Research up North

Sali was in the Toronto Star describing some outcomes of her latest research project. Thanks to Chandan for sending this in.

Clearing the mind

Last weekend, I managed to work out my plan of attack for a SSHRC grant while hiking in a beautiful park with an unlikely name: Mono Cliffs. It boasts over 400 kinds of plants and, while I didn't stop to count them, all, I believe it. Plus, great scenery. Here's me going into a tunnel of trees. I came out the other side with a 1-page summary ready to go. Then I watched reflections in this lake and more and more became clear.
It's the best place I've hiked near Toronto, and if you want to try it, I posted a map.

What did you do on the weekend?

Visiting scholar: Maria Parascandolo

We have a visitor from Italy for Fall 2011. She writes:
"I'm Maria Parascandolo, a PhD student from Italy.
I graduated in 2009 in Modern Literature at University of Naples "Federico II". My thesis concerned Computational Linguistics, specifically I compared three syntactic annotation tagsets developed for the Italian language (TUT: Turin University Treebank, AN.ANA.S.: Annotazione e analisi sintattica and TreSSI: Treebank sintattico-semantica dell'italiano) and then I chose a solution to combine them into a unique approach.
Now I'm taking my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Salerno and my supervisor is prof. Miriam Voghera. My research project concerns linguistic attrition in the Italian community of Toronto. During my time in Canada I am both going to take advantage of the data in the HLVC corpus and to collect more samples aimed at studying this specific phenomenon. I am particularly interested in the loss of verbal morphology and I plan to structure my interviews in such a way that different verbal tenses can be elicited. From my experience at University of Toronto I hope to gain more insight into language attrition and also to gain experience with work "in the field" by means of interviews."

Maria has been exploring the area and learning about local inhabitants: