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)

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'.

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.

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)

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

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.

Not able to be present, but part of the research team for this project were:

• 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

Fiona and Katharina gave a talk entitled, “Transmission of Variation Between Homeland and Heritage Faetar”, as part of the Western Linguistics speaker series.

Team Faetar September 2017: David, Fiona, Katharina, Naomi & Michael at Western