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

A new award is added this year, for outstanding achievement in required 200-level courses:

• The Gold Award is awarded to Jeffrey Wang, Major in Linguistics

There are also two runners-up for this award:

• Toshiaki Kamifuji, Specialist in Linguistics
• Calahan Janik-Jones, Specialist in Linguistics

Congratulations to all these students for their academic achievements!

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)

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)

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

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

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 

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!

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.

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".