Congratulations, Mercedeh!

Mercedeh Mohaghegh successfully defended her thesis, "Connected Speech Processes and Lexical Access in Real-Time Comprehension", on Wednesday, August 24th. The committee was comprised of Craig Chambers (supervisor), Philip Monahan, Yoonjung Kang, Elizabeth Johnson, Laura Colantoni, and external examiner Benjamin Tucker (University of Alberta). Congratulations, Dr. Mohaghegh!

Dog Days V Syntax Workshop

The 5th annual Dog Days summer workshop on syntax, semantics, and morphology was held on August 17th in the department. The schedule was as follows.

Bronwyn Bjorkman (postdoc 2012-2015, now at Queen's University): "Building imperfect counterfactuals"

Maayan Abenina-Adar (BA 2012, now at UCLA) & Nikos Angelopoulos (UCLA): "On root modality and thematic relations in Tagalogand English"

Gavin Bembridge (York University): "On free variation: Spanish perfect tenses and DM"

Cassandra Chapman & Ivona Kučerová (McMaster): "Two base-generated positions of why: Evidence from English why-questions"

María Cristina Cuervo (faculty) & Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.): "Syntactic restrictions on Hungarian noun incorporation"

Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.): "On the restriction of noun-verb incorporation in Japanese"

Barend Beekhuizen (postdoc at UofT Computer Science): "Carving up the world: semantic typology and cognition"

Sherry Hucklebridge (MA): "Relational and partitive inalienable possession in Slave"

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "Noun incorporation and instability"

Dan Milway (Ph.D.): "Subjects of adjuncts and labeling"

Andrew Peters (York University): "A Distributed Morphology approach to bilingual syntax"

Rebecca Tollan (Ph.D.): "Asymmetric displacement asymmetries: ergative versus accusative case"

Monica Irimia (Ph.D 2011, now at University of York, soon to be at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): "When differential marking is obligatory: Equality comparatives and ellipsis"

Michela Ippolito (faculty): "Indefinite pronouns"

Julie Goncharov (Ph.D. 2016, soon to be at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem): "Advantages of silence"

Ileana Paul (Western University): "The features of proper determiners in Malagasy dialects"

Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba): "Deriving agreement asymmetries from pronominal structure"

This workshop was presented with the support of Alana Johns, Keren Rice, the Department of Linguistics (U of T), SSHRC #435-2015-1987, SSHRC #435-2013-1756

Congratulations, Julie!

Congratulations to Julie Goncharov (Ph.D. 2016), who has accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, related to the 'Landscape of n-words' project led by Luka Crnic, Ivy Sichel, and Hedde Zeijlstra. The position starts on October 1st. All our best, Julie with this new adventure!

Congratulations, Monica!

Congratulations to Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2011), who has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in Linguistics (research stream, syntax) at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She goes to this from her current position as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of York, England. Best wishes for your new adventures, Monica!

Congratulations, Marisa!

Marisa Brook successfully defended her thesis, "Syntactic categories informing variationist analysis: The case of English copy-raising", on Tuesday, August 16. The committee was comprised of Sali A. Tagliamonte (supervisor), Diane Massam, Jack Chambers, Naomi Nagy, Aaron Dinkin, and external examiner Belén Méndez-Naya (University of Santiago de Compostela). Congratulations, Dr. Brook!

Sali Tagliamonte among those named LSA Fellows for 2017

Congratulations to Sali, who was recently announced by the Linguistic Society of America as one of only six LSA Fellows for 2017 (announcement here). This distinction, awarded each year since 2006, is intended to recognize "distinguished contributions to the discipline". See here for a past list of LSA Fellows, which includes from our department B. Elan Dresher (2011) and Keren Rice (2009).

Michael Iannozzi featured in Western News

Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014), who is now a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario (while still being involved with Elaine Gold's Canadian Language Museum), has been featured in an article on Western News (available here).

He is currently working on a research project investigating the speech of Southwestern Ontario, which he notes is often inaccurately lumped in with the speech of Toronto. With dozens of interviews completed so far, he hopes to create a digital archive of recordings, artifacts, and photos.

Jill's farewell lunch

Jill Given-King, the Department’s Graduate Assistant since 2011, celebrated her retirement in a farewell lunch with faculty and staff at the Faculty Club. Enjoy your very well earned time with family, friends and freedom, Jill! We will all miss your great knowledge and ability, sense of humour, unflappable poise, and unfailing courtesy.

Jill is about to break into the celebratory dessert!

Left to right: Jill Given-King, Sali Tagliamonte, Elizabeth Cowper.