WCCFL 39 and SAIL 2021

The 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, along with this year's Symposium on American Indian Languages, is taking place from April 9 through 11, online, hosted by the University of Arizona.

• Keren Rice (faculty) is giving one of the invited plenary talks: "Can formal linguistics help language reclamation?"
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is presenting a poster: "When roots become names: An issue of locality."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) is presenting a poster: "Reduplicative morphemes and their non-reduplicative allomorphs in Stratal OT: Stem-level and word-level reduplication in Hul’q’umi’num’."
• Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego) is part of a talk with Gabriela Caballero (University of California, San Diego) and Claudia Juárez Chávez (University of California, San Diego): "The representation of tone in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological and orthographic implications."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Indivisible portmanteaux and the timing of ellipsis."
• Spanish and Portuguese MA graduate Filipe H. Kobayashi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Sherry Yong Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Tracking down (c)overt movement with adverbial distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese."

Research Groups: Friday, April 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario) presenting on his work about heritage Italian and contact with English in southern Ontario.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.): "Intonation contours in Russian declarative questions."

Intonation is often used to encode speaker commitment to a proposition. While intonation-contours for genuine questions and assertions have been explored previously, phonetic correlates of declarative questions are understudied, particularly for languages other than English. We present preliminary results from an online production experiment, which elicited 4 utterance types – assertions, genuine questions, confirmative declarative questions, and echo declarative questions – from speakers of Russian. A Principal Component Analysis of the F0 contours reveals that the first two principal components are enough to distinguish assertion from other types of sentences, and questions from CDQs and EDQs, but not CDQs from EDQs. The main factor distinguishing CDQs from EDQs appears to be utterance duration. More impressionistically, true questions are signaled through a peak on the verb, while CDQs and EDQs with a peak on the object. Assertions tend to have a peak on the subject, or not at all.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Family names and the morphosyntax of specific reference."

Many languages differ from English in requiring a determiner when referring to kinds.

(1) *(Az) elefántok nagyok. (Hungarian)

(2) *(Los) elefantes son grandes. (Spanish)

'Elephants are big.'

In (1) and (2), only context differentiates between specific reference (the elephants are big) and generic reference (elephants are big). With family names, however, these languages contrast specific and generic reference morphosyntactically. To refer to a specific family, Hungarian uses an associative plural marker (3), while Spanish uses a plural determiner (4).

(3) Nagyék a szomszédaim. (Hungarian)
(4) Los García son mis vecinos. (Spanish)
'The Nagys/Garcías are my neighbours.'

The constructions in (3) and (4) are both exceptional. In Hungarian, names do not directly combine with canonical plural morphology, as indicated by the regularization of family names derived from irregular common nouns (ló 'horse' → lovak 'horses', but Ló 'surname' → Lók 'the Lós'). In Spanish, the plural determiner cannot otherwise combine with morphologically singular elements (*los elefante 'the.pl elephant.sg').

These data suggest two generalizations: 1) names are not compatible with NumP, the locus of individuation; 2) there is special plural morphology that only occurs with names. I propose a distinct nominalizer for names to capture these facts and account for the interpretation that names receive at the syntax-semantics interface.

Research Groups: Friday, December 11

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Dave Kush (faculty): "What to expect when you're expecting (an antecedent)."

In this talk I’ll present results from recent experiments on the processing of cataphoric dependencies in English, Norwegian, and Dutch. The goal of the studies is to determine to what extent cataphora resolution can be described as an 'active' dependency resolution process and to what extent/how far in advance active resolution strategies make predictive syntactic commitments.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Nouns, names, and the problem with [proper]."

LSA et al. 2020

The Linguistic Society of American's 94th Annual Meeting is taking place in New Orleans from January 2nd through 5th. Alongside it are the annual meetings of a number of 'sister societies'. Current U of T linguists and alumni taking part are:

Linguistic Society of America:

• Karlien Franco (postdoc) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "Lexicalization in grammatical change? The simple past/present perfect alternation in Canadian English."
• Keren Rice (faculty) is both a discussant and a speaker on a symposium about language documentation: "A brief introduction to DEL: Reflections on the intellectual merit of language documentation."
• Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019): "A workspace-based analysis of adjuncts."
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) with Alicia Parrish (New York University): "Acquisition of quantity-related inferences in 4- and 5-year-olds."
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) also has a poster with Vishal Sunil Arvindam (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Maxime Tulling (New York University): "Do 2-year-olds understand epistemic maybe? Maybe!"
• Bettina Spreng (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Saskatchewan) has a poster: "v-Asp Feature Inheritance: Some insights from Inuktitut and Swabian (Alemannic)."
• Fulang Cater Chen (MA 2017, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Split partitivity in Mandarin: A diagnostic for argument-gap dependencies."
• Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego): "Deriving ergativity from object shift across Eskimo-Aleut."
• Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego) also has a talk with Ksenia Ershova (Stanford University): "Dependent case in syntactically ergative languages: Evidence from Inuit and West Circassian."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Princeton University) with Emily Clem (University of California, San Diego) and Virginia Dawson (University of California, Berkeley): "Altruistic inversion and doubling in Tiwa morphology."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Ellipsis as Obliteration: Evidence from Bengali negative allomorphy."
• Recent faculty member Nicholas LaCara: "Synthetic compounding in Distributed Morphology with phrasal movement."

American Dialect Society:

• Karlien Franco (postdoc) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "How to gain a new guy in 10 decades: A study of lexical variation in Ontario dialects."
• Derek Denis (faculty), Chantel Briana Campbell (BA), Eloisa Cervantes (BA), Keturah Mainye (BA), Michelle Sun (BA), Timothy Gadanidis (Ph.D.) and Jeanne F. Nicole Dingle (University of British Columbia): "Ideologies and social meanings around Multicultural Toronto English."
• Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "Where have all the articles gone? Bare nominals in Marmora and Lake, Ontario."
• Emily Blamire (Ph.D.) and Marisa Brook (faculty): "Very quick reversal: Rapid real-time change in Canadian English intensifiers."
• Naomi Nagy (faculty) and James Walker (BA 1989, now at La Trobe University) are part of a talk with Michol Hoffman (York University) and Ronald Beline Mendes (University of São Paulo): "Sounds of the city: Perceptions of ethnically marked speech in Toronto."
• Timothy Gadanidis (Ph.D.): "Uh, that’s a little rude: Implicit judgments of um and uh in instant messaging."
• Nicole Rosen (Ph.D. 2007, now at the University of Manitoba) has a poster with Sky Onosson (University of Manitoba): "Ethnolinguistic vowel differentiation in Manitoba."
• Alexandra D'Arcy (Ph.D. 2005, now at the University of Victoria) has a poster: "On being a caregiver and a community member in the midst of language change."

Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americans (SSILA):

• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "The prosody of anger and surprise in Cayuga."
• Patricia A. Shaw (Ph.D. 1976, now at the University of British Columbia) and Severn Cullis-Suzuki (University of British Columbia): "Xaayda kil intonation patterns: Empowering language learners to 'sing' like their elders."
• Shay Hucklebridge (MA 2016, now at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst): "Bare nouns and negation in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì relative clauses."
• Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) with Christopher Baron (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) and Rodrigo Ranero (University of Maryland): "Narcissistic allomorphy in Santiago Tz'utujil."

American Name Society:

• Kate Brennan (Ph.D., Centre for Comparative Literature): "Semantic relations and personal names in literature: Naming as authority."

North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS):

• Alexandra D'Arcy (Ph.D. 2005, now at the University of Victoria) is part of a panel with Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel): "Historical sociolinguistics: Lineage and leading edge."

Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL):

• Ella Rabinovich (postdoc, Department of Computer Science) is part of a poster with Maria Ryskina (Carnegie Mellon University), Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (University of California, San Diego), David Mortensen (Carnegie Mellon University), and Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University): "Where new words are born: Distributional semantic analysis of neologisms and their semantic neighbourhoods."

Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics:

• James Walker (BA 1989, now at La Trobe University): "Complements of the Eastern Caribbean."

SPF 2019

This year's Summer Phonology Forum will be taking place on Tuesday, July 30, from 11 AM through 4:30 PM, in SS 2106. The registration form is available here.

• Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.) is giving the B. Elan Dresher Phonology Prize Talk: "Allomorphy and morphophonology: Where do we draw the line?"

Other speakers from our department are:

• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.): "Hiatus resolution strategies in Persian."
• Heather Yawney (Ph.D.): "The Kazakh velar and uvular distribution."
• Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "The effects of cognitive processing style on the perceptual compensation of stop voicing for place of articulation."
• Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.): "Emotional phonetics cues in the speech of chess grandmasters."
• Ekaterina Prigaro (MA): "Interaction of stress shift and palatalization in Russian nominal systems."
• Gajathree Ananthathurai (BA), Laurestine Bradford (BA), Araz Derohan (BA), Siobhan Galeazzi (BA), Khadija Jagani (BA) and Yoonjung Kang (Ph.D.): "Sound symbolism of gender in personal names: Western Armenian and Kutchi."
• Patricia A. Shaw (Ph.D. 1976, now at the University of British Columbia) with colleagues Emily Elfner (York University) and Nicoline Butler (York University): "Guess who? Game-play, questions, and intonation in Kwak’wala."

Thanks to the organizational committee - Alessandro Jaker (postdoc), Peter Jurgec (faculty), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Phil Monahan (faculty), Keren Rice (faculty), Nathan Sanders (faculty), and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty).

SCULC 10

The tenth annual Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SCULC 10) is taking place at the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 18. Several of our undergraduates will be presenting!

Kristen Wing Yan Wong (BA):
"Sound symbolism of gender in Cantonese first names."

Andrea Michelle Leung (BA):
"The effect of visual integration of pitch contour in Mandarin tone perception."

Stephanie Deschamps (BA) and Shanthos Thirunavukkarasu (BA):
"Cross-modal noise compensation in audiovisual words."

MOT 2019

We are co-hosting this year's Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto Workshop in Phonology/Phonetics, taking place from March 29th through 31st, co-organized by York faculty member Emily Elfner and our faculty members Peter Jurgec, Yoonjung Kang, Keren Rice, and Jessamyn Schertz. The Friday sessions will be held at York University, with the Saturday and Sunday sessions at the U of T.

Department members and alumni presenting are:

Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.) and Kinza Mahoon (Ph.D.):
"Dialect accommodation in Canadian English."

Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.):
"The role of word frequency in sound change: [n(j)u] evidence from yod dropping Toronto English."

Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.):
"/u/-fronting in second-generation Filipinos in Toronto: Evidence of cross-language influence."

Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.):
"Loanword adaption in Persian: A Core-Periphery model approach."

Paulina Łyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) and Naomi Nagy (faculty):
"Language contact and convergence in Polish devoicing: Phonological versus phonetic perspectives."

Jessica Yeung (Ph.D.):
"The role of phonetic and typological naturalness in learning sound patterns."

Connie Ting (Ph.D.)and Yoonjung Kang (faculty):
"The effect of habitual speech rate on speaker-specific processing in English stop voicing perception."

Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D.):
"The role of web-based identification training in the perception of Korean vowels and codas by Mandarin learners of Korean."

Iryna Osadcha (Ph.D. 2019):
"Lexical stress patterns: Ukrainian vocative case."

Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.):
"Asymmetries in aspiration."

Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D.), and colleague Suyeon Yun (Ewha Womans University):
"Contrastive hyperarticulation of vowels in two dialects of Korean."

Alessandro Jaker (postdoc):
"The full ~ reduced vowel contrast in Tetsǫ́t'ıné: Evidence for an eight-vowel system."

Heather Yawney (Ph.D.):
"Asymmetry of Kazakh velar and uvular consonants."

Photini Coutsougera (faculty):
"High front vowel deletion, palatalization, and fortition in Arcadian Greek."

Kristen Wong (BA) and Yoonjung Kang (faculty):
"Sound symbolism of gender in Cantonese names."

Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.):
"Consonant-vowel sequences and their gradient interactions."

Aleksei Nazarov (faculty):
"Formalizing the link between opacity and exceptionality."

Vincent DeCaen (former postdoc, now at DeCaen and Associates) and Elan Dresher (faculty):
"The vowel system of Tiberian Hebrew."

TULCON 12

The twelfth annual TULCON (Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference) is taking place on Saturday the 9th and Sunday the 10th. Given the designation of 2019 as the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages, the keynote speakers will be Suzi Lima (faculty) and Jessica Denniss (Ph.D.). Suzi's talk is "Language maintenance and revitalization in Brazil: A case study," and Jessica will be presenting "The mutual value of linguistic work with Indigenous communities: A perspective from Ngarinyman (Australia)". Undergraduate students of ours presenting at TULCON this year are:

Anissa Baird (BA) and Rachel Keir (BA):
"Word-final vowel deletion: Italian's influence on Faetar?"

Kai Ian Leung (BA) and Monika Molnar (faculty, Speech-Language Pathology)
"The role of voice familiarity during bilingual spoken language processing."

Nazia Mosin (BA), Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), and Yoonjung Kang (faculty)
"Gender phonology of Urdu first names."

Breanna Pratley (BA):
"The importance of methodological choices in the typology of uncommon phenomena:
A Gilaki case study."

Mark Smith (BA):
"Choosing between VVPE and OG in Brazilian Portuguese."

Aileen Song (BA) and Grace Ryu (BA):
"Exploring the universality of pro-drop patterns: An analysis of Korean heritage and homeland speakers."

Rosemary Webb (BA):
"Modifier reduplication in Gilaki."

6th Scarborough Undergraduate Linguistics Conference

The Linguistics Student Association at the Scarborough campus is holding the 6th Annual Scarborough Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SULC) on Friday, March 1. The keynote speaker is Keren Rice (faculty). 

The other talks are a mix of speakers from other campus and Scarborough undergraduates:

Andrea Leung (BA):

"The effect of visual integration of pitch contour in Mandarin tone perception."

Sarah Lai (BA) and Melanie Lamarca (BA):

"The lexical skills of trilingual children in French immersion."

Kristen Wing Yan Wong (BA):

"Sound symbolism of gender in Cantonese names."

Stephanie Deschamps (BA), Hanna Zhang (BA), and Shanthos Thirunavukkarasu (BA)

"Cross-modal noise compensation in audiovisual words: Impact of native language."

Nazia Mohsin (BA):

"Gender phonology of Urdu first names."

Julia Toljagic (BA):

"The Danish invasions of England: An inquiry to the possibility of creolization."

Kristen Wing Yan Wong (BA) and Ka Yan (Kitty) Tsang (BA):

"The effect of speech rate on age estimation in conversational speech."

The entire schedule is available here. Well done to all the organizers!

Research Groups: Week of November 12-16

Tuesday, November 13, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, PT266
Computational Linguistics Group, Department of Computer Science
Eric Corlett (Ph.D., Computer Science): "Probability and program complexity for NLP."
Probabilistic models used in NLP often come from general frameworks into which otherwise difficult-to-define tasks can be embedded. The power of these frameworks can lead to situations in which traditional measures of descriptive complexity, such as worst-case running time, can overestimate the cost of running our algorithms. In this talk I look at how practical and theoretical complexities can differ by investigating the Most Probable Sentence problem, which was shown to be NP-complete by Khalil Sima'an in 2002. I show that linguistic entropy can be used to formulate a more natural bound for the running time of this problem, as well as its error of approximation.

Wednesday, November 14, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Bissell Building 113
Morphology Reading Group
Jean-François Juneau (Ph.D.) will be leading a paper discussion of: Kracht, Marcus (2002). Suffixaufnahme. Manuscript, Freie Universität Berlin.

Friday, November 16, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: Everyone is encouraged to bring a research issue they've been working on or thinking about to discuss briefly and get some feedback from the group!

Friday, November 16, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Phonology Research Group
Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "Phonology of gender in French and English given names."

Friday, November 16, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Semantics Research Group
TBA

Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) is the (thoroughly deserving) recipient of a 2018 Arbor Award for outstanding volunteer service to the University of Toronto. Elizabeth is the co-creator of the University Reader Training Program, directed at faculty members who read off the list of graduates at Convocation, which provides extensive instruction in pronouncing names from a wide variety of nationalities and languages such that no students are made to feel unwelcome or misrepresented. Elizabeth's co-readers, Christina Kramer (faculty, Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Michael Patrick Albano (faculty, Music) also received Arbor Awards for this reason this year. Congratulations to all!

Elizabeth Cowper and Christina Kramer on CanadaAM

Faculty members Elizabeth Cowper (Linguistics) and Christina Kramer (Slavic Languages and Literatures), along with Michael Albano (a resident stage director of opera at the U of T) were interviewed this week on CTV's CanadaAM about the job of reading students' names at convocation, the challenge of trying to get pronunciations correct, and 'Convocation Bootcamp' (founded by Elizabeth), which trains name readers in advance.

LSA et al. 2015

The 89th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America will be taking place in Portland, Oregon, from January 8-11, 2015 – as will the annual meetings of several smaller linguistics-related conferences.

Linguistic Society of America

Current department members giving talks are:

Bronwyn Bjorkman (postdoc) with alumnus Ewan Dunbar (MA 2008, now at the Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics, École Normale Supérieure):
"Eliminating cyclicity: A reanalysis of Chamorro stress."

Marisa Brook (Ph.D.)
"Syntactic categories informing variationist analysis: The case of English copy-raising."

Ailís Cournane (Ph.D.)
"Input-divergent L1 acquisition in the direction of diachronic V-to-INFL reanalysis."

Nicholas Welch (postdoc)
"Mapping the frontier: Discourse particles and the cartography of the Dene clause."

Yu-Leng Lin (Ph.D.) is presenting a poster:
"Sociophonetic variation of coronal sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin."

Keren Rice (faculty) is giving a presentation as part of a special session on the publishing process:
"What is peer review?"

Several alumni are giving talks or posters:

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) is co-presenting a poster with colleague Isaiah Yoo (Sogang University): "Bare DP adverbs and the syntax of relative clauses."

Former visiting student Jorge Rosés Labrada (University of Western Ontario) is giving a talk:
"Proto-Sáliban subject marking and the grammaticalization of copulas into TAME and polarity morphology."

Marina Sherkina-Lieber (Ph.D. 2011, MA 2003, now at Carleton University) is giving a talk: "Syntactic knowledge and cross-linguistic influence in Russian-English bilingual children."

Lyn Tieu (MA 2008, now at l'École Normale Supérieure) is presenting a poster with colleague Erin Zaroukian (also at l'École Normale Supérieure): "Hedging arguments."

Former visiting student Holman Tse (University of Pittsburgh) is also giving a talk: "Retroflexion in Somali Bantu Kizigua: Language shift and a contact-induced explanation to what looks like an internally-motivated sound change."

Former visiting student Michael Wagner (McGill) is part of two talks. One is with Daniel Goodhue (McGill): "The effect of the contradiction contour on the interpretation of ambiguous yes-no responses." The other is with Alan Bale (Concordia) and Jessica Coon (McGill) and is an introductory talk as part of a workshop: "LingSync and ProsodyLab-Aligner: Tools for linguistic fieldwork and experimentation."

Rachel Walker (MA 1993, now at the University of Southern California) will be presenting "Feature-restricted evaluation of surface identity."

American Dialect Society

Five current department members and two alumni are involved:

Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D.) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty):
"The bike, the back, and the boyfriend: Confronting the 'definite article conspiracy' in Canadian and British English."

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

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty), Kinza Mahoon (BA), and Lyndsey Leask (BA) are presenting a poster: "Hills and hails in the Madawaska Valley: Introducing a unique Canadian dialect."

Alumna Alex D'Arcy (Ph.D. 2005, now at the University of Victoria) and former postdoc Becky Roeder (now at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte) are part of a talk with colleague Sky Onosson (University of Victoria): "City, province, or region? What do the vowels of Victoria tell us?"

Alex is also giving a talk with colleague Janelle Serediak (University of Victoria) "Old njooz or noo nooz? A diachronic look at yod dropping."

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Several alumni will be presenting talks:

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "Gender and person mismatches and ellipsis in Cayuga."

French Linguistics alumnus David Beck (University of Alberta): "Primary and secondary objects in Upper Necaxa Totonac."

MA alumna Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins (MA 1984, now at the University of Victoria): "Constructing a dictionary for academic and community audiences: The Nxaʔamxcín Project."


Other

Sali is also giving a talk for the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS): "Off the cuff and from the heart: A history of variationist sociolinguistics from personal narratives."

Alumna Donna Lillian (MA 1986, now at Appalachian State University) is giving the presidential address at the meeting of the American Name Society: "Names and magic."