Congratulations, Joanna and John!

Congratulations to Joanna Chociej (PhD 3) and John Latta, who were married at St. Casimir's Church on May 12, 2012! The ceremony was attended by a number of U of T linguists, present and past, and an informal reception was held at the Duke of York pub.

Photo credit: Eugenia Suh

L to R: Andy Lin, Jacqueline Peters, Alex Motut, Eugenia Suh, Joanna Chociej, Radu Craioveanu, Tomohiro Yokoyama, Christopher Spahr, and Derek Denis

Photo credit: Tomohiro Yokoyama

The happy newlyweds, finding a moment to rest after the festivities.

Skill Share Workshop

This year the LGCU applied for the Dean's Small Departments' Projects Fund and was awarded a grant to hold Skill Share Workshops! These workshops are intended to provide an opportunity for our graduate students to share non-linguistics-related hobbies and talents. Our first one was a jewellery-making event hosted by our Social Coordinator Ailis Cournane and Michelle St. Amour. After ten minutes of instructions, attendees were already ready to begin applying their skills.

       Derek Denis, Joanna Chociej, Julia Su, and Sarah Clarke model their creations below.

The next workshop will take place in the summer and will likely either be a bike tune-up or photography workshop.

Photo credits: Eugenia Suh

Graduating Majors & Specialists - Spring 2012

Undergraduate Coordinator Elaine Gold and Interim Chair Diane Massam with
graduating Linguistics students at the annual department lunch  honouring
students who have completed a Major or Specialist program in Linguistics.
March 30, 2012.

Front row (L to R): Isabel Lui,  Alim Walker, Jen Collins

Middle row: Saejin Byeon, Emily Dunbar, Michelle Yuan, Diane Massam
Back row: Elaine Gold, Horace (Yuen Hang) Li, Antonio Cunha, Maayan Adar

Heritage Language Conference

U of T was quite well represented at the recent Conference on Formal Approaches to Heritage Languages, held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Marina Sherkina-Lieber, Nelleke Strik (now at Dalhousie), Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux gave talks and Joanne Markle Lamontagne, Maria Parascandolo (visiting from U Salerno), and Naomi Nagy came along to listen.
Marina wrote in: "I love small conferences with no parallel sessions, focused on a particular topic/area. Chatting during coffee breaks is much more stimulating. I loved having almost all those whom I cited in the audience. This conference was particularly amazing in terms of hospitality. I was picked up from the Amherst Inn by car on both mornings - together with Silvina Montrul and Acrisio Pires. Well, not just "by car" - by Luiz Amaral! Barbara [Pearson] was amazing as an organizer."  I think we all agree about the high level of hospitality!
Here are some other highlights of the weekend.

Faculty Club, for the reception

Maria, Joanne and Nelleke at the Faculty Club

Wegman's!

English-Inuktitut Automatic Speech-to-speech Machine Translation

Kinfe Mengistu, a post-doc in Computer Science, and Richard Compton, PhD candidate in Linguistics, won the best paper award at the 2012 Conference on Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND 2012) for a paper entitled, "Towards Concept-Based English-Inuktitut Automatic Speech-to-speech Machine Translation."  Congratulations!