even total erasure of the capacity to learn hard skills.

Regardless, the researchers' position is that the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are necessarily intertwined.

Due to tools' like Chat-GPT's reliance on large language models, students of both linguistics and computer science, or even artificial intelligence engineering, have much to gain by probing the threads linking their interests to each other, potentially by exploring something like the groundbreaking focus on Computational Linguistics offered by UofT. 

Presented by Konnelly at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January, this work will be published soon as a proceedings paper. 

As Sanders and Konnelly will be the first to tell you, by the time this post goes live, this information may be obsolete. 

We at WHITL don't see this as a reason not to comment, but as an opportunity to mark our ideas on an AI-timeline quickly extending into the future, and an exciting chance to engage with all students across UofT. 

AI in the classroom poses all kinds of ethical questions for students and professors, and raises new questions every time it is used. This work gives us some interesting and thought-provoking ways of dealing with technology which passes the Turing Test daily, and (usually) with flying colours at that.

UTM Faculty Dr. Samantha Jackson and Derek Denis Publish their Research into Accent-Based Biases in the GTA

Postdoctoral Fellow of Language Studies at UTM, Dr. Samantha Jackson, and Associate Professor of Linguistics, Derek Denis, have recently published their work titled What I say, or how I say it? Ethnic accents and hiring evaluations in the Greater Toronto Area.

Jackson’s work, focusing on sociolinguistics, investigates how immigrants to Canada speaking with an identifiably non-Canadian accent are perceived by prospective employers. She investigates strategies to reduce such workplace discrimination and target other societal problems. 

Denis' interests follow variationist sociolinguistics (language change), and how human language faculty allows for variation both within the individual’s grammar and the larger context of the society in which it exists.

During their study, they recorded 12 women giving scripted 6 answers to interview questions, (3 good, 3 bad) and asked Human Resources students at universities and colleges in the GTA to rank the content of responses, as well as the employability of each voice. They were also asked to determine for which, if any, job interview to recommend these individuals. 

Jackson and Denis analyzed the results using conditional inference tree modeling and random forest analysis.

They found that the accent heard by participants affected their ratings of all these scripted responses, viewing Canadian accents as superior to those of non-Canadians – specifically, the most disadvantaged being Chinese, Nigerian, and German accents. These were least likely to be recommended for customer-facing and, importantly, higher-ranking jobs. 

Presented at online conferences in 2021 and 2022, in Germany and in Vancouver, a full thematic analysis of comments from the full study’s sample will be presented in June at the CLA (Canadian Linguistics Association) Conference, held in Ottawa. Watch out for WHITL’s coverage of that event, coming soon. 

As for this publication, major recommendations from the report include (1) adding language to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s grounds for discrimination, among others, which can be found in their full published work. It will also be available in the June issue of Language. 

Though linguistic protection is an idea covered in sections 15 (Equality Rights), and 23 (Minority language and educational rights) of the Canadian Charter, Jackson and Denis’ work puts a spotlight on the need for specific and targeted legislation to protect Canadians with non-Canadian accents in the workplace.

Real change in public policy and legislation which emerges from projects like these are some of the most exciting moments we get to watch as they evolve. Looking forward to seeing this work at the CLA Conference in June.

An important p.s.: Dr. Jackson will join the UofT Department of Linguistics in January 2025. We can't wait!

Workshop on Linguistic Equity and Justice (29-30 April 2022)

Our friends at UTM Derek Denis (Faculty) and Samantha Jackson (Post Doctoral Fellow) are organizing a workshop on Linguistic Equity and Justice!  

While language functions as both a means and target of oppression, linguists have, until only recently, rarely critically engaged with historical and contemporary inequities and injustices (cf. Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz 2020). That said, we recognize that many scholars are currently working toward language-based anti-oppression goals. Although these researchers are diverse, we see among them a shared goal of advocacy through critical engagement with language and racism, ableism, transphobia, sexism, colonialism, and classism. We are so excited to bring together like-minded researchers for a two-day workshop of knowledge sharing and community building to be held virtually on April 29th and 30th, 2022. We would love for you to attend/participate in this workshop so our community can share and gain knowledge. 

Please register before the event. There will be  ASL interpretation and auto-generated captions for all sessions. 

For questions or more information, please contact Samantha Jackson.

Publication about COVID and Language Shift

 I don't know about you but I have been wondering about what linguistic change has been occuring during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you're like me then you're in luck as there has been a faculty publication entitled "Disruptions due to COVID-19: using mixed methods to identify factors and influencing language maintenance and shift". 

Maya Ravindranath Abrahian (University of Rochester) worked with Naomi Nagy (Faculty), Katharina Pabst (PhD Candidate) and Vidhya Elango (MA) to examine  principles of language maintenance and shifts during the COVID-19 lockdowns amongst people still involved in critical acts of identity creation; university students. This study is used to learn how lockdown is affecting young people's language ecologies and attitudes. 

A very interesting sign of the times paper! 

Speech, Language and Learning Intervention Research Symposium

Arizona State University will be hosting the Speech, Language and Learning Intervention Research Symposium virtually on March 25th -26th 2022.  The focus will be on advancing interventions and exploring creative solutions to improve the quality of education for children with disabilities across culturally and linguistically diverse background. 

Esther Geva (Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE) is a keynote speaker and will be presenting a talk entitled "Language and Literacy Skills Development of Typically and Atypically Developing Second Language Learners". 

For more information and registration, see their website which is linked above! 

Publication: Ageist Communication Experienced by Middle-Aged and Older Canadians

Sali. A Tagliamonte (Faculty) and Katharina Pabst (PhD Candidate) have teamed up with UofT's Department of Psychology to publish "Ageist Communication Experienced by Middle Aged and Older Canadians"!  Their paper was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 

This article investigates how ageism manifests in the daily lives of Canadians and helps in understanding the nuances of the expression of ageism in North America. 

Great job team! 

Chasteen, A. L., Tagliamonte, S. A., Pabst, K., & Brunet, S. (2022). Ageist Communication Experienced by Middle-Aged and Older Canadians. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 2004.

Virtual Pride Concert featuring Jeremy Dutcher

The University of Toronto is holding a Pride concert featuring two Indigenous performers: Jeremy Dutcher and Nenookaasi, both Two-Spirit. The event is co-sponsored by the Sexual and Gender Diversity Office, Hart House, First Nations House, Office of Indigenous Initiatives, and the UTM Indigenous Centre. Note that while the concert will not be recorded, it will be available via livestream on Tuesday, June 22, from 3 PM through 5 PM, and will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Dutcher won the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and a 2019 Juno Award for his bilingual debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, building on anthropological documentation of music from his community:

Jeremy Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor and composer who takes every opportunity to blend his Wolastoq First Nation roots into the music he creates, blending distinct musical aesthetics that shape-shift between classical, traditional, and pop to form something entirely new. Dutcher’s debut release, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, involves the rearrangement of early 1900s wax cylinder field recordings from his community. “Many of the songs were lost because our musical tradition was suppressed by the Canadian government. I'm doing this work as there's only about a hundred Wolastoqey speakers left. It's crucial that we're using our language because, if you lose the language, you're losing an entire distinct way of experiencing the world.”

Registration is available here. Students, staff, faculty, librarians, alumni, and friends of the U of T are welcome.

New paper: Konnelly (2021)

Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) has a paper out in the Journal of Language and Sexuality, 10(1): "Nuance and normativity in trans linguistic research."

While normativity has been central to queer linguistic research, the emergent field of trans linguistics provides opportunities for greater nuance and elaboration on the concept. Drawing from interviews with non-binary people documenting their narratives of doctor-patient visits, I present a series of recounted interactional moments where what might be considered 'normative' is in fact a survival strategy, highlighting how we might view certain invocations of the transnormative (Johnson 2016) in more complicated ways. Notions of normativity and authenticity, which are too often weaponized against trans people as a means to measure their 'success' in approximating cisheteronormative ideals, are not easily transported from queer linguistics to trans linguistics. As concepts imbricated with a history of violence for trans people, they must be treated with care and responsibility, as part of an active devotion to dismantling transphobia.

Guest speaker: J Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Our departmental Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative is very pleased to be hosting a talk by J Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder); they are a faculty member in sociolinguistics working on language, gender and sexuality, marginalization, stylization, and sociophonetics. Their talk, "Moving beyond the white and cisgender speaking subject in variationist research," will be held online from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, to be followed by a reception. Note that the talk will be recorded, and that access to the recording will be available on request; for further details, contact Nathan Sanders (faculty).

While the study of gender has largely concerned the practices of white, cisgender speakers in variationist sociolinguistic research, this talk encourages the field to consider a wider range of gendered perspectives, including non-white and non-cisgender ones, in order to facilitate epistemic justice (see also King 2020). An exploration of the realization of /s/ across multiple non-white and non-cisgender communities reveals that gendered linguistic patterns don’t always conform to those found among the white, cisgender subjects prevalent in previous research. In addition, I argue that the social interpretations of these patterns runs the risk of reifying problematic controlling images (Hill Collins 1986) about marginalized populations, if they aren’t grounded and contextualized within local epistemologies. A discussion of the patterns and epistemologies of various non-white and non-cisgender communities illuminates that indexicality is ditransitive - i.e., variables index particular subsets of social meanings for particular populations. In other words, the sociolinguistic epistemologies researchers have gained through studies of the majority population are not always adequate and accurate in explaining the patterns found in underrepresented and understudied communities. Local epistemologies should be considered in variationist analysis to ensure that the way we represent the sociolinguistic motivations behind particular linguistic patterns is epistemically just.

Affirming Writing workshop

As a joint initiative of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Writing-Integrated Teaching (WIT) programs in our department, we are holding a writing workshop online on Tuesday, March 16 from 10 AM to 11:30 AM. It will be anchored by Nathan Sanders (faculty), Virgilio Partida Peñalva (Ph.D.), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), and Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.). The focus will be on how to describe marginalised communities in a way that is respectful and thoughtful, particularly if the researcher is not a member of the in-group. More details are available here.

Guest speaker: Anne Charity Hudley (University of California, Santa Barbara)

We are delighted to (virtually) welcome Anne Charity Hudley, who is a Professor and the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A renowned sociolinguist and scholar of pedagogy, she has been at the helm of extensive, constant, hands-on work that identifies and dismantles the barriers to success in academic environments that disproportionately affect those from racialized/marginalized/low-income backgrounds. Her talk, "A roadmap for inclusion in linguistics," will probe the projects that the Department of Linguistics at UCSB has undertaken to counter the systemic forces that turn away marginalized populations at every level of mainstream education. The talk will be taking place online via Zoom on Friday, October 9, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, with a reception to follow.

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the highest ranked and highest resourced Minority Serving Institution in the world. Considering the designation as both an honor and a call to action, the UCSB Linguistics Department is working to make significant changes to its faculty and student recruitment, its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and its research and outreach focus. Charity Hudley will focus on methods and models used to engage people in inclusion in linguistics from secondary school through emeritus status, and she will also share challenges that our department has met along the way with a focus on interdepartmental, institutional, and disiplinary concerns. She will focus on three programs that UCSB Linguistics has developed in recent years: School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics, and the Sneak Peek student recruitment event.

Talk by Nathan, Lex, and Pocholo for Arts and Science

For the 'Teaching and Learning Community of Practice' series hosted by Arts and Science, Nathan Sanders (faculty), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), and Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.) are giving an online presentation on Tuesday, September 22, from 2 PM to 3:15 PM, based on the ongoing LEAF-funded project in our department: "Building equity, diversity, and inclusion in courses: A case study in linguistics." There will also be ample time for discussion. To register to attend, visit the link.

In linguistics courses, language-related biases can surface in many forms, affecting the choice of course material (especially linguistic data), how that material is presented, and how instructors interact with students. We began a three-year project in September 2019 to address some of these biases in the linguistics classroom, with the ultimate goal of generalizing the methods and materials to other fields.

In this session, we present some preliminary results of this project from the first year in various linguistics courses, including new course content on the relationship of phonetics to gender, race and sign languages; new problem sets featuring data from under-represented languages; and workshops on inclusive classroom practices. We will also discuss paths forward for creating more affirming classrooms beyond linguistics, especially in fields where issues of language can play a central role (English, psychology, etc.).

Department of Linguistics statement regarding current events

On behalf of the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Nathan Sanders (faculty) offers this message to the members of our linguistics community:

We are outraged and saddened by the continuing racist violence and abuses of power against racialized groups in the United States, Canada, and throughout the world, especially the long history of police brutality against Black people and Black communities that has once again gained worldwide attention. The faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto declare our explicit support for the Black Lives Matter movement and other networks that are working to end unjust power structures and the racism that drives them.

We believe it is also important to recognize our department's shortcomings on these issues and the need to redress them. The small number of Black scholars and students in the field of linguistics is a pervasive problem, and we acknowledge that we can do better with Black representation in our department and with fighting anti-Black racism more broadly. We have taken small steps, such as ongoing changes to our curriculum and applying for institutional opportunities such as the Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship for Black and Indigenous scholars, but there is much more uncomfortable work we need to do. As we make plans to put that work into action, we welcome voices from our community and beyond about how we as a department can best enact positive change.

Please consider joining some of the upcoming events sponsored by the Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office to help further much needed discussion and action: https://antiracism.utoronto.ca/reflect-restore-action/

For more information and resources on the important role of linguistics in racial justice, see the following statement from the Linguistic Society of America: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2020/06/03/lsa-issues-statement-racial-justice

CLA-ACL 2020

The annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique normally occurs in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This year's Congress has been cancelled owing to current events. However, CLA-ACL will be held online from May 30 through June 1. Digital attendance is free.

Presentations from scholars who are associated with our department are:

• Nathan Sanders (faculty), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.): "Methods for increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in linguistics pedagogy."
• Peter Jurgec (faculty): "Online interactive tools for undergraduate phonology."
• Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) and Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.) with Mansour Shabani (University of Guilan): "The two faces of a nominal linker: Another look at reverse ezafe in Gilaki."
  
• Cristina Cuervo (faculty) and Alexander Tough (MA, Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Not aspect, but tense: A morphological argument for the old analysis of the Spanish imperfect."
• Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.) and Phil Monahan (faculty): "Paradigmatic gaps impact early morphological decomposition: Evidence from masked priming."
• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): "Persian elides the second vowel."
• Diane Massam (faculty) and Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario): "Instructions for nullness."
• Michelle Troberg (faculty) and Justin Leung (BA): "On the uniform loss of Medieval French verb particles."
• Julien Carrier (Ph.D.): "From ergative to accusative in North Baffin Inuktitut."
• Jean-François Juneau (Ph.D.) with Gavin Bembridge (York University): "Root alternations for discourse effects: A challenge for locality?"
• Gregory Antono (MA): "Expressing a multiplicity of events in Macuxi."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (MA): "Les titres de civilité : De l’ancien français jusqu’au français moderne."
• Rosalind Owen (BA): "Sweet songs and soft hearts: Metaphor in Cuzco Quechua."
• Alia Alatassi (Ph.D., Department of French), and Mihaela Pirvulescu (faculty): "The acquisition of French object clitics by L2 children: Effects of age of onset."
• Olga Tararova (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Western Ontario) with Martha Black (University of Western Ontario): "Adult acquisition of grammatical gender in instructed L2 Spanish and the role of metacognition."
• David Heap (Ph.D. 1997, now at the University of Western Ontario) with Yarubi Diaz Colmenares (University of Western Ontario): "Variation et changement dans les accords du français inclusif."
• Former visiting student Sander Nederveen (Simon Fraser University): "Discourse novelty, givenness, and EV2 in German."
• Andrew McCandless (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "The influence of phonetic training on production of Spanish rhotics in beginner L2 learners with L1 Canadian English."

Posters include those of:

• Alana Johns (faculty) and Elan Dresher (faculty): "Morpheme structure change in Labrador Inuttut."
• Elan Dresher (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University) and Sara Mackenzie (Ph.D. 2009, now at Memorial University of Newfoundland): "The status of phoneme inventories: The role of contrastive feature hierarchies."
• Songül Gündogdu (postdoc), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty), and Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "Revisiting 'doubled' ezafe in Southern Zazaki."
• Mihaela Pirvulescu (faculty) and Elena Valenzuela (University of Ottawa): "Genericity in the grammars of Romanian, French, and English trilinguals."
• Elizabeth Johnson (faculty) with Tania Zamuner (University of Ottawa), Amélie Bernard (McGill University), and Félix Desmeules-Trudel (University of Western Ontario): "The time-course of toddlers' recognition for native-accented versus non-native-accented speech."
• Crystal Chow (MA): "Expressing paths of motion in Apurimac Quechua."
• Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019): "The puzzle of irrelevant assertions in alternative semantics."
• Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario): "Variable realization of /v/ as [v] or [w] in a heritage Italian variety."
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Regular and irregular inflexion of derived proper nouns: A syntactic-semantic model."

THEY 2019

Our department is delighted to be among the sponsors of THEY, HIRSELF, EM, and YOU: Nonbinary Pronouns in Theory and Practice (THEY 2019), being held from June 11 through 13 at Queen's University.

For their book Gender: Your Guide (2018), faculty member Lee Airton of the Faculty of Education at Queen's interviewed two people linked to our department: current Ph.D. student Lex Konnelly, and former postdoc Bronwyn Bjorkman, both of whom have worked on singular they in present-day English. Now all three have combined forces to organize this conference on pronouns and genders outside historical European attempts at collapsing gender into a binary system based on sex assigned at birth. Lex is also giving one of the keynote talks: "Gender diversity and linguistic advocacy: Innovation in the use of singular they."

Please note that even if you are not able to travel to Kingston, you can register to participate remotely!

Lex in Lee Airton's new book

Ph.D. student Lex Konnelly, who works on morphosyntax and sociolinguistics (and who is teaching Language and Gender at UTM this semester), was recently interviewed for a new book by faculty member Lee Airton of Queen's University. Airton's book, Gender: Your Guide (Adams Media/Simon and Schuster) outlines approaches to supporting human beings across a range of gender identities given the untenable nature of historical European attempts at equating gender with sex assigned at birth. Lex was interviewed about the singular they pronoun in present-day English.