University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
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| Group smiles for a job well done (or well on the way) |
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| Satisfied writers Rhoda and Claudia |
With a lot of enthusiastic feedback on the experience, the Department hopes to host a more regular writing accountability group in the future.
Thanks, Claudia, for organizing!
One highlight was lunch together in the lounge:
Presentations were really interested and diverse. They included:
Martin Renard
Stem and Initial Segment Faithfulness in Kanien’kéha Dresher Prize Winner
Simon LiVolsi, Angela Cristiano, Naomi Nagy
Modeling Italian variable apocope
Jessica Yeung
How not to learn an ATR harmony pattern: Results from two pilot experiments
Song Jiang and Alexei Kochetov
An ultrasound study of English rhotic allophones produced by L1 and L2 speakers
Abram Clear and Naomi Nagy
Identifiably Italian: Acoustic features of the Toronto Italian Ethnolinguistic Repertoire
Yi-Ting Deng, Gianna Giovio Canavesi, Ji Whan Kim, Gideon Mehna, and Avery Ozburn
A preliminary investigation of the tone system of Keiyo Hafza Nuh, Aman Sakhardande, and Avery Ozburn
Plosive voicing in Keiyo
Radu Craioveanu
A prosodic typology of preaspiration
Thank you, Organizing committee (Peter Jurgec, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Philip Monahan, Avery Ozburn, Keren Rice, Nathan Sanders, Jessamyn Schertz)!
And thanks to Simon LiVolsi, recent grad from St. George, for taking these photos!
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Susana Bejar (Faculty) and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Faculty) presented their work on "Failing low, succeeding high: Agreement with specificational subjects."
After all their hard work, Bejar and Kahnemuyipour got to enjoy an amazing sunset picnic under the Eiffel Tower with their colleagues! 🧺🥖🌅🍷
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.
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| Here we have almost all the UofT presenters! |
This was an amazing event and the department is excited to see Ba-TOM continue in the years to come!
On June 9th the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are co-organizing this workshop:
Semantics of NPs, DPs, and Modality
Thursday June 9, 2022 NFC, Victoria College VC102
Registration: https://uoft.me/semantics
Professor Roberta Pires de Oliveira, a specialist on modality and bare nominals in Brazilian Portuguese, is the invited speaker and will be sharing their work on Semantics, Language Variation and Experiments!
Students working on related topics will also be presenting their work during the workshop! Student Talks include:
Program
10:30 – 11:00 a.m.
Sophie Harrington
"More than a mood": Uniting structure and interpretation through pronominalized complements
11:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Roberta Pires de Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina/CNPq PQ-1C)
Invited talk: Bare arguments and kinds: The case of Brazilian Portuguese
12:00 – 1:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Crystal Chen
That Kind-of demonstrative: A Semantic Analysis of English Demonstratives
2:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Samuel Jambrović
Names, articles, and unique individuals
2:30 – 2:45 pm Coffee break
2:45 – 3:15 p.m.
Ohanna Severo
Investigating bare nouns in Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals
3:15 – 3:45
Gregory Antono, Daphna Heller, Craig Chambers
Linearizing classifiers, numerals, and nouns in the noun phrase. Does artificial language learning
reflect cognitive biases?
3:45 – 4:00 p.m. Closing remarks
This may sound a bit familiar, but...
Brian Diep (undergrad), Justin Leung (PhD student) and Naomi Nagy (faculty) are presenting about variation in heritage and homeland Cantonese at another conference this weekend:
第五屆粵語語言學論壇 The Fifth Forum on Cantonese Linguistics (FoCaL-5)
邊啲人[naːn23]啲? (n-/l-) in Cantonese in Hong Kong and Toronto
This will present some further developments since the talk at WICL last weekend.
Katrina Kechun Li, Christopher Bryant & Li Nguyen (University of Cambridge)
Tonal aspects of Cantonese-English code-switching in HLVC corpus
Holman Tse (Asst. Professor at St. Catherine University, previously a visiting student in our Department):
Is there cross-linguistic influence of English /u/ on Toronto Cantonese high round vowels?
(Sorry, not good shots of Holman, but here's his slides.)
The Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop (TOM 14) will be hosted this year by the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University! The workshop will take place on May 28th 2022 on Zoom. The event is free to attend and we encourage all our semanticist to join!
Crystal Chen (PhD Student) and Michela Ippolito (Faculty) will be presenting their work on "Exclamatives Interrogatives"
Dr. Ai Taniguchi (UTM Faculty) will also be presenting at TOM! She will be sharing her work on "Semantics and Pragmatics in a Justice-Centered Introductory Linguistics Textbook: Reflection from Updating an Open Educational Resource"
Our friends at UTM Derek Denis (Faculty) and Samantha Jackson (Post Doctoral Fellow) are organizing a workshop on Linguistic Equity and Justice!
While language functions as both a means and target of oppression, linguists have, until only recently, rarely critically engaged with historical and contemporary inequities and injustices (cf. Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz 2020). That said, we recognize that many scholars are currently working toward language-based anti-oppression goals. Although these researchers are diverse, we see among them a shared goal of advocacy through critical engagement with language and racism, ableism, transphobia, sexism, colonialism, and classism. We are so excited to bring together like-minded researchers for a two-day workshop of knowledge sharing and community building to be held virtually on April 29th and 30th, 2022. We would love for you to attend/participate in this workshop so our community can share and gain knowledge.
Please register before the event. There will be ASL interpretation and auto-generated captions for all sessions.
For questions or more information, please contact Samantha Jackson.
We are excited to share that the Bilingualism and Multilingualism developmental (BAM!TO) Lab will be hosting a FREE online workshop and roundtable discussion on Friday April 1st (11:00 am - 3:00 pm EST).
The focus will be on speech language pathologists' perspectives on providing assessment and intervention for multilingual children in Canada and on the future areas of research in the provision of multilingualism pediatric SLP services.
Featured speakers include Diane Dacquay, RSLP, S-LP(C) and Rachel Lévesque, RSLP, S-LP(C) who have experience providing bilingual services at the Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine; as well as, Fern Westernoff, Ed.D., M.H.Sc. Reg. CASLPO from the Toronto District School Board and co-chair of the OSLA Multicultural and Multilingual Interest Group.
See their webpage for registration and the preliminary schedule!
The Global Language Initiative at UofT has extended the invitation for faculty members and students to participate in their symposium titled Languages Towards a Planetary Education.
The deadline to submit your abstract is December 12th 2021. The Symposium will be hosted online on January 28th-29th 2022.
Spread the word to anyone you think would be interested!
Complex Sentences in South American Languages will be held virtually on November 17th-19th. The workshop's objective is to help researchers find common ground in how they describe the different phenomena involved in complex sentences.
There will be a UofT presence at this workshop: Suzi Lima (faculty) and Guillaume Thomas (faculty). Lima will be presenting her work on the acquisition of conjunctions in Yudja. Thomas, an invited speaker, will be presenting his work on restructuring and evidentiality in Mbyá Guaraní.
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!!
The Junior Forum session on October 26th will be open to all members of the department to discuss research ethics! Suzi Lima (faculty) and Susana Béjar (faculty) will be joining on behalf of the department's Ethics Committee.
The workshop will feature:
Please refer to the listserv email for more details!
Angelika Kiss (PhD) and Andrei Munteanu (PhD) will be presenting their joint work on Form-meaning relations in Russian declarative questions at this year's Moscow HSE Pragmatics Workshop. The event will be hosted virtually from Sept 30 - Oct 1 by the International Laboratory for Logic, Language and Formal Philosophy and the School of Linguistics at the HSE University (Moscow).
The workshop programme including abstracts can be found at this link.
The following UofT linguists will present:
We're excited to see our linguists out in force this weekend and we wish them all the best.
The University of Toronto will be hosting the first Language Research Day! This will be a one-day meeting where graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members can share their language-related research. All researchers from all departments, campuses and affiliated hospitals are welcome!
Language Research Day will be held virtually on November 12th, 2021. The theme is Language Research in a Virtual Context, which is very fitting for the time!
Research on ANY aspect/ level of language is welcomed. Note that your research does not need to be relevant to the virtual context, all topics are welcomed!
For those interested, submit your abstracts (250 word limit) for a poster or oral presentation through EasyChair. The deadline for submission is September 13th 2021.
We encourage everyone to attend! This is a great way to learn about the diverse language research happening at UofT. You can register via Eventbrite by November 5th 2021.
If you have any questions, feel free to email language.research@utoronto.ca for more information.
We look forward to seeing the program!
The Summer Phonetics / Phonology Forum (SPF) took place last Tuesday, it was such a great success!
Congratulations and thank you for the great presentations and organization, we appreciate all your hard work and effort. We are looking forward to the next SPF!
(And super-excited to see that Alexei has figured out how to clone himself!)
On Tuesday, July 27th the Department of Linguistics will be hosting the Summer Phonetics / Phonology Forum! This informal workshop gives UofT graduate students the opportunity to present their phonetics /phonology related research they have be working hard on!
The program has been released and is jam-packed with innovative research from familiar names within the department (bolded).
9:25 Welcome
9:30 Emily J. Clare (Postdoc), EJ Guerrero, Anna Kravchuk, Ishika Mroke, Devmini Rodrigo, & Jessamyn Schertz (Faculty)
Perception and production of prevoicing
9:50 Koorosh Ariyaee (Graduate Student), Chahla Ben-Ammar (MA Alumni), Talia Tahtadjian (Graduate student), & Alexei Kochetov (Faculty)
The acoustics of guttural fricatives in three languages
Break (10:10-10:20)
10:20 Anissa Baird (Graduate Student)
Gender expression and its representations in video games
10:40 Lisa Schlegl (Graduate Student) & Jessamyn Schertz (Faculty)
Production and perception of mock speech
Break (11:00-11:10)
11:10 Photini Coutsougera (Faculty)
The syllable structure of Arcadian Greek
11:30 Yi-Ting Deng, Kailea Edmonds, Madeline Glover, & Avery Ozburn (Faculty)
ATR and ATR harmony in Keiyo (Kalenjin)
Lunch Break (11:50-1:00)
1:00 Christopher Legerme (Graduate Student)
Creole on the cusp: Phonological variation and change in Haitian determiners
1:20 Pedro Mateo Pedro (Faculty)
Acquisition of status suffixes in Chuj
Break (1:40-1:50)
1:50 Andrei Munteanu (Graduate Student), Lauren Bigelow (Graduate Student), & Ilia Nicoll (Graduate Student)
Quick onset dialect accommodation in Marmora Ontario
2:10 Lisa Sullivan (Graduate Student)
Beg, bag or bEYg? Reliability of self-reported /æg/-raising in North American English
Break (2:30-2:40)
2:40 Zhanao Fu (Graduate Student) & Ewan Dunbar (Faculty)
Discovering features from production and perception errors
3:00 Wei Wang
The orthography effect in loanword adaptation: Variable adaptation of English VNV sequences into Mandarin Chinese
3:20 Rasha Al-Rammahi, Dalainey Gervais, Gianna Giovio Canavesi, Alexei Kochetov (Faculty), & Avery Ozburn (Faculty)
A preliminary investigation of sibilant harmony in Panoan
3:40 Concluding Remarks
A massive thank you goes out to the Organizing committee for putting together this amazing event. Committee members include Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Philip Monahan, Nathan Sanders, Avery Ozburn, Keren Rice and Jessamyn Schertz.
We wish the best of luck to all our presenters! We cannot wait to see what you have been working on!
The 40th Mutual Knowledge workshop is taking place online on June 25 and 26, hosted by University College London.
The University of British Columbia and McGill University are co-hosting an online workshop on Move and Agree from May 31 through June 4.
