Congratulations, Arsalan!

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) has been awarded a Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute grant to support his research on the syntax of nominal linkers in Iranian languages. This award recognizes Arsalan's substantial efforts towards the study of Persian culture. Congratulations, Arsalan, on this thoroughly well-deserved honour!

Congratulations, Iryna!

Iryna Osadcha successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, "Lexical stress in East Slavic: Variation in space and time," on Thursday, November 29, 2018. On the committee were Elan Dresher (supervisor), Peter Jurgec, Joseph Schallert, Aleksei Nazarov, Keren Rice, and external examiner Christina Bethin (Stony Brook University). Congratulations, Dr. Osadcha!

Christopher Spahr (Ph.D. 2015, now at Tulip Software), Iryna, and Elan;
Iryna, Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.), and Aleksei Nazarov (faculty);
Aleksei in front, and Iryna serenading us at her celebration!

A Faetar-speaking visitor!

This past weekend, Naomi Nagy (faculty) hosted a speaker of Faetar (a Franco-Provençal language spoken in two small communities in Foggia in south Italy: Faeto and Celle), and used the opportunity to practice her Faetar (photo #1), catch up on Faetar texting practices (photo #2) - not bad for a language with no official writing system! - and compare pizzas in Faeto and Toronto (photo #3). Livia was only 2 the last time Naomi did fieldwork in Faeto.

Telling time with a clock from Faeto: [o fa kase lu kat e mietS]

A text message in Faetar - transcribed in IPA.

Livia e la sua pizza. (Grazie Napoli Centrale!)

Guest speaker: Adam Roth Singerman (University of Chicago)

Our department is very pleased to welcome guest speaker Adam Roth Singerman, a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he recently earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics. His research centers on morphosyntax and typology and Tuparí. On Friday, November 30 at 2:30 PM, in SS 560A he will be presenting "The synchrony and diachrony of Tuparí evidentiality".

Those Tupían languages described as possessing grammaticalized evidentality typically mark the category through freestanding particles located in a predicate peripheral or clause peripheral position (Moore 1984; Gabas Jr. 1999; Seki 2000; Galucio 2011). Tuparí, however, marks evidentiality throug a bound verbal suffix that sits inside of tense morphology and agrees in number with the subject. This suffix, -pnē/-psira, participates in a nuanced set of interactions with the language's set of second position clause typing particles. This talk draws upon original fieldwork to provide a detailed description and analysis of -pnē/-psira. I show that -pnē/-psira presupposes commitment to p on the part of the speaker. This analysis correctly predicts the incompatibility between -pnē/-psira and thoes clause types that express doubt or uncertainty, and it also accounts for how the witnessed/non-witnessed evidential contrast projects out of finite embedded clauses. This talk also puts forth a diachronic hypothesis concerning the origins of -pnē/-psira. A separate suffix, -psē/-pnē/-psira, qualifies as a resultative in the sense of Nedjalkov and Jaxontov (1988) and Nedjalkov (2001). Resultative -psē/-pnē/-psira is partially homophonous with evidential -pnē/-psira but the two morphemes differ from one another according to several syncrhonic diagnostics. I argue that resultative readings ('the pen is lying in a fallen position') were reinterpreted as non-firsthand declaratives ('the pen fell [non-witnessed]'). Tuparí thus instantiates the same resultative to evidential grammaticalization pathway which is known from Eurasia (Tatevosov 2001; Jalava 2014, 2017; Friedman 2018, among others) but which to my knowledge has not previously been described for an indigenous language of the Americas.

Research Groups: Week of November 26-30

Note the slight irregularities in the timing this week.

Wednesday, November 28, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Bissell Building 113
Morphology Reading Group
Virgilio Partida Penalva (Ph.D.) leading a discussion of: Harris, James, and Morris Halle (2005). Unexpected plural inflections in Spanish: Reduplication and metathesis. Linguistic Inquiry, 36(2), 195-222.

Friday, November 30, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Psycholinguistics Group
Presentation by guest speaker Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester).

Friday, November 30, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Phonology Research Group
Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.): "Homophony avoidance in Russian nominals: an experimental approach."

Friday, November 30, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Semantics Research Group
Group discussion: Singerman, Adam Roth (2018). Negation as an exclusively nominal category. Language, 94(2), 432-467.

LSA Linguistic Institute 2019

Next's year's Linguistic Institute offered by the Linguistic Society of America is being held at the University of California, Davis, from June 24 through July 19, 2019. Marisa Brook (faculty) and Emily Blamire (Ph.D.) are jointly teaching 'Topics in Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication'.

Research Groups: Friday, November 23

Note the slightly irregular times and/or places this week.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, SS 4043
Psycholinguistics Group
Daphna Buchsbaum (faculty, Department of Psychology): "Does pragmatic context influence children's use of majority information in object label learning and causal learning?"

10:30 AM - 12:00 PM, SS2110
Syntax Group
Paper discussion led by Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): Lima, Suzi (2018). New perspectives on the count-mass distinction: Understudied languages and psycholinguistics. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2018, e12303.

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Fieldwork Group
Virgilio Partida Penalva (Ph.D.) leading a presentation of the methodology of the MesoSpace group.

Invited talk: Suzi Lima (University of Toronto/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

We are delighted to host a talk by Suzi Lima, currently an Assistant Professor in our department visiting from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research encompasses documentation and revitalization, acquisition, semantics/pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. Her talk, "A typology of the count/mass distinction in Brazil and its relevance for count/mass theories," will be taking place on Friday, November 23 at 3:00 PM in SS 560A. A reception will follow in the department lounge.

Since Link's (1983) seminal contribution, much work has explored the semantics of count and mass nouns from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. In this talk, I explore some of the recent advances in this field, drawing particularly from experimental research and descriptions of understudied Brazilian languages, more specifically, Yudja (Juruna family, Tupi Stock). This talk has two main goals. First, I will explore the debate about what can be counted grammatically, that is, how we define atoms and what role extra-linguistic factors may play in this process, focusing on the distinction between natural and semantic atomicity (Rothstein 2010). More specifically, I will show that, in many languages, substance-denoting nouns - predicted to be uncountable in most count/mass theories (cf. Chierchia 1998, 2010) - can interact with the counting system, suggesting that the substance/object distinction might have an impact on what is more likely to be counted, but does not in itself restrict counting. I will also argue that the counting units that we use with object denoting nouns do not always correspond to 'natural atoms'. Second, I will discuss the results of a large-scale project on the count-mass distinction in 17 Brazilian languages, and how the results of this project can contribute to typological research on this topic.

Invited talk for Cognitive Science: Michael K. Tanenhaus (University of Rochester/Nanjing Normal University)

The Cognitive Science Program at University College is hosting Michael K. Tanenhaus, who is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics and the Director for Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester, and also Chair Professor at Nanjing Normal University. His extensive research focuses on psycholinguistics and processing. He will be giving a talk, "Real-time spoken language comprehension: A tale of signal and context," on Thursday the 29th in UC 140 starting at 4:30 PM.

Congratulations, Elizabeth!

We are thrilled to have learned that cross-appointed faculty member Elizabeth Johnson (psychology, UTM) has been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition! From her research profile:

Johnson is exploring whether infants whose primary caregivers are late learners of English face different developmental challenges than those whose parents learned English early. She is also examining what factors should be considered when assessing language skills and vocabulary size in infants who receive exposure to multiple varieties of spoken English.

Congratulations, Elizabeth, on this landmark honour!

Julie at UTM Linguistics Brown Bag

Julianne Doner (Ph.D.) is the next guest speaker for the Linguistics Brown Bag Lunch series at the Mississauga campus. Her talk, "A 3D typology of the EPP", will be taking place on Monday, November 26, from 11 AM to 12 PM, in room 5128 of the New North Building.

The Extended Projection Principle (EPP) was proposed by Chomsky (1981, 1982) to account for why subjects are obligatory in English clauses. I define the EPP as the obligatory move of some element into the inflectional domain. A variety of EPP types have been identified cross-linguistically: (a) Massam and Smallwood (1997) argue that the EPP in Niuean is checked by VPs; (b) Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) argue that the EPP can vary in the size (Xº or XP) of the element that checks it; (c) Davies and Dubinsky (2001) argue for a contrast between D- and V-prominent EPP; and (d) Richards and Biberauer (2005) claim that the EPP pied-pipes the entire vP in some Germanic languages. I argue that the EPP can vary in three dimensions: (a) by having a head (Xº) or a phrase (XP) as a goal, (b) by pied-piping the entire vP or not, and (c) by targeting an argument/nominal (D) or a predicate (Pred). Combining these three dimensions gives us a total of 8 logical types, 7 of which are attested.

	Pied-piping	No pied-piping
Dº-EPP	German (Richards and Biberauer 2005)	Greek (Alexidou and Anagnostopoulou 1998)
Predº-EPP	Irish	Inuktitut (Johns 2007)
DP-EPP	Afrikaans (Richards and Biberauer 2005)	English
PredP-EPP	indistinguishable from no pied-piping	Niuean (Massam 2001)

Some languages exhibit alternations between two EPP types, providing evidence that these different types are equivalent on some level. I will show that intra-linguistic alternations in EPP type target only one dimension of variation at a time. However, where Biberauer (2010) proposes that the various EPP occur independently and can co-occur, as each particular type alternates between presence versus absence, I show that the various EPP types are in complementary distribution. I will also show that these different movements are also united in being somewhat mysterious or unexplained.

December 2018 Graduate Speaker Series

Next month's event in the Graduate Speaker Series hosted by the Grad Room (Harbord and Spadina, on the ground floor under the Grad House), focuses on linguistics and features two of our Ph.D. candidates. This will be taking place on Tuesday, December 4, from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. Registration is available here (there is no fee).

Emily Blamire (Ph.D.): "Judging talkers: How speech affects our perceptions of each other."
Humans convey a great deal of information with their speech, far beyond the actual messages we say with our words. Small changes in the sounds of our speech can have large and wide-ranging effects on how we are perceived as people. Humans can not only recognize familiar individuals from just hearing their voices, but we can also make various judgments about a person’s emotional state, gender, and age, and even judge attributes such as attractiveness and personality. Using data from perception experiments, this talk explores which aspects of the speech stream we are listening to when we make some these judgments, as well as how we go about recognizing the voices of people we have had limited exposure to.

Julien Carrier (Ph.D.): "Cultural renewal and language changes in Inuktitut."
Inhabiting the Arctic regions of Alaska, Canada and Greenland, the Inuit did not face the same socio-cultural and historical changes that most other Indigenous groups in North America had already experienced until the beginning of the 20thcentury when traders and missionaries began to take an interest in them. In fact, Inuit language varieties are believed to have remained quite similar until 1900 and to have diverged rapidly afterwards following these numerous transformations (cf. Dorais 1993, 2010). Indeed, many studies on the Inuit language report on dialectal distinctions and language changes (e.g., Johns 1999; Carrier 2012; Yuan 2018), but none of them present detailed statistics to support their claims or establish correlations with socio-historical factors. On the other hand, there are sociolinguistic studies that analyze the socio-cultural or historical changes that the Inuit have gone through, like the increasing bilingualism across the Inuit population (cf. Dorais &Sammons 2000; Patrick 2003), but no study has ever made a convincing correlation between them and dialectal distinctions or language changes. My dissertation fills this research gap. In this talk, I present and discuss results of my statistical analysis in North Baffin Inuktitut with natural data across speakers born between 1902 and 1998, and the interaction between some language changes observed in this Inuktitut dialect and different social and linguistic factors. 

Congratulations, Nick!

Wonderful news from recent postdoc/faculty member Nick Welch (Memorial University of Newfoundland), who has been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Change, Adaptation and Revitalization of Aboriginal Languages.

Dr. Welch’s research focuses on the syntactic structure of the Indigenous languages of North America, particularly those of the Dene family of languages, as well as the implications for teaching and learning these languages. He also pursues the creation of IT tools for the teaching of endangered languages.

“Almost all Indigenous languages in North America are endangered,” said Dr. Welch, who was a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto before joining Memorial. “More and more kids are growing up monolingual in English. Language is a vital medium for the transmission of culture and when a language disappears, a millennia-old wealth of cultural knowledge goes with it.”

Dr. Welch says his CRC appointment provides him with a unique opportunity to make a large-scale contribution to language preservation efforts. He says he hopes to build a program for training students and community members in skills for language documentation and revitalization, similar to those at universities in Western Canada that are not yet available in the eastern part of the country.

He also says he wants to build large online databases of Innu-aimun and Inuktitut, the Indigenous languages of Labrador, and to create a program to train community linguists and language teachers.

“I intend to recruit interested Indigenous students for undergraduate and graduate work in linguistics,” he said. “My hope is that when I retire, my successor will be a native speaker of Inuttitut or Innu-aimun.”

Congratulations and all the best, Nick! We can attest to this tremendous honour being more than well-earned.

Guest speaker: Karin Vivanco (Universidade de São Paulo)

Our department is delighted to welcome Karin Vivanco, a Ph.D. candidate at the Universidade de São Paulo, who works on syntax, psycholinguistics, and indigenous languages of the Amazon. Her talk, "On clausal pied-piping," will be taking place at 10:00 AM in SS 2127.

Since its discovery by Ross (1967), the phenomenon of pied-piping has drawn much attention in the area of syntax. Basically, pied-piping occurs whenever a certain element (usually a WH- phrase) "drags along" additional elements in the presence of some kind of syntactic displacement. Even though it is commonly found with small syntactic constituents such as prepositional and noun phrases, pied-piping may even affect larger constituents such as clauses. This operation, which seems to be rare cross-linguistically, is called clausal piped-piping and has been found in languages like Basque (Urbina 1993, Arregi 2003), Imbabura Quechua (Cole 1982), and Tlingit (Cable 2010). In this talk, I show how a Brazilian language called Karitiana (Tupian family) exploits clausal pied-piping extensively to build long-distance questions like 'What do you think that Mary bought?'. I suggest that rampant nominalization of embedded clauses and a ban against WH- in situ may force widespread clausal pied-piping in Tupian languages. If this proporal is correct, one could explain why some languages resort to clausal-piping while others don't - and this ultimately could shed some light on the nature of pied-piping itself.

Congratulations, Vidhya!

Vidhya Elango (BA) is in Dublin, Ireland this week for the Global Undergraduate Summit, taking part from November 12 through 14. This event draws undergraduates from nearly 50 countries and 25 fields of study. Vidhya is in attendance having received a Highly Commended designation for her paper "Syllable structure of French loanwords in Malagasy: An OT perspective," originally written for faculty member Suzi Lima's Field Methods class in the Fall 2017 semester. Congratulations, Vidhya, on this very well-deserved recognition!

Research Groups: Week of November 12-16

Tuesday, November 13, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, PT266
Computational Linguistics Group, Department of Computer Science
Eric Corlett (Ph.D., Computer Science): "Probability and program complexity for NLP."
Probabilistic models used in NLP often come from general frameworks into which otherwise difficult-to-define tasks can be embedded. The power of these frameworks can lead to situations in which traditional measures of descriptive complexity, such as worst-case running time, can overestimate the cost of running our algorithms. In this talk I look at how practical and theoretical complexities can differ by investigating the Most Probable Sentence problem, which was shown to be NP-complete by Khalil Sima'an in 2002. I show that linguistic entropy can be used to formulate a more natural bound for the running time of this problem, as well as its error of approximation.

Wednesday, November 14, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Bissell Building 113
Morphology Reading Group
Jean-François Juneau (Ph.D.) will be leading a paper discussion of: Kracht, Marcus (2002). Suffixaufnahme. Manuscript, Freie Universität Berlin.

Friday, November 16, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: Everyone is encouraged to bring a research issue they've been working on or thinking about to discuss briefly and get some feedback from the group!

Friday, November 16, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Phonology Research Group
Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "Phonology of gender in French and English given names."

Friday, November 16, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Semantics Research Group
TBA

MoMOT 3

We are delighted to be hosting this year's Morphology in Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto workshop (MoMOT 3) on Friday, November 16 and Saturday, November 17.

The keynote speaker is Daniel Siddiqi (Carleton University), presenting joint work with Brandon J. Fry (University of Ottawa):
"On root suppletion and the Root Competition Hypothesis."

Other talks are by:

Julien Carrier (Ph.D.):
"Mixed projections in Inuktitut."

Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba):
"Three Algonquian metasyncretisms."

Adriana Soto-Corominas (University of Alberta) and David Heap (Ph.D. 1997, now at the University of Western Ontario):
"Clitic substitution as featural underspecification."

Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University):
"The logic of morphological 'repairs'."

Rose-Marie Déchaine (UBC), Monique Dufresne (Queen's University), and Charlotte Reinholtz (Queen's University):
"(Ir)realis morphology and clause-typing in the Cree dialect continuum."

Isabelle Boyer (Université du Québec à Montréal):
"Subsyllabic morphemes in Mandarin: Demonstratives zhei and nei."

Andres Salanova (University of Ottawa) and Adam J.R. Tallman (University of Ottawa):
"Two constituent structures or one? A case study of two Amazonian languages."

Justin Case (University of Ottawa):
"Deriving the tripartite differential object marking system of Siona by means of Impoverishment."

Peter Ara Guekguezian (University of Rochester):
"Morphological interaction in Muskogee verbs and phase."

And there will be the following posters:

Jean-François Juneau (Ph.D.):
"Old and Modern Georgian case stacking: A unified mechanism."

Kinza Mahoon (Ph.D.):
"The structure of Urdu ezafe."

Ilia Nicoll (Ph.D.):
"Licensing inflected nominal incorporation in Labrador Inuttitut."

Virgilio Partido Peñalva (Ph.D.):
"The uno strategy in Spanish: A mechanism for gender recoverability."

Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.):
"On interaction of Laki subject agreement enclitics with possessor agreement in VP domain."

George Balabanian (University of Ottawa):
"Morphosyntactic properties in Armenian adpositions."

Kenny Castillo (University of Western Ontario):
"Comparison of the tense-mood-aspect (TMA) systems of Chabacano, Palenquero and Papiamentu."

Evgenii Efremov (University of Western Ontario):
"Word-internal complex phrases in Russian and their implications for the theory of morphology."

William Tran (University of Western Ontario)
"Aspectual and temporal properties of the morphemes vừa and mới in Vietnamese."

Roxana Barbu (Carleton University) and Ida Toivonen (Carleton University):
"Romanian pe-marking: Feature unification and animacy."

Angelica Hernandez (University of Western Ontario):
"Use of pluralized existential haber in the Spanish of Texas."

Fall Convocation 2018

MA and Ph.D. convocations were held this week. Congratulations to all our newest graduate alumni! We are so proud of your accomplishments.

Ph.D.:
Clarissa Forbes
Jim Smith
Phil Howson

MA:
Koorosh Ariyaee
Kelly-Ann Blake
Timothy Gadanidis
Isabelle Ladouceur-Séguin
Mia Misic
Megan Parker
Ryan Pidhayny
Lisa Schlegl
Rachel Soo
Lisa Sullivan
Connie Ting

Ryan, Isabelle, Tim, Lisa Sullivan, Megan, and a photo of Koorosh! (Photo courtesy of Koorosh.)

Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) is the (thoroughly deserving) recipient of a 2018 Arbor Award for outstanding volunteer service to the University of Toronto. Elizabeth is the co-creator of the University Reader Training Program, directed at faculty members who read off the list of graduates at Convocation, which provides extensive instruction in pronouncing names from a wide variety of nationalities and languages such that no students are made to feel unwelcome or misrepresented. Elizabeth's co-readers, Christina Kramer (faculty, Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Michael Patrick Albano (faculty, Music) also received Arbor Awards for this reason this year. Congratulations to all!

Invited talk for Philosophy: Craige Roberts (Ohio State University/New York University)

The Department of Philosophy and its group on Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind are delighted to welcome Professor Craige Roberts. Now Professor Emerita at Ohio State University and a Visiting Professor at New York University, she is an esteemed scholar who works on formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Her talk, "The character of epistemic modals in natural language: Evidential indexicals", will be taking place on Thursday, November 8, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, in room 418 of the Jackman Humanities Building.

I assume a central thesis about Modal Auxiliaries due to Kratzer, roughly as follows:

THE MODAL BASE PRESUPPOSITION: Natural language expressions that contain a modal       component in their meaning, including all English modal auxiliaries and Epistemic Modal Auxiliaries (EMA)s in particular, presuppose a modal base, a function that draws from context a relevant set of propositions which contribute to a premise-semantics for the modal.

Accepting this thesis for EMAs leaves open (at least) the following two questions about the meaning of English EMAs like must and might:

i. What constraints, if any, are there on the character of the premise set for an EMA?
ii. What is the nature of the relationship between premises and conclusion that is required for truth of the EMA statement?

I argue for at least a partial answer to (i), with two hypotheses about the proper constraints on the modal base for an EMA:

EVIDENTIALITY: The modal base for an EMA is evidential and doxastic, not truly epistemic (i.e., weak, not strong).

INDEXICALITY: EMAs, unlike some other types of modals, are indexical: They are anchored to an agent-at-a-time whose doxastic state is currently under discussion in the context of utterance.

These constraints are modeled as presuppositions triggered by the EMA, restrictions on the modal’s domain. The independently motivated indexical anchoring (a) correctly predicts the contextually limited range of candidates for the anchoring agent of such a modal, as attested in the literature, (b) thereby constrains what body of evidence is understood to be relevant (that of the anchor), and (c) in some cases plays a role in explaining the modal’s scope (not discussed here). The account sheds light on several puzzles, including (d) Yalcin’s (2007) version of Moore’s paradox for embedded epistemic modals, and (e) purported arguments for modal relativism (e.g., Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson 2005).

New paper: Brook (2018)

Marisa Brook (faculty) has a paper out in Language Variation and Change, 30(2), based on her 2016 doctoral dissertation: "Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change."

This paper uncovers evidence for two linked levels of morphosyntactic change occurring in Canadian English. The more ordinary is a lexical replacement: with finite subordination after seem, the complementizer like has been overtaking all the alternatives (as if, as though, that, and Ø). On top of this, there is a broader syntactic change whereby the entire finite structure (now represented primarily by like) is beginning to catch on at the expense of infinitival subordination after seem. Drawing on complementary evidence from British English and several partial precedents in the historical linguistics literature, I take this correlation to mean that like has reached sufficient rates among the finite strategy to have instigated the second level of change, to the point that it has ramifications for epistemic and evidential marking with the verb seem. I propose that the best model of these trajectories is a set of increasingly large envelopes of variation, one inside the next, and argue that the envelope might itself be an entity susceptible to change over time.

50th Anniversary celebrations underway!

The festivities have begun! Check out #TOling50 on Twitter and/or Instagram for photos. A special welcome back to our alumni, our retired/former faculty/postdocs, and all partners in attendance. Note: if you would like a T-shirt, you need to submit an order form. See the registration desk for details.

Thanks to the committee: Jack Chambers (faculty), Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.), Julianne Doner (Ph.D.), Elaine Gold (faculty), Mary Hsu (staff), Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.), Diane Massam (faculty), Keren Rice (faculty), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty).

And to the designers: Jack Chambers (faculty), Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.), and Emilia Melara (Ph.D.).

Plus department staff: Mary Hsu, Jennifer McCallum, and Deem Waham.

And our volunteers: Gregory Antono (BA), Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.), Ibrahim El-Rayes (BA), Ariel Gomes (BA), Nathan Leung (BA), Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.), Kinza Mahoon (Ph.D.), Kat Meereboer (BA), Emilia Melara (Ph.D.), Miriam Neuhausen (visiting scholar), Deepam Patel (BA), Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), Akio Teruya (BA), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Jessica Yeung (Ph.D.).

BUCLD 43

The 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) is meeting from November 2 through 4.

Suzi Lima (faculty) is presenting a talk:

"Acquisition of conjunctions in recursive and distributive scenarios: A production study in Yudja."

Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) with Dunja Veselinovic (New York University) also have a talk:
"Doing what you must: Child actuality inferences in modal comprehension."

Ana-Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), Anny Castilla-Earls (University of Houston), María Fernanda Lara Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Erin Pettibone (Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese) have a poster:
"Recursion follows productivity, not vice versa: The case of Spanish NP recursion."

Ailís and Ana-Teresa are also presenting a poster:
"Leaving obligations behind: Epistemic incrementation in preschool English"

Ailís and colleagues Anouk Dieuleveut (University of Maryland), Annemarie van Dooren (University of Maryland), and Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland) are presenting a poster as well:
"Learning the force of modals: Sig you guess what sig means?"