Features Workshop in Tromsø

Elan Dresher and Elizabeth Cowper returned last week from a workshop on features in Tromsø, Norway: Features in Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics: What are they?.

Elan gave an invited talk: The arch not the stones: Universal feature theory without universal features.

Elizabeth co-presented a talk with alumnus Daniel Hall (PhD 2007): Reductio ad discrimen: Where features come from

Also, recent alumna Sarah Clarke (PhD 2013) presented a poster: Features across domains: The nominal-aspectual parallel.

Elizabeth and Elan with Betsy Ritter

 

Sarah with Wendy Sandler

 

Congratulations to Richard Compton!

Congratulations to Richard (PhD 2012), who has won a teaching award from the Department of Language Studies at UTM. Above is a picture of him at the ceremony on October 25.

Catching up on recent talks by faculty and students

People in the department were busy over the past month giving talks. Here is a round-up of some of the news we missed in October (and there's more to come):

At NELS 44 (U Conn, Oct 18-20), Will Oxford (PhD) gave a talk entitled "The Activity Condition as a Microparameter." And Avery Ozburn (PhD) presented a poster with Alexei Kochetov entitled "Non-local laryngeal alternations in Lezgian: An Agreement by Correspondence analysis."

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux gave two invited talks in Europe. On October 8 she presented "What RCs tell us about the syntax and semantics of complex structures in children," at the Goethe University Frankfur. On October 18 she presented a seminar "Continuity, structure and recursion: DP internal PP attachment in English-speaking children", at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, in Barcelona. Also, from August 12-16, Ana was a guest lecturer  at the 2013 Graduate Institute, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she lectured on the Acquisition of Bilingual Syntax.


Michela Ippolito has just returned from a workshop on conditionals at the University of Konstanz that brought together linguists and philosophers working on conditionals in North America and Europe.  http://cms.uni-konstanz.de/what-if/events/workshop-october-2013-p1-and-

Yoonjung Kang gave an invited talk titled "A corpus-based study of positional variation in Seoul Korean vowels<http://www.yoonjungkang.com/uploads/1/1/6/2/11625099/jk_presentation2.pdf>" at Japanese/Korean Linguistics 23 <http://jk.mit.edu>, held at MIT, October 11-13. Also in attendance was our recent graduate, Kyumin Kim (PhD, 2011) who gave a talk titled "Idioms in Korean and Japanese: phase-based account". <http://jk.mit.edu/abstracts/kim.pdf> The conference was also a chance to catch up with Isaac Gould (MA, 2010) and Michelle Yuan (MA, 2013) currently studying at MIT, who send their greetings!

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!

LVC Group Meeting (Nov 8)

This week the LVC Group has a visiting speaker: Véronique Lacoste (University of Freiburg) reporting on a project investigating the English of the Toronto Haitian community. They'll be meeting in SS560A as usual, from 10-12.

Massam 2014: Lasting Insights and Questions

Congratulations to Diane, whose 2000 paper "VSO and VOS: Aspects of Niuean Word Order" is excerpted in the newly published Wiley-Blackwell volume An Annotated Syntax Reader: Lasting Insights and Questions (edited by Richard Kayne, Thomas Leu and Raffaella Zanuttini). The volume compiles excerpts from classic syntax papers, dating back to 1966.

Guest Speaker: Morgan Sonderegger (Nov 1)

Morgan Sonderegger is visiting from McGill ( http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/), and will talk about "The dynamics of sounds on reality television" -- see abstract below.

The talk will take place in Sid Smith 560A (basement of Sid Smith), starting at 3:10pm. A reception in the department lounge will follow.

"The dynamics of sounds on reality television"

To what extent does an individual’s phonetics and phonology change during adulthood? Previous work has addressed this question on two timescales. In short-term laboratory settings, aspects of one's speech shift in response to the speech of others (e.g. Nielsen, 2008; Babel, 2009). It has been hypothesized that the accumulation of such shifts is an important source of accent change in individuals and sound change in communities (Delvaux & Soquet, 2007). However, studies of phonetic or phonological variables in individuals at times years apart have found huge variability: there is often no evidence for change for a majority of individuals, while a minority change significantly (e.g. Evans & Iverson, 2007; Sankoff & Blondeau, 2007). What is the link between the different patterns seen in short-term convergence and long-term dynamics? And more generally, what do phonetic and phonological dynamics in individuals look like at time scales in between?

We address these questions by investigating ‘medium-term’ trajectories of phonetic and phonological variation in a British reality television show, where speakers live in an isolated house for three months. We examine five variables in spontaneous speech from 12 contestants: voice onset time, coronal stop deletion, and formant frequencies for three vowels. As a preliminary step, we build a model of synchronic variation for each variable; these models yield interesting and surprising findings with respect to previous work. We then analyze the trajectory of each variable within individual speakers, controlling for linguistic factors. Variability is the norm: speakers and variables show several qualitatively different types of dynamics, with a significant minority showing stability. There is some evidence that particular speakers (across variables) and variables (across speakers) have characteristic dynamics. Long-term time trends do sometimes occur, which could be due to accumulation of short-term shifts. By contrast, day-by-day variation is very common. Our results suggest a tentative account of the relationship between short-term and long-term dynamics, and directions for future work.

Syntax/Semantics Project (Nov 1)

Syntax project will be held Friday, November 1st, in SS560A from 12-2 pm. Kenji Oda will be presenting, "On Apparent Adjective Fronting in Irish."

Psycholinguistics Group Meeting (Nov 1)

The Psycholinguistic Group is meeting Friday, November 1st in Sid Smith 560A and will start at 10:15. Morgan Sonderegger (http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/) is visiting from McGill that day and will give a talk entitled "Voice onset time: automatic measurement and corpus studies"

"Voice onset time: automatic measurement and corpus studies"
 Large corpora of speech from laboratory and naturalistic settings are becoming increasingly available and easy to construct, and promise to change the questions researchers can ask about human speech production. However, this promise depends on the development of accurate algorithms to quicken or replace manual measurement, which becomes infeasible for large corpora. With some important exceptions (e.g. vowel formants), such algorithms do not currently exist for most quantities which are widely measured in phonetic research. The first part of this talk describes an automatic measurement algorithm for perhaps the most widely measured consonantal variable, voice onset time (VOT), which has been extensively studied since the 1960s (Lisker & Abramson, 1964). Our approach combines knowledge about the cues human annotators use to measure VOT with machine learning techniques for predicting structured output, to tailor an algorithm which learns to measure VOT nearly as accurately as humans (evaluated on several corpora), by training on a small number (50-200) of hand-labeled examples.

The second part of the talk will describe a corpus study of variability in VOT in British reality television speech enabled by our automatic measurement algorithm, which quantifies the relative importance of different factors affecting VOT in conversational speech (e.g. speaking rate, place of articulation, speaker gender). There have been very few previous studies of VOT in conversational speech (Yao, 2009); in addition to replicating many findings of laboratory studies, we find a number of novel and surprising effects, including inter-speaker differences in the strength of conditioning factors. Time permitting, we will also describe a a collaborative project applying the algorithm to studying real-time change in VOT in a speech community.

Phonetics/Phonology Group meeting (Oct 25)

The Phonetics/Phonology Group is meeting Friday at 12pm in SS560A, as usual. On the agenda:

1) A dry run by Elan, for his talk at the Tromsø Feature Workshop

2) Our first paper discussion of the year!  Sonderegger & Niyogi 2013 - "Variation and change in English noun/verb pair stress: Data and dynamical systems models".

Invited talk by Alexei at York this Thursday

Alexei Kochetov is giving a talk at York University (Keele campus) this Thursday, Oct 24, 5:15-6:15.

The talk will take place in Ross S 562 and will be followed by a reception in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

 Title: Tracking and Imaging the Tongue: New insights into language-particular phonetic variability

Abstract:
"Early articulatory phonetic research using static palatography and x-ray imaging was crucial to the development of phonetic and phonological theories, and provided important foundations for phonetic typology. For many decades, however, articulatory research has been limited to a small number of research labs, as it required costly equipment, extensive training, and labour-intensive data analysis. While this is still true to some extent, new methods of articulatory data collection and analysis are becoming increasingly available and gradually more affordable. This, together with the increased collaboration among researchers/labs and the discipline-wide growing interest in experimentation, is likely to provide a new impetus to the applied and theoretic phonetics/phonology research. In this talk I will present results from two studies that are part of a larger collaborative effort to develop a cross-language corpus of articulatory data with the goal to explore the data’s implications for applied and theoretical research. The first study employs electropalatography to examine the degree of linguopalatal contact for Japanese voiced, voiceless singleton, and voiceless geminate stops. These contrasts are traditionally analyzed as involving voicing and length features. The results of the study show that the three classes of consonants differ in the relative tightness of the constriction (e.g. /t:/ > /t/ > /d/). This suggests that the primary distinction may involve the feature ‘tense’, thus making the Japanese stop contrasts parallel to those of Korean. The second study (in collaboration with the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing) uses ultrasound to image the tongue during the production of retroflex and dental consonants in Kannada (Dravidian). Retroflexes in Dravidian languages have been observed to involve substantial curling of the tongue tip towards the palate. Much less is known about the overall shape of the tongue and its dynamics during the retroflex production. The results of the study provide some insight into the process, potentially explaining facts of the retroflex patterning in phonology and acquisition."

New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 42 in Pittsburgh

NWAV 42 took place last weekend in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. U of T was extremely well-represented this time around. The talks and posters by current members of the department were (alphabetically by first author):

 • André Arsenault: "Sociolinguistic variation in Mari Old Babylonian."

• Marisa Brook: "Comparative complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from early fiction."

• Aaron Dinkin: "Linguistic and non-linguistic regions in perceptual dialectology."

• Chris Harvey: "Any and no negation in Southern Ontario English."

• Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali Tagliamonte: "The new global flow of linguistic influence: be like at the saturation point."

• Naomi Nagy and Derek Denis: "An amplification role for lexical frequency in syntactic variation? Testing with heritage Italian."

Sali co-presented a paper with alumna Alexandra D'Arcy (University of Victoria) and colleague Celeste Rodriguez Louro (University of Western Australia) on the spread of be like throughout the English-speaking world.

Alex also presented a solo paper: "Does one change have ramifications for the other?",  introducing her corpus of Victoria English.

Alumna Nicole Rosen (University of Lethbridge) was a part of two talks: "Rhythmic variation in southern Alberta Englishes," with three colleagues, and "Religion as a factor in Southern Alberta English variation."

Former student Greg Madan presented "Enregisterment and disaccomodation: The rise of rhotic speech in rural New Hampshire."

Naomi Nagy also co-led a software workshop: "Extending ELAN into variationist sociolinguistics."

Other sociolinguists from U of T in attendance were Jim Smith (PhD), Ruth Maddeaux (MA), Emilie LeBlanc (MA), Martin Sneath (undergraduate), and French professor Anne-José Villeneuve. Alumni who put in appearances were Bridget Jankowski (recent PhD), Maddie Shellgren (MA, now at Michigan State University), and Shannon Mooney (MA, now at Georgetown University). Thanks to everyone for contributing to a fantastic conference!

Syntax-Semantics Project Meeting, Friday, Oct 18

There will be a syntax project this Friday, October 18th, from 12-2, in room SS 560A. Rebecca Tollan will be giving a dry run entitled, "Case marking and sensitivity of little v: evidence from dialectal variation in Basque (and beyond)," and Elizabeth Cowper will be presenting "Reductio ad discrimen: Where features come from" (co-authored with Daniel Currie Hall).

(Post courtesy of Julie Doner)

Psycholinguistics Group Meeting Friday, Oct 18

This is a reminder that the Psycholinguistics Group is meeting on Friday, Oct 18, from 10-12. Danielle Moed (MA student, LIN) will present research she did as an undergrad at McMaster, entitled "A psycholinguistic analysis of NP-movement in English".

The  next meeting is Nov 1. Morgan Sonderegger ( http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/) will be vising that day from McGill, and will give a presentation to the group. Details to follow.

(Post courtesy of Daphna Heller)

Phonetics/Phonology Group meeting Friday, Oct. 11

The phonetics/phonology group will be meeting on Friday, Oct. 11 at 12pm. There are two scheduled talks:

Clarissa Forbes will be presenting her paper "Gitksan stress and the development of lexical accent." This is the paper that won Clarissa the 2013 Elan Dresher Student Phonology Prize!

Avery Ozburn will be doing a dry run of her NELS poster, "Non-local laryngeal alternations in Lezgian: an Agreement by Correspondence analysis".

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.