Congratulations, Keren!

Congratulations to Keren Rice, who has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada by Governor-General David Johnston! She has been recognised "[f]or her contributions as a linguist and scholar whose research on Canada’s North has notably helped to preserve the Athapaskan languages."

More information and the full list of recipients can be found here.

Happy Holidays

Some scenes from the end-of-term party a few weeks ago:

 Singers and F-zero

 Maestro

 Green tea ice cream cake

 

Nick Welch stealing the show. The picture does not hint at the true magnitude of this moment.

Things we missed in 2013

WHITL failed to report a couple of special news items this term. Quick, before the calendar year changes:

Belated congratulations to Clarissa Forbes, the winner of this year's Elan Dresher Phonology Prize! This was originally announced in September, at the start-of-term party, where this picture was taken.

 Clarissa with Yoonjung and Elan

And here are some beautiful pictures of Sali in Banff in November, where she was officially inducted into the Royal Society of Canada.

Sali in the National Post

Sali is interviewed in the National Post this week, on the decline of the Mackenzie brothers. The story is also picked up on the U of T website.

Matt Hunt Gardner and Becky Roeder in San Francisco

Ph.D. student Matt Hunt Gardner and former Post-Doc Becky Roeder (now an assistant professor at UNC Charlotte) were in San Francisco this past week for the Acoustical Society of America's annual conference. Their poster entitled "Phonetics as a compliment to phonology in the Canadian Shift" went over really well. 

The poster can be found here: 

http://matthuntgardner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/GardnerRoeder_ASA2013-Poster.pdf

Diane in Zurich

Diane Massam has just returned from giving an invited talk at the Workshop 'Mass and count in Romance and Germanic languages', coordinated by the University of Zurich's Research Center (UFSP) 'Language and Space' - University of Zurich, 16th and 17th of December 2013.

This workshop was a discussion forum for research on the semantics and morphosyntactic encoding of the mass-count distinction, mainly, but not exclusively, in Romance and Germanic languages and varieties (cf. e.g. the survey in Massam, Diane (ed.) (2012), Count and Mass Across Languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press).  It addressed questions concerning all kinds of semantic and morphosyntactic phenomena (absence of determiners, partitive determiners, indefinite articles with mass nominals, gender and its interplay with a mass vs. count reading of nominals etc.).

Congratulations, Julia!

Julia Yu-ying Su (Phd, 2012) is starting a new position at the Centre for Immigrant and Community Services here in Toronto. The job will include designing, developing, and promoting educational, social, and recreational activities for multicultural immigrant/low income youths and families. Congratulations and best of luck on this interesting new career path, Julia!

LIN458 (Revitalizing Languages), Fall 2013

This semester, students of LIN458 (Revitalizing Languages) taught by postdoc Nick Welch have created teaching materials to contribute to revitalization efforts for Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì, a Dene language of the Northwest Territories, in consultation with Tammy Steinwand and Lucy Lafferty of the Tłı̨chǫ Community Services Agency and the Tłı̨chǫ Government.

Judy Chau, Shay Hucklebridge, Chris Valdivia, Luke West, and Shelby Zhang designed an interactive learning DVD, with an animated story told by a CGI narrator, and an associated computer game in which the player must answer questions in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì in order to reach goals.

Magali Boizot-Roche, Nastassia Guarda, Brian Lang, Kirsten McCann, and Angie Rajani designed a themed lesson set, “Flying through the Seasons” [Sı̨ı̨ gogee k’ets’et’ah], which includes an illustrated storybook, the script of a classroom play, a worksheet set and a DVD.

Erin Braithwaite, Dylan Fotiadis, Paul Horbatiuk, Jonathan Mastrogiacomo, and Ravi Wood created a website hosting lessons, activities and essays on Tłı̨chǫ language and culture; this site will also serve as the host for the materials created by the other groups.

Eunji Choi, Nadine Cormier, Vanessa Cortese, Julia Grasso and Jeongyoon Mok created an interactive DVD with stories, slide shows, and listening-comprehension activities to teach seasonal vocabulary, animals and kinship terms.

All of these materials will be given to the Teaching and Learning Centre of the Tłı̨chǫ Community Services Agency in Behchokǫ̀, Northwest Territories, in the hope that they will be useful.

LVC Group (Dec 6)

This week, Derek Denis presented a project he and Sali Tagliamonte will be presenting at the LSA meeting this year in Minneapolis; and then Janet Fu reported on research she's done on language use in multicultural societies.

Phonetics and Phonology Group (Dec 6)

This Friday (12-2) is the last Phon Group of 2013. 

On the agenda this week, there are two dry runs for OCP (Old-World Conference in Phonology). Christopher Spahr will be presenting "Prosodic epenthesis and floating vowels in Estonian quantity", and Radu Craioveanu will be presenting "Spread glottis and [spread glottis]."

Next semester, the first official meeting will be January 17th, but there may be an extra meeting (with special guest) on the afternoon of the 10th as well. More info to come once this is confirmed.