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).

Congratulations, Shayna!

We're delighted to have heard that Shayna Gardiner (Ph.D. 2017, now at Receptiviti) has accepted a position as a Natural Language Processing Engineer at Dialpad. Congratulations, Shayna, and all the best from us as you begin this well-deserved new job!

LSA Institute 2019

The four-week 2019 Linguistic Institute run by the Linguistic Society of America has just wrapped up at the University of California, Davis. Our department was involved in three ways.

Several of our students - Gregory Antono (BA), Rosalind Owen (BA), and Max Haohang Xi (BA) - were in attendance this year and navigated an intense month of classes, symposiums, social events, and networking.

One of the themes of this year's Institute recognized the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the associated Dene Languages Conference included presentations by Keren Rice (faculty) and Alessandro Jaker (postdoc).

We also had two current departmental members teaching. The other of this year's Institute themes was Linguistics in the Digital Era; in conjunction with this, Marisa Brook (faculty) and Emily Blamire (Ph.D.) teamed up to teach 'Topics in Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication'.

Marisa and Emily explain the Internet, or at least the linguistic elements thereof. (Photo by Mark Richard Lauersdorf.)

Sali and Bridget in the Bulletin

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) is interviewed in this week's U of T Bulletin about her new paper with Bridget Jankowski (Ph.D. 2013; staff) on dialectical patterns in Canadian English surrounding 'goodness', 'gosh', 'jeez', 'OMG', and other present-day English exclamations originating in ways of referring, either strongly or euphemistically, to deities.

Congratulations, Na-Young!

Na-Young Ryu defended her doctoral dissertation, "Effects of web-based auditory training on the perception of Korean sounds by Mandarin learners of Korean," on Wednesday, July 24. On the committee were Yoonjung Kang (supervisor), Philip Monahan, Jessamyn Schertz, Anabela Rato, Nathan Sanders, and external examiner Ocke-Schwen Bohn (Aarhus University). Congratulations, Dr. Ryu!

Na-Young is departing shortly to take up a position as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. We'll miss you very much, Dr. Ryu, but we're also thrilled to get to send you off!

Congratulations, Joanna!

Keren, Nathan, Joanna, Peter, and Yoonjung. (Not pictured: Alexei and Maria.) (Photo by Jennifer McCallum.)

Joanna Chociej defended her doctoral dissertation, "Exceptional faithfulness and exceptional alternation: A case study of Polish vowel-zero alternations as deletion and epenthesis," on Friday, July 19. On the committee were Keren Rice (supervisor), Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Peter Jurgec, Nathan Sanders, and external examiner Maria Gouskova (New York University). Congratulations, Dr. Chociej!

Coordinated coral colleagues

July around the department is normally quiet, but this at least frees up some time for everyone - up to and including our hard-working department chair, Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) - to get some research done! Here, Sali and Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.) have a chance to work on the final revisions for a paper going into the Journal of English Linguistics - and discover an ability to be synchronized in more than one way!

2019 Cowper Syntax Prize and Dresher Phonology Prize

We are delighted to announce the winners of our annual graduate student term-paper awards: the Elizabeth Cowper Syntax Prize and the B. Elan Dresher Phonology Prize. These are awarded to the authors of outstanding papers in the graduate syntax and phonology courses offered over the past academic year.

Cowper Syntax Prize: Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.): "Agents, paths, and states in the Hebrew middle templates."

Dresher Phonology Prize: Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "Allomorphy and morphophonology: Where do we draw the line?" and "An OT analysis of –(i)an demonym allomorph selection."

Congratulations to Alec and Lisa for their excellent work!

Congratulations, Naomi!

Naomi Francis (MA 2014) defended her Ph.D. dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Presuppositions in focus," on Tuesday, July 9, under the co-supervision of Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox, and Sabine Iatridou. Congratulations, Dr. Francis!

New paper: Nagy and Lo (2019)

Naomi Nagy (faculty) and Samuel Lo (BA) have a paper out in Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 5(1): "Classifier use in Heritage and Hong Kong Cantonese."

Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than homeland (monolingual) speakers. For example, Wei and Lee (2001:359), a study of British-born Chinese-English bilingual children’s morphosyntactic patterns (including classifier use), report “evidence of delayed and stagnated L1 development.” However, many studies compare heritage speaker performance to a prescriptive standard rather than to spontaneous speech from homeland speakers. We compare spontaneous speech data from two generations of Heritage Cantonese speakers in Toronto, Canada, and from Homeland Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Both groups are similar in a strong preference for general and mass classifiers, and classifier choice being primarily governed by the noun’s number. We observe specialization of go3 to singular nouns, a grammaticalization process increasing with each generation. The similarity between homeland and heritage patterns replicates previous studies utilizing the same corpus.

New paper: Rice, Beekhuizen, Dubrovsky, Stevenson, and Armstrong (2019)

Caitlin A. Rice (University of Pittsburgh), Barend Beekhuizen (faculty), Vladimir Dubrovsky (BSc), Suzanne Stevenson (faculty, Department of Computer Science), and Blair Armstrong (faculty) have a paper out in Behavior Research Methods, 51(3): "A comparison of homonym meaning frequency estimates derived from movie and television subtitles, free association, and explicit ratings."

Most words are ambiguous, with interpretation dependent on context. Advancing theories of ambiguity resolution is important for any general theory of language processing, and for resolving inconsistencies in observed ambiguity effects across experimental tasks. Focusing on homonyms (words such as bank with unrelated meanings 'edge of a river' versus 'financial institution'), the present work advances theories and methods for estimating the relative frequency of their meanings, a factor that shapes observed ambiguity effects. We develop a new method for estimating meaning frequency based on the meaning of a homonym evoked in lines of movie and television subtitles according to human raters. We also replicate and extend a measure of meaning frequency derived from the classification of free associates. We evaluate the internal consistency of these measures, compare them to published estimates based on explicit ratings of each meaning’s frequency, and compare each set of norms in predicting performance in lexical and semantic decision mega-studies. All measures have high internal consistency and show agreement, but each is also associated with unique variance, which may be explained by integrating cognitive theories of memory with the demands of different experimental methodologies. To derive frequency estimates, we collected manual classifications of 533 homonyms over 50,000 lines of subtitles, and of 357 homonyms across over 5000 homonym–associate pairs. This database - publicly available at: www.blairarmstrong.net/homonymnorms/ - constitutes a novel resource for computational cognitive modeling and computational linguistics, and we offer suggestions around good practices for its use in training and testing models on labeled data.

Suzi Lima's REP course in Arts and Science News

Back in May, Suzi Lima (faculty) led a Research Opportunity Program course to Brazil with students Octavia Andrade-Dixon (BA), Greg Antono (BA), and Guilherme Teruya (BA). This week, their adventures are chronicled in the Arts and Science News.

2019 Dene Languages Conference

This year's Dene Languages Conference is taking place at the University of California, Davis, on July 6 and 7. We have two departmental members presenting:

• Keren Rice (faculty): "Phonological effects of contact between related languages: Tsiigehtshic Gwich'in and Fort Good Hope Dene."
• Alessandro Jaker (postdoc):"A verb grammar of Tetsǫ́t’ıné Yatıé."

Research Groups: Week of July 1-5

Wednesday, July 3, 11:00 AM-1:00 PM in SS 560A
Syntax Group
Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "Reduced nominals: Syntax and prosody."
I explore the well-known idea that phases and prosodic domains coincide. Specifically, I look at noun incorporation and pseudo noun incorporation and show that the phonological word does not correspond to a syntactic head but to nP (in the sense of Match Theory). The notion that the phonological word corresponds to a head rests by and large on the fact that nP and vP are often evacuated leaving the n+N complex head the only element in nP. This gives rise to the appearance of the complex n+N head being the phonological word.

Sali in the U of T Magazine

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) has been interviewed for the University of Toronto Magazine about the task of adding more Canadian words to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Arsalan on View to the U

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) has been interviewed on UTM's View to the U podcast this week about his research and the place of language in multiculturalism, both in Canada and around the world.

Sociolinguists in Marmora

Faculty member Sali A. Tagliamonte's Ontario Dialects Project has spent the past 17 years documenting and analysing the dialects of English found in this province. Nearly every summer, Sali takes a team of students (graduate and/or undergraduate) out to a select location to conduct a large number of sociolinguistic interviews with the locals. This year's expedition, in late May, was to the town of Marmora, located northeast of Peterborough and northwest of Belleville. Sali, along with graduate students Ilia Nicoll (Ph.D.) and Lauren Bigelow (MA), spent a week interviewing residents, going on local adventures, and singing Bob Dylan songs with quite a crowd! (Photos courtesy of Sali.)

Lauren and Ilia in Marmora.

Ilia discovers some local educational materials!

Playing music and singing with the locals!

Congratulations, Tomohiro!

Tomohiro Yokoyama defended his doctoral dissertation, "The person case constraint: Unconditional interfaces and faultless derivations," on Tuesday, June 25. The committee consisted of Susana Béjar (supervisor), Elizabeth Cowper, Guillaume Thomas, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Nicholas LaCara, and external examiner Omer Preminger (University of Maryland). Congratulations, Dr. Yokoyama!

Research Groups: Week of June 24-28

Wednesday, June 12, 11:00 AM-1:00 PM in SS 560A
Syntax Group
Clarissa Forbes (Ph.D. 2018, now at the University of Arizona): "The synchrony and diachrony of person-sensitive patterns in Tsimshianic."
The Tsimshianic languages of northern British Columbia share a number of syntactic properties, including verb-initial order and a complex ergative agreement pattern. In this paper, I illustrate that the languages of this small family exhibit alternations based on the person features of clausal arguments in two distinct ways: VSO/VOS word order alternations, and alternations in verbal agreement. I demonstrate that across the family these alternations occur independently, and argue that this motivates an account in which they are derived in different ways: either syntactically or post-syntactically. I present an analysis of restrictions on local persons in each branch, assuming a common clause structure, and demonstrate how distinct synchronic models generate the patterns of each branch. Finally I compare the two branches in a diachronic light, considering their Proto-Tsimshianic origin and possible paths of grammaticalization to the two subtly different patterns attested today.

Workshop on ELAN

Clarissa Forbes (Ph.D. 2018, now at the University of Arizona) will be holding a workshop on interlinear glossing in ELAN (5.3 or above), on Monday, June 24, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, in SS560A. This will be aimed at people who already use ELAN to annotate recordings, but everyone is welcome! Please bring a laptop with ELAN 5.3 or above installed on it, and ideally a sound file that has one to two lines of transcription.