Summer Wrap-Up!

Ailis Cournane in Rouen, France
(Photo credit: Ailis Cournane)

We had quite an eventful summer! In addition to our five thesis defenses, three of our students completed their thesis proposals (Will Oxford, LeAnn Brown, and Michelle St-Amour), several members of our department participated in summer conferences and workshops (in addition to the CLA and the workshops we hosted), and one PhD student (Derek Denis) taught for the first time.

In May, Ailis Cournane went to France to present "Experimenting with Innovation in the Domain of Modality" at the International Conference on Grammaticalization Theory and Data, hosted by the University of Rouen.

U of T linguists at CVC VI
(Photo credit: Derek Denis)

In June, at Change and Variation in Canada VI (hosted by UQAM), Natalia Lapinskaya (undergraduate) and Naomi Nagy presented "“Cross-generational change in Heritage Russian phonology”, Derek Denis presented “Reaching a little further back: Building a corpus of earlier Ontario English from oral histories”, and incoming PhD student Matthew Pankhurst presented “Rhotic lenition as a marker of a dominant character type in Henan Mandarin Chinese”. This conference was also attended by Shannon Mooney (MA), and PhD students Marisa Brook, Matt Hunt Gardner, and Élodie Thomas.


Also in June, Julia Su presented "Inner modal in Mandarin excessive constructions" at the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 24) in San Francisco.

In August, incoming MA student Clarissa Forbes presented "Gitxsan adjectives: Evidence from nominal modification" at the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL 47) in Cranbrook, BC, and Radu Craioveanu and Christopher Spahr attended Nordic Prosody XI at the University of Tartu in Estonia, where Christopher presented "Rethinking the morphophonology of Estonian quantity".

An LGCU Welcome Workshop is in the works for October to provide all of the incoming students (as well as current students) the opportunity to share and learn about each other's areas of research.

(Photo credit: Eugenia Suh)

One of our PhD students, Derek Denis, taught for the first time this summer. The course, with
roughly 35 third year students, was LIN 351, Sociolinguistic Patterns in Language. Derek taught students how to measure and interpret the correlations between linguistic variation and social categories. Topics included social class, gender, ethnicity, and age and linguistic change, perception and attitudes toward variation, the language of the internet, and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation.
He shared that he really enjoyed teaching and the best part was having the opportunity to go back and re-read (and in some cases read for the first time) the classics of sociolinguistics, such as "Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City". Through the course he learned how to synthesize the material in the most effective way for teaching it to students who were brand new to the field and is happy that he is now equipped with a foundational set of lecture notes and materials which he can use in the future.

We hope that Derek has inspired many new sociolinguists and variationists!