From Canada to Guatemala: Connecting Knowledge and People through ICM

We're delighted to feature this posting by guest blogger Ilona Semchuk!

 

Radio 1 Interview with Sali Tagliamonte!

For those who have not heard yet, Sali A. Tagliamonte (Faculty) will be taking a Field trip to Thunder Bay, Ontario! As Tagliamonte and her students head up the north shore of Lake Superior, they will be interviewing locals for a dialect survey and for an accommodation study! 

RADIO 1 did a story on Tagliamonte's upcoming trip! In her interview, "A linguist dedicated to the language of Northern Ontarians",  she shared more details on the project and got to show off her French-speaking skills. 😉 

Be sure to check out the interview to learn more! They are always looking for participants, so if you know any born and raised locals in a Northern Ontario community, share this post with them! 😃

Ba-TOM 1!

The First Toronto-Montreal Bantu Colloquium (Ba-TOM) was hosted (IN PERSON!) on our Scarborough Campus from May 27th -28th! 

Students from the Winter Semester Field Method courses at the University of Toronto and at McGill's linguistics department presented their final papers at Ba-Tom 1. 

Here we have almost all the UofT presenters! 

Check out the program to see how many UofT names you can recognize!

This was an amazing event and the department is excited to see Ba-TOM continue in the years to come! 

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.

Congratulations, Alexei and Paul and coauthors!

Congratulations to Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College), and coauthors Jan Heegård Petersen (Københavns Universitet), Sikandar Kalas (Central Film School, London), and Taj Khan Kalash (Kalasha Heritage Conservation Initiative). As part of the Illustrations of the IPA series in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, this team has a forthcoming profile of the phonetics of Kalasha (Bumburet variety), and it has just been awarded the journal's first Most Illustrative Illustration Prize. Wonderful news!

Research Groups: Friday, April 16

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Friesner (faculty, Department of French) and Laura Kastronic (faculty, Department of French): "Developing sociolinguistic competence in French through the flipped classroom model."

​The flipped classroom approach (cf. Bergmann and Sams 2012), in which class time is largely devoted to collaborative activities, has recently been extended to the second-language classroom. Nonetheless, despite incorporating communicative methods, predominant pedagogical practices, focusing on prescriptive norms and traditional textbook explanations of linguistic phenomena (Mougeon et al. 2010), impart minimal sociolinguistic competence, leaving most second language learners ill-equipped to replicate native-like patterns of variation (cf. Dewaele 2004). Learners therefore overuse hyperstandard, hyperformal, or register-inappropriate forms. We believe that the flipped classroom model is well suited to addressing these challenges for FSL teaching. We therefore draw on variationist sociolinguistic research to foster a deeper understanding of three well-studied phenomena (cf. Mougeon et al. 2010) - negation, expression of future time, and first-person plural address - for which traditional pedagogical explanations diverge considerably from L1 community behaviour. We argue that time outside of the classroom is well spent building sociolinguistic awareness through evidence-driven description, corpus-based realia, and analytical commentary on sociolinguistic implications of variant choice, providing scaffolding for communicative in-class comprehension and production exercises. Additionally, we address questions of the appropriate point of intervention based on perceptions of casual or nonstandard linguistic behaviour by L1 speakers of varying geographic origins. 

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Shabri Kapoor (Ph.D.): "The mass/count distinction in Cusco Quechua."

The mass/count distinction is often described as the difference between nouns that represent countable entities (dog/dogs), and uncountable entities such as substances or 'stuff' (water/*waters). Languages that have this distinction often show differences in the features that distinguish count from mass nouns. One such feature is the use of a container classifier when combining numerals with mass nouns (three cups of water). My research explores how the mass/count distinction applies to the Cusco variety of Quechua, and specifically, how container classifiers that combine numerals with mass nouns in Cusco Quechua differ morphologically, depending on classifier type.

Research Groups: Friday, March 19

 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
1. Guest speaker: Juliette Millet (Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7): "Inductive biases, pretraining and fine-tuning jointly account for brain responses to speech."

Our ability to comprehend speech remains, to date, unrivaled by deep learning models. This feat could result from the brain's ability to fine-tune generic sound representations for speech-specific processes. To test this hypothesis, we compare i) five types of deep neural networks to ii) human brain responses elicited by spoken sentences and recorded in 102 Dutch subjects using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Each network was either trained on an acoustics scene classification, a speech-to-text task (based on Bengali, English, or Dutch), or not trained. The similarity between each model and the brain is assessed by correlating their respective activations after an optimal linear projection. The differences in brain-similarity across networks revealed three main results. First, speech representations in the brain can be accounted for by random deep networks. Second, learning to classify acoustic scenes leads deep nets to increase their brain similarity. Third, learning to process phonetically-related speech inputs (i.e., Dutch vs English) leads deep nets to reach higher levels of brain-similarity than learning to process phonetically-distant speech inputs (i.e. Dutch vs Bengali). Together, these results suggest that the human brain fine-tunes its heavily-trained auditory hierarchy to learn to process speech.

2. Julia Watson (MSc., Department of Computer Science), Jai Aggarwal (MSc., Department of Computer Science), and Anna Kapron-King (MSc., Department of Computer Science): "Come together: Integrating perspective taking and perspectival expressions."

Conversational interaction involves integrating the perspectives of multiple interlocutors with varying knowledge and beliefs. An issue that has received little attention in cognitive modeling of pragmatics is how speakers deal with the choice of words like come that are inherently perspectival. How do such lexical perspectival items fit into a speaker's overall integration of conversational perspective? We present new experimental results on production of perspectival words, in which speakers have varying degrees of certainty about their addressee's perspective. We show that the Multiple Perspectives Model closely fits the empirical data, lending support to the hypothesis that use of perspectival words can be naturally accommodated as a type of conversational perspective taking.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.): "A POS tagger for Nahuatl."

Nahuatl is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico; it enjoys the attention of many academics and scholars in the country and abroad; and it has an active community of native researchers and young advocators. Yet, there aren´t many language resources for Nahuatl speakers. In this talk, I will look at the practical issues that stand in the way of progress in this particular case, and I present the first part-of-speech tagger for Nahuatl (still under construction).

Research Groups: Friday, March 12

As this Friday is our annual prospective graduate students' day (by invitation), we are having our customary research-group extravaganza. Via Zoom this time, all six of our current research groups are holding sequences of mini-presentations (anywhere between 3 and 12 minutes to highlight ongoing work.

10:05 AM - 10:55 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Dave Kush (faculty), Priscilla Fung (Ph.D., Department of Psychology), Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty), Julia Watson (MSc., Department of Computer Science), Jai Aggarwal (MSc., Department of Computer Science), and Anna Kapron-King (MSc., Department of Computer Science).

11:05 AM - 11:55 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Vidhya Elango (MA), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Naomi Nagy (faculty), and Jeremy Needle (postdoc).

12:05 PM - 12:55 PM: Syntax Group
Andrew Peters (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), and Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.).

1:05 PM - 1:55 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Heather Yawney (Ph.D.), Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.), Talia Tahtadjian (MA), Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French), Nathan Sanders (faculty), and Photini Coutsougera (faculty).

2:05 PM - 2:55 PM: Fieldwork Group
Keren Rice (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Guillaume Thomas (faculty), Pedro Mateo Pedro (faculty), Ryan DeCaire (faculty), Suzi Lima (faculty), Jessica Denniss (Ph.D.), and Virgilio Partida-Peñalva (Ph.D.).

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM: Semantics Research Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.) and Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.).

Guest speaker: Nico Nassenstein (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

This semester's Field Methods class, taught by Suzi Lima (faculty), is very pleased to welcome virtual guest speaker Nico Nassenstein, a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. His talk, "Linguistic change in Lingala: Urban language use and the emergence of new registers", will be taking place on Wednesday, March 10, at 6:00 PM. Please note that registration is required by March 9; see the email from Suzi for details.

Lingala is a Bantu language classified by Maho (2009) as C.30b [lin], which is spoken by approximately 40-45 million speakers (or more), see Meeuwis (2020) for an overview. Over the course of its history, Lingala (and its pidginized predecessor based on Bobangi; Meeuwis 2019) has been subject to interventions and adaptations by colonial agents, missionaries and linguists since the 1890s, and has given rise to a multitude of registers and ideas how and which Lingala represents 'correct' or 'incorrect' varieties (see for instance the list discussed in Sene Mongaba 2013, including Lingala ya basango, literary Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala etc.). Apart from Bangala, Lingala’s closest sister language in the northeastern parts of DR Congo (classified by Maho 2009 as C30a), and the northwestern dialect of Lingala, the variety used in the capital Kinshasa has been treated in most of the available recent studies (Motingea 2006, Meeuwis 2010, 2020). However, Kinshasa Lingala is no homogenous language but varies and is interpreted by different speakers depending upon the context of their interactions. What Sesep (1990) still labelled as Indoubil/Hindubil or the language of Kinshasa’s cowboys (Gondola 2016), is nowadays known as Lingala ya Bayankee or Yanké (van Pelt 2000, Nassenstein 2014) and is slowly changing from a youth language practice and 'street language' to a common medium of communication in urban Kinshasa, developing into an urban contact dialect or urban register (Wiese and Kerswill 2021). As a parallel development, Lingala speakers all around the world make increased use of a public language game or ludling, Langila (Nassenstein 2015), which expresses strong language ideologies of worldliness, global repertoires and 'fashionable' language use – especially across social media such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In my talk, I trace processes of current linguistic change that are observable in these urban and global language practices based on Lingala and bring them into relation to general patterns of contact and change in Bantu languages. I therefore try to connect early processes of change and compare them with current Kinshasa Lingala and its diverse registers. From a perspective of microvariation, my hypothesis is that despite the linguistic manipulations and agentive language use by urban youth etc. specific morphosyntactic changes in Lingala correspond with those found in other Bantu languages prone to urban diversification and multi-register emergence, e.g. Kiswahili (G.40), Kinyarwanda (JD.60) and Luganda (JE15).

Research Groups: Friday, February 12

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Guest speaker: Mary Edward (University of Brighton): "Lexical variation in sign language: A cross-linguistic comparison of two Ghanaian sign languages."

The existence of linguistic variation has been identified as an intrinsic part of all languages irrespective of the modality (spoken or signed). Lexical variation in different signed languages have been documented by researchers working on signed languages (Schermer, 2004; Stamp, et al., 2014; Bickford, 1991; Lucas, et al., 2001). Research has demonstrated that different factors may contribute to variation in sign languages and these factors include gender, ethnicity, social class, and region. These social variables are distinctive to different signing communities and their manifestations vary. In this talk, I explore lexical variation in Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL) and Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL). These two sign languages are used in Ghana by different Deaf communities. I explore variation in two semantic categories; Handheld tools and Appliances and considers the differences and similarities between GSL and AdaSL. Specifically, I consider if iconicity (form-meaning resemblance mappings) contributes to lexical variation in each sign language.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Christopher Legerme (MA): "Contact, identity, and change in the Haitian Diaspora: A sociolinguistic study of a creole language."

This presentation reports on my progress investigating the role of language contact and social identity in the development of variable linguistic phenomena in Haitian Creole (HC). I also discuss methods in sociolinguistic fieldwork and the pros and cons of remote language work. The Haitian disapora is the community in focus for my research and I reflect on aspects of HC sociophonology and if that factors into the transmission of the language from Haiti born homeland speakers of the diaspora to heritage speakers raised outside of Haiti. The linguistic feature I explore is the nasalization of HC postnominal determiners following syllables with non nasal nuclei (Valdman, 1991; Tezil, 2019). I discuss the extent that this process continues to be a variable rule in the grammar of heritage speakers of HC and what factors might be conditioning this variable given new linguistic landscapes away from the homeland, and why? The broader goal of my work is to contribute to our understanding of how Creole communities and their languages might inform our knowledge of contact-induced language change and to provide some rich vernacular data of HC for future research.

New paper: Bonfim and Lima (2020)

Anari Bonfim (Museu Nacional/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Suzi Lima (faculty) have a paper out in Linguistic Variation, 20(2): "Count and mass nouns in Patxohã."

This paper describes the count/mass distinction in Patxohã, a revitalized language spoken in Bahia and Minas Gerais, Brazil. We observe that only count nouns can be directly combined with numerals and that only count nouns can co-occur with plural determiners. Furthermore, only count nouns can be combined with size adjectives. As for quantifiers, we observe that at least one quantifier in the language (nitxi) can be combined with count and mass nouns, but trigger different interpretations depending on the noun it is combined with. We also discuss the use of container phrases in counting and measuring contexts.

Guest speaker: Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

As part of her graduate seminar on the semantics of indigenous South American languages, Suzi Lima (faculty) has invited Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) to give a talk; current departmental members are welcome. A postdoc in linguistic anthropology with the National Science Foundation, she has been making waves for boldly exploring the intersections of language documentation with methodology from adjacent subfields (e.g. variation, acquisition, and psycholinguistics). Her talk, "Understanding deixis in Ticuna: Experimental, observational, and L1 acquisition studies," will be taking place online on Tuesday, November 3, at 4:00 PM. To register, see the first of the two emails from Suzi and fill out the form.

This talk discusses three fieldwork-based studies of the meaning of demonstratives (equivalents to this/that and here/there) in Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language. These studies illustrate the range of methods - from descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and first language acquisition - which researchers can use to analyze semantics and pragmatics in a fieldwork setting. First, I discuss a mixed-methods descriptive study which examined perceptual meanings, or whether Ticuna demonstratives encode information about the speaker's mode of perception of the referent (e.g., whether it is visible). I show how elicitation, semi-experimental methods, and observational recordings of conversation converged to support the same analysis in this line of research. Second, I report on a quantitative study that examined the co-organization of demonstratives and pointing gestures in a video corpus of interviews. This analysis reached substantially different conclusions than either judgment-based or experimental research on the topic, illustrating one way that observational data can complement experimental work. Last, I discuss my continuing research on the L1 acquisition of Ticuna by children aged 1 to 4 years. I show how collecting a large, observational dataset of children's language production allowed me to ask novel questions about the interplay of frequency effects and cognitive/learning biases in the acquisition of demonstratives.

LGCU Welcome Workshop 12

The annual Welcome Workshop held by the Linguistics Graduate Course Union is happening this year on Friday, October 16, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The workshop is an informal, supportive event aimed at giving incoming graduate students in the MA and Ph.D. programs a chance to introduce their research to each other and to the rest of the department. Everyone is encouraged to attend.

This year's presenters are all beginning either the MA or the Ph.D. program:

• Gregory Antono (Ph.D.): "Countability in Kristang (Melaka Creole Portuguese)."
• Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.): "Referential density in Tarahumana."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (Ph.D.): "Les titres de civilité : Old French to Modern French honorifics."
• Christina Duong (MA): "The Great Vowel Shift: Shifting the bigger picture."
• Vidhya Elango (MA): "Linguistic capital in Sierra Da Lua, Roraima, Brazil."
• Marjorie Leduc (MA): "A lexical phonological account of Turkana harmony system."
• Justin Leung (MA): "A quantitative approach to the loss of Medieval French verb particles."
• Talia Tahtadjian (MA): "Western Armenian rhotics: Differences in phonemic contrast."

Research Groups: Friday, October 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Guest speaker: Jiangtian Li (University of Western Ontario): "On polysemy: a philosophical, psycholinguistic, computational approach."

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched clusters in contextual modulation of word meaning and a word is polysemous if and only if it has entrenched clustering in its contextual modulation. I argue that this theory explains all the features of polysemous senses. In order to demonstrate more thoroughly how clusters emerge from meaning modulation during processing and provide evidence for this new theory, I implement the theory by training a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns distributional information through exposure to a large corpus of English. Clusters of contextually modulated meanings emerge from how the model processes individual words in sentences. This trained model is validated against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy, focusing on the gradedness and flexibility of polysemous sense individuation, a human-annotated corpus of regular polysemy, focusing on the regularity of polysemy, and behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. Last, the implication to philosophy of this new theory of polysemy is discussed. I focus on the debate between semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. I argue that the phenomenon of polysemy poses a severe challenge to semantic minimalism. No solution is foreseeable if the minimalist thesis is kept, and the existence of contextual modulation is denied within the literal truth condition of an utterance.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Guillaume Thomas (faculty) presenting on collaborative work with language consultant Germino Duarte: "Switch-Reference: Syntax and/or (discourse) semantics?"

Research Groups: Friday, October 2

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: group discussion of ideas and insights!

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Guest speaker: Javier Domingo (Université de Montréal) on his work with L1 speakers of extremely endangered indigenous languages from Central and South America (Ayapaneco, Tehuelche, Chaná and Yagan) and the construction of the notion of a language's 'last speaker'.

Research Groups: Friday, September 18

Note that all groups are meeting online until otherwise indicated; see the emails from group administrators for links and for further details. Also note that subsequent meetings of the Fieldwork Group this semester will be in the afternoon time-slot instead (1 PM - 2:30 PM).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Jeremy Needle (postdoc): "Two computational studies of lexical knowledge in te reo Māori in NZ."

The two studies presented in this talk demonstrate our efforts with computational and experimental approaches to replicate and extend traditional formal descriptions of te reo Māori. In the first study, we compare wordlikeness ratings for words and non-words to gradient phonotactic scores based on subsets of the lexicon derived from spoken and written corpora. In additional to deriving a gradient probabilistic description of Māori phonotactics which extends prior phonological work, we find that non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders demonstrate wordlikeness knowledge of Māori which suggests form-only familiarity with about 2000 morphemes. The importance of morphology in the lexical model for this study spurred us toward the second study: a quantitative survey of morphological patterns in Māori which combines knowledge from expert informants with machine-learning morphological parsing models. Among our findings, we particularly note that our native-speaker informants do not appear sensitive to the same taxonomy of reduplication patterns that appear in traditional grammars.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Fieldwork Group
Introductions and group discussion of developing elicitation materials.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
1. Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.): "Question tags projecting sourcehood in Italian."

Question tags like isn't it or right? in English can serve the purpose of eliciting confirmation or acknowledgment from the addressee. In Italian, no?, o sbaglio? and vero? have such a function, but there is another tag in its inventory, eh?, which is subject to further restrictions. In addition to elicit the addressee's acknowledgment/confirmation, eh? also conveys evidential meaning. When a tag question hosts eh?, the speaker conveys i) that the addressee is independently committed to the proposition conveyed by the anchor (p), and presupposes ii) that the speaker knows i) from a direct source. That is, a question like Buono, eh? 'It's tasty, EH?', is pronounced felicitously in a context where the speaker directly perceives an event where the addressee has direct evidence for the truth of p (i.e., that whatever the addressee is eating, the addressee finds it tasty). Acknowledging a tag question like Buono, eh? results in registering p as a projected independent commitment of the addressee on the scoreboard of Farkas and Roelofsen (2012).

2. Michela Ippolito (faculty): "Gestures and the semantics of non-canonical questions."

I argue that both the co-speech and pro-speech symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh-questions. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a biased interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to add the presupposition that the question is resolved in the conversational context. This results in generalizing the speaker's bias to all discourse participants. More generally, I aim to show that both modalities (speech and gesture) can be analyzed and modelled using the same linguistic tools and principles.

SULA 11

The 11th conference on Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas (SULA 11) is being held online, hosted by El Colegio de México and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, from August 4 through 7.

• Guillaume Thomas (faculty) is one of the invited speakers: "Switch reference: Syntax and/or (discourse) semantics?"
• Suzi Lima (faculty) is a discussant on a session on classifiers.
• Gregory Antono (MA) is giving a talk: "Reduplication and the pîtî morpheme in Macuxi."
• Michael Schwan (MA 2014, now at the University of British Columbia) is part of a talk with UBC colleagues Neda Todorović and Lisa Matthewson: "Compositionally deriving the future in Gitksan."

Congratulations, Suzi!

Congratulations to Suzi Lima (faculty), who has been named this year's recipient of the new Early Career Researcher Award from the Canadian Linguistic Association! Their released statement describes Suzi's accomplishments as follows:

Dr. Suzi Lima is an early career researcher who has contributed substantially to language research, demonstrated innovation in research and dissemination, and engaged in practice and policy development in the broader community. Her theoretical focus is the pragmatics and semantics of number and quantity, and she has made contributions to formal semantics, typology, language acquisition, psychology, language documentation and revitalization, and the study of indigenous languages. She has held several research grants and has presented her work at the world's top conferences. She has published many peer-reviewed research works, and has also prepared, with the indigenous communities, a dictionary of verbs (Yudja) and a co-authored pedagogical grammar (Kawaiwete), to be published. She is also in demand as an invited speaker and as an innovative teacher and mentor. Dr. Lima holds a BA and MA from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. Since her 2014 graduation she has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and Assistant Professorships at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and in the Departments of Linguistics, and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. In 2019, she began her current position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Lima's research focuses on pragmatics, semantics, typology, language acquisition, and documentation and revitalization. She engages in experimental fieldwork, with a focus on indigenous languages of Brazil, most prominently on Yudja and Kawaiwete. In her dissertation and much of her following work, Dr. Lima has developed ingenious protocols for uncovering the mechanisms by which languages count and measure things and substances, making novel contributions to the semantics and typology of number and quantity. Her work is also innovative in investigating the acquisition of these concepts in under-studied languages, through the study of monolingual and bilingual speakers of indigenous languages and Brazilian Portuguese. She has also collaboratively investigated questions of general cognition, such as how mathematical reasoning relates to cultural practice. Dr. Lima has also been exemplary in the ways she has shared her research with academic and non-academic communities. For example, her collaborative work has resulted in a questionnaire which is a masterpiece in elicitation and experimental design, targeting detailed semantic properties by using methods such as translation, production, comprehension tasks, storyboards, and videos. This questionnaire was applied by specialists who presented their results at a 2017 workshop, now in press as a special volume of Linguistic Variation. One reading book (Kawaiwete songs) was published in 2015 by the Museu do Índio. This ambitious project (coorganized with Susan Rothstein) involved both under-represented scholars and languages, demonstrating Dr. Lima's qualities of leadership. Dr. Lima also reaches out to communities and activists in her work twice funded by United Nations/National Indian Foundation/Indian Museum in Brazil, to document the Kawaiwete language. This work has involved educational workshops for teachers and collaborations with community leaders and researchers, and has resulted in the production of educational materials such as a pedagogical grammar and a dictionary draft. Dr. Lima has also collaborated in creating a database featuring resources for documentation and methods for fieldworkers. Dr. Lima is also an inspiring teacher and mentor, demonstrated in particular by her research excursion program courses where she takes undergraduate students to Brazil for hands-on documentation and fieldwork experience. In summary, Suzi Lima is an extraordinary early career researcher who has already achieved distinction in a range of areas, including theoretical, experimental, and documentation linguistics, while also demonstrating innovation in teaching and community outreach. The Canadian Linguistic Association is delighted to recognize her achievements by awarding Dr. Suzi Lima our inaugural Early Career Researcher Award in 2020.

New book: Massam (2020)

Congratulations to Diane Massam (faculty) on the publication of Niuean: Predicates and Arguments in an Isolating Language, newly available from Oxford University Press! This landmark book, which forms part of the 'Oxford Studies of Endangered Languages' series, represents the culmination of Diane and her consultants' and colleagues' 25 years of work on Niuean.

Research Groups: Friday, April 3

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

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, online: Psycholinguistics Group
Presentation by Breanna Pratley (MA).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, online: Phonetics/Phonology Group
1. Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "Gender-based sound symbolism in Korean given names."
2. Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.): "Phonetic correlates of performative voicing."