LVC Group Meeting, Friday Oct 11

The LVC Group meets this Friday starting at 10 AM. Presenters will be giving dry-runs for NWAV.  Matt, Derek, Sali, and Marisa will present on their study of quotatives. Derek and Naomi will present on heritage Italian. Marisa will also be presenting aspects of her MA research.

S4 Meeting on Friday, Oct 11

The newly formed 'syntax semantics squib section' (S4) will meet Friday 12-1 in SS2127. There will be two short tutorials – Plurality (by Youri Zabbal) and Types of Copular Constructions (by Susana Bejar) – plus discussion.

The S4 meeting is a newly formed 1-hour slot for informal discussion of sytax-semantics. It will meet every two weeks, alternating with the Syntax-Semantics group.

'Canadian English, Eh?' at Gerstein

The Canadian Language Museum's exhibit 'Canadian English, Eh?' is currently on display at U of T's Gerstein Library (Gerstein Science Information Centre) at 9 King's College Circle. It will be up until October 18. It's very prominently displayed on the main floor, so it is attracting many readers!

The Museum's other exhibit 'Speaking the Inuit Way' was displayed at the Foundation for Endangered Languages conference at Carleton last week, and will be at the Université de Moncton for the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association meeting at the beginning of November. Work is underway on the next exhibit about Canadian French, which will open in March 2014.

(Post courtesy of Elaine Gold)

Psycholinguistics Group this Friday

(Courtesy of Daphna Heller)

There will be a psycholinguistics group meeting this Friday (Oct 4). Phil Monahan (LIN, UTSC) will present his work entitled "Using behavior and brain to probe speech categories: Dialects, underspecification and bias".

Psycholinguistics group meets in Sid Smith 560A. The talk will start at 10:15.

Syntax-Semantics Project meets twice this week

(Courtesy of Julie Doner)

There will be two meetings of syntax-semantics project this week, as follows. Please take note of the special time for the first meeting.

"Kaqchikel Agent Focus as anti-locality"
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, MIT
Thursday, October 3rd 4:30-6:30 pm in BL 114

Abstract: Many Mayan languages show a syntactically ergative extraction asymmetry whereby the A-bar extraction of subjects of transitives requires special verbal morphology, known as Agent Focus. In this talk I discuss the syntax of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. I argue that Agent Focus does not simply occur whenever an ergative subject is A-bar extracted---as predicted by previous approaches---but is instead a strategy to avoid a movement step which is *too short*. Support for this claim comes from new data on the distribution of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel which shows this locality-sensitivity. Time permitting, I will discuss the notion of "last-resort" and motivate the use of a system of ranked, violable constraints to model the full pattern of Agent Focus and verbal agreement observed in the language.


"Deducing clause structure from the right periphery in T??ch? Yat?ì"
Nick Welch, U of T
Friday, October 4th 12-2 pm in SS 560A.

Abstract: T??ch? Yat?ì, a Dene language of the Northwest Territories, Canada, has a number of post-verbal auxiliaries and particles indicating categories such as futurity, mode, negation, information structure and evidentiality. The interaction of these elements reveals that they occur in a strict order, which in turn illuminates the structure of the clause in this language, with positions for future, mode, negation, and focus as functional categories at the right edge.

Guest speaker: Matthew Dryer

We have a guest speaker event today, Friday, Sept 27th, at 3pm (it will start at 3:10pm, U of T time).

Matthew S. Dryer (University at Buffalo) is presenting his work entitled "On the Order of Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective and Noun" (see abstract below).

The talk will take place in Sidney Smith 560A, and a reception will follow in the Linguistics lounge.

On the Order of Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective and Noun
This paper reports on a typological study of the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun, based on a sample of 442 languages. I propose a set of five surface principles which interact to predict the relative frequency of the different orders of these four elements. I compare my approach to a generative account of the same phenomenon by Cinque (2005). I argue that my approach accounts for the relative frequency of the different orders better than Cinque’s and that his account suffers in three respects: (1) my sample contains instances of four orders that Cinque’s account predicts should not exist; (2) two orders are considerably more common than his account predicts; and (3) two orders are considerably less common than his account predicts. I also argue that the principles underlying the different orders of these four elements must be interpreted in terms of semantic categories and that any attempt to account for them syntactically cannot work.

Bronwyn Bjorkman wins Banting postdoctoral fellowship

The department is pleased to be able to announce that Bronwyn Bjorkman is staying on for two more years, now as a Banting Fellow. Though you have already seen Bronwyn around this term, the Banting results were only publicly announced on Monday. 

Her project for this postdoctoral fellowship is to investigate the cross-linguistic and language-internal relationships between expressions of anteriority, especially past tense and perfect and perfective aspects, and to develop featureal representations of these oppositions. She will continue to work with Elizabeth, on this and other topics. 

Congratulations, Bronwyn!

Canadian Language Museum exhibit at Gerstein next month

The Canadian Language Museum's Canadian English exhibit will be at Gerstein Library, on the U of T campus, from October 7-18. You can hear a CD of Canadian Dialects and admire the exhibit created by Elaine Gold and a team of students a couple of years ago. Thanks, Elaine!

2013-2014 Research group meetings start today

The 2013-2014 calendar of research group meetings begins today.

The Psycholinguistics group is meeting at 10:15am in Sid Smith 560A. Mindaugas Mozuraitis (PhD student, psychology, UTM) will present his work entitled "Appearance-reality distinction in real-time referential processing.".

At 12:00 the Syntax-Semantic project will meet  in SS560A. Dan Milway (PhD student) will present a part of his MA research: "Asymmetries and implicit arguments in English particle verb constructions."

Congratulations, Michela!

Congratulations to Michela Ippolito on the publication of her 2013 LI monograph "Subjunctive Conditionals: A Linguistic Analysis." Here is a link to the publisher's page:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/subjunctive-conditionals

Sali Tagliamonte elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Congratulations to Sali! She has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. See the following for the description of her accomplishments, plus information about the others from the University of Toronto who have been selected as fellows or won Royal Society awards. http://news.utoronto.ca/u-t-makes-impressive-showing-royal-society-honours

Special meeting of the Phonology Group today: Manami Hirayama

There will be a special meeting of the phonology group next today (September 6th) at 10 am in SS560A. Manami Hirayama (Ritsumeikan University) will be presenting her research on high vowel devoicing in Japanese; all are welcome to attend. The title and abstract follow below.

Testing the visibility of morphology in postlexical phonology: Evidence from vowel devoicing in Japanese

It has been argued in the literature of high vowel devoicing in standard Tokyo Japanese (HVD) that HVD makes reference to morphological boundaries. For example, McCawley (1968) observes that accent shifting in verb and adjective alternations triggered by HVD has the stem as the domain. Vance (1992), looking at nominal compounds with two potential undergoers of HVD in two successive syllables, argues that the presence of the boundary prohibits HVD: those adjacent to the boundary fail to undergo the process. Yoshida (2004) argues that what he calls “compound boundaries” blocks the occurrence of HVD more frequently than “morpheme boundaries” do.

The visibility of word-internal structure in HVD is a challenge to phonological theories. For example, in the theory of Lexical Phonology (e.g., Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986), processes in the postlexical domain do not refer to word-internal structure (only phonological information is available in that domain), while HVD, being non-structure-preserving and non-categorical, occurs postlexically. The reference to the word-internal information is also not expected in the prosody-morphology/syntax interface hypothesis, where phonological/phonetic rules refer only to prosodic structure, not directly to morphological/syntactic structure.

In this talk, I explore the effects of morphological boundaries in HVD through two studies I have conducted. One is preliminary results from a production experiment with ten speakers. The other is a dictionary study on the lexical accent variation related to HVD (Hirayama & Giriko 2012). I argue that it is not the morphological boundary but likely the phonological boundary that HVD refers to. This supports the view of Lexical Phonology and the prosody-morphology/syntax interface hypothesis discussed above.

Richard Compton begins new post-doc

Recent alumnus Richard Compton (PhD 2012) begins a post-doctoral fellowship this month at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Jessica Coon. During the post-doc he will be continuing his research into polysynthetic word formation, word-internal modifiers, linearization, and lexical categories in Inuktitut. He also hopes to explore theoretical connections between these topics and phenomena in Mi'gmaq and other Algonquian languages. Richard will also be participating in the Mi'gmaq Research Project and organizing a reading group on a topic pertaining to Algonquian. In the winter semester he will be teaching Field Methods at McGill. Congratulations, Richard!

Congratulations, Dr. Clarke!

Congratulations to Sarah Clarke, who recently defended her thesis entitled "Aspectual Scope and Contrast in English and Japanese"! Sarah was supervised by Elizabeth Cowper, and her committee consisted of Susana Béjar, Robert Binnick, Daniel Currie-Hall, Alana Johns, Diane Massam, and external examiner Michiya Kawai (UWO). Celebrations included a party hosted by Elizabeth, with music provided by F-Zero.

Congratulations, Sarah!

L to R: Elizabeth Cowper, Sarah Clarke, and Michiya Kawai

A toast to the new doctor

Sarah with a subset of her committee

(Photos courtesy of Eugenia Suh)

Summer Workshops 2013

Following tradition, we held two informal (phonetics/phonology and syntax) summer workshops which both took place on Aug. 15 this year. The CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop was organized by Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, and Keren Rice, and included many interesting talks by members of our faculty, graduate students, and alumni. The program included the following talks:

• Avery Ozburn & Alexei Kochetov: Long-distance and positional constraints in Lezgian laryngeal harmony
• Peter Jurgec & Tina Razboršek: Opaque interactions in Šmartno Slovenian
• Christopher Spahr: Confronting the European Portuguese low vowel distinction
• Phil Howson: An EMA examination of the Czech trill-fricative
• George Nagy & Naomi Nagy: What R we hearing?
• Marisa Brook: Intersecting phonotactic restrictions and their perceptual effects
• Yu-Leng Lin: Nasal harmony with opaque segments
• Vincent DeCaen: Coffee tomorrow?: A Generative-Masoretic approach to Tiberian gutturals and sonority
• Joanna Chociej: The role of sonority in Polish vowel‐zero alternations

The talks were held in BA 1220, and lunch was served in the lounge.

(Photo credit: Eugenia Suh)

Break time

(Photo credit: Emily Clare)

The second workshop was Two BE (or not two BE), a follow-up to the Practical BE-Keeping (BE-lated) workshop which took place in March. This workshop followed the same structure as the first one, where attendees came up with questions, broke off into groups to discuss the questions that interested them the most, and then came back together to present a review of what was discussed.

(Photos courtesy of Kenji Oda)

Thank you to all of the organizers and attendees for making both workshops a success!

Photos from CLA 2013

Here are some snapshots from CLA 2013, courtesy of Becky Tollan.

Congratulations, Bridget!

On July 3, 2013, Bridget Jankowski defended her dissertation, "A Variationist Approach to Cross-Register Language Variation and Change", with dignity and aplomb.

We were pleased to have Prof. Terttu Nevalainen, University of Helsinki, join us as External Examiner.

We were also favoured with a brief appearance by alum Cathleen Waters (now at U Leicester. Congrats to her on her new job!).

Celebrations included a Pennsylvania specialty: Strawberry Pretzel Salad (recipe by popular demand) and Derek's Brie-en-croûte à la canadienne.

(Post courtesy of Naomi Nagy)

Bridget with Sali and Cathleen

(Photo courtesy of Sali Tagliamonte)

Bridget with Terttu Nevalainen 

(Photo courtesy of Eugenia Suh)

(Photo courtesy of Eugenia Suh)

Craig manning the grill

(Photo courtesy of Eugenia Suh)

Liisa Duncan, Derek Denis, Sarah Clarke, Eugenia Suh

(Photo courtesy of Sali Tagliamonte)

Congratulations, Bridget!

Must be nice to be a professor...

... and have all that free time all summer, plus sabbaticals every seven years.  We've all heard these comments. In case you've ever wondered what profs do during sabbaticals, here's a glimpse inside Naomi's first sabbatical at U of T.

Congratulations, Marina!

Alumnus Marina Sherkina-Lieber (PhD 2011) has received a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship which she will hold at Carleton University, with Kumiko Murasugi, for two years. Her project, which began on May 1, 2013, is entitled "Heritage receptive bilinguals knowledge of noun incorporation in Inuktitut."  Marina says she is continuing her work on the morphosyntactic knowledge of those who "understand but don't speak" Inuktitut. This time she will work with the Ottawa Inuit community. Congratulations, Marina!

Congratulations, Will!

PhD student Will Oxford is leaving us shortly for the University of Manitoba, where he has accepted  a tenure-stream position specializing in Algonquian linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, commencing July 1. Will is currently completing his dissertation "Microparameters of agreement: The development of the Algonquian Independent inflection." Congratulations, Will!