U of T Linguists at Large

This weekend, Elan Dresher, Christopher Harvey & Will Oxford will be presenting a paper at NELS 43 in New York (CUNY). The title of their talk is "Contrast shift as a kind of diachronic change".

Next week, Marisa Brook and Naomi Nagy are presenting a Pecha Kucha talk at the "Road Less Travelled" Heritage Language conference (http://individual.utoronto.ca/perezleroux/site/roadlesstravelled.html) at Victoria College in October. The title is "Speech rate across generations in two Toronto heritage languages". This stems from a project Marisa undertook in LIN 1256 with Naomi last Fall.
Alumnus Marina Sherkina-Lieber will also be presenting a Pecha Kucha talk, and former postdoctoral fellow Nelleke Strik will be presenting a poster at the same conference. Marina will be presenting "Probing for productive capacity in receptive bilinguals: Elicited imitation in Labrador Inuttitut", and Nelleke will be presenting "Interrogative inversion in Spanish-English bilinguals: Instances of bidirectional transfer" (joint work with Alejandro Cuza, a U of T alumnus from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese).

Naomi will also be an invited speaker at the Heritage Language conference, with the title "Sociolinguistics of Heritage Languages". Earlier this month, Naomi participated in an international workshop in Wuppertal, Germany, "Heritage languages: language contact-change-maintenance and loss in the wave of new migration landscapes". The title of her talk was "Looking for contact-induced change in heritage languages".

Also next week,  NWAV 41 will be taking place in Bloomington, Indiana (http://www.indiana.edu/~nwav41/) , with several talks by U of T linguists. Sali Tagliamonte is a plenary speaker with: "The elephant and the pendulum: Variationist perspectives". She will also be giving a joint talk with U of T alumnus Alexandra D'Arcy (Univ. of Victoria):  "Vernacular repercussions of adaptive change".

Two graduate students will also be presenting their work at NWAV. James Smith is giving a talk entitled: "It's a bik deal: Sociophonetic Variation of Word-Final Stop Voicing in Toronto English". Matt Hunt Gardner is presenting joint work with Rebecca Roeder (Univ. of North Carolina-Charlotte): "The Phonology of the Canadian Shift Revisited: Thunder Bay and Cape Breton". Rebecca is a former U of T postdoctoral fellow.

Also at NWAV was sociolinguist Anne-José Villeneuve, assistant professor in the French Department.