LSA et al. 2021

The 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is taking place online from January 7 through 10. The custom for the on-site conferences is for a number of smaller 'sister societies' to meet concurrently. However, given extenuating circumstances, many of the 'sister societies' this year are either meeting at other times or not meeting at all. The exceptions are the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS), and the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS).

Linguistic Society of America

• Naomi Nagy (faculty), Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.), and Vidhya Elango (MA) are part of a panel discussion with Maya Ravindranath Abtahian (University of Rochester): "Sociolinguistic research in the time of COVID: Methods, ethics, theory."
• Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty), Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.), and Alison Chasteen (faculty, Department of Psychology) are giving a talk: "Lifespan change and linguistic innovation: The quotative system as we age."
• Marisa Brook (faculty) and Mirva Johnson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) are giving a talk: "Substrate effects and diachrony: Back vowels during long-term language shift in a Finnish-Canadian enclave."
• Jeremy Needle (postdoc), Simon Todd (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jeanette King (University of Canterbury), and Jennifer Hay (University of Canterbury) have a presentation: "Overt speaker knowledge of reduplication patterns in te reo Māori."
• Jeremy Needle (postdoc) is part of a second talk with Simon Todd (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jeanette King (University of Canterbury), and Jennifer Hay (University of Canterbury): "Phonological influences on lexicalized compound formation in Māori."
• Breanna Pratley (MA 2020) and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a poster: "Can English idioms undergo the dative alternation? A priming investigation."
• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Justin R. Leung (MA) have a poster with Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo (University of British Columbia): "Two types of rhetorical questions: Evidence from Cantonese prosody."
• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) also has a solo poster: "Not all tag questions are alike: The case of source tags."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (Ph.D.) has a poster: "The history and internal structure of French honorifics."
• Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.) is part of a panel called "VariAsian: Contact and change in Asian North American speech communities," with Andrew Cheng (University of California, Irvine), Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (University of Michigan), and Lauretta Cheng (University of Michigan).
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) has a poster: "The problem with [proper]: Reanalyzing morphosyntactic regularization."
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is also part of a panel, "Student resources during a pandemic: Linguistic Society of America student ambassadors share their experiences and insight," with Lillian Jones (University of California, Davis) and John Powell (University of Arizona).
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) has a talk with Maxime Tulling (New York University): "The past is fake: Child comprehension of counterfactual wishes and conditionals."
• Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) and Rodrigo Ranero (University of Maryland) have a talk: "Sibilant harmony in Santiago Tz'utujil."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) has a talk with Laura Kalin (Princeton University): "Deconstructing subcategorization: Conditions on insertion versus position."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Two ways to form a portmanteau: Evidence from ellipsis."
• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) is part of a poster presentation with Juyeon Cho (University of Delaware): "The role of case in the subject advantage: Korean double nominative constructions."
• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) has a poster with Jun Gu Kang (Sogang University): "Prosody and bare nouns in Mongolian."
• Recent faculty member Aleksei Nazarov (Utrecht University) has a poster: "Learning restrictive analyses of Canadian Raising in OT using exceptionality diacritics."

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 

• Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) and Rodrigo Ranero (University of Maryland): "Vowel harmony in Santiago Tz'utujil (Mayan)."

North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics

• Jeremy Needle (postdoc) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "From 'buddy' to 'dude' to 'bro': Vocative change in Ontario English."

New paper: Denis (2020)

Derek Denis (faculty) has a new squib in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 65(4): "How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology."

New paper: Moulton (2020)

Keir Moulton (faculty) has a paper out in Theoretical Linguistics, 46(3-4): "Attitudinal and modal objects: A view from the syntax-semantics interface."

Congratulations, Yining!

Congratulations to Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at New York University), who has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the project 'Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind', co-directed by Artemis Alexiadou, Uli Sauerland, and Maria Teresa Guasti (on which one of the language consultants is our faculty member Suzi Lima). Congratulations, Yining, and all the best in Germany!

New papers: Kochetov (2020a, 2020b)

Alexei Kochetov (faculty) has a pair of papers in recent issues of Language and Linguistics Compass. The first, "Research methods in articulatory phonetics I: Introduction and studying oral gestures," is in 14(4):

This article is Part I of a general overview of current methods in articulatory phonetics research. This part deals with methods used to investigate oral gestures—speech‐related movements of the tongue, the lips, and the jaw (while Part II is concerned with methods studying laryngeal and nasal gestures, and the entire vocal tract). The focus of the article is on electropalatography, ultrasound, and electromagnetic articulography, with some attention also given to static palatography, X‐ray microbeam, and video recording. For comparison purposes, the methods are illustrated using similar articulatory data—productions of the plain‐palatalized contrast in Russian fricatives. Strengths and limitations of each method are discussed, and so are recent developments and trends.

The second, "Research methods in articulatory phonetics II: Studying other gestures and recent trends," is in 14(6):

This article is Part II of a general overview of current methods in articulatory phonetics research (which also consists of Part I “Research methods in articulatory phonetics I: Introduction & studying oral gestures”). The article begins by examining methods employed by phoneticians to investigate laryngeal and nasal gestures—speech‐related configurations of the glottis and the lowering/raising the velum for nasal/oral consonants and vowels. This is done by reviewing the methods of electroglottography, endoscopy, photoglottography, and measurements of airflow and air pressure. The article further examines magnetic resonance imaging and radiography (X‐rays)—the methods employed to investigate the entire vocal tract. The review is concluded with the methods of video recording and optical tracking, as used to study manual gestures in speech and sign language. Each methodological section contains a review of relevant journal publications illustrating the application of the method, as well as references to further readings. The article concludes with an overview of current developments and trends in instrumental articulatory phonetics, and highlight issues requiring further research.

Katharina at Linguistweets

Given the popularity of Linguist Twitter, the current constraints on conference-holding, and general interest in open-access science, ABRALIN (the Brazilian Linguistics Association) recently organized Linguistweets, the first Twitter-based linguistics conference, which was held on Saturday, December 5. Katharina Pabst (Ph.D.) gave a presentation: "Place Identity and Co-Occurrence in Northern Maine." The conference can be viewed in its entirety either at #linguistweets or via the program at the conference website.

Ai and Julie on Words to the Whys

Ai Taniguchi (faculty) has recently been featured on Word to the Whys, a podcast produced by a collective of introductory linguistics instructors in Canada. In her episode, 'Why we do semantics', Ai is interviewed by Julie Doner (Ph.D. 2019) about what semantics is, how she took an interest, what it means for languages and dialects to make sense, and why we put a plural suffix on 'zero chairs' even though there aren't any. Check it out!

BCGL 13

The thirteenth Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 13) is taking place online from December 16 to 18, hosted by the Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This year's theme is 'The syntax and semantics of clausal complementation'. Keir Moulton (faculty) is giving one of the invited talks: "Things we embed."

New paper: Becker and Jurgec (2020)

Michael Becker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Peter Jurgec (faculty) have a new paper in Phonology, 37(3): "Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian."

We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika]‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.

New paper: Bigelow, Gadanidis, Schlegl, Umbal, and Denis (2020)

Most years, the second issue of Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is a special selection of well-received papers from the previous autumn's New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference. This year, following up from last year's NWAV in Oregon, one of the papers in PWPL 26(2) is about Multicultural Toronto English and represents a collaborative effort by Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Derek Denis (faculty): "Why are wasteyutes a ting?"

This paper examines lexical enregisterment through TH/DH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect emergent in the Greater Toronto Area. Sociolinguistic interview data from young MTE speakers reveals an overall ~10% rate of stopping, with teenage males being the primary stoppers. However, despite the presence of stopping in the vernacular of most speakers, certain terms referring to character archetypes - e.g. wasteyutes, mandem - have become sites of enregisterment of TH/DH-stopping in MTE rather than enregisterment of stopping in more frequent words or of stopping itself. We argue that this is because these lexical items implement reflexive tropes, as speakers thought to be stoppers are those who might be labeled wasteyutes or mandem: young, male, suburban, typically non-white, and typically low status. As such, performance of these stereotypical personae fosters indexical linking between sound (TH/DH-stopping) and culturally salient identities (wasteyutes, mandem), cementing enregisterment of these terms in MTE.

New direct-entry Ph.D. option

We are pleased to announce that our Ph.D. program will now be dual-track. The department's regular 4-year Ph.D. program, which requires applicants to have (or will soon have) a master's degree in linguistics, will continue. Aside from this, we will also be considering applications for direct entry to a 5-year Ph.D. from the undergraduate level. This option is aimed at outstanding students who have extensive background in linguistics.

For Fall 2021, the deadline for applications to both options, as well as our MA program, is January 8, 2021. More details on the Linguist List and our department website.

New paper: Heller (2020)

Daphna Heller (faculty) has a paper out in Language and Linguistics Compass, 14(5): "The production and comprehension of referring expressions: Definite description."

This paper examines the topic of reference from the perspective of the production and comprehension of definite descriptions. We begin by reviewing evidence that the processes underlying reference production and comprehension are incremental. We then examine how the descriptive content of definite descriptions is selected and processed against a rich context that contains both visual and linguistic information, finding gradient effects that need to be combined. We also discuss the nature of referential domains, concluding that a definite description is not interpreted relative to a single referential domain and is instead influenced by two (and possibly more) domains whose influence is combined. The range of these findings calls for a probabilistic framework of reference that can accommodate gradient patterns.

Research Groups: Friday, December 11

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Dave Kush (faculty): "What to expect when you're expecting (an antecedent)."

In this talk I’ll present results from recent experiments on the processing of cataphoric dependencies in English, Norwegian, and Dutch. The goal of the studies is to determine to what extent cataphora resolution can be described as an 'active' dependency resolution process and to what extent/how far in advance active resolution strategies make predictive syntactic commitments.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Nouns, names, and the problem with [proper]."

New paper: Hussain et al. (2020)

Qandeel Hussain (postdoc) along with colleagues Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Mark Harvey (University of Newcastle) and Katherine Demuth (Macquarie University), is in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 50(2), with a phonetic profile of Punjabi (Lyallpuri variety).

Research Groups: Friday, December 4

Note that this week's meeting of the Semantics Research Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Guest speaker: Suzanne Robillard (University of Ottawa): "Implicit norms and prestige forms: Linguistic cohesion of G2 French in Victoria."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French): "Modelling early language acquisition from raw speech data."

The problem of language acquisition is key to the way questions are posed and answered in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences of language more broadly. And we now know quite a lot about the earliest stages of language acquisition, which, logically, show infants tuning into the signal, learning the sound inventory of the language and developing a small early lexicon between six and twelve months. What can recent advances in machine learning bring to the table? I will discuss how we have been able to take advantage of an interest from industry in applied problems in speech recognition, and channel the forces of modern machine learning towards cognitively interesting problems in early language acquisition. I will cover the small number of initial results that seem to come out of this line of research, which suggest that abstract phonet/emic categories are both critically important and somewhat overrated, depending on what facts need to be explained.

Guest speaker: Marija Tabain (La Trobe University)

We are very pleased to (virtually) welcome Marija Tabain, a Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is an esteemed phonetician and the current editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Her own research has encompassed a range of languages across four continents, including five indigenous languages of Australia. She will be giving a talk for our department - "The phonetics of Qaqet, a language of Papua New Guinea" - on Friday, December 4, at 3:00 PM via Zoom.

Qaqet is a Baining language of East New Britain province, Papua New Guinea. In this talk, I initially outline the phonetics and phonology of Qaqet, which has four vowels and 16 consonants, focusing in particular on phonetic variability in this small phoneme inventory. I then consider in a little more detail the voiced stops of Qaqet /b d ɡ/, which are described by Hellwig (2019) as being pre-nasalized. The issue of pre-nasalization of voiced stops has been of considerable interest in the literature on Papuan languages (cf. Palmer 2018), and their presence in Qaqet (a Papuan language) is usually attributed to contact with Oceanic languages. I present analyses of the voiced stops which suggest that any pre-nasalization is acoustically quite different from the nasal consonant phonemes of the language, and serves largely to maintain the very long voiced stop closure durations. These phonetic details may inform issues of language contact between Oceanic languages and Papuan languages, providing evidence of how a particular phonetic feature may be realized when borrowed into an existing inventory.

Congratulations, Diane!

Congratulations to Diane Massam (faculty), who is one of the winners of this year's Janice Colbert Poetry Award offered by the School of Continuing Studies! A well-deserved honour indeed.

Congratulations, Daphna!

We are delighted to have learned that Daphna Heller (faculty) has been awarded a six-month Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities by the Jackman Humanities Institute, in support of her project 'Sources of information and linguistic meaning: From typology to cognition'. Congratulations, Daphna!

Adeiza and students in Arts and Science News

Sociolinguist Adeiza Isiaka (postdoc, Department of French and Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and two of his students have been interviewed for Arts and Science News on the subject of Adeiza's new first-year seminar, Urban Youth Languages of the World (FCS194H1).

New book: Pérez-Leroux, Pirvulescu, and Roberge (2020)

Congratulations to Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), Mihaela Pirvulescu (faculty, Department of French), and Yves Roberge (faculty, Department of French) on the publication of their co-authored book, Direct Objects and Language Acquisition, now available from Cambridge University Press!

Direct object omission is a general occurrence, observed in varying degrees across the world's languages. The expression of verbal transitivity in small children begins with the regular use of verbs without their object, even where object omissions are illicit in the ambient language. Grounded in generative grammar and learnability theory, this book presents a comprehensive view of experimental approaches to object acquisition, and is the first to examine how children rely on the lexical, structural and pragmatic components to unravel the system. The results presented lead to the hypothesis that missing objects in child language should not be seen as a deficit but as a continuous process of knowledge integration. The book argues for a new model of how this aspect of grammar is innately represented from birth.

Ryan at McMaster University next week

As part of McMaster University's 2020-21 Cognitive Science of Language lecture series, Ryan DeCaire (faculty) is giving a virtual talk on Monday, November 30, at 2:30 PM: "Adult Kanien'kéha acquisition and its role in revitalization."

Indigenous communities, some now for decades, have been working tirelessly to maintain and revitalize their languages, with the hopes that their use will again become normalized. Given this experience, many communities are now in a very unique, yet critical, time in their history, as they struggle to restore intergenerational transmission and primary use among and between peer groups. In this struggle, we are noticing that adults are now more important than ever, especially given their necessarily role in raising and teaching children. While focusing on our situation in Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) communities, in this presentation I will discuss the critical role of adults in our revitalization efforts, how we are creating second language speakers, and how we can work in partnership with the university to make a historical impact in the pursuit to revitalize Indigenous languages.  

Attendance is free, but registration is required (before 2 PM on Monday the 30th). In order to register, please visit this link.

Research Groups: Week of November 23-27

Note that this week's meeting of the Fieldwork Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty): "The ins and outs of spatial language."

Among the earliest learned spatial prepositions are Containment in/out and Support on/off. These prepositions denote both static locations ('places': be in/out of X) and dynamic motions (‘paths’: go in/out of X). In this presentation, I report and explain a previously unnoticed constraint on the use of out/off compared to in/on that cross-cuts the place/path distinction. In a series of elicited production experiments with English-speaking adults and three-year-olds, we show that, unlike in and on, out and off are used extremely sparsely to describe static locations but quite frequently to describe dynamic motions. We hypothesize that the reason for the asymmetry lies in the fact that place-denoting out/off are ‘negative’ locatives and as such have a restricted informational contribution without specific pragmatic support. We confirm this hypothesis in further production tasks with English speakers. We conclude that prepositional semantics and the place/path distinction conspire to produce subtle properties of spatial language.

Beginner Michif Language Workshop

The Centre for Indigenous Studies is holding a digital workshop on beginning Michif on Wednesday, November 25, from 1-3 PM, featuring speaker Joshua Morin from Alberta. All U of T people (including faculty and postdocs) and/or people of Indigenous descent are welcome!

Congratulations, Julien!

(Screenshot courtesy of Naomi Nagy.)

Julien Carrier defended his doctoral dissertation, "Ergativity on the move", on Monday, November 23. The committee consisted of Alana Johns (supervisor), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Naomi Nagy, Sali A. Tagliamonte, Derek Denis, Diane Massam, and external examiner David Adger (Queen Mary University of London). Congratulations, Dr. Carrier!

Fall Convocation 2020

Today, the U of T is holding its (virtual) convocation for Fall 2020 graduates. Degrees are all being conferred in absentia.

From our department, Majed Al-Solami and Erin Hall are officially receiving their Ph.D.s.

Our new MA alumni are Greg Antono, Chahla Ben-Ammar, Crystal Chow, Gabrielle Dumais, Sadaf Kalami, Sarah Khan, Noah Philipp-Muller, Paul Poirier, Breanna Pratley, and Nadia Takhtaganova.

Congratulations to all of you! We are so proud.

Ryan interviewed by Shankhalika in the Innis Herald

Ryan DeCaire (faculty) has recently been interviewed in the Innis Herald by Shankhalika Srikanth (BA) on the subject of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk), Indigenous language revitalization, and settler-Indigenous relations.

Research Groups: Friday, November 20

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Presentations by Kaleigh Woolford (Ph.D.) and Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.).

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.): "Uvular obstruent lenition in Persian."

Former proposals (Pisowicz 1985; Lazard 1992; Reza Asa, 2016, among others) attempt to describe the lenition of the uvular obstruent in Persian. These accounts show that factors such as the place of articulation of the preceding segments as well as the position in the word affect the lenition of the target sound, resulting in the allophonic variation of the uvular obstruent. Via acoustic measurements, this study aims to investigate the influence of the manner of articulation of the preceding segments on the lenition of the uvular obstruent. The broader question is to investigate whether this lenition is gradient or categorical.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.): "Substitutives and the syntax-semantics interface in Cuzco Quechua."

Since Pylkkänen (2002), applicatives have been divided between a 'low' and a 'high' variety. Low applicatives are taken to relate the applied argument to a theme (generally via a relationship of transfer-of-possession), while high applicatives are analyzed as relating the applied argument to the entire event. The latter variety tend to generate a more diverse range of interpretations, but 'affected' readings, such as benefactives, are typologically the most common (Polinsky 2013). In Cuzco Quechua, -pu is a fairly canonical example of a high applicative verbal suffix, as its most common usage is to add a benefactive participant to an event. However, there is evidence that the particular interpretation of an applicative actually depends upon the case-marking on the applied argument itself in Quechua, rather than merely the presence of -pu on the verb (Myler 2016). In this talk, I analyze one of these case-markers as a substitutive – that is, the agent is interpreted as carrying out an action instead of the applied argument – and argue that substitutives are fundamentally unlike other high applicatives. In particular, they cannot be analyzed as simply relating an argument to the event, but denote most basically a relationship between two arguments, similar to low applicatives. From here, I sketch a possible analysis of how the derivation of a substitutive might proceed.

New paper: Bonfim and Lima (2020)

Anari Bonfim (Museu Nacional/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Suzi Lima (faculty) have a paper out in Linguistic Variation, 20(2): "Count and mass nouns in Patxohã."

This paper describes the count/mass distinction in Patxohã, a revitalized language spoken in Bahia and Minas Gerais, Brazil. We observe that only count nouns can be directly combined with numerals and that only count nouns can co-occur with plural determiners. Furthermore, only count nouns can be combined with size adjectives. As for quantifiers, we observe that at least one quantifier in the language (nitxi) can be combined with count and mass nouns, but trigger different interpretations depending on the noun it is combined with. We also discuss the use of container phrases in counting and measuring contexts.

Guest speaker: Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is pleased to be digitally hosting guest speaker Maria Polinsky, who is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, noted for her work on syntax, typology, and heritage languages. Her talk, "Gender agreement and gender assignment in heritage grammars", will be taking place at 2:00 PM on Friday, November 20. See the email for Zoom details.

This talk presents and analyzes differences in gender agreement between heritage languages and the baseline. Within the realm of morphology, gender agreement is among the often-cited areas of divergence between heritage and baseline speakers. In contrast, agreement in person is rarely problematic in heritage languages. After presenting empirical data illustrating this divergence, I will address the following questions: (1) what can explain the asymmetry between the features [person] and [gender] in heritage grammar agreement? (2) what is the status of the feature [number] in heritage grammars? In the process of addressing these questions, I will additionally consider whether the heritage data shed new light on existing theories of morphological gender and of the lexicon more broadly.

New papers: Lima and Rothstein (2020); Thomas (2020)

The October 2020 issue of Linguistic Variation - number 20(2) - is a special issue devoted to the mass/count distinction in nouns across indigenous languages of Brazil.

Suzi Lima (faculty) and Susan Rothstein (Bar-Ilan University) are co-authors of the introductory paper: "A typology of the mass/count distinction in Brazil and its relevance for mass/count theories."

While much work has been done on the description of the mass/count distinction in different geographical areas, Brazilian Indigenous languages are still highly underrepresented in the field. This paper presents the results of a project that involved researchers describing the mass/count distinction in 15 Brazilian Indigenous languages, based on a questionnaire we prepared in 2016 in order to explore the distribution of bare nouns, plurals, numerals, and quantifiers. Three main observations will be drawn. First, number marking and countability are independent. Second, counting is not restricted to natural atoms. Third, since there seems to be no systematic symmetry in the distribution of plurals, numerals, and quantifiers, we argue that the standard diagnostics for countable versus non-countable nouns are highly language-specific.

Guillaume Thomas (faculty) also has a paper in this issue: "Countability in Mbyá."

This paper investigates the distribution of nouns in Mbyá (Tupi-Guarani), with respect to plural marking, numerals and quantifiers. The study reveals the existence of a robust grammatical distinction between a class of count nouns, which consists mostly of individual denoting nouns, and a class of mass nouns, which consists mostly of substance denoting nouns.

Yoonjung at McMaster University next week

As part of McMaster University's 2020-21 Cognitive Science of Language lecture series, Yoonjung Kang (faculty) is giving a virtual talk on Monday, November 16, at 2:30 PM: "Speaking and listening, fast and slow." It incorporates joint work with Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D. 2019, now at Pennsylvania State University), and Connie Ting (MA 2018).

Speech is highly variable: the same words are produced differently depending on the context and the speaker. For a long time, variability was considered a problem to overcome in search of invariance. More recently, however, researchers recognize that highly structured variation aids communication by providing cues to linguistic context and speaker identity. This talk will focus on one particular type of speech variation: variation due to how fast one speaks. Speech rate variation is ubiquitous and is one of the major causes of variability in speech. Fast speech introduces 'lenition' processes and shortens segments, thereby obscuring contrasts between 'long' and 'short' sounds. I will discuss the results from a series of perception experiments on English, Japanese, and Korean that explore the extents and the limits of speech rate-induced variation in perception, and discuss their potential implications for the mechanism of perceptual compensation.

Attendance is free, but registration is required. To register, please visit this link. Note that a recording will be made available after the presentation.

Daphna and Sarah talk for CycleLinguists

Daphna Heller (faculty) and colleague Sarah Brown-Schmidt (Vanderbilt University) are giving a talk for online occasional psycholinguistics group Cycle Linguists on Thursday, November 12, from 12 PM to 1:30 PM: "Common Ground is dead. Long live Common Ground!" Registration is available here.

Theories of the role of mental state representations during linguistic communication, inspired by early proposals by philosophers of language and formal linguists, posit representations of shared knowledge and beliefs, or common ground. Alternative accounts posit that successful communication does not require calculating representations of common ground, but instead, that more general cognitive mechanisms give rise to shared or coordinated representations. Despite their differences, what these views have in common is a focus on shared information. Here we argue that views that rely on what is shared as the basis for communication fail to capture many aspects of language use. We propose a novel account of the role of mental state representations for language, where the perspectives of the partners are compared. This proposal accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel, yet-to-be-tested empirical predictions.

Research Groups: Friday, November 6

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
1. Breanna Pratley (MA 2020): "Can English idioms undergo the dative alternation? A priming investigation."

Many analyses support that the English Double Object and Prepositional Dative are syntactically and semantically distinct. The observation that idioms do not alternate between these structures is used as evidence for this distinction; however, examples of dative idioms in both forms exist in natural language corpora. In principle, this would invalidate their use as evidence for a distinction. Bruening (2010) proposes an account, called Rightward Dative Shift, that retains the Double Object structure in idioms that appear to alternate. This analysis maintains that idioms can only have one structure, and therefore can continue to be used as evidence of a complete distinction between dative structures. To adjudicate between these analyses, we conducted a two-alternative forced-choice syntactic priming experiment. Significant priming effects were found in Active/Passive filler trials, confirming task validity. Prepositional Dative primes resulted in significantly more Prepositional Dative responses than Double Object primes, as predicted. The Rightward Dative Shift results are inconclusive but warrant further investigation.

2. Frederick Gietz (Ph.D.): "Measuring speakers' understanding of complement coercion."

In this talk, I present data from a crowdsourcing experiment which I argue supports a view of coercion as a non-categorical phenomenon. Complement coercion in the psycholinguistics and semantics literature typically involves an entity-type noun filling argument role reserved for an event type object, through a costly process of type-shift. This manifests in increased reading times for entity-type arguments in coercion sentences. Our crowdsourcing data and distributional work instead shows that middle-ground cases, not clearly entity or event, pattern between cases classically labeled coercion or non-coercion.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Kelly-Ann Blake (Ph.D.): "Phonetic convergence during online conversational interaction: Do greater differences lead to greater convergence patterns?"

Phonetic convergence is the phenomenon in which interlocutors adopt each other's speech characteristics unconsciously. Recent studies using speech shadowing and conversational interaction tasks have presented mixed evidence for convergence patterns (e.g., male versus female speakers, same-sex pairs versus m-f pairs, high versus low frequency words, and monosyllabic versus bisyllabic words). The current study uses an online conversational map task to determine whether convergence occurs when pairs start with larger differences in their speech patterns.

NELS 51

The 51st meeting of the North East Linguistics Society is being held online, hosted by l'Université du Québec à Montréal, from November 6 through 8.

• One of the keynote talks is by Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba): "Elsewhere morphology and alignment variation: Evidence from Algonquian."
• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Peter Jurgec (faculty) are giving a flash talk: "Variable hiatus in Persian."
• Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.) is giving a talk: "Insubordination of an SR clause construction."
• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) and Kyumin Kim (Ph.D. 2011, now at Cheongju University) are giving a talk: "Variation in agreement in pseudo noun incorporation in Blackfoot."
• Fulang Cater Chen (MA 2017, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is giving a talk: "The role of Strong Strong Start in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi."
• Shay Hucklebridge (MA 2016, now at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is giving a flash talk: "Learning and the typology of word order: A model of the Final-over-Final Condition."
• Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at New York University) is giving a talk: "Double causatives are real."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) is part of a flash talk with Laura Kalin (Princeton University): "Deconstructing subcategorization: Conditions on insertion versus position."

Guest speaker: Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

As part of her graduate seminar on the semantics of indigenous South American languages, Suzi Lima (faculty) has invited Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) to give a talk; current departmental members are welcome. A postdoc in linguistic anthropology with the National Science Foundation, she has been making waves for boldly exploring the intersections of language documentation with methodology from adjacent subfields (e.g. variation, acquisition, and psycholinguistics). Her talk, "Understanding deixis in Ticuna: Experimental, observational, and L1 acquisition studies," will be taking place online on Tuesday, November 3, at 4:00 PM. To register, see the first of the two emails from Suzi and fill out the form.

This talk discusses three fieldwork-based studies of the meaning of demonstratives (equivalents to this/that and here/there) in Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language. These studies illustrate the range of methods - from descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and first language acquisition - which researchers can use to analyze semantics and pragmatics in a fieldwork setting. First, I discuss a mixed-methods descriptive study which examined perceptual meanings, or whether Ticuna demonstratives encode information about the speaker's mode of perception of the referent (e.g., whether it is visible). I show how elicitation, semi-experimental methods, and observational recordings of conversation converged to support the same analysis in this line of research. Second, I report on a quantitative study that examined the co-organization of demonstratives and pointing gestures in a video corpus of interviews. This analysis reached substantially different conclusions than either judgment-based or experimental research on the topic, illustrating one way that observational data can complement experimental work. Last, I discuss my continuing research on the L1 acquisition of Ticuna by children aged 1 to 4 years. I show how collecting a large, observational dataset of children's language production allowed me to ask novel questions about the interplay of frequency effects and cognitive/learning biases in the acquisition of demonstratives.

Research Groups: Friday, October 30

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Group discussion led by Marisa Brook (faculty) of a paper: Eckert, Penelope (2019). The individual in the semiotic landscape. Glossa, 4(1).

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019): "On the uncountability of possible worlds."

In possible worlds semantics the extension of a proposition in a given context is not a truth value but rather a function from possible worlds to truth values. Using Cantor’s diagonal argument - a method from mathematical logic - I show that this theory of semantics predicts that, although the set of possible propositions and the set of possible worlds are both infinite, the set of possible worlds is larger than the set of possible propositions. I further argue that this incommensurability between worlds and propositions renders possible world semantics semantically incomplete. I close by exploring alternative approaches to semantics, some of which (e.g., situation semantics) suffer from the same problems as possible worlds semantics, while others, which require us to limit the empirical domain of semantics, are still available to us.

52nd Algonquian Conference

The 52nd Algonquian Conference is taking place online from October 23 through 25, hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

• Fiona Wilson (Ph.D.) is presenting "Quantitative analysis of negation in two Cree corpora."
• Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba) is presenting "Direct, inverse, and neutral: Refining the description of Algonquian transitive verb forms."
• Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014) is also part of a talk with Zlata Odribets (University of Manitoba): "Algonquian languages are not ergative."
• Katherine Schmirler (MA 2015, now at the University of Alberta) is presenting "Infrequent morphosyntactic phenomena in Plains Cree: Bloomfield’s text collections and the Ahenakew-Wolfart corpus."
• Katherine Schmirler (MA 2015, now at the University of Alberta) is also part of a talk with Antti Arppe (University of Alberta): "A quantitative look at Plains Cree text types: âtayôhkêwina versus âcimowina in Bloomfield's texts and âcimisowina versus kakêskihkêmowina in the Ahenakew-Wolfart corpus."

Naomi on the Linguist List

Naomi Nagy (faculty) is this week's Featured Linguist on the Linguist List newsletter. Check out the link for more!

Research Groups: Friday, October 23

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Ewan Dunbar (faculty): "The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Group discussion of a recent paper: Durvasula, Karthik, and Adam Liter (2020). There is a simplicity bias when generalising from ambiguous data. Phonology, 37(2), 177-213.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Fieldwork Group
Fiona Wilson (Ph.D.): "Quantitative analysis of negation in two Cree corpora"

New book: Punske, Sanders, and Fountain (eds.) (2020)

Congratulations to Nathan Sanders (faculty) and his colleagues Jeffrey Punske (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) and Amy V. Fountain (University of Arizona) on the publication of their groundbreaking co-edited book, Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy, now available from Oxford University Press!

This book is the first to explore the varied ways in which invented languages can be used to teach languages and linguistics in university courses. There has long been interest in invented languages, also known as constructed languages or conlangs, both in the political arena (as with Esperanto) and in the world of literature and science fiction and fantasy media - Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, Dothraki in Game of Thrones, and Klingon in the Star Trek franchise, among many others. Linguists have recently served as language creators or consultants for film and television, with notable examples including Jessica Coon's work on the film Arrival, Christine Schreyer's Kryptonian for Man of Steel, David Adger's contributions to the series Beowulf, and David J. Peterson's numerous languages for Game of Thrones and other franchises. The chapters in this volume show how the use of invented languages as a teaching tool can reach a student population who might not otherwise be interested in studying linguistics, as well as helping those students to develop the fundamental core skills of linguistic analysis. Invented languages encourage problem-based and active learning; they shed light on the nature of linguistic diversity and implicational universals; and they provide insights into the complex interplay of linguistic patterns and social, environmental, and historical processes. The volume brings together renowned scholars and junior researchers who have used language invention and constructed languages to achieve a range of pedagogical objectives. It will be of interest to graduate students and teachers of linguistics and those in related areas such as anthropology and psychology.

Research Groups: Friday, October 16

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Presentation by Samantha Jackson (postdoc) on variation in Trinidadian children's speech.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Qandeel Hussain (postdoc): "Development of rhotic vowels in Kalasha: Language contact, sound change, and biomechanical modeling."

Rhotic vowels are found in fewer than 1% of the world's languages. While vowel rhoticity may be considered marginal from a broad crosslinguistic perspective, it is a basic vowel feature in Kalasha, an endangered Dardic (Indo-Aryan) language which contrasts a full set of oral /i e a o u/, nasal /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/, rhotic /i˞  e˞  a˞  o˞  u˞ /, and rhotic-nasal /ĩ˞  ẽ˞  ã˞  õ˞  ũ˞ / vowels. In this talk I present findings of an ongoing project which investigates the development of phonemic rhotic vowels in Kalasha.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.): "Insubordination of an SR clause construction."

Recent literature has analyzed switch-reference (SR) as a type of complementizer agreement (Arregi and Hanink 2018, Clem 2019). Subject coreference is tracked through a probe which interacts with both subjects. Inuktitut has a dependent clause construction, the conjunctive mood, which morphologically marks whether its subject has the same or different reference than the matrix clause subject. I look at cases where the conjunctive mood undergoes insubordination (Evans 2007): where the dependent clause can stand alone to express a particular meaning. This phenomenon creates difficulties for assumptions about SR clause derivation, as there is no matrix clause in an insubordinate construction. How can we derive this pattern?

LGCU Welcome Workshop 12

The annual Welcome Workshop held by the Linguistics Graduate Course Union is happening this year on Friday, October 16, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The workshop is an informal, supportive event aimed at giving incoming graduate students in the MA and Ph.D. programs a chance to introduce their research to each other and to the rest of the department. Everyone is encouraged to attend.

This year's presenters are all beginning either the MA or the Ph.D. program:

• Gregory Antono (Ph.D.): "Countability in Kristang (Melaka Creole Portuguese)."
• Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.): "Referential density in Tarahumana."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (Ph.D.): "Les titres de civilité : Old French to Modern French honorifics."
• Christina Duong (MA): "The Great Vowel Shift: Shifting the bigger picture."
• Vidhya Elango (MA): "Linguistic capital in Sierra Da Lua, Roraima, Brazil."
• Marjorie Leduc (MA): "A lexical phonological account of Turkana harmony system."
• Justin Leung (MA): "A quantitative approach to the loss of Medieval French verb particles."
• Talia Tahtadjian (MA): "Western Armenian rhotics: Differences in phonemic contrast."

New paper: Soo, Sidiqi, Shah, and Monahan (2020)

Rachel Soo (MA 2018, now at the University of British Columbia), Abdulwahab Sidiqi (BSc 2017), Monica Shah (BSc 2017), and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a new paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(4): "Lexical bias in second language perception: Word position, age of arrival, and native language phonology."

The study examines whether non-native listeners leverage their L2 lexicon during a phonetic identification task and whether lexical bias is influenced by word position and length. Native English and native Mandarin speakers were tested on English words where the natural sibilant was replaced by one member of a nine-step [s]/[ʃ] continuum. English speakers experience a lexical bias effect for longer words. No clear bias was observed for Mandarin participants, although age of arrival correlated with amount of lexical bias but only in the initial position of longer words. These results suggest that language proficiency and higher-order linguistic representations drive perception.

Research Groups: Friday, October 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Guest speaker: Jiangtian Li (University of Western Ontario): "On polysemy: a philosophical, psycholinguistic, computational approach."

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched clusters in contextual modulation of word meaning and a word is polysemous if and only if it has entrenched clustering in its contextual modulation. I argue that this theory explains all the features of polysemous senses. In order to demonstrate more thoroughly how clusters emerge from meaning modulation during processing and provide evidence for this new theory, I implement the theory by training a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns distributional information through exposure to a large corpus of English. Clusters of contextually modulated meanings emerge from how the model processes individual words in sentences. This trained model is validated against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy, focusing on the gradedness and flexibility of polysemous sense individuation, a human-annotated corpus of regular polysemy, focusing on the regularity of polysemy, and behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. Last, the implication to philosophy of this new theory of polysemy is discussed. I focus on the debate between semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. I argue that the phenomenon of polysemy poses a severe challenge to semantic minimalism. No solution is foreseeable if the minimalist thesis is kept, and the existence of contextual modulation is denied within the literal truth condition of an utterance.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Guillaume Thomas (faculty) presenting on collaborative work with language consultant Germino Duarte: "Switch-Reference: Syntax and/or (discourse) semantics?"

Guest speaker: Anne Charity Hudley (University of California, Santa Barbara)

We are delighted to (virtually) welcome Anne Charity Hudley, who is a Professor and the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A renowned sociolinguist and scholar of pedagogy, she has been at the helm of extensive, constant, hands-on work that identifies and dismantles the barriers to success in academic environments that disproportionately affect those from racialized/marginalized/low-income backgrounds. Her talk, "A roadmap for inclusion in linguistics," will probe the projects that the Department of Linguistics at UCSB has undertaken to counter the systemic forces that turn away marginalized populations at every level of mainstream education. The talk will be taking place online via Zoom on Friday, October 9, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, with a reception to follow.

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the highest ranked and highest resourced Minority Serving Institution in the world. Considering the designation as both an honor and a call to action, the UCSB Linguistics Department is working to make significant changes to its faculty and student recruitment, its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and its research and outreach focus. Charity Hudley will focus on methods and models used to engage people in inclusion in linguistics from secondary school through emeritus status, and she will also share challenges that our department has met along the way with a focus on interdepartmental, institutional, and disiplinary concerns. She will focus on three programs that UCSB Linguistics has developed in recent years: School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics, and the Sneak Peek student recruitment event.

New paper: Brook (2020)

Marisa Brook (faculty) has a new paper in Linguistics Vanguard, 6(1): "I feel like and it feels like: Two paths to the emergence of epistemic markers."

The collocation I feel like has attracted American media attention for reportedly being newly ubiquitous (Baker 2013, Smith 2015, Worthen 2016). While I have proposed that it is becoming an epistemic marker in North American dialects of English (Brook 2011: 65), I have made this prediction of (it) feels like as well. The present study artificially restricts the conventional envelope of variation to evaluate what distinguishes these two phrases in vernacular Canadian English. I feel like is the more frequent by far, but (it) feels like shows a specialization for metaphorical subordinate clauses rather than concrete ones. I interpret this as a case of persistence (Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009). Before the arrival of the like complementizer, the only predecessors to (it) feels like were (it) feels as if and (it) feels as though, and both as if and as though have a preference for metaphoricality (Brook 2014). I feel like was also preceded by options with as if and as though, but counterbalanced with that and Ø, which prefer concrete subordinate clauses (Brook 2014). The results attest to the value to be found in (cautiously) conducting a microscopic study of a corner of the envelope of variation.

New paper: Ryu, Kang, and Han (2020)

Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D. 2019, now at Pennsylvania State University), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), and Sungwoo Han (Inha University) have a new paper in Language Research, 56(2): "The effects of phonetic duration on loanword adaptation: Mandarin falling diphthong in Chinese Korean."

This study examines how Mandarin falling sonority diphthongs are adapted to a Chinese Korean dialect. It investigates how the subtle phonetic conditions of the source language affect adaptation, and if and how those phonetic effects differ in established loanwords compared to the on-line adaptation of novel loan forms. We found that in this bilingual population, while the Mandarin diphthongs are usually adapted as monophthongs, obeying the native phonological restriction against falling diphthongs, the retention of the input diphthongs in violation of the native constraint is also quite common. Additionally, we found that the choice of the monophthong vs. diphthong realization is strongly affected by the input phonetic duration and in particular, the durational difference among the different tones is robustly reflected in the adaptation patterns.

Research Groups: Friday, October 2

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: group discussion of ideas and insights!

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Guest speaker: Javier Domingo (Université de Montréal) on his work with L1 speakers of extremely endangered indigenous languages from Central and South America (Ayapaneco, Tehuelche, Chaná and Yagan) and the construction of the notion of a language's 'last speaker'.

New paper: Konnelly (2020)

Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) has a new paper in Language and Communication, 75: "Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in 'craft beer talk'."

Building on Silverstein's (2003, 2016) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper argues for a closely related genre: brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as ‘elite’ and ‘classy.’ The ‘specialist’ lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse provide the higher order of indexicality through which the emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. Together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer. 

Congratulations, Nicholas!

Congratulations to Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Princeton University), who has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin!

Congratulations, Marisa and Nathan!

The Linguistics Graduate Course Union has announced their annual awards for Excellence in TA Supervision for 2019-20. This year, the award recognizes Marisa Brook (faculty), with an honorable mention to Nathan Sanders (faculty). Congratulations to both!

New paper: Lima and Martins (2020)

Suzi Lima (faculty) and Adriana Leitão Martins (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) have a paper out in the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 19(1): "Aspectual information of durativity/punctuality impacts the countability of deverbal nouns in Brazilian Portuguese."

This paper explores the countability of deverbal bare singular nouns in Brazilian Portuguese, such as chute ‘kick’ in Maria deu mais chute ‘Maria did more kicking/Maria did more kicks’. More specifically, it investigates whether the aspectual information of a verb impacts the count (cardinal interpretation) or mass (volume/intensity interpretation) interpretation of a bare singular noun. Based on the results of a forced choice task replicating Barner, Wagner, and Snedeker (2008) for English, we show that deverbal bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese allow count and mass interpretations, depending on the aspectual features of the verbs they are derived from. Punctual events were more likely than durative events to be associated with a cardinal/count response. These results corroborate previous analysis of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese, whereby these nouns allow both count and mass interpretations (Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011b).

Research Groups: Friday, September 25

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Presentation by Nayoun Kim (postdoc).

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Elan Dresher (faculty): "Foundations of contrastive hierarchy theory."

I will present a brief introduction to a theory of contrastive feature hierarchies in phonology. This theory builds on ideas that go back to the early days of modern phonology, to the work of Henry Sweet and Edward Sapir. Most directly, the theory adapts proposals by Roman Jakobson and N. S. Trubetzkoy to the generative framework of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. The first part of this talk will be a historical review of these sources. In the second part I will set out the main tenets of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (CHT) and consider what implications they have for our understanding of phonological features. I will show how contrastive feature hierarchies contribute to illuminating analyses of synchronic and diachronic phonology.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "Is the Mongolian complementizer gejü really a complementizer?"

The Mongolian complementizer gejü is formed from a verb of saying and the imperfective converbial marker -jü. It is not uncommon for verbs of saying used in quotative constructions to become grammaticalized as general complementizers (cf. e.g. Japanese toiu). However, Mongolian gejü maintains some features of its adjunct-y origins: the clauses it subordinates can only appear in what superficially (putatively?) look like verbal complements, and not in subject or PP complement positions; it is entirely un-utilised in relative clauses; it appears in some aspectual constructions e.g. producing prospective aspect. Also, while the verbal root ge- is rarely used as a matrix verb of speech in the modern language, it can be used in other non-finite forms such as the habitual masdar.  Is gejü actually a fully grammaticalized complementizer with some quirky restrictions, and the other uses are separate productive instances of a homophonous verb root that just happens to share historical origins with gejü? Or is gejü still a fully verbal form, and the complementizer analysis has simply been taken for granted since it was asserted by some Eurocentric German philologists (Ramstedt and Poppe) in the first half of the 20th century? I don't know! However, I would like to show you some data and compare these complement clauses with nominalized ones in the language, and maybe get some advice on what to look into.

Talk by Nathan, Lex, and Pocholo for Arts and Science

For the 'Teaching and Learning Community of Practice' series hosted by Arts and Science, Nathan Sanders (faculty), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), and Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.) are giving an online presentation on Tuesday, September 22, from 2 PM to 3:15 PM, based on the ongoing LEAF-funded project in our department: "Building equity, diversity, and inclusion in courses: A case study in linguistics." There will also be ample time for discussion. To register to attend, visit the link.

In linguistics courses, language-related biases can surface in many forms, affecting the choice of course material (especially linguistic data), how that material is presented, and how instructors interact with students. We began a three-year project in September 2019 to address some of these biases in the linguistics classroom, with the ultimate goal of generalizing the methods and materials to other fields.

In this session, we present some preliminary results of this project from the first year in various linguistics courses, including new course content on the relationship of phonetics to gender, race and sign languages; new problem sets featuring data from under-represented languages; and workshops on inclusive classroom practices. We will also discuss paths forward for creating more affirming classrooms beyond linguistics, especially in fields where issues of language can play a central role (English, psychology, etc.).

Research Groups: Friday, September 18

Note that all groups are meeting online until otherwise indicated; see the emails from group administrators for links and for further details. Also note that subsequent meetings of the Fieldwork Group this semester will be in the afternoon time-slot instead (1 PM - 2:30 PM).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Jeremy Needle (postdoc): "Two computational studies of lexical knowledge in te reo Māori in NZ."

The two studies presented in this talk demonstrate our efforts with computational and experimental approaches to replicate and extend traditional formal descriptions of te reo Māori. In the first study, we compare wordlikeness ratings for words and non-words to gradient phonotactic scores based on subsets of the lexicon derived from spoken and written corpora. In additional to deriving a gradient probabilistic description of Māori phonotactics which extends prior phonological work, we find that non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders demonstrate wordlikeness knowledge of Māori which suggests form-only familiarity with about 2000 morphemes. The importance of morphology in the lexical model for this study spurred us toward the second study: a quantitative survey of morphological patterns in Māori which combines knowledge from expert informants with machine-learning morphological parsing models. Among our findings, we particularly note that our native-speaker informants do not appear sensitive to the same taxonomy of reduplication patterns that appear in traditional grammars.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Fieldwork Group
Introductions and group discussion of developing elicitation materials.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
1. Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.): "Question tags projecting sourcehood in Italian."

Question tags like isn't it or right? in English can serve the purpose of eliciting confirmation or acknowledgment from the addressee. In Italian, no?, o sbaglio? and vero? have such a function, but there is another tag in its inventory, eh?, which is subject to further restrictions. In addition to elicit the addressee's acknowledgment/confirmation, eh? also conveys evidential meaning. When a tag question hosts eh?, the speaker conveys i) that the addressee is independently committed to the proposition conveyed by the anchor (p), and presupposes ii) that the speaker knows i) from a direct source. That is, a question like Buono, eh? 'It's tasty, EH?', is pronounced felicitously in a context where the speaker directly perceives an event where the addressee has direct evidence for the truth of p (i.e., that whatever the addressee is eating, the addressee finds it tasty). Acknowledging a tag question like Buono, eh? results in registering p as a projected independent commitment of the addressee on the scoreboard of Farkas and Roelofsen (2012).

2. Michela Ippolito (faculty): "Gestures and the semantics of non-canonical questions."

I argue that both the co-speech and pro-speech symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh-questions. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a biased interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to add the presupposition that the question is resolved in the conversational context. This results in generalizing the speaker's bias to all discourse participants. More generally, I aim to show that both modalities (speech and gesture) can be analyzed and modelled using the same linguistic tools and principles.

AMP 2020

The 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place online from September 18 through 20, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Note that registration is free but will close on September 13.

Current members of the department who are presenting:

• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): "Variable hiatus in Persian is affected by suffix length."
  
• Alexei Kochetov (faculty), along with Jason Shaw (Yale University), Sejin Oh (CUNY Graduate Center), and Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University): "Distinguishing complex segments from consonant clusters using gestural coordination."
• Peter Jurgec (faculty) is also co-presenting a poster with Jesse Zymet (University of California, Berkeley): "Slovenian speakers learn the lexical propensities of individual affixes."

Alumni:

• Fulang Cater Chen (MA 2017, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "On the left-/right-branching asymmetry in Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) and Suzanne Urbanczyk (University of Victoria): "Binarity in prosodic morphology and elsewhere."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) and John Merrill (Princeton University): "Tone-driven vowel epenthesis is possible: Evidence from Wamey."

In addition, please note that next year's Annual Meeting on Phonology will be co-hosted by the University of Toronto and York University. It will be held online from October 1 through 3, 2021.

Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 1

The first Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM 1) is being held online from September 16 through 18, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. This new conference investigates experimental approaches to theoretical semantics and pragmatics.

• Suzi Lima (faculty) is giving an invited talk: "Defining atoms: a view from Brazilian languages."

And several alumni are involved with presentations:

• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) with Anouk Dieuleveut (University of Maryland) and Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland): "Finding the force: A novel word learning experiment with modals."
• Naomi Francis (MA 2014 and recent faculty, now at the University of Oslo) with Leo Rosenstein (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Martin Hackl (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Shuli Jones (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "On the acquisition of either and too."
• Giuseppe Ricciardi (MA 2016, now at Harvard University)with Rachel A. Ryskin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ted Gibson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Epistemic 'must p' is literally a strong statement."

New paper: Kochetov and Arsenault (2019)

Alexei Kochetov (faculty) and Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College) have a paper available in the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 6(2): "Kalasha affricates: An acoustic analysis of place contrasts." 

Affricates are not uncommon in consonant inventories of world languages. However, most languages have affricates at a single place of articulation (e. g. postalveolars /ʧ, ʤ/; Maddieson 1984). In Maddieson and Precoda’s (1990) sample of 451 languages, only 18% of them have affricates at two places, and just 3% have affricates at three places. The latter group includes Burushaski (isolate), Jaqaru (Aymaran), Mandarin Chinese (Sino-Tibetan), and Mazatec (Oto-Manguean), where affricates contrast at the dental/alveolar, retroflex, and alveolopalatal places of articulation. Kalasha and other Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan and Nuristani) languages of the Hindu-Kush region are not part of this sample, but they exhibit equally complex place contrasts in affricates, which are not characteristic of other Indo-Iranian languages. For instance, Kalasha features a three-way place contrast (dental, retroflex, and alveolopalatal) with four laryngeal qualities: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced, and breathy voiced. Such complex feature combinations are highly unusual in affricates, being reported in only two cases in Maddieson and Precoda’s sample: Naxi (Sino-Tibetan) and Hmong (Hmong-Mien). In this paper we examine properties of the typologically rare set of affricates in Kalasha, focusing on the acoustic realization of place across various laryngeal contrasts and syllable positions. Our results demonstrate that the three-way place contrast in Kalasha affricates is robustly distinguished by noise spectra during burst/frication and by formant transitions during adjacent vowels, while showing some variation across different laryngeal classes. These results extend the phonetic typology of coronal place contrasts, highlighting some general and language-specific aspects of the phonetic realization of affricates. In addition, the results of the study contribute to the general phonetic documentation of Kalasha, the language of a culturally and linguistically threatened community of Northern Pakistan (Rahman 2006; Khan and Heegård Petersen 2016).

Sinn und Bedeutung 25

Sinn und Bedeutung 25 is taking place online, co-hosted by University College London and Queen Mary University of London, from September 3 through 9. Special sessions are being held in the two days before that.

• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo (University of British Columbia) are presenting a talk: "Rhetorical wh-questions differing in inquisitiveness: Support from Mandarin prosody."
• Naomi Francis (MA 2014 and recent faculty, now at the University of Oslo) is giving a talk at the associated workshop on Gestures and Natural Language Semantics: "Objecting to discourse moves with gestures."

New paper: Schertz and Khan (2020)

Jessamyn Schertz (faculty) and Sarah Khan (MA) have a paper out in the Journal of Phonetics, 81: "Acoustic cues in production and perception of the four-way stop laryngeal contrast in Hindi and Urdu."

This work examines cue weighting in production and perception of the four-way laryngeal contrast in Hindi and Urdu. Previous work has consistently identified several cues, including prevoicing (duration), aspiration (duration), voice quality, and f0, that are relevant to the contrast, although the phonetic specification of the contrast, and particularly the status of the so-called “voiced aspirates,” remains unclear. In this work, we confirm the importance of prevoicing and aspiration to the contrast overall, but argue that voice quality (murmur or breathy voice) best distinguishes the voiced aspirates in production. In perception, listeners make use of all cues, in line with production patterns. Tokens in which concurrent prevoicing and aspiration are categorically identified as voiced aspirates, indicating that the joint presence of these two cues is sufficient for voiced stop identification and demonstrating the primacy of these features over all of the others tested. At the same time, neither prevoicing nor aspiration is strictly necessary for voiced aspirate identification; a stop token be perceived as a voiced aspirate even when one of these is absent, as long as the breathy voice quality also characteristic of voiced aspirates is present. We attribute the disproportionately large perceptual category space for voiced aspirates to the variability of voiced aspirates in production.

Naomi and Maya guest talk for U of T Student Life

Naomi Nagy (faculty) and collaborator Maya Abtahian (University of Rochester) are presenting a talk and question-and-answer session online on Wednesday, August 26, from 1-2 PM Eastern time, for the Stories Through Research series being held by the U of T Student Life's Innovation Hub: "Our Languages, Our Lives, and the Global Pandemic."

We all have experienced some disruption in our daily lives as a result of the pandemic, and although we can make predictions, only time will tell which disruptions will lead to long-term change. Linguists who study language change already pay attention to the relationship between short-term variation and long-term change. We already know that relatively minor disruptions in communication patterns and networks can lead to major shifts in language ecologies (the languages we speak and the people with whom and places where we speak them). As COVID-19 spread around the world, the question that occurred to us was this: How do disruptions related to the COVID lockdown affect multilingual students' language ecologies? Does it change how often we use the languages we know? And/or the contexts in which we use certain languages? 

Note that registration is required; those interested can either follow the 'Register Here' link at the bottom of this page or go directly to Eventbrite.

Research Groups: Week of August 24-28

Friday, August 28, 11:00 AM-12:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) reporting on joint work with Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo (University of British Columbia): "Rhetorical wh-questions differing in inquisitiveness: Support from Mandarin prosody."

Rhetorical questions are in many respects both question-like and assertion-like. In this talk, we propose a unified account of rhetorical and information-seeking wh-questions in inquisitive semantics, by which we claim to account for both traits. Rhetorical questions that suggest that the answer is the empty set ('nobody' to a question with who) are compared to ones that suggest a non-empty answer. We assign the same basic conventional discourse effects to the two types of rhetorical questions as for information-seeking questions, but posit different special discourse effects (following Farkas and Roelofsen 2017), which signal differences in speaker commitment. Rhetorical questions with an empty set answer signal that the speaker commits to a single piece of information, which is an informative update. On the other hand, rhetorical questions with a non-empty answer do not signal a specific answer as straightforwardly, let alone the givenness of the answer. Their interpretation therefore depends on the context, unlike the interpretation of empty set rhetorical questions. While rhetorical questions are normally considered a homogeneous group, given the differences between the two subtypes posited above, it is expected to find differences in their prosodic realization as well. We briefly show the results of a production experiment on Mandarin rhetorical wh-questions, which shows a three-way prosodic distinction between information-seeking questions and the two types of rhetorical questions: we observe a gradience in a number of prosodic cues that we think matches the inquisitive state of the speaker.

AFLA 27

The 27th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 27) is being hosted online by the National University of Singapore from August 20 through 22. Note that the conference is free of charge.

• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) and Diane Massam (faculty) are giving a presentation: "Cognate object case in Samoan and Niuean."
• Diane Massam (faculty) is also giving a presentation with Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario): "A recipe for null arguments."

SALT 30

The 30th Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30) conference is being held online from August 17 through 20, hosted by Cornell University and featuring a welcome address from university president Martha Pollack, a computational linguist by training.

• Daphna Heller (faculty) is part of a poster presentation with Sadhwi Srinivas (Johns Hopkins University) and Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins University): "Asymmetries between uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of definite descriptions."
• Julie Goncharov (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Tromsø) is giving a talk: "Dynamic presupposition of want and polarity sensitivity."
• Recent faculty member Meg Grant (Simon Fraser University) is part of a talk with Fabienne Martin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Florian Schäfer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), and Christopher Piñón (Université Lille 3): "A new case of low modality: Goal PPs."
• Spanish and Portuguese MA graduate Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is part of a talk with Vincent Rouillard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "High and low exhaustification in singular which-questions."
• Filipe Hisao Kobayashi is also presenting a poster: "Composing reciprocity: An analysis of scattered reciprocals."

Goodbyes and hellos for 2020-21

The 2020-21 year approaches! We bid farewell to our students completing their MAs in our department; to Erin Hall (Ph.D. 2020), taking up a tenure-track position in linguistics and speech pathology at California State University, San Bernardino; and to Naomi Francis (MA 2014; recent faculty), beginning a postdoc in semantics at the University of Oslo. Also, best of luck to Susana Béjar as she begins a semester of research leave.

Welcome and/or welcome back to:

• Curt Anderson (faculty), a semanticist beginning a contract faculty position at UTSC.
• Tahohtharátye William Joseph Brant (faculty), who will be beginning a joint teaching-stream position in the Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Indigenous Studies starting next summer.
• Emily Clare (postdoc; Ph.D. 2019), beginning a postdoctoral fellowship with Jessamyn Schertz (faculty) at UTM.
• Ewan Dunbar (faculty; MA 2008, BA 2007), beginning a tenure-track position in the Department of French as an Assistant Professor with a focus on computational linguistics.
• Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty), completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Language and Learning Lab at OISE and joining the Department of Linguistics as a tenure-track faculty member in language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
• Qandeel Hussain (postdoc), joining us as an Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow associated with the Phonetics Lab, working on sociophonetic variation in the speech of South Asian communities in the Toronto area.
• Samantha Jackson (postdoc), beginning a U of T Provost's Postdoctoral Fellowship and working with Derek Denis at UTM.
• Dave Kush (faculty), beginning a tenure-track position at UTSC in psycholinguistics starting in 2021.
• Avery Ozburn (faculty; MA 2014), completing a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University and joining UTM as a tenure-track faculty member in phonology.
• Pedro Mateo Pedro (faculty), beginning a teaching-stream position in Indigenous languages and revitalization.
• Ai Taniguchi (faculty), beginning a teaching-stream position in semantics at UTM.
• Deem Waham (staff), returning from leave.

We also have 16 new graduate students: 11 in the MA program and 5 in the Ph.D. Welcome, all!

New paper: Gardner and Tagliamonte (2020)

Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D. 2017, now at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) have a new paper out in English World-Wide, 41(2), "The bike, the back, and the boyfriend: Confronting the 'definite article conspiracy' in Canadian and British English."

Using comparative sociolinguistic methods, we probe the underlying mechanisms governing the variation between possessive determiners, 'my bike', and the definite article, 'the bike', in possessive contexts in two mainstream English varieties (Canadian and British English, N = 6,217). Results indicate the is stable and pervasive, occurring approximately 30 percent of the time with personal domain possessed nouns. For some nouns, e.g. dog and cat, the occurs over 75 percent of the time. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary records possessive the as chiefly British, while Quirk et al. (1985: 271–272) observe that only low-status men use it; however, we find no difference between the UK and Canada, nor a significant gender or education effect in either dataset. When we model the variation between forms according to conceptions of ownership, we find an underlying system for encoding communal possession that transcends social categories and dialect: the more that possession is communal, the more the is used.