On December 11, in the Linguistics lounge, there will be a Malagasy Workshop showcasing work from this year's Field Methods course. Also featured are two invited talks by Ileana Paul (Western University) and Lisa Travis (McGill). All are invited. See the program and registration below.
Program: https://malagasyworkshop.wordpress.com/program/
Registration: https://malagasyworkshop.wordpress.com/registration/
December 4, 2017
Malagasy Workshop: December 11, 2017
December 3, 2017
20th Bilingual Workshop on Theoretical Linguistics
The Bilingual Workshop on Theoretical Linguistics was held at New College, University of Toronto on November 24-25th, 2017, organized by Sophia Bello and Yves Roberge. It was the 20th BWTL (over 21 years), and it is fitting that it is here because the first BWTL was also held at University of Toronto. The program included speakers from U. of T., York, Western, and Wilfred Laurier. José Camacho (Rutgers University) gave a keynote presentation on proper names. The U. of T. speakers included Julianne Doner, Elan Dresher, Jean-François Juneau, Kinza Mahoon, and Andrew Peters. One speaker was unable to attend, so Diane Massam and Yves Roberge gave a last minute replacement talk. The conference followed its traditional format, with short talks and longer discussions. A great time was had by all!
Photo credit: Sophia Bello, University of Toronto (French Linguistics)
Adriana Soto-Corominas, Scott James Perry & David Heap |
Yves and Diane giving their last minute alternate talk |
José Camacho giving his keynote talk |
Photo credit: Sophia Bello, University of Toronto (French Linguistics)
Labels:
Conference,
Faculty,
Graduate students
November 29, 2017
Workshop on Approaches to Coercion and Polysemy 2017, University of Oslo
Patrick Murphy (PhD) presented his eye-tracking study of the Canadian English "I'm done my homework" construction at the Workshop on Approaches to Coercion and Polysemy (CoPo 2017), held at the University of Oslo (Nov. 20-21, 2017).
Royal Palace, Oslo |
Oslo waterfront |
Oslo street |
Labels:
Linguists abroad,
Psycholinguistics,
Workshop
November 28, 2017
Welcome Workshop 2017 Photos
On October 20th, 2017, new students and new faculty presented their work to the department at the 9th annual Welcome Workshop.
Andrew Peters (PhD) on finiteness in Mandarin |
Jean-François Juneau (PhD) on fieldwork in Georgia |
Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin (MA) on vowel harmony in Laurentian French |
Nathan Sanders (faculty) on sign language phonetics |
Pocholo Umbal (PhD) on use of the Canadian Shift by Filipinos in Vancouver |
Rachel Soo (MA) on lexical tone and Cantonese heritage speakers |
Labels:
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Sign Languages,
Workshop
November 25, 2017
Mo-MOT 2 at UQAM, November 18-19
The following past and present U of T people presented papers at Mo-MOT 2 (Annual morphology workshop at Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto) at UQAM on November 18-19:
Andrea Boom (MA), presenting joint work with Nicholas Welch (former postdoc, now at McMaster)
Andrew Peters (PhD)
Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) presenting joint work with Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen’s) and Daniel Siddiqi (Carleton)
Daniel Currie Hall (PhD 2007, now at Saint Mary’s, Halifax)
Fábio Bonfim Duarte, Visiting Scholar
Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM)
Nicholas La Cara (faculty)
Next year’s Mo-MOT will be held at U of T, date to be determined.
Andrea Boom (MA), presenting joint work with Nicholas Welch (former postdoc, now at McMaster)
Andrew Peters (PhD)
Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) presenting joint work with Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen’s) and Daniel Siddiqi (Carleton)
Daniel Currie Hall (PhD 2007, now at Saint Mary’s, Halifax)
Fábio Bonfim Duarte, Visiting Scholar
Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM)
Nicholas La Cara (faculty)
Next year’s Mo-MOT will be held at U of T, date to be determined.
Labels:
Morphology,
Postdocs,
Workshop
November 17, 2017
Tanya Slavin featured on CBC, on learning Oji-Cree and visiting Kingfisher Lake First Nation
Tanya Slavin (Ph.D. 2011) has been featured on CBC with her personal essay "As a non-Indigenous student of Oji-Cree, I learned much more than a language" on her experiences in Kingfisher Lake First Nation. Check it out here!
November 13, 2017
A Conversation with Diane Massam, by Sali Tagliamonte
Diane Massam retired as of June 30, 2017.
Diane and I sat down to have a conversation about her life in the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto on June 24th,
2017.
How did you become
a linguist?
Looking back, I think I was always a
linguist. I remember in elementary school, the highlight for me was
spelling. We had exercises where we had to make up sentences with our
spelling words in them. I loved doing those exercises.
There was something about sentences that
was particularly fascinating to Diane. She loved the structure of it
all, subjects, objects, nouns and verbs. Of course like most people,
Diane didn’t know anything about Linguistics. She thought she
wanted to be a writer, so she did an undergraduate degree in English.
One day she asked one of her professors why they never focused on the
actual language the writers used. The professor told her she needed a
course in Linguistics. So Diane took Introduction to Linguistics and
fell in love. She says: “I found what I wanted.”
Diane did her undergraduate degree at York
University in Toronto, graduating in 1979 and her MA at U of T
(1980). At first she was interested in dialectology and historical
linguistics and took a course with Jack Chambers; however, Elizabeth
Cowper “turned her on to syntax”.
In 1980 she went to the Linguistics
Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She got a scholarship to go
which paid for her travel, food and lodging. Aside from that however,
she had no money at all. As everyone knows, there is a lot of
socializing at the LSA Summer Institutes, but Diane couldn’t go out
on the town because she had no money. So, she stayed on campus with a
small group of other students. They became fast friends, Among the
groups
was Juliette Levin (later, Blevins). Juliette and Diane decided to
apply to MIT together. At the summer institute Diane took courses
with Ray Jackendoff, Ken Hale and James McCawley setting the stage
for her work in theoretical syntax.
As a sideline to these developments, Diane
had a short sojourn in Edinburgh as a Commonwealth Scholar, because
she wanted to study Shetland English. However, the situation didn’t
work out for her linguistically. Instead, she went to MIT.
As Diane explains it, being at MIT was
another one of those “ever increasing moments of realization” of
finding where you should be.
Diane studied at MIT from 1981-1985.
Chomsky’s “Lectures on Government and Binding” (LGB) had just
come out, so it was a very exciting time. LGB had grown out of a
series of Lectures that Chomsky had done in Pisa, Italy. In so doing,
he had drawn many European linguists into his theoretical
orientation. This meant that many languages started coming into the
theory, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. Diane’s supervisor was
Noam Chomsky, but she also worked
with Ken Hale, who had a strong interest in Polynesian languages, and
Joan Bresnan who was working on cross-linguistic variation. These
influences set the scene for Diane’s abiding interest in languages
more generally, particularly Niuean (as we will find out below).
Diane reflects on her MIT experience like
this:
“So, there was this perfect matching
of Chomsky’s brilliant, beautiful perfect theories of human grammar
with a lot of really rich and complicated and very different
empirical data… that took my heart at that point. And that’s been
sort of what I’ve been interested ever since.”
“There were wonderful people around.
It was a great time to be a student at MIT. “Intellectually it was
like nothing else I had ever experienced; personally I remember it as
a time of friendship.”
I could not help
but ask Diane what was it like to have Chomsky as her advisor
Chomsky’s modus operandi was to meet with
his students every week for an hour. For the students, this meant
that most of their waking life was spent focused on what they were
going to say to him the next week. Everyone tried to bring him
something worthy of his attention. Diane remembers him as a very
human, warm, and kind advisor with a wry sense of humour.
“Like I think you know if you’re
going to live in the 20th
century, which it was then, you can’t ask for more than to be able
to be around a mind like that on a regular basis.”
After
she completed her PhD, Diane took a temporary post at UBC as a
phonologist, replacing Patricia Shaw. Within the first week she met
her husband, Yves Roberge (more on him later). In 1986, both Diane
and Yves got post-docs at the
Université du Québec à Montréal,
and then again at UofT in Toronto
in
1987,
which was the year they got
married.
What was the
department of Linguistics like when she first arrived?
When Diane first arrived in the Department
of Linguistics in 1979, the faculty included Ed
Burstynsky, Jack Chambers, Al Gleason, Peter Reich, Hank
Rogers and Ron Wardaugh. Elizabeth Cowper was the only
female professor. Eventually a
new cohort formed, including Elizabeth, and Keren Rice, Elan Dresher
and Alana Johns. The
way Diane sees it, the older group (especially Ed) “set the heart”
of the Department that can still be felt today in 2017. Many of the
newer layer of faculty and students that came along in the 2000’s
may not know the old cohort. Diane describes them as follows:
Everyone shared an “esprit de corps” focused on departmental
well-being. People were willing to put their personal issues aside
for the sake of the department.
“They cared about education. They
cared about teaching. They loved Linguistics. They created the
department with its good will and openness, openness not only to
intellectual points of view and exploration but also to human
qualities — being nice to each other and trying to make this a
human place.”
Diane’s cohort went on to develop the
curriculum and grow the graduate program. Issues of equity came to
the fore. Elizabeth and Keren started the practices that made it
possible for both women and men in the department to have a family
life. For example, they instituted departmental meetings and guest
talks starting at 2 or 3pm rather than at 5pm. These adjustments were
quite different to what had before been the UofT norm and further
enhanced the humanness of department.
Next, we turned to
talking about Diane’s intellectual contributions.
Diane explains that she works “on the A
side of syntax.” The A side is the part of syntax that focuses on
argument structure, subject-hood and object-hood etc. However,
Diane’s interests on the A side are unusually broad because her
work is not only theoretically oriented but also language oriented.
She works on both
Niuean and English, and she likes to work on pretty much anything
that is of interest in those languages.
How did you come
to work on the Niuean language?
Diane’s first answer to this question was
tongue in cheek: “There’s something in common about all my
interests. They are all focused on islands! I grew up on an island,
Vancouver Island. I loved the Shetland Islands. I’m drawn to
islands.”
However the real answer to her love affair
with Niuean starts at MIT and her association with Ken Hale who
worked on Polynesian languages. Under Hale’s teaching, Diane became
interested in Niuean and subsequently Niuean figured prominently in
her dissertation. There was a big hiatus in her Niuean work when she
started her job at UofT. Instead of fieldwork in far-away lands, she
was busy teaching and writing papers on English and starting a
family. However, when she had her first sabbatical in 1995, she
finally had the funds and the time to go to Niue and New Zealand and
do fieldwork, and
get to know many wonderful members of the Niuean community, and to
learn from them more about Niuean language and culture. To
Diane, Niuean has “everything I could possibly want in a language
from a linguistic point of view”.
Why is that Diane?
Niuean is verb initial. The basic puzzle
that I’m interested in is sentences and what the basic structure of
a sentence is. Aristotle said that sentences consist of a subject and
a predicate. But in a VSO language, questions immediately arise.
There is no single entity you can point to and say that’s the
predicate and that’s the subject. So, that’s been the focus of my
research mostly. Are VSO languages fundamentally different? On top of
that, Niuean has ergative case marking. It raises all kinds of
interesting things about subject hood.
I don’t know
about you, but no-one has ever been able to explain ergativity to me
as well as Diane did during our interview so, let’s hear it in her
own words.
Ergativity
“The best way I think of to explain it
is that we’re all used to English and languages like English that
are nominative systems. So, in that language when you have a
transitive sentence, you would say something like: “she saw her”.
So, we have two forms of the feminine pronoun, ‘she’ and ‘her’.
And they’re very different but they mean the same thing, but one is
the subject and one is the object. So, ‘she likes her’. Now, when
you have an intransitive sentence, there’s one instance of this
pronoun and
is it like ʻsheʻ or like ʻherʻ? And in English it is like ʻsheʻ.
You say “she slept’.
You don’t say ‘her slept’. So you’ve got ‘she’ and ‘her’,
and then ‘she’. In an ergative language — if English was an
ergative language — we would say something like: “she saw her”
and then we would also say “her slept”. So the subject of an
intransitive verb has the same form as the object of transitive verb
in an ergative language. Whereas in a nominative language the subject
of an intransitive verb has the same form as the subject of a
transitive verb. So, if that makes any sense at all you can
understand why it’s interesting. Subject hood becomes a big issue
in these languages because, the intransitive subject, the ‘her’
in ‘her slept, is it a subject? But then why doesn’t it look like
‘she’? Or is it an object? But then how can it be an object when
it’s the only argument in the sentence? It’s the only noun phrase
in the sentence. So, if it’s an object then you’ve got this
sentence that consists of a
verb and an object but it doesnʻt have a subject. We also have to
ask if the transitive object might really be a subject, since it
looks the same. So, the questions are endless.”
Looking back at
your career, what gives you the most satisfaction?
First of all, Diane said: “Every
moment that I work on Niuean - it is just a treasure trove.”
One of her favorite topics has been verb fronting. She recalls one
time on a long-haul flight back to Toronto from Niue she had one of
those rare Eureka experiences. She had been wondering about verb
fronting and it struck her that what was fronting was not just a
verb, as had been previously thought, but a larger structure. Ah hah!
She drew trees all the way home trying to figure out how to work it
out structurally. Two developments provided the empirical insight she
needed: verb fronting and noun incorporation.
People thought verb initial languages
were derived by the verb moving to the front of the sentence. In
parallel, theories of noun incorporation developed that said that a
noun phrase that is an object can form a lexical item along with the
verb to get a single word, e.g. like “meat-eat”. Then, that
single lexical item can move.
What Diane realized was that in Niuean the
incorporated nominal was much larger than in other languages. It was
not just a noun but a phrase that was forming a unit with the verb.
Looking at the details of that, led to a new way of understanding how
verb fronting works in some languages. The series of papers Diane
wrote on this topic is one of her most satisfying intellectual
accomplishments.
The
other thing that Diane is known for is her work on unusual syntactic
constructions in English. One question is how do people hold on to
different rule sets in different registers, like recipes and diaries?
Recently, Diane worked on the ‘is is’ construction, e,g, The
thing is is that… and this
paper has just appeared in Language
(2017, 93:121-152.),
the flagship journal of Linguistics. There had been a lot of
different ideas going around about the “is is” construction.
However, none of them made sense to Diane. She thought to herself:
“No, this has to be plain old ordinary
syntax. It can’t be something too weird because we all do it all
the time. So, it must be part of the syntax.”
Diane explained to me her three main
observations about these constructions. First, they are always in
specificational contexts. For example, to specify what a problem is
you can say: The problem is that
… and to specify what an issue
is you can say: The issue is
that…. You donʻt find an
extra be
in sentences like "She is pretty." The second observation
is that these constructions occur with ‘shell nouns’. Shell nouns
encapsulate a lot of information, such as a
problem, an issue, or
a question etc. And third, the
shell noun is shared by two verbs. Once you pull together these
pieces of information, the syntax falls out from those observations.
But to get the complexities, Diane says, you will have to read the
paper.
Massam, Diane (2017). Extra be: The
syntax of shared shell-noun constructions in English. Language
93: 121-152.
Diane said: Those
two projects, the Niuean one about noun incorporation verb-fronting
and the double ‘be’ one in English were really satisfying to me.
Is there anything
else you would like to add about your research?
“I taught courses on Language
Diversity and Linguistic Universals. That topic sums up my research
love. That tension of having a theory of human language that is true
for all languages and then accounting for the diversity that you find
across languages. That’s been the larger focus of my interest.”
“I love theory and I love data so I’m
very happy that I was able to combine them throughout my career. I
think it’s partly the time I lived in that made that possible.”
You’ve been
married to Yves Roberge, another linguist, for most of your academic
life. What was it like being married to another linguist?
Yves has formed a huge part of the tapestry
of my life. Linguistics has been in my life at work, but also part of
my life at home. We don’t talk about Linguistics all the time, but
when we need to, it’s just great to have someone to bounce ideas
off of. Being with Yves has also given me access to a whole other
aspect of Linguistics, Romance Linguistics, a whole other dimension
to Linguistics and all the people I came in contact with from Yvesʻ
associations. Yves was also Principal of New College at UofT for 7
years, and this has given me access to the broader, college life of
UofT. Finally, bringing up kids, seeing their language development in
a bilingual household. Linguistics has been present in all aspects of
my life.
At this point, we turned to Diane’s
reflections on her work in the Department of Linguistics.
What did you enjoy
most about the department? What makes you think this department has
‘heart’?
Diane’s own words on this topic are a
poignant record of her sentiments. I have included three of her
observations:
I think that the department has heart
and I think it has a big heart. Part of it is what I like to bring
out in my own teaching and advising and part of it is what I
inherited.
Everyone who comes here is quite
wonderful. They’re super intelligent people who have stories and
richness to them but they’re all very different. Create an
environment where people can be who they are. Sometimes things don’t
go so well and a lot of things happen along the way. It’s very
important to create an environment where that’s okay. I think we
have a department like that.
We used to have this saying: “Not in
front of the students; not in front of the Dean.” In the department
we might have problems and issues but we didn't want to show that to
the Dean and we wanted the students to think everything is good. It
has made the department strong.
What was it like
to be departmental chair?
The call to be Chair of the department came
as a bit of a shock to Diane, but she thought of it a great
privilege. She liked being part of the larger university community.
It was a time for her to stretch out beyond the department and learn
more about the broader University of which it is a part. It was also
a great time to lead the department. It didn’t need a lot of
heavy-handedness. There were all kinds of powerhouses working in the
department at that time and everyone was doing really well with their
research. So, in one sense being the Chair was easy. All Diane had to
do was create an environment where people could do what they were
already doing.
Diane was chair between 2002 and 2008 (as
well as Interim Chair in 2012). To her, remembering it all is often a
blur. It was an extremely intense time in her life, getting up very
early in the morning to prepare her teaching, doing her morning walks
(or runs) in the dark, juggling work and family, kids and students,
faculty and staff. One year she even had to be both chair and
graduate coordinator, which I can hardly believe (because I am
currently the graduate coordinator and it’s bad enough just doing
that!) Finally, it must be told that there was one thing that Diane
remembers only too well: the end of the day deadline, which came at
4:30pm sharp. She recalls many times people walking down the hall to
the elevator with her for some last minute Q&A because at 4:30
the workday ended and Diane went to pick up her kids.
Can you tell me
about your love of the department through the history of lounges?
The lounge has always been a gathering
place. It is the defining nature of UofT Linguistics. We had one at
the Queenʻs Park building in 1979 when I first came to the
department as an MA student. Gleason was always there talking about
language. There was always intellectual stuff going on. Then, we
moved to the 6th
floor of Robarts Library. While I was at MIT, I came back as a TA.
Many of us drank wine late at night and talked about language and the
meaning of life. Then I came back again as a Canada Research Fellow
and then a professor. I often worked on my teaching materials in the
lounge and everyone talked about things in the lounge. That’s where
we came up with the idea of the Syntax Research Group. Then when we
were about to move to the fourth floor of Sid Smith there was a big
controversy. We wanted a lounge and
a meeting room, but the administration said we couldn’t have both.
So, we said we could not live without a lounge. The lounge is
necessary for our department. It’s the heart and soul of the
department. So, we got a lounge and the tradition continues.
The lounge in the department of Linguistics
is truly unique. Some departments don’t have lounges. There is
nowhere for students to go. Some departments have lounges but they
typically allow only faculty and maybe graduate students to use them.
In the Linguistics department everyone
can use the lounge. This makes it possible for faculty, staff,
graduates and undergraduates to interact, creating an environment of
interaction and camaraderie. The egalitarian nature of the lounge
gives everyone the opportunity to talk to each other. It makes
everyone feel like they are a part of something. In particular, the
undergraduates get the opportunity to see firsthand what it is like
to be a graduate student. This gives them the competitive edge when
they apply to graduate school themselves. But it gives them life
training more generally too.
You have a large
number of intellectual achievements and administrative positions,
what is the thing you are most proud of?
Diane did not hesitate in her answer to
this question! She told me straight out that the things she is most
proud of are her graduate students. From the very beginning, the most
rewarding part of Diane’s academic life has been advising, at both
the MA and PhD levels. She loves giving students the space to explore
and discover their own abilities. Diane says, “Each student has
been a joy and a treasure.” Most of her 20 doctoral students have
gone on to be academics themselves, working in countries around the
world - Canada (Toronto, Winnipeg), France, Israel, Italy, Korea,
Oman, Taiwan, Thailand, and the USA, and those who have left academia
have distinguished themselves in a range of different careers in
Toronto.
It must have been
a hard choice to retire?
Academic life is exhausting. With the full
range of things that Diane has done she uses this expression to sum
up her experience: “run
ragged”. This is not because
academics are under extreme pressure to ‘do-it-all’ but because
they inherently want to do it all, so they just keep over doing. As
Diane explains, the choice for retirement arose logically: “I am
always governed by my list of things to do and I wanted my list of
things to do to be shorter and more manageable.” That imperative
meant that Diane had to give up something. So, she made the choice to
give up classroom teaching and administration — the things that
take tremendous time and energy, and the things that she could give
up without forsaking her true love — research.
What are your
plans for the future?
For someone who is about to retire, Diane
has a long list of things to do on her list. First, she wants to
write a theoretical book on Niuean syntax. Up to this point there has
never been enough time to do it. Now there is. Second, she’d like
to continue her work on weird syntax in English and write more papers
on Niuean. Third, she’d like to write a grammar of Niuean. She also
speculates that she might want to try other types of writing,
returning to her long lost penchant for wordsmithing. She also muses
about painting, travel, reading, cryptic crossword puzzles (a private
fascination), spinning, hiking, biking, etc.
What are you going
to miss the most?
Diane has obviously struggled with this
sensitive subject. She said very clearly: “What I am going to miss
the most is daily and given-to-you-for-free deep and rich contact
with young people. I worry that I won’t have that anymore. I think
I’ll still have access to colleagues and to graduate students to
some extent but the young undergrads, like the ones in my 199 and
300-level courses, I’m not sure I’ll have that and I’m sad
about that.”
Is there anything
else that you’d like to add?
Not long before Diane and I had our
conversation, we had a department retreat. Our discussions primarily
focused on the graduate program, how to improve it and the best ways
forward. Diane recalls that she was sitting back a bit during the
meeting because she knew she would not be part of the decisions that
were being made. Then, she looked across the table at Alana and they
shared a secret smile, together acknowledging that the department is
in good hands. The newest cohort of young colleagues are working
together and gelling. They came into the department as individuals.
They didn’t have any joint goals as a group but now Diane notices
they are developing this quality. She smiles and says: “It’s
going to be exciting to see where the department goes in the future.
I just hope that it stays as a really good department and really warm
department, with a lounge, and a heart.”
Labels:
Faculty,
Interview,
Retirement
November 11, 2017
Fall Convocation 2017
Congrats to the graduates who took part in Fall Convocation, 2017! Here are some pictures, courtesy of Diane Massam and Yves Roberge.
Matt Hunt Gardner and Shayna Gardiner |
Kinza Mahoon, Sarah Newman, Luke Zhou, Savannah Meslin, and Brea Lutton |
All from above, plus Diane Massam (faculty) on left |
Andrei Munteanu |
November 8, 2017
What’s new in Undergrad Linguistics
We’ve been having a busy semester on the undergraduate front! On September 28, we had a back to school “Welcome Tea” event for our undergrads where they got to come by and chat with professors, staff, and fellow students and hang out over some tea and pastries. This was the first of hopefully many social events geared to undergraduates.
At this event, we also announced our 2016-17 award winners:
McNab Scholarship: Toshiaki Kamifuji, LIN Specialist
Jack Chambers Undergraduate Scholarship: Katherine Alexandra Sung, LIN Specialist
Henry Rogers Memorial Scholarship Fund: Yan-Lum Charissa Chan, LIN Major
And a brand new award, the “Elaine Gold Award for Undergraduate Achievement in Linguistics”, which went to Jeffrey Wang (LIN Major). Two honourable mentions went to Toshiaki Kamafuji and Cal Janik-Jones.
On October 22, we welcomed thousands of prospective undergraduate students at U of T’s annual Fall Campus Day, which took place at Hart House this year. Our little Linguistics booth saw quite a bit of traffic, thanks to the efforts of our fantastic volunteers from SLUGS and the LGCU (Laila Faqiri, Cal Janik-Jones, Pocholo Umbal, and Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin) – huge thanks to them for their time and enthusiasm!
Naomi Nagy (faculty) with a crowd |
Nicholas LaCara, Peter Jurgec, and Nathan Sanders (all faculty). Photo credit: Mary Hsu |
A crowd, including Sali Tagliamonte (faculty) in foreground. Photo credit: Mary Hsu |
Greg Antono, Deepam Patel, Calahan Janik-Jones, Katie MacIntosh, and Katharine Zisser (undergrads) |
McNab Scholarship: Toshiaki Kamifuji, LIN Specialist
Jack Chambers Undergraduate Scholarship: Katherine Alexandra Sung, LIN Specialist
Henry Rogers Memorial Scholarship Fund: Yan-Lum Charissa Chan, LIN Major
And a brand new award, the “Elaine Gold Award for Undergraduate Achievement in Linguistics”, which went to Jeffrey Wang (LIN Major). Two honourable mentions went to Toshiaki Kamafuji and Cal Janik-Jones.
On October 22, we welcomed thousands of prospective undergraduate students at U of T’s annual Fall Campus Day, which took place at Hart House this year. Our little Linguistics booth saw quite a bit of traffic, thanks to the efforts of our fantastic volunteers from SLUGS and the LGCU (Laila Faqiri, Cal Janik-Jones, Pocholo Umbal, and Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin) – huge thanks to them for their time and enthusiasm!
Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin (MA), Calahan Janik-Jones (undergrad), and Suzi Lima (faculty). Photo credit: Pocholo Umbal |
Photo credit: Pocholo Umbal |
Laila Faqiri (undergrad), Keren Rice (faculty), and Pocholo Umbal (PhD) |
Labels:
Exhibits,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Honours,
Plaid,
Undergrads
October 29, 2017
NELS 48 at the University of Iceland
The 48th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48) was recently held at the University of Iceland. From our department:
Left to right: Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), Julie Legate (MA 1997, now at U Penn), Tomohiro Yokoyama (PhD), Rachel Walker (MA 1993, now at U of Southern California), Rebecca Tollan (PhD), Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM), Bronwyn Bjorkman (Postdoc 2012-2015), Mike Barrie (PhD 2005, now at Sogang U, Seoul), Michelle Yuan (MA 2012, now at MIT)
Left to right: Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), Julie Legate (MA 1997, now at U Penn), Tomohiro Yokoyama (PhD), Rachel Walker (MA 1993, now at U of Southern California), Rebecca Tollan (PhD), Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM), Bronwyn Bjorkman (Postdoc 2012-2015), Mike Barrie (PhD 2005, now at Sogang U, Seoul), Michelle Yuan (MA 2012, now at MIT)
Labels:
Alumni,
Conference,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Linguists abroad,
Postdocs,
Syntax/Semantics
October 15, 2017
Alexei Kochetov and Jessica Yeung in Hawai'i (25th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference)
Alexei Kochetov (faculty) and Jessica Yeung (PhD1) have attended the 25th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and presented the paper:
'Inhibition of Korean palatalization in L2 English: Electropalatographic data', co-authored with Kelly-Ann Blake (MA), Andrei Munteanu (PhD1), Fiona Wilson (PhD2), and Luke Zhou (MA graduate). This paper was based on a term project done as part of LIN1211H1S Advanced Phonetics (Winter 2017) 'The phonetics of bilingual speech'.
'Inhibition of Korean palatalization in L2 English: Electropalatographic data', co-authored with Kelly-Ann Blake (MA), Andrei Munteanu (PhD1), Fiona Wilson (PhD2), and Luke Zhou (MA graduate). This paper was based on a term project done as part of LIN1211H1S Advanced Phonetics (Winter 2017) 'The phonetics of bilingual speech'.
October 14, 2017
Field Methods (JAL401H1 F/ LEC 5101) Malagasy Workshop
Field Methods (JAL401H1 F/ LEC 5101), taught by Suzi Lima, is holding a Malagasy Workshop on December 11th (2017). Students in the class will present their research projects on Malagasy, and there will also be talks from invited speakers Ileana Paul (Western University) and Lisa Travis (McGill). The room and schedule are TBA, but click here for the website and call for papers.
Labels:
Field Methods class,
Fieldwork,
Workshop
October 12, 2017
1st Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Indigenous Languages of Latin America Workshop
The first annual TOMILLA (Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Indigenous Languages of Latin America) Workshop is being held at UofT on November 24th, 2017 (room TBA, see the website for updates). Below are the talks and posters.
Three theses about active-stative languages (Andrés Pablo Salanova, University of Ottawa, & Javier Carol, Universidad de Buenos Aires)
What is the motivation behind allomorphy in the number markers in Wichí (Jimena Terraza, Université du Québec à Montréal, & Lorena Cayré Baito, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste)
The Possessive Analysis: Support for the Nominal Interpretation of Property Words in Tupi-Guarani (Justin Case, University of Ottawa)
Noun Classifiers, (in)definiteness, and pronouns in Chuj (Justin Royer, McGill)
Poster 1: Adjectives in Chuj (Paulina Elias, McGill)
Poster 2: On the count-mass distinction in Nheengatu (Francy Fontes, UFRJ, Cal Janik-Jones, UofT, Suzi Lima UofT/UFRJ)
Poster 3: Language Vitality in Macuxi and Wapichana in Terra Indigena Serra da Lua, Roraima (Vidhya Elango, UofT, & Isabella Coutinho, UERR/UFRJ)
Switch-reference in Yudja (Guillaume Thomas, UofT, & Suzi Lima, UofT/UFRJ)
Three theses about active-stative languages (Andrés Pablo Salanova, University of Ottawa, & Javier Carol, Universidad de Buenos Aires)
What is the motivation behind allomorphy in the number markers in Wichí (Jimena Terraza, Université du Québec à Montréal, & Lorena Cayré Baito, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste)
The Possessive Analysis: Support for the Nominal Interpretation of Property Words in Tupi-Guarani (Justin Case, University of Ottawa)
Noun Classifiers, (in)definiteness, and pronouns in Chuj (Justin Royer, McGill)
Poster 1: Adjectives in Chuj (Paulina Elias, McGill)
Poster 2: On the count-mass distinction in Nheengatu (Francy Fontes, UFRJ, Cal Janik-Jones, UofT, Suzi Lima UofT/UFRJ)
Poster 3: Language Vitality in Macuxi and Wapichana in Terra Indigena Serra da Lua, Roraima (Vidhya Elango, UofT, & Isabella Coutinho, UERR/UFRJ)
Switch-reference in Yudja (Guillaume Thomas, UofT, & Suzi Lima, UofT/UFRJ)
Labels:
Brazilian languages,
Faculty,
Undergrads,
Workshop
October 10, 2017
Visit from Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov
Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov visited us on Friday (Oct 6, 2017) from the University of Pennsylvania. In the morning they held a discussion with students and faculty in the Language Variation & Change research group, and in the afternoon Gillian gave a talk on lifespan variation.
Sali Tagliamonte (faculty), Gillian Sankoff, Bill Labov, and Jack Chambers (faculty) |
Reception after Gillian's talk |
October 1, 2017
Team Faetar at UWO
On the way from a class project in LIN 1256: Language Contact, Corpora & Analysis in 2017 to a talk at NWAV 46 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Team Faetar presented its latest research (and some earlier research!) on subject pronouns in Faetar, an endangered variety of Francoprovençal spoken on two mountaintops in southern Italy and a small group of speakers in the GTA. Presenting were:
- David Heap, Professor of Linguistics at UWO, who started working on Faetar as a grad student at U of T, as part of a project examining dialect atlas data to understand Romance subject pronoun systems.
- Michael Iannozzi, a PhD student at Western who, as an undergrad linguist at UofT, analyzed variable null subjects in Faetar.
- Naomi Nagy, Associate professor of linguistics at UofT.
- Katherina Pabst, PhD student in linguistics at UofT.
- Fiona Wilson, PhD student in linguistics at UofT.
- Lex Konnelly, PhD student in linguistics at UofT.
- Savannah Meslin, who earned her MA in linguistics at UofT in 2017 and now teaches French at the Canada's National Ballet School
Team Faetar September 2017: David, Fiona, Katharina, Naomi & Michael at Western |
September 29, 2017
2016-2017 Undergraduate Awards
We are pleased to announce the winners of 4 Undergraduate Awards in Linguistics for 2016-17:
- The Chambers Award is awarded to Katherine Alexandra Sung, Specialist in Linguistics
- The McNab Award is awarded to Toshiaki Kamifuji, Specialist in Linguistics
- The Rogers Award is awarded to Yan-Lum Charissa Chan, Major in Linguistics
- The Gold Award is awarded to Jeffrey Wang, Major in Linguistics
- Toshiaki Kamifuji, Specialist in Linguistics
- Calahan Janik-Jones, Specialist in Linguistics
September 25, 2017
Photo from Manitoba Workshop on Person
The Manitoba Workshop on Person was held this past weekend at the University of Manitoba. Here's a picture of UofT people (names below):
Back row, left to right:
Betsy Ritter (former postdoc), Will Oxford (PhD 2014, now at U
Manitoba), Michael Wagner (former graduate exchange student 1998, now at
McGill), Martha McGinnis (BA 1992, MA 1993, now at U Victoria), Diane
Massam (faculty), Jila Ghomeshi (PhD 1996, now at U Manitoba), Richard
Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM)
Front row, left to
right: Andrew Peters (PhD), Lex Konnelly (PhD), Elizabeth Cowper
(faculty), Tomohiro Yokoyama (PhD), Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at
Queen's), Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now a PhD student at MIT)
Labels:
Alumni,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Morphology,
Postdocs,
Syntax/Semantics,
Workshop
September 24, 2017
Photos from 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (2017)
The 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) was recently held at New York University (click here for list of UofT talks). Here are some pictures from the conference.
Poster by Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Laura Colantoni (Spanish & Portuguese), & Jeffrey Steele (French Dept.) |
Talk by Mia Sara Misic (MA), Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta (BA), Karmen Kenda-Jež (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) & Peter Jurgec (faculty) |
Poster by Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) & Yoonjung Kang (faculty) |
Labels:
Conference,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Phonetics/Phonology,
Slovenian
September 20, 2017
Ngumpin-Yapa Workshop (2017, University of Queensland)
The Ngumpin-Yapa Workshop (on the Ngumpin-Yapa subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan language family in Australia) was held at the University of Queensland on August 10th and 11th, 2017. From our department, Jessica Mathie (Ph.D.) presented her paper "Through the looking-glass: Ngarinyman expressions of searching, looking and finding".
Workshop participants |
September 17, 2017
Manitoba Workshop on Person 2017
The Manitoba Workshop on Person is being held on September 22 and 23 (2017) at the University of Manitoba. Invited speakers from our department:
Susana Bejar (faculty): Ineffable person in copular complements
Bronwyn Bjorkman (former post-doc, now at Queen's), Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (PhD 2007, now at Saint Mary's University), and Andrew Peters (PhD): Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns
Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at MIT): Plural person and associativity (in Inuktitut)
Diane Massam (faculty): Person and null pronouns
And other presentations from our department:
Tomohiro Yokoyama (PhD): The Person Case Constraint: Repairing the notion of “repair”
Lex Konnelly (PhD) and Elizabeth Cowper (faculty): The future is they: The feature geometry of non-binary gender
Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM): Inuktitut PCC revisited
Will Oxford (PhD 2014, now at University of Manitoba): Person and the Algonquian inverse
Susana Bejar (faculty): Ineffable person in copular complements
Bronwyn Bjorkman (former post-doc, now at Queen's), Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (PhD 2007, now at Saint Mary's University), and Andrew Peters (PhD): Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns
Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at MIT): Plural person and associativity (in Inuktitut)
Diane Massam (faculty): Person and null pronouns
And other presentations from our department:
Tomohiro Yokoyama (PhD): The Person Case Constraint: Repairing the notion of “repair”
Lex Konnelly (PhD) and Elizabeth Cowper (faculty): The future is they: The feature geometry of non-binary gender
Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM): Inuktitut PCC revisited
Will Oxford (PhD 2014, now at University of Manitoba): Person and the Algonquian inverse
Labels:
Alumni,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Indigenous languages of Canada,
Postdocs,
Syntax/Semantics,
Workshop
September 14, 2017
5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (2017)
The 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) is being held at New York University from September 15 to 17 (2017). Alumna Yining Nie (MA 2015; now PhD NYU) was one of the student organizers of the conference. Presentations from UofT:
Mia Sara Misic (MA), Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta (BA), Karmen Kenda-Jež (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) & Peter Jurgec (faculty): Nasal harmony and nasalization in Mostec Slovenian
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) & Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects
Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Laura Colantoni (Spanish & Portuguese), & Jeffrey Steele (French Dept.): Gradient and categorical effects in native and non-native nasal-rhotic coordination
Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010; now PhD at University of California, Berkeley), Transparadigmatic output-output correspondence
Sharon Rose (BA 1990; now Professor and Chair at University of California, San Diego), ATR Harmony: new typological patterns and diagnostics
Mia Sara Misic (MA), Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta (BA), Karmen Kenda-Jež (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) & Peter Jurgec (faculty): Nasal harmony and nasalization in Mostec Slovenian
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) & Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects
Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Laura Colantoni (Spanish & Portuguese), & Jeffrey Steele (French Dept.): Gradient and categorical effects in native and non-native nasal-rhotic coordination
Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010; now PhD at University of California, Berkeley), Transparadigmatic output-output correspondence
Sharon Rose (BA 1990; now Professor and Chair at University of California, San Diego), ATR Harmony: new typological patterns and diagnostics
Labels:
Conference,
Faculty,
Phonetics/Phonology,
Slovenian,
Undergrads
September 9, 2017
Congratulations Safi!
Safieh Moghaddam successfully defended her thesis, "Split Ergativity in Davani", on September 8th, 2016. The committee was comprised of Diane Massam (supervisor), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour and Yves Roberge (thesis committee members), Susana Bejar, and Michela Ippolito. The external examiner was Dr. Martha McGinnis-Archibald (University of Victoria). Congratulations, Dr. Moghaddam!
September 7, 2017
Corpora in the Classroom
Two increasingly important domains in linguistics are the study of spontaneous speech and the analysis of large corpora of natural language data. Our Linguistics Department has professors and students who do both.
To improve the instructional infrastructure and scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments that teach relevant theory and research skills, we have developed a teaching resource called Corpora in the Classroom (https://corpora.chass.utoronto.ca/), on which hundreds of hours of recorded and digitized speech from 9 languages (so far) are archived and meta-data-tagged.
This tool has been used in 7 or 8 sociolingusitics classes over the past 5 years, but we are hoping to expand its utility and use to additional classes/areas. If you'd like to use this tool or contribute data to it, please have a look at the demo pages (https://corpora.chass.utoronto.ca/demo/) and then contact Naomi to discuss. (Sample assignments using this tool for a 1st year course are at http://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/LIN/courses/TBB199/TBB199.16W_syll.htm, HWs 11 & 13.)
The project has been funded by internal ITIF and CRIF grants, Keren Rice's CRC funds, and SSHRC.
To improve the instructional infrastructure and scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments that teach relevant theory and research skills, we have developed a teaching resource called Corpora in the Classroom (https://corpora.chass.utoronto.ca/), on which hundreds of hours of recorded and digitized speech from 9 languages (so far) are archived and meta-data-tagged.
This tool has been used in 7 or 8 sociolingusitics classes over the past 5 years, but we are hoping to expand its utility and use to additional classes/areas. If you'd like to use this tool or contribute data to it, please have a look at the demo pages (https://corpora.chass.utoronto.ca/demo/) and then contact Naomi to discuss. (Sample assignments using this tool for a 1st year course are at http://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/LIN/courses/TBB199/TBB199.16W_syll.htm, HWs 11 & 13.)
The project has been funded by internal ITIF and CRIF grants, Keren Rice's CRC funds, and SSHRC.
September 1, 2017
SemDial 2017
The 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2017 – SaarDial) was held August 15-17, 2017 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. From our department, Angelika Kiss (PhD) presented her paper "Meta-conversational since when-questions and the common ground".
Labels:
Conference,
Linguists abroad,
Semantics
August 31, 2017
LVC memes
In case you missed it, this Drake meme was floating around linguistics circles on Facebook. (Caption: "Reading about dialectology is better than reading fiction :P".)
Labels:
Faculty,
Language Variation and Change
August 28, 2017
Andrei Munteanu, Dresher award winner, presenting at CRC
Andrei Munteanu (MA), winner of the 2016-17 Dresher Phonology Prize for outstanding work in a graduate phonology course, presented his winning work at the 2017 CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop on August 15th: "Co-occurrence restrictions in English: A corpus study". Here's a picture of his talk:
Labels:
Graduate students,
Workshop
August 23, 2017
Brazilian Indigenous languages research excursion program
(See the course blog here for pictures and updates: https://uoftbrazil.wordpress.com/)
This summer, Suzi Lima (faculty in Spanish & Portuguese, as well as Linguistics) has been teaching a course called "Brazilian Indigenous Languages: documentation, language maintenance and revitalization" in the Spanish & Portuguese department. The first four classes were held at UofT, and the final six classes (starting August 18th) are being held in Brazil, where the students are receiving hands-on training for language documentation projects and collaborative research.
Check out the blog link above (or click here); Suzi and her students and colleagues are doing a great job of documenting their progress in Brazil with pictures and updates.
If you're interested in research on Brazilian Indigenous languages but weren't able to join the class and go on this research excursion, check out the Brazilian Indigenous Language research group (https://brazilianlanguagesuoft.wordpress.com/) at UofT.
This summer, Suzi Lima (faculty in Spanish & Portuguese, as well as Linguistics) has been teaching a course called "Brazilian Indigenous Languages: documentation, language maintenance and revitalization" in the Spanish & Portuguese department. The first four classes were held at UofT, and the final six classes (starting August 18th) are being held in Brazil, where the students are receiving hands-on training for language documentation projects and collaborative research.
Check out the blog link above (or click here); Suzi and her students and colleagues are doing a great job of documenting their progress in Brazil with pictures and updates.
If you're interested in research on Brazilian Indigenous languages but weren't able to join the class and go on this research excursion, check out the Brazilian Indigenous Language research group (https://brazilianlanguagesuoft.wordpress.com/) at UofT.
Labels:
Brazilian languages,
Faculty,
Language documentation and revitalization,
Linguists abroad,
Other blogs
August 22, 2017
Solar eclipse nerds
Toronto was in the path of the August 2017 eclipse (a partial eclipse for us, at more than 70% coverage of the sun), and a contingent of linguists went outside of Sid Smith to (safely) see it.
Labels:
Cosmic events,
Faculty,
Graduate students,
Plaid,
Staff
August 19, 2017
Distinctive featured linguists
August 18, 2017
Association of French Language Studies conference Blue Jays outing
UofT linguistics profs Alexei Kochetov, Jeff Steele and Naomi Nagy attended the Association of French Language Studies conference outing to the Blue Jays-Yankees game on Aug. 10, following 3 full days of interesting talks about French in a wide range of contexts.
August 17, 2017
New volume on ergativity, edited by Diane Massam and colleagues
The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity was recently published. This volume, which was edited by Diane Massam (faculty) alongside colleagues Jessica Coon and Lisa deMena Travis at McGill, includes almost fifty articles on ergativity (from theoretical approaches to case studies to experimental work). Congratulations on this Diane, I know how much work and coordination has gone into this!
Authors featured in this volume include Julie Anne Legate (MA 1997, now at University of Pennsylvania), Alana Johns (faculty, co-authoring with Ivona Kucerova at McMaster), Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at Université du Québec à Montréal), and Tyler Peterson (visiting assistant professor 2012-2013, now at University of Auckland). Click here for more information, or read the abstract below.
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages.
Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.
Labels:
Morphology,
Publication,
Syntax/Semantics
August 16, 2017
2017 CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop
The annual CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop hosted by our department took place on Tuesday, August 15th. Here were the presentations:
Jessamyn Schertz (faculty): Listening differently to accented talkers: Use of acoustic and contextual cues in perception of native vs. non-native speech
Na-Young Ryu (PhD): Effects of cross-language acoustic similarity on non-native speakers’ perception of Korean vowels
Rachel Soo (incoming MA) and Philip J. Monahan (faculty): Phonemic perception and lexical access: Evidence for speech factor levels in Cantonese heritage speakers
Julian Bradfield (The University of Edinburgh): The Sound of a Spherical Cow
Karina Kung (BA UTSC), Luan (Jessie) Li (BA UTSC), Connie Ting (incoming MA), Jasmine Yeung (BA UTSC), and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Compensating for speech rate variation in English stop perception
Rachel Evangeline Chiong (BA), Andrea Macanović (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Secondary palatalization in Zadrečka Valley Slovenian
Andrei Munteanu (MA): Co-occurrence restrictions in English: A corpus study
Paul Arsenault (PhD 2012, now at Tyndale University College) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Retroflex vowel harmony in Kalasha: A preliminary acoustic analysis
Wenxuan Chen (BA) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Vowel harmony in Slovenian
Nathan Sanders (faculty): Some issues in the perceptual phonetics of sign language: Motion-in-depth and the horizontal-vertical illusion
Mercedeh Mohaghegh (PhD 2016) and Craig Chambers (UTM Psychology faculty): Perceptibility of the place of articulation in nasal and oral stops and recognition of assimilated words
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc): Quantifying sonority contour
Katherine Sung (BA) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Allophonic variation in English coronal stops: An EPG corpus study
Deepam Patel (BA), Rosemary Webb (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): The rise and fall of the palatal nasal glide in Slovenian
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in Korean dialects
Jessamyn Schertz (faculty): Listening differently to accented talkers: Use of acoustic and contextual cues in perception of native vs. non-native speech
Na-Young Ryu (PhD): Effects of cross-language acoustic similarity on non-native speakers’ perception of Korean vowels
Rachel Soo (incoming MA) and Philip J. Monahan (faculty): Phonemic perception and lexical access: Evidence for speech factor levels in Cantonese heritage speakers
Julian Bradfield (The University of Edinburgh): The Sound of a Spherical Cow
Karina Kung (BA UTSC), Luan (Jessie) Li (BA UTSC), Connie Ting (incoming MA), Jasmine Yeung (BA UTSC), and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Compensating for speech rate variation in English stop perception
Rachel Evangeline Chiong (BA), Andrea Macanović (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Secondary palatalization in Zadrečka Valley Slovenian
Andrei Munteanu (MA): Co-occurrence restrictions in English: A corpus study
Paul Arsenault (PhD 2012, now at Tyndale University College) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Retroflex vowel harmony in Kalasha: A preliminary acoustic analysis
Wenxuan Chen (BA) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Vowel harmony in Slovenian
Nathan Sanders (faculty): Some issues in the perceptual phonetics of sign language: Motion-in-depth and the horizontal-vertical illusion
Mercedeh Mohaghegh (PhD 2016) and Craig Chambers (UTM Psychology faculty): Perceptibility of the place of articulation in nasal and oral stops and recognition of assimilated words
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc): Quantifying sonority contour
Katherine Sung (BA) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Allophonic variation in English coronal stops: An EPG corpus study
Deepam Patel (BA), Rosemary Webb (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): The rise and fall of the palatal nasal glide in Slovenian
Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in Korean dialects
Labels:
Phonetics/Phonology,
Sign Languages,
Slovenian,
Workshop
August 15, 2017
Julie Doner in Probus (International Journal of Romance Linguistics)
Julie Doner (PhD) has had her article "Spanish stress and lexical accent across syntactic categories" published in the August 2017 volume of Probus, International Journal of Romance Linguistics. Congrats, Julie! The abstract is below, and a link to the article is here.
In this paper, I provide an analysis of Spanish stress with the following three characteristics: (a) both verbal and non-verbal stress are accounted for in a single, unified, system, (b) the three-syllable window for stress is accounted for in a principled way, and (c) the stress algorithm has no access to the morphosyntactic structure. I do this by extending Roca’s analysis of variable edge parameters for stress in Spanish non-verbs to verbs, and by arguing that morphemes which mark for only person, number, and gender (φ-features) are outside of the domain of stress because they are prosodic adjuncts.
Labels:
Graduate students,
Phonetics/Phonology,
Publication
August 14, 2017
Methods in Dialectology XVI (Tachikawa, Japan)
The Sixteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (METHODS XVI) was held in Japan from August 7th to 11th (2017). Presentations from our department:
Jack
Chambers (faculty), Erin Hall (Ph.D. student), Mary Aksim (M.A. 2016,
now at the University of Ottawa): Dialect asymmetries in vowel
perception
Katharina
Pabst (Ph.D. student), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D. student), Melanie
Röthlisberger (Ph.D. student at KU Leuven, former visiting student), and
Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): The individual vs.
the community: Evidence from T,D deletion in Canadian English
Sali
A. Tagliamonte (faculty): Into the hinterlands: Probing urban to rural
diffusion in intensifier variation (part of the workshop “Beyond the
well-known: current foci and issues in research
on intensification”)
Thanks to Katharina Pabst for the pictures!
Jack Chambers (faculty) and Dennis Preston (faculty at Oklahoma State University) giving a speech at the conference dinner |
Katharina and Mel before their talk |
Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) giving a talk about intensifiers in Northern Ontario |
The U of T related contingent at Methods XVI |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)