LGCU has started a new newsletter!

The LGCU has started a monthly newsletter to be sent out to members of the Department. If you are looking to advertise any events, post announcements, or simply share some linguistic fun facts or positivity, send it on over! Submissions for the next (April) newsletter close on March 28. Please submit to aliya.zhaksybek@mail.utoronto.ca.

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."

Congratulations, Marisa and Nathan!

The Linguistics Graduate Course Union has announced their annual awards for Excellence in TA Supervision for 2019-20. This year, the award recognizes Marisa Brook (faculty), with an honorable mention to Nathan Sanders (faculty). Congratulations to both!

LGCU pub night with Susana

As announced at one of our recent department parties, the winner of the TA/Grader Supervision Excellence Award for 2018-19 from the Linguistics Graduate Course Union was Susana Béjar (faculty). She earned a certificate and a special pub night with the graduate students; Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.) has sent along this photo of himself and Susana from the official ceremony, which took place recently. Congratulations, Susana, and thanks for all your efforts!

Report from Welcome Workshop 11

On Friday, October 25, the LGCU held its 11th annual Welcome Workshop, a casual and amiable way for new graduate students to introduce themselves and their research thus far to each other and to other departmental members. The afternoon was lively and followed by a reception in the department lounge. Well done to all the organizers and presenters! Thanks to Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.) for the photos.

Greg Antono (MA): "Pluractionality in Macuxi: A first look."

Sadaf Kalami (MA): "The structure of DP in Ardalani Kurdish."

Gabrielle Dumais (MA): "Gender-neutral speech in Canadian French: How are non-binary identities expressed in a gendered language?"

Nadia Takhtaganova (MA): "Devoir devrait devoir: Epistemic modality in French."

Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.): "Neo-hosers up north: Locally constructed meaning and FACE and GOAT ungliding in rural Ontario."

Kaleigh Woolford (Ph.D.): "'They just say, oh, you're a Geordie': The development of just in Tyneside English."

Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.): "Decay of memory traces for pitch."

Shabri Kapoor (Ph.D.): "Language contact in Canada: Restructuring of ditransitive constructions in Heritage Hindi."

Time to celebrate!

LGCU Welcome Workshop 11

The LGCU's Welcome Workshop, an informal and friendly event held annually in the autumn to help introduce new graduate students to each other and each other's research, is now in its 11th year! This time around, it will be held in the afternoon of Friday, October 25, with the introductory remarks at 1 PM. Note that the meeting of the Fieldwork Group normally scheduled for this time has been cancelled to allow the workshop to be held in SS560A. The presenters - who are all beginning graduate programs in our department this year - are as follows:

• Greg Antono (MA): "Pluractionality in Macuxi: A first look."
• Sadaf Kalami (MA): "The structure of DP in Ardalani Kurdish."
• Gabrielle Dumais (MA): "Gender-neutral speech in Canadian French: How are non-binary identities expressed in a gendered language?"
• Nadia Takhtaganova (MA): "Devoir devrait devoir: Epistemic modality in French."
• Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.): "Neo-hosers up north: Locally constructed meaning and FACE and GOAT ungliding in rural Ontario."
• Kaleigh Woolford (Ph.D.): "'They just say, oh, you're a Geordie': The development of just in Tyneside English."
• Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.): "Decay of memory traces for pitch."
• Shabri Kapoor (Ph.D.): "Language contact in Canada: Restructuring of ditransitive constructions in Heritage Hindi."

A reception will follow in the department lounge. Kudos to the organizers: Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Bruno de Oliveira Andreotti (Ph.D.), and Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.).

Beginning-of-semester party

We rang in the new academic year with a departmental party on Friday, September 13! Our Department Chair, Sali A. Tagliamonte, and Graduate Coordinator, Yoonjung Kang, welcomed the new departmental members and welcomed back everyone else. We congratulated the 8 students who have finished MAs and the 9 who have completed Ph.D.s in the last year! Well done to all of our hard-working new graduate alumni.

Also, Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.), on behalf of the Linguistics Graduate Course Union, presented the annual Excellence in TA Supervision Award to Susana Béjar (faculty), and also recognized runner-up Guillaume Thomas (faculty). Congratulations! And many thanks to the students, staff, and faculty involved in the arrangements. Here's to a good academic year for all of us.

December 2018 Graduate Speaker Series

Next month's event in the Graduate Speaker Series hosted by the Grad Room (Harbord and Spadina, on the ground floor under the Grad House), focuses on linguistics and features two of our Ph.D. candidates. This will be taking place on Tuesday, December 4, from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. Registration is available here (there is no fee).

Emily Blamire (Ph.D.): "Judging talkers: How speech affects our perceptions of each other."
Humans convey a great deal of information with their speech, far beyond the actual messages we say with our words. Small changes in the sounds of our speech can have large and wide-ranging effects on how we are perceived as people. Humans can not only recognize familiar individuals from just hearing their voices, but we can also make various judgments about a person’s emotional state, gender, and age, and even judge attributes such as attractiveness and personality. Using data from perception experiments, this talk explores which aspects of the speech stream we are listening to when we make some these judgments, as well as how we go about recognizing the voices of people we have had limited exposure to.

Julien Carrier (Ph.D.): "Cultural renewal and language changes in Inuktitut."
Inhabiting the Arctic regions of Alaska, Canada and Greenland, the Inuit did not face the same socio-cultural and historical changes that most other Indigenous groups in North America had already experienced until the beginning of the 20thcentury when traders and missionaries began to take an interest in them. In fact, Inuit language varieties are believed to have remained quite similar until 1900 and to have diverged rapidly afterwards following these numerous transformations (cf. Dorais 1993, 2010). Indeed, many studies on the Inuit language report on dialectal distinctions and language changes (e.g., Johns 1999; Carrier 2012; Yuan 2018), but none of them present detailed statistics to support their claims or establish correlations with socio-historical factors. On the other hand, there are sociolinguistic studies that analyze the socio-cultural or historical changes that the Inuit have gone through, like the increasing bilingualism across the Inuit population (cf. Dorais &Sammons 2000; Patrick 2003), but no study has ever made a convincing correlation between them and dialectal distinctions or language changes. My dissertation fills this research gap. In this talk, I present and discuss results of my statistical analysis in North Baffin Inuktitut with natural data across speakers born between 1902 and 1998, and the interaction between some language changes observed in this Inuktitut dialect and different social and linguistic factors. 

10th Annual LGCU Welcome Workshop

The tenth LGCU Welcome Workshop is being held on Friday, October 12, in SS 560A. This yearly event is a way of introducing new graduate students and their prior research to the LGCU and the department community.

Sadaf Rahmanian (MA):
"Does misspelling words matter?"

Lauren Bigelow (MA):
"[ej] and [ow] ungliding in Northern Ontario."

Liam Donohue (MA):
"Tense-aspect interaction in Georgian verbs."

Bruno Andreotti (Ph.D.)
"Aspectual, volitional and agentive properties of control marking in Comox-Sliammon."

Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.)
"Phonological blocking factors of pre-nasal vowel raising in Tehrani Persian."

Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.)
"Phonological conditioning of –ian /–iən/ and –an /–ən/ place name suffixes."

All department members are welcome. A reception will follow in the lounge.

LGCU Welcome Workshop

The 8th annual Welcome Workshop of the Linguistics Graduate Course Union (LGCU) will take place this Friday, October 7, in Sidney Smith Hall, Room 1083. Our new graduate students will be presenting their research, so please stop by and have a look!

The schedule is below.

1:00-1:10 Coffee & welcome
1:10-1:35 Lexical variation in syntactic profiles: New insights from world Englishes (Melanie Röthlisberger)
1:35-2:00 Frequency of use and lexical change: A case study of Latin and Spanish (Fiona Wilson)
2:00-2:25 Hooking up: Defining and using an ambiguous term in the college bubble (Savannah Meslin)

2:25-2:40 BREAK
2:40-3:05 The dark side of the loon or Joyeux No-dark-ël (Luke Zhou)
3:05-3:30 Enriching sociolinguistic categories: Evidence from variation within the adjective phrase (Lex Konnelly)
3:30-3:55 ‘It’s new, it’s wicked, it’s awesome’: Using adjectives to pinpoint the actuation of linguistic change (Katharina Pabst)
3:55-4:20 The interpretation of pronouns in proxy counterfactuals (Heather Stephens)

4:20-4:35 BREAK
4:35-5:00 De and Chinese morpho-syntax (Cater Chen)
5:00-5:25 Restrictive relativized constituents and verbal predicates in Krio: An investigation of the accessibility hierarchy (Brea Lutton)
5:25-5:50 Relexification of Haitian Creole with French (Sarah Newman)

Talk on non-academic jobs for linguists

The LGCU is kicking off its new Job Application Workshop Series (JAWS) with a session on jobs for linguists outside of academia, to be presented by Naoko Tomioka. This will be held in the department lounge on Thursday, November 27 at 7 PM, with pizza served beforehand at around 6:30 and time for questions and discussion afterwards. If you're interested in attending and have not already done so, please RSVP.

Special Workshop on Linguistics, Data, and Market Research
Naoko Tomioka, Ph.D. (Data Scientist/Linguist, iPerceptions)

In this workshop, I will talk about the field of VOC (Voice of Customer) Research, Big Data, and how linguistics can make important contributions to market research. I work at iPerceptions (www.iperceptions.com) as a data scientist/linguist. After finishing my Ph.D. in linguistics at McGill University, I spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher, and then started exploring the world outside of academia. In my current work, I use my knowledge of linguistic theory to extract insights for market research. You can find an example of my work in this blog entry, in which I apply the semantics of gradable adjectives to better understand customer feedback.

LGCU Welcome Workshop 6

The sixth annual LGCU Welcome Workshop will be held on Friday the 17th in SS 560A, starting at 2:10 PM. Sponsored by the Linguistics Graduate Course Union, the workshop provides a venue for new students (and a few returning ones) to present research that they've been working on. This serves as a way for the rest of the department to get to know the newcomers and their research interests.

This year's schedule features the following talks:

Emilia Melara (Ph.D.): "Tense and deixis: Revisiting sequence of tense in English."

Daniel McDonald (MA): "ECMs in Latin and Ancient Greek."

Patrick Murphy (Ph.D.): "Split accusativity in Finnish."

Frederick Gietz (MA): "A semantic treatment for dual-transitive verbs."

Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.): "Me, myself, and I: The role of the untriggered reflexive in the English pronominal system."

Erin Hall (Ph.D.): "Style and substance in the Canadian Shift: New evidence from Toronto."

Emily Blamire (Ph.D.): Gay speech in North American television."

Paulina Lyskawa (MA): "An ultrasound study of /ɹ/ production among native and non-native English speakers."

Luke West (MA): "Interaction of intonation and lexical tone in Sgaw Karen."

Yining Nie (MA): "Derived environment phonology in Distributed Morphology."

Thanks to Julie Doner, Ruth Maddeaux, Dan Milway, and the LGCU in general for all of their work in organizing the workshop!

LGCU Welcome Workshop 5

Today is the fifth LCGU Welcome Workshop. This annual event gives our new MA and Ph.D. students an opportunity to introduce the rest of the department to research they've done over the course of past studies. The workshop will take place from 2pm to 7pm in SS560A. The schedule is posted on the door of the lounge. Seven of our new MA students and five Ph.D. students are taking part this year:

Michael Schwan
Gitksan 'ejectives'

Jessica Mathie
Antipassives and transitivity in Australian languages

Julianne Doner
How regular stress became lexical: Changes in stress from Latin to Spanish

Kazuya Bamba
The 'selflessness' of grammar: A diachronic study of Romance reflexives

Danielle Moed
Against the NP-Movement Hypothesis in English middle constructions

Emilie LeBlanc
A phonetic and phonological study of Chiac as spoken by Moncton adolescents

Maida Percival
The perception of Hul'q'umi'num' ejectives by native speakers of English

Richard Gananathan
An OT account of Ojibwe syncope in the Ottawa dialect

Tomohiro Yokoyama
Japanese honorifics and their structures

Naomi Francis
The marking of future uncertainty in Nata

Daniel Milway
Pro-drop in English and German: Evidence from particle verbs

The workshop was followed by a catered dinner in the department lounge. Thanks to Radu Craioveanu and the LGCU more generally for organising and funding the afternoon!

LGCU Welcome Workshop IV

On October 12th we held our fourth annual LGCU Welcome Workshop! This workshop was started in order to provide a forum for our new graduate students to introduce their research interests to each other and to other members of the department, while also providing the new students with an opportunity to learn about some of the current research being undertaken by other members of our department as well.

This year, several of our new MA and PhD students, a few of our 2nd year PhD students, and one alumnus participated, giving talks on a wide range of topics based on previous work undertaken as undergraduate students, generals papers in progress, and current side projects.

The workshop was well attended; many faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and alumni came to listen to the talks. Many interesting questions were posed, and it was quite interesting to see where research interests overlapped between various members of the department.

The workshop concluded with a catered dinner in the lounge.

Alumnus Kenji Oda discussing the complexities of Irish 

New LGCU co-president Christopher Spahr presenting syllable length in Estonian

New MA students Matt Pankhurst, Jada Fung, Michelle Yuan, new PhD student Shayna Gardiner, and PhD student Iryna Osadcha enjoying a coffee break in between presentations

New PhD student Julien Carrier and PhD student Élodie Thomas

New MA students Emily Blamire and Phil Howson, and new PhD student Julie Doner

A list of the talks presented is given below:

Julie Doner:           "An exception to pro-drop in Italian and its implications for the EPP''
Clarissa Forbes:     "Gitxsan relative clauses: A diagnostic for adjectives''
Shayna Gardiner:   "Some morphosyntactic properties of Middle Egyptian''
Ross Godfrey:        "Inner and outer causatives in Amharic and Hindi-Urdu''
Phil Howson:         "Czech trills revisited: Ultrasound, EGG and acoustic study''
Kenji Oda:             "Adjective fronting in nominal predicates in Modern Irish''
Matt Pankhurst:     "Breaking the syllable structure: Over-rhotacization and nasality in
                                Northeastern Mandarin Chinese''
Christopher Spahr: "The role of floating features in the (morpho)phonology of Estonian
                                quantity: An overlong story short''
Élodie Thomas:      "Le parler-jeune de Courcouronnes: Some notes on the vernacular spoken                                 in the suburbs of Paris''
Becky Tollan:         "On the relationship between inflectional morphology and verb raising:                                 What can be concluded from changes in the history of English?''
Michelle Yuan:        "Left-peripheral movement in Twic East''

Thank you to the organizers and to all who attended for making this workshop a success!

Photo credits: Alex Motut

New Graduate Students in 2012-2013

Relaxing after the welcome tour
(L to R: Phil Howson, Emily Clare, Becky Tollan, Michelle Yuan, Dan Milway, and Clarissa Forbes)

A belated welcome to our incoming graduate classes! Here is a little bit of information about each of our new MA and PhD students.

New MA Students

Emily Blamire has a BA in Linguistics from UBC, and has a broad range of interests, including language variation (sexuality, gender, taboo words, and slang), fieldwork, and psycholinguistic experimentation.

Clarissa Forbes is originally from Seattle, but has spent the last few years in Vancouver at UBC, getting a BA in linguistics. Language documentation and the languages of the Pacific Northwest are her two greatest linguistic interests. So far she has worked on Gitksan (Tsimshianic) and Blackfoot (Algonquian). Other research interests include syntax, morphology, and historical linguistics. Her undergraduate thesis was on Gitksan noun modification, arguing in favor of a class of adjectives.

Jada Fung completed her undergraduate studies a couple years ago here at U of T and is happy to be returning to this department as a graduate student. Her research interests include syntax, semantics, language change/variation and the Chinese language.

Phil Howson is from Vancouver and is primarily interested in phonetics and speech production. He is interested in Slavic languages, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Germanic languages. He also has an interest in syntactic theory, scrambling, and phonology, and phonetics.

Dan Milway did his undergraduate studies here at U of T. After a brief foray into chemistry, he earned his degree in German and Linguistics in 2009. For his MA, he will be focusing on morphosyntax; specifically he is interested in morphological case and Germanic particle verbs.

Rebecca Tollan is from North Yorkshire in the UK, and completed her undergrad at the University of York. Her main research interests involve theoretical and historical syntax, first language acquisition and processing of island constraints/A-bar movement. She is also interested in evolutionary linguistics, in particular the emergence of the human capacity for recursive grammar, and comparative-historical work.  

Michelle Yuan completed her undergraduate degree at U of T in Linguistics and German. Her research interests generally fall at the interface of syntax and semantics. She is especially interested in the left-periphery of the clause and the behaviour and functions of syntactic operators. Languages of interest include Inuktitut, Twic East (Dinka), and Mandarin.

New PhD Students

Majed Al-Solami  [maʒɪd] is from The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His research interests are in phonetics and phonology in general. Specifically he is interested in the study of emphatics and post-velar sounds in Arabic.

Julien Carrier has a BA from UQAM and completed his MA there last year. He has worked on two varieties of Inuktitut: Tarramiut and Itivimiut, and plans to continue working on the morphosyntax of Itivimiut.

Emily Clare did a BA in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in Phonological Development in Childhood at the University of York in the UK.  She is interested in acoustic phonetics, particularly human and machine speech recognition.  She hopes to research how speakers and listeners adjust in adverse listening conditions.

Julianne Doner just finished an MA in Linguistics here at U of T, after doing an undergraduate degree, also in Linguistics, at York University. She is interested in syntax, particularly the syntax of the inflectional domain. Her MA forum paper was entitled "A Typology of EPP-Checking Mechanisms," and considered how the EPP is checked in languages such as English, Niuean, Italian, Irish, and Arabic.

Shayna Gardiner did an undergraduate degree in linguistics and psychology at Queen's University, and wrote an honours thesis on Ottawa Valley English syntax.  She has an MA in linguistics from the University of Ottawa where she mainly focused on historical morphology and syntax. She did RA work on Old and Middle English and her major research paper was about Middle Egyptian lexical categories.  Her current interests and research are in the areas of morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, and Middle Egyptian.

Matt Pankhurst has an MA in linguistics from Western University and a BA in English Literature and Rhetoric. He has also holds diplomas in Chinese Language and East Asian Studies from the University of Waterloo, and a Chinese language certificate from Nanjing University. For his MA he did fieldwork on Spoken Manchu in Qiqihar.  His MA paper addressed a number of vowel-related processes in Spoken Manchu and the relevance of a diachronic approach to Spoken Manchu vowel harmony. He is interested in the phonology of languages in Northeast China, particularly rhotacization and prosody.

Kyle Weishaar is a first year PhD student. He has a BA from McMaster University in Cognitive Science of Language and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Toronto. His research follows two distinct paths. His primary interest is in the syntax-morphology interface in Romance languages. Specifically, he is interested in pronominal systems and agreement patterns in the Ibero-Romance languages in both Europe and in the Americas. His other area of interest is in the similarity between timing, or time keeping, in music and speech. 

Skill Share Workshop

This year the LGCU applied for the Dean's Small Departments' Projects Fund and was awarded a grant to hold Skill Share Workshops! These workshops are intended to provide an opportunity for our graduate students to share non-linguistics-related hobbies and talents. Our first one was a jewellery-making event hosted by our Social Coordinator Ailis Cournane and Michelle St. Amour. After ten minutes of instructions, attendees were already ready to begin applying their skills.

       Derek Denis, Joanna Chociej, Julia Su, and Sarah Clarke model their creations below.

The next workshop will take place in the summer and will likely either be a bike tune-up or photography workshop.

Photo credits: Eugenia Suh

Our New Cactus Collection!

Hello all,

As the Chair of the Cactus Caucus, a prestigious sub-committee of the Plant and Beautification Committee, I would like to provide an important report:

The cactus collection that was housed in the lounge in September was my personal collection. After I removed it, there was quite an uproar -- with many feelings and expressions of sadness and discontent. As such, the Cactus Caucus has put together a new, *permanent* collection in the lounge for our enjoyment.

So next time you have a moment, please stop by the lounge and take a look at our new prickly friends!

Many thanks to Elaine Gold and the LGCU for funding this project.

-Michelle St-Amour
Cactus Caucus, Chair

LGCU Welcome Workshop

The LGCU hosted its second annual Welcome Workshop, an informal conference that enables participating new students in particular to introduce themselves and share a bit of their research in a 15-minute talk.

Half of the new MA students opted to take part, along with Ph.D. students Ross Krekoski, Will Oxford, and LeAnn Brown. The presentations were interspersed with coffee, cheese, and pastries; and then followed by leftovers and an impressively lengthy period of standing around in the room and talking.