Elan in New Orleans

Elan Dresher gave an invited talk on “Methodological Issues in the Dating of Linguistic Forms: Considerations from the Perspective of Contemporary Linguistic Theory,” at the National Association of Professors of Hebrew session on Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, part of the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans, November 2009.

Naomi's trip to Italy

At the beginning of November, Naomi attended a conference, Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation, or CLAVIER '09, in Modena Italy. She presented the first findings from the Heritage Language Variation & Change in Toronto project -- a comparison of Faetar lexical variation in Faeto, Italy and the GTA. Following that, she met with linguists who have worked on the Calabrese dialect, another component of the HLVC project, in Firenze, Roma, and Cosenza. This is a link to some of the sites she saw on the way. [http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/creativeapps/slideShow/Main.jsp?token=482055568112%3A967505449]

Day in Niagara

Following an excellent lecture for the Department of Linguistics Speakers Series ("Early Null Objects: Pronominal phi-features and saving strategies in language development") , Vincenzo Moscati, a visitor from the Università di Siena, joined French Department post-doc Nelleke Strik, avid photographer Craig Diegel and assistant professor Naomi Nagy to venture to Niagara Falls, because none of them had been there (in the past few decades). Here's a taste of their day.
http://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/Day_at_Niagara.htm

Recent Departmental Honours

In the last year, three members of the department have been honoured by both the University and externally.

• Mary Hsu won the 2009 Dean's Student Life Award. The award committee writes that they were very impressed with Mary's work over the years as Graduate Administrator. The award was presented at a ceremony this spring.

• Keren Rice was named University Professor at the June 3, 2008 meeting of Academic Board. http://www.news.utoronto.ca/campus-news/three-honoured-as-university-professors.html

• Jack Chambers was nominated as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
  http://www.news.utoronto.ca/lead-stories/fourteen-honoured-by-royal-society-of-canada.html

Congradulations to Mary, Keren, and Jack!

Alana Johns on Canada AM talking about Dying Words

Alana appeared on Canada AM recently. Below is a link to the interview:
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/dying-words/#clip231514


The written story is at:
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/plocal/CTVNews/20091108/bc_dying_languages_091108/20091108/?hub=BritishColumbiaHome

Jack Chambers in Hungary

Jack Chambers is in Budapest in December 1-6.He is consulting with
researchers on the Hungarian Sociolinguistic Survey, directed by
Miklós Kontra of the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. He will also present two talks while he is
there, one on "Talking Heads: Television and Your Language" and the
other on "Multilingualism and Nationalism."

Heritage Languages engage SLUGS

Exploring Heritage Language Variation in Toronto

As part of the SLUGS Academic Seminar Series, I gave a talk to a room full of interested, enthusiastic students (mostly undergrad) about the research project "Heritage Language Variation and Change" that I'm undertaking along with Alexei, Yoonjung, and James Walker, and ~18 student RAs. SLUGS provided wonderful refreshments and the students provided good suggestions. Info about the project, which is examining how Cantonese, Korean, Faetar, Italian, Russian, and Korean vary and change across 3 generations of immigrants, is at:
http://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm.

I gave a similar talk at the Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation Conference in Modena, Italy, a few weeks ago, which was also received enthusiastically and led to several possible collaborations for comparing Calabrese as it is spoken in the GTA to how it is spoken in Italy (specifically Calabria). Info on that conference, which was quite international, is at:
http://clavier09.sltt.unimore.it/on-line/Home.html.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Naomi

Sid Smith rooms

Here's a glimpse of current state of our new home. Two weeks to go!
Will they be done in time?
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/Moving/images/

(Photos courtesy of Bill)

Elaine Gold on 'Fresh Air', CBC Radio

Sunday morning (November 22) I got up bright and early to get down to the CBC studio on Front Street for 7:15. Mary Ito had asked me to be on her show 'Fresh Air' to discuss the words of the year. Apparently it had been announced that 'admonish' and 'unfriend (a verb)' were chosen as the words of the year. We had a friendly discussion of those words and how language changes. A number of early birds heard me - including Ron Smyth, who was baking bread at the time. It was my second time for an interview with Mary Ito - she had me on last June to discuss words borrowed into English from other languages.

Elaine

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