Department field trip to Niagara: My Fair Lady at the Shaw Festival

Earlier this fall, the Department of Linguistics invited faculty members and graduate students to watch My Fair Lady at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

The musical is about a phonetics professor and language documenter, and discusses implicit bias in language. 

Thank you everyone for coming!

Professor Naomi Nagy's Book Launch at the Canadian Language Museum

Professor Naomi Nagy (department chair) introduced her new work, Heritage Languages: Extending Variationist Approaches, earlier this semester at the Canadian Language Museum at Glendon College. 

This book is a part of the larger Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto project (HLVC), and an accumulation of hard work of linguists at the UofT, and heritage language speakers across the city. 

Professor Nagy at the Book Launch

Read the publication at this link, accessible through University of Toronto libraries.

Congratulations Professor Nagy on your publication and launch! 

Canadian Language Museum
Picture credits: Craig Diegel

Pedro Mateo Pedro Publishes The Itza' Pedagogical Grammar

The department is pleased to congratulate Pedro Mateo Pedro (faculty) on the publication of the Itza' Pedagogical Grammar, in collaboration with the Comindad Lingüística Itza' of the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala.

Itza’ is an endangered language spoken in Guatemala that belongs to the Yucatecan branch of Mayan languages. 80% of the pedagogical grammar appears only in Itza’, since the aim is to strengthen the understanding and oral expression of the language. The development of the grammar is part of a larger project on the revitalization of Itza’. 

This project was a joint effort with individuals in the language community and at UofT: Jorge Francisco Mex Tesucún (Comunidad Lingüística Itza'), Ana López Sipac (Kaqchikel speaker), Aki Zhang, Sooyoun Im, David Ramsay, Jevan Konyar, and Daniela Lopez Loncar (UofT).  

This is a great step towards revitalization and documentation. Congratulations everyone! 

The book is available here: 

Itza' Pedagogical Grammar

Grad Convocation 2024

On October 28 and November 1, we celebrated the conferral of our graduate students' MA and PhD degrees. This marks the culmination of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. Your achievements are a testament to your determination––we are incredibly proud of each and every one of you!

Our newly minted PhDs:

• Angelika Kiss
• Emilia Melara
• Virgilio Partida Penalva
• Maida Percival

We even had our own hooding ceremony! Angelika was hooded by her supervisor, Michela Ippolito (faculty).

Our new MAs:

• Louis Careri
• Laura Escobar
• Siyi Fan
• Fredrik Gao
• Olanrewaju Samuel
• Mechelle Wu
• Aliya Zhaksybek
  
  

Kelly, Dave, Naomi, Keir, Michela, Nathan, Angelika, Pocholo, and Emily

Guillaume Thomas (Graduate Coordinator) giving a toast

Naomi Nagy (Department Chair) congratulating our grads

Thank you to everyone (colleagues, friends, and family) who celebrated with us! And once again, a huge congratulations to our grads!

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.

Sali Tagliamonte's CRC Grant is Renewed!

Sali Tagliamonte is one of Spring 2024's recipient of a Canada Research Chair (CRC) Grant renewal!

The renewal of this grant, which was confirmed earlier in June, awards $200,000 annually for 7 years to the University College linguist. 

For more information, see https://www.utoronto.ca/celebrates/14-u-t-researchers-awarded-new-or-renewed-canada-research-chairs or check out the relevant accounts: @salitag, or @theucprincipal, as well as:

X: @UC_UofT

Instagram: @uc_uoft; @theucprincipal

YouTube: @UC_UofT

Facebook: @universitycollegetoronto

LinkedIn: @University of Toronto - University College

Congratulations once more to Sali, and best of luck in the future!

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.

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.

Professor Reynolds and the Controversy of More/Less: Paper Accepted at Journal of Linguistics

In May 2024, Adjunct Professor Brett Reynolds published his paper "Why more and less are never adverbs" in the Journal of Linguistics, arguing that the analysis of semantic information is useful for making categorical decisions about words and their meanings. 

This interesting work is somewhat of a discovery in the field of categorization. If we had all been agreed that timber wolves and grey wolves were distinct species, for example, Reynolds in his own words has come out with data which suggests that these are actually the same type of wolf living in different territories!

To read Reynolds' succinct twitter thread explaining the phenomenon, check out his Twitter: @brettrey3.

Figure 5of Reynolds' publication,
a k-means grouping between adjectives
and determinatives (pg. 26)

To summarize, words function differently according to context: the words "more" and "less" are categorized in most dictionaries as adverbs, as they can modify adjectives or adverbs, such as in the phrase "more/less quickly." However, they can also determine nouns, and in sentences such as "more/less food" are called determinatives.

Determinatives, (Ds) thus, don't just determine nouns, but they can also modify Advs. 

So why are "more" and "less" special? 

The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, (CGEL) refers to these two words as adverbs because they perform the same linguistic function as the comparative -er and superlative -est in ways that "much" and "little" don't. 

Reynolds disputes this distinction - you can't have "much massive," but you can have "much [and more] different." 

He suggests that you get overlaps that don't follow rigid rules because of semantic scales, and not because "much" and "more" are categorically different. 

Adjectives "prefer" different modifiers according to semantic rules such as size, similarity, and improvement.

Analyzing different adjectives and their modifiers in a corpus, Reynolds noticed an "almost perfect" split between more-adjectives (blue), much-adjectives (red), and adjectives that are more ambivalent (green).

Thus, Reynolds says that the "most thorough and consistent grammar of English," the CGEL, is only "mostly right" in their categorization of Adjs. and Ds. 

Determinatives shouldn't be listed twice, once with adverbs, and again with other Ds: rather, words like "more" and "less" are never adverbs. 

Stay tuned to see what changes come out of this publication, and weigh in with your own two cents!

UofT at the 37th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference

The University of Michigan’s Linguistics Department hosted the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Ann Arbor May 16th-18th. A full list of UofT participants can be found below.

UofT Linguistics presenters gave talks at this exciting conference, including Tiana Simovic of the Department of Psychology, her supervisor Dr. Craig Chambers, focusing on Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science, and Wesley Orth, a Postdoctoral Fellow who completed his PhD at Northwestern University.

That presentation by Simovic and Chambers looked at how pragmatics (mental state reasoning) is involved in pronoun resolution, a relatively unexplored field.

At HSP 2023, they explored "how reasoning is involved in language processing." 

Orth's talk at the conference was a collaborative effort in relative clauses in Hungarian, a relatively understudied language. Unique properties of its structure allowed Orth and co. to test new hypotheses, testing variants which read to different reading behaviours, offering insights into the role of memory and prediction in processing. Their work will have an impact on tools for investigating such understudied languages.

Some posters from our UofT linguists included Dave Kush's poster on Active expectation in the processing of Urdu and Hindi correlative structures, in collaboration with Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, and Hayah Siddiqui. 

Their work developed a variant of the "violated expectation paradigm," used in work on expectations and prediction. Hypothesizing surprise if readers were presented with something other than a demonstrative pronoun at the start of a sentence after seeing a correlative, they measured reading time to gauge "surprise" in readers presented with a name at the start of a second sentence instead of a pronoun. Indeed, they found this surprise value. 

Future work will clarify whether these results show prediction of a pronoun as a subject of the next clause, or the pronoun as the first thing in the sentence - a challenging task due to Urdu and Hindi's flexible word order. 

Other posters included Ivan Bondoc’s on the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog; Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations, co-authored by Lyn Tieu, assistant Professor in the French Department; and a poster on children’s interpretation of the hotly-debated ambiguous singular “they” by Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, and Emily Atkinson.

Notable alums presenting at the conference include Ailís Cournane, who earned her Master of Arts and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and who now leads the Child Language Lab at New York University.

The Linguistics Department was proud to see so many of our own linguists forging new paths in their fields, and can't wait for HSP Conference #38!

Presentations and talks by UofT Linguists:

Talks:

Tiana Simovic and Craig Chambers: Pronoun Interpretation Highlights the Robustness of Social Perspective Reasoning

Sonny Wang and Craig Chambers: The Trait-Like Nature of Bridging and Instrument Inferences in Younger and Older Adults: An Individual Differences Study

Wesley Orth, Dávid Nemeskey, and Eszter Ronai: Hungarian relative clause processing: Diverging Results in L-maze and A-Maze

Posters by current UofT linguists:

Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, Hayah Siddiqui, Dave Kush: Active expectations in processing Urdu and Hindi correlative structures

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu, Mara Panaitescu, Gabriela Bîlbîie, Anton Benz, Andreea Nicolae: Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations

Ivan Bondoc, Dave Kush: Animacy does not modulate the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog

Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, Emily Atkinson: Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Singular "They"

Presentations by UofT Linguistics Alum: 

Maxime Tulling, Vishal Arvindam, Ailís Cournane: Maybe now, not later: online processing of possibility and negation in adults and 2-year-olds

UofT Linguists at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Several members of our UofT community presented talks at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics hosted by McGill University, between May 2nd and May 4th. 

A complete list of UofT attendees and presenters can be found below. 

Liam McFadden, Assistant Professor Samuel Akinbo, PhD Candidate Gregory Antono, Yi-Ting Deng, and Assistant Professor Avery Ozburn presented their work, Mapping African languages. 

His first conference outside of UofT, McFadden is an undergraduate student at UofT, who got to combine his knowledge of linguistics and GIS (Geographic Information System) to navigate through the field of language mapping with the goal of engaging the linguistics community in a project of making better maps. 

McFadden and the team are excited to see the development of their work in future years, and we at the WHITL are excited to see ACAL 56!

UofT Linguistics Department Presence: 

Speakers: 

Laura Griffin, Alexander Angsongna - An Analysis of Tone Delinking in Future Contexts in Central Dàgáárè

Liam McFadden, Samuel Akinbo, Gregory Antono, Yi-Ting Deng, Avery Ozburn - Mapping African languages

Keffyalew Gebregziabher - Polar and Wh-questions in Tigrinya 

Samuel Akinbo, Tongpan Rabo Fwangwar - Grammatical tones in the Derivation of Verbs from Ideophones in Mwaghavul

Atiqa Hachimi, Gareth Smail - Stylized performance of “mock Berber” in a Moroccan Stand-Up comedy talent show

Juvénal Ndayiragije, Patrick Kinchsular - A comparative analysis of transitive expletive constructions in Kirundi and Germanic

Poster:

Avery Ozburn, Gregory Antono, Saba Mirabolghasemi - Community- and context-based approaches to African linguistics: the Language Profiles Project

UofT Hosts WSCLA - The Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas

 

Members of the WSCLA organizing committee at the Saturday dinner. L to R: Martin Renard, Jack Mahlmann, Greg Antono, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Susana Béjar, Yanfei Lu, Laura Griffin. We are missing Keren Rice. 

Between April 26th and 28th, the University of Toronto’s Linguistics Department and the Centre for Indigenous Studies were proud to host WSCLA - the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas.

Dedicated to the “formal and theoretically-informed linguistic study of the Indigenous languages of North, Central, and South America,” the event included speakers from Montreal, Alberta, Buffalo, Minnesota, and even Copenhagen. Invited speakers from UofT included Oheróhskon Ryan DeCaire, Associate Professor, while panelists saw a presentation from Tahohtharátye Joe Brant, Assistant professor. Looking forward to WSCLA 2025!

Talks

The Acquisiton of Ideophones and Split Ergatvity in Chuj

Pedro Mateo Pedro (Faculty)

Adult Immersion in Kanien’kéha Revitalizaton 

Oheróhskon Ryan DeCaire (Wáhta and UofT Faculty)

Posters

Low “From” Applicatves in Kanien’kéha

Martn Renard (PhD)

Language Contact and the Extended PP Projection: Huasteca Nahuatl Spatial Expressions 

Nadia Takhtaganova (PhD)

Language Revitalizaton, is it only Indigenous Speakers’ Responsibility?

Pedro Mateo Pedro (Faculty), Nathalia Ortz Rios (BA), Daniela Lopez Loncar (BA), Jorge Francisco Mex Tesucun, Otoniel Rosendo Zacal Chayax, and José Alfredo Chayax Tesucun (Comunidad Lingüistca Itzaj)

Special Session Panel: The Future of Kanien’kéha Revitalization

Panelists from the Sunday special session on the Future of Kanien'kéha Revitalization: 

Tahohtharátye Joe Brant (TTO and UofT), Rohahiyo Jordan Brant (Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa), Oheróhskon Ryan DeCaire (Wáhta Mohawks and UofT), Tehota’kerá:ton Jeremy Green (TTO and York University), Konwanonhsiyóhstha’ Callie Hill (Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na), Owennatekha Brian Maracle (Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa), Karonhiióhstha’ Shea Sky

(Ionkwahronkha’onhátie and Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa).

Other presentations involving UofT alumni:

Apparent Cross-Clausal Agreement with Obliques in Kalaallisut is Prolepsis

Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley), Emily Clem (UCSD), Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now Faculty at UCLA), Ellen Thrane

(Mis)matches Between Speech and Gesture in Hul’q’umi’num’ Storytelling

Rosemary Webb (BA 2019; now PhD student at UVic)

A Source of Conatvity in Tlingit Pluractonal Verbs

Laurestine Bradford (MA 2021, now PhD student at McGill)

Voice, Valence, and Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish Switch-Functon Serial Verb Constructons

Lauren Schneider (SFU) and Rosemary Webb (BA 2019; now PhD student at UVic)

Elder Eileen Antone giving the opening special session on Sunday, Iwith. 

Sunday Morning Poster session.

Mskwaankwad Rice (University of Minnesota) giving the presentation on a Learner-Centered Approach to Linguistic Research, one of 6 invited talks.

The Faculty Club

 A few linguistics profs get out together after a long week and brave the weather to participate in a Linguistics Review Panel. 

Graduation Lunch & Eclipse

 

How often do we have 2 such exciting things on the same day? 

On April 8, about 20 of our amazing undergrads joined us for a delicious lunch, a live feed to astronomical experts sharing their wisdom about eclipses, and we all got to see the sun disappear (behind the moon, behind the clouds, whatever...). 

Congratulations to our undergrads completing their Majors, Minor and Specialist POSts in linguistics!!!

Here are some highlights from the day:

the actual eclipse (Nathan's pic)

a cake eclipse -- watch the chocolate pass over the lemon, then disappear (Naomi's pic)

Nathan rocks his solar glasses

Picture-in-picture (Craig's pic)

And, if that's not enough, here's more from The Bulletin Brief <bulletin.brief@utoronto.ca>:

Skies darkened and temperatures dropped as the solar eclipse swept across U of T’s three campuses Monday, bringing community members together to marvel at the celestial spectacle. See how the day unfolded through the lenses of photographers at the university.

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!

New paper by Prof. Samuel Akinbo in Glossa!

A new paper by Prof. Samuel Akinbo entitled "Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal" has recently appeared in Glossa. The paper presents evidence in favour of iconicity in the core morphophonological grammar.

Here is the abstract:

We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.

Congratulations Prof. Akinbo! 

Congratulations to Prof. Suzi Lima for her new paper in Language Documentation and Description

Congratulations to Professor Suzi Lima whose new article entitled "On Quotatives and Speech Verbs in Yudja" has recently appeared in the journal Language Documentation and Description. The article examines the argument structure of speech verbs in Yudja, an indigenous language spoken in Brazil.

Here is the abstract:

Much literature has debated the argument structure of speech verbs. For example, Munro (1982) has provided evidence to show that, in many languages, quotations do not pattern like the complements of transitive verbs. In this paper, I analyze the distribution of four speech verbs in Yudja (Juruna branch, Tupi), an Indigenous language spoken in Brazil, and compare them with bona fide transitive verbs. I provide morphosyntactic evidence to argue that direct quotations are not complements of speech verbs based on the distribution of such verbs both in quotative and non-quotative constructions.

Happy reading!

2024 IGNITE grant recipients

 Congratulations to Samuel Akinbo and Suzi Lima! 

They got a 2024 IGNITE grant which supports "interdisciplinary research led by Black faculty, librarians, post-doctoral scholars, clinical scientists and medical research fellows/residents at the University of Toronto." These funds will help support their "project to document the preparation of traditional foods and investigate the grammar of counting and measuring in Gã and Yoruba, two closely related languages spoken in Ghana and Nigeria, respectively. Collaborating with universities in Ghana and Nigeria, one of the project’s key goals is to preserve and revitalize stigmatized traditional foods."

See great photos and more about other winners here:
https://brn.utoronto.ca/announcing-the-2024-brn-ignite-grant-recipients/

New paper from Michela Ippolito in the Journal of Semantics!

Faculty member Michela Ippolito has recently published a new paper in the Journal of Semantics entitled "The Hell with Questions." The paper examines current approaches to wh-the-hell questions, and proposes a new theory based on the idea of doxastic dissonance.

Here is the abstract:

We discuss previous proposals for the semantics of wh-the-hell questions (domain widening theories and domain restriction theories), highlighting the challenges these accounts face in trying to explain the different properties of wh-the-hell questions and capture the contribution this expression makes to the semantics of the question. We review the semantic properties of wh-the-hell questions discussed in the literature and propose a new analysis according to which the hell signals doxastic dissonance. We argue that this proposal accounts for the semantic properties of this type of expletive question, and has the potential to extend to the class of wh-the-hell questions we see across languages.

Congratulations Michela!