University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
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| 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!
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| Canadian Language Museum Picture credits: Craig Diegel |
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On Monday, June 3rd, the University of Toronto hosted Language Research Day (LRD), a student-led academic conference designed to facilitate interaction and learning among graduate students in the field of language research.
Spanning campuses, languages, and levels of inquiry, this hybrid conference hosted over 100 in-person and virtual attendees.
Dr. Craig Chambers, a joint PhD in Cognitive Science and Linguistics, gave the closing keynote, Where and how does nonlinguistic cognition fit into language abilities? This presentation was drawn from a cross-sectional study on real-time language processing, and aids in the complete understanding of the "mental architecture supporting language abilities across the human lifespan."
One other Linguistics Dept member presented: PhD student Nick Haggarty, who was featured in June's spotlight on Queer Linguistics.
We look forward to seeing the development of this exciting event in 2025!
Congrats to Karina Cheung!
She presented her research at TULCON and then at Vic's Research Day. For the second, she won the Student Choice Research Award (Voted on by UofT Community) for her paper, "The effects of Heavy-NP Shift on Tagalog Word Order Preferences," based on work supervised by Dr. Ivan Bondoc.
Professor Alexei Kochetov is presenting at the SLUGS academic seminar on Monday, October 25th! He will be presenting his work on Kalasha laterals; Phonetic Realizations and Change in Progress!
For the full abstract please see the SLUGS website! Zoom link and password are also available on the website.
Hope to see you all there!!
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.
Susana Béjar (faculty), Diane Massam (faculty), Ana-Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), and Yves Roberge (faculty) have a chapter, "Rethinking complexity" in an edited volume, Syntactic architecture and its consequences I, edited by András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas, and Sten Vikner.
This paper addresses the nature of complexity of recursion. We consider four asymmetries involving caps on recursion observed in previous experimental acquisition studies, which argue that complexity cannot be characterized exclusively in terms of the number of iterations of Merge. While recursion is essentially syntactic and allowed for by the minimalist toolkit via Merge, selection, and labeling or projection, the complexity of recursive outputs arises at the interface.
We are delighted to have learned that Daphna Heller (faculty) has been awarded a six-month Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities by the Jackman Humanities Institute, in support of her project 'Sources of information and linguistic meaning: From typology to cognition'. Congratulations, Daphna!
For the 'Teaching and Learning Community of Practice' series hosted by Arts and Science, Nathan Sanders (faculty), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), and Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.) are giving an online presentation on Tuesday, September 22, from 2 PM to 3:15 PM, based on the ongoing LEAF-funded project in our department: "Building equity, diversity, and inclusion in courses: A case study in linguistics." There will also be ample time for discussion. To register to attend, visit the link.
In linguistics courses, language-related biases can surface in many forms, affecting the choice of course material (especially linguistic data), how that material is presented, and how instructors interact with students. We began a three-year project in September 2019 to address some of these biases in the linguistics classroom, with the ultimate goal of generalizing the methods and materials to other fields.
In this session, we present some preliminary results of this project from the first year in various linguistics courses, including new course content on the relationship of phonetics to gender, race and sign languages; new problem sets featuring data from under-represented languages; and workshops on inclusive classroom practices. We will also discuss paths forward for creating more affirming classrooms beyond linguistics, especially in fields where issues of language can play a central role (English, psychology, etc.).
Statistics Canada (2019) reports that the Black population is steadily growing in Canada. In Toronto, this population has doubled in the last 20 years. In this population, 56% are first-generation (born outside Canada) and 35% are second-generation (born in Canada but at least one parent was born abroad). Statistics Canada (2019) also reports that the number of immigrants from Africa has increased significantly, making up about 65% of the population of Black immigrants (as opposed to 27.3% of immigrants from the Caribbean and Bermuda). At the University of Toronto the population of undergraduate students from Africa corresponded (in 2017) to 2.6% (415 students) of the international student population (Liang 2017). The official records of the University of Toronto (Liang 2017) also report that Nigeria is the 9th most common country of origin for international students. In this project, our goal is to describe some semantic aspects of African languages while engaging the first- and second-generation communities of speakers of these languages. The goals of this project will advance the description of African languages spoken in Toronto and promote the visibility of these languages and communities of speakers on campus.
One of the major discoveries in attitude semantics over the last thirty years has been the fact that certain types of attitude reports require interpretation de se. This finding has prompted a move among semanticists to treat attitude verbs as uniformly quantifying over centered worlds (typically modeled as triples of worlds, individuals, and times), rather than merely over possible worlds, and likewise a move to treat attitude complements as uniformly denoting sets of centered worlds, rather than mere sets of possible worlds. Thus "A believes P" is true iff P holds of all triplessuch that A believes that she might be x in w at t. Proponents of a Uniformity Thesis of this type include Schlenker (1999), Ogihara (1999), von Stechow (2003), Anand (2006), Pearson (2015), and Grønn and von Stechow (2010). In this talk I present evidence against the Uniformity Thesis, drawing from my fieldwork on Nez Perce (Sahaptian). I show that dedicated de se devices (shifty 1st person indexicals, relative tenses) are possible in one type of attitude report in Nez Perce, but not in another type, and argue that the difference between the two types of attitude report crucially reflects the semantics of the attitude verb and its complement. I argue in particular that some attitude verbs quantify over centered tuples, making it possible to include dedicated de se devices, whereas others quantify merely over possible worlds, ruling such devices out.
Person-case constraint (PCC) phenomena involve restrictions on the relative person of the two objects of a ditransitive. In this talk, I present an account of four types of PCC patterns within the Interaction/Satisfaction theory of Agree (Deal 2015), and demonstrate some advantages of this view over various competitors. Advantages include the ability to account for both strong and weak PCC effects without invoking multiple types of Agree, and the ability to capture the rather complex relationship between PCC effects and morphological marking of Agree (i.e. in some languages PCC holds only when IO and DO clitics are combined, whereas in others PCC effects hold even though IO and DO clitics are not combined, and in still others IO and DO clitics combine without triggering PCC effects). I will also discuss the extent to which the theory can capture the role of number in PCC effects.
On the assumption that a head syntactically selects the head of its sister phrase, the following question arises: How is selection satisfied in a left periphery with a rich functional sequence (Rizzi 1997, etc.)? In many languages, left-dislocated topics can precede wh-words in indirect questions: "You asked me this book to whom I should give" (okay in Hebrew, Italian, Spanish and some people's English). If the Topic sits in Spec/Top, how can the interrogative-selecting V 'ask' "see" the wh-word?
Hebrew copular sentences in the present tense look like small clauses, leading one to think that the structure of (i) is equivalent to the reduced structure attributed to the bracketed part of (ii).
(i) Daniela balʃanit mecuyenet.
Daniel linguist excellent
'Daniela is an excellent linguist.'
(ii) Bill considers [Daniela an excellent linguist].
I believe this is a false analogy. I try to demonstrate that the copula-less sentences in (i) contain a (perhaps surprisingly) rich functional structure and incorporate (at least) two distinct subject positions. The presentation starts out with a discussion of copular sentences in French, where the evidence for two subject positions is overt, and proceeds to a presentation and analysis of Hebrew.
