Naomi and undergrad RAs in Arts and Science News

Naomi Nagy (faculty), Kate Cheung (BA), Mira Chow (BA), and Jonathan Ng (BA) are featured in the Arts and Science News this week in the form of an article on variation and change in heritage Cantonese as spoken by several generations of Toronto residents - one of 10 languages of Naomi's ongoing Heritage Language Variation and Change project.

Research Groups: Friday, January 31

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in SS 560A: Fieldwork Group

Greg Antono (MA): "Language revitalisation in Singapore: The case of Kristang (Melaka Creole Portuguese)."

Kristang, also known as Melaka Creole Portuguese, is the critically endangered heritage language of the Portuguese-Eurasian community in Singapore and the greater Malayan region. Spoken by fewer than 100 speakers in Singapore, there was little documentation, nor even awareness of this Portuguese-Malay creole up until recently. In 2016, Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’), a community-based non-profit, multicultural and intergenerational initiative was launched to revitalise this language. Through their classes and other activities, this youth-led initiative has since seen considerable success in generating public interest in the language. In this presentation, I first provide an overview of this creole language's features and its origins; and address Singapore’s sociolinguistic situation that has led to its current status. Drawing from Wong (2019)'s article on Kodrah Kristang's development, I will then discuss some aspects of Kodrah Kristang’s grassroots efforts, and the challenges they face in the revitalisation of this language in the highly urbanised context of Singapore.

1:15 PM - 2:45 PM in SS 560A: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Thesis proposal of Robert Prazeres (Ph.D.): "Comparative sociolinguistic study of nominal genitives across Arabic varieties."

Guest speaker: Laurel Perkins (École normale supérieure)

Our department is pleased to welcome back Laurel Perkins (BA 2010), now a postdoc at l'École normale supérieure in Paris. Laurel earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2019, focusing on the earliest stages of the L1 acquisition process, especially with respect to syntax and semantics. Her talk, "How to grow a grammar: Syntactic development in one-year-olds", will be taking place on Friday, January 31, at 3 PM in SS 560A.

What we can learn depends on what we already know; a child who can't count cannot learn arithmetic, and a child who can't segment words cannot identify properties of verbs in her language. Language acquisition, like learning in general, is incremental. How do children draw the right generalizations about their language using incomplete and noisy representations of their linguistic input? In this talk, I'll examine some of the first steps of syntax acquisition in one-year-old infants, using behavioral methods to probe their linguistic representations, and computational methods to ask how they learn from those representations. Taking argument structure as my case study, I will show: (1) that infants differentiate core clause arguments like 'subject' and 'object' when learning verbs, (2) that infants develop the ability to recognize when arguments have been displaced in "non-basic" clauses like wh-questions, but do so only after learning local argument dependencies, and (3) that it is possible for infants to draw accurate generalizations even when they cannot yet recognize displaced arguments, by learning to treat some of their data as signal and some of their data as noise for early grammar learning. I will argue that the approach I take for studying this particular learning problem will generalize widely, allowing us to build new models for understanding the role of development in grammar learning.

In memoriam: William J. Samarin (1926-2020)

We are very saddened to have learned of the passing of Professor Emeritus Bill Samarin, a linguistic anthropologist of towering reputation, on January 16 at the age of 93. Bill joined our faculty in 1967 - the same year he introduced the term 'field linguistics' in a newly published book. Prior to this, as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Bill had already begun working on the Niger-Congo languages (especially Gbeya) and creole linguistics (particularly Sango), and continued doing so for the rest of his days - well past his official retirement in the early 1990s. He had a number of departmental undergraduates and graduate students working on his grant-funded projects all the way up to present-day Ph.D. students, and could be found on campus well into his eighties. In 2018, Bill attended our 50th Anniversary festivities as he was completing a comprehensive new work on Central African languages. Thanks to Jack Chambers (faculty) for sharing the details, as well as this anecdote:

"He became a kind of venerated figure in the African community where he worked partly because his use of the pidgin Sango was seen as classic, retaining features that were lost by young speakers. He was proud to tell me that elders would send their children to speak with him as he sat in the town common so they could get a taste of 'proper' Sango."

Rest in peace, Bill.

UTism 2020

The ninth University of Toronto Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Mind (UTism) is taking place this weekend (February 1-2). Please note that registration is required. The theme is 'Vision and visual perception: How does vision affect cognition?'. Of special note when it comes to linguistics is the invited talk by Corrine Occhino (Rochester Institute of Technology): "Embodied cognition, visual language, and the emergence of form":

Vision and visual schematization have an important role to play in conceptualization and in the creation of grammatical structure. Following the embodied turn in cognitive science, we see spoken language and written language as inextricably anchored to the visual modality. In this talk I will argue that signers and signed languages offer a unique look into cognition when the primary sensory mode of experience unfolds in the visual modality. Looking at language processing in American Sign Language (ASL), we find that tasks which do not require overt semantic processing nevertheless are influenced by meaningful, 'visually iconic' aspects of signs. My work on iconicity in the visual modality has shown that while iconicity can impact processing, it interacts with several experiential factors including language proficiency and socio-cultural experience. How can these findings from studies on the role of iconicity in signed language processing be reconciled within a larger, psychologically plausible framework of language and cognition? I will conclude my talk by discussing the mechanisms underlying findings from embodied and situated language processing and the findings presented on iconicity effects in signed language processing. I argue that the key to bringing research on signed languages and spoken languages together is to recognize that language users visualize scenes to make sense of the language that they process. Understanding the interaction between language users’ experiences and the multimodality of the linguistic signal will be important factors to consider as we investigate the role of vision in the emergence of linguistic structure.

Guest speaker: Myrto Grigoroglou (University of Toronto)

We are very pleased to host a guest talk by Myrto Grigoroglou (postdoc), who is currently working with Patricia Ganea (faculty, OISE) in the Language and Learning Lab. Her research is focused on language acquisition, particularly its intersections with cognitive development. Myrto's talk, "Pragmatic inference in language acquisition and use," will be taking place on Friday, January 24, at 3:00 PM, in SS560A.

A design feature of the human language is that what a speaker means often goes beyond what the speaker says. To become competent communicators, children need to learn how to bridge the gap between the semantic meaning of words and the intended, pragmatic meaning of an utterance. In this talk, I will describe my work on how semantics and pragmatics interact over the course of language acquisition. I will first present evidence on children's ability to tailor their speech to the informational needs of other people. I will argue that the likelihood of children adjusting their speech to the needs of their listener depends on the cognitive load of each specific listener-oriented adjustment and the nature of the communicative exchange. Next, I will examine the role of pragmatic inference in the children's acquisition and use of spatial terms. I will argue that cross-linguistically robust patterns of spatial language emergence do not solely index semantic development but may also be linked to pragmatic factors. Finally, I will briefly show that pragmatic factors may similarly affect spatial language use in adults across languages . Together, these studies shed light on the mechanisms underlying children's ability to integrate pragmatic inference in to the language use.

Chalkboard throwback #2: Everywug (Spring 2014)

Photo by Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D. 2019). Collaborative art by, inter alia, Naomi Francis (faculty), Maida Percival (Ph.D.), Marisa Brook (faculty), and Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.).

​Spot the cross-country skiing wug, programmer wug, hockey wug, farmer wug, Canadian wug, graduating wug, Easter egg wug, librarian wug, photographic negative wug, umbrella-hat wug, knitter wug, left-handed wug, golf wug, skateboarder wug, gardener wug, dragon wug without wings, leiderhosen wug, phonetician wug, winter wug, mutant wug, downhill skiing wug, Santa wug, underwater wug, Doctor Who wug, ballerina wug, guitar wug, alligator wug, medieval wug, tipsy wug, math-nerd wug, royal monarch wug, angel wug, arrow'd wug, Wuglo, jazz wug, Victorian-gentleman wug, dragon wug with wings, wug on fire, wug on a brick wall, chef wug, fairy wug, Harry Potter wug, bunny wug, hiker wug, jousting wug, business wug, prisoner wug, birthday wug, traveller wug, hula-hoop wug, and more - as well as a number of wugs whose features correspond to underspecified contrasts.

For bonus points: wugs aside, without peeking, whose birthday was it?

Research Groups: Week of January 20-24

Thursday, January 23, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM in SS 1078: Morphology Reading Group
Ross Godfrey (Ph.D.) leading a group discussion of: Chandlee, Jane (2017). Computational locality in morphological maps. Morphology, 27, 599–641.

Friday, January 24, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in SS 4043: Psycholinguistics Group

Jade Lei Yu (Ph.D., Department of Computer Science) and John Xu (Ph.D., Department of Computer Science), making two presentations: "How nouns surface as verbs: A generative framework for word class conversion" and "Prototype theory and meaning change in the semantic field of emotion."

Friday, January 24, 1:15 PM - 2:45 PM in SS 560A: Semantics Research Group

Heather Stephens (Ph.D.): "Yeah, no, that was implied: Targeting non-asserted propositions with propositional anaphors."

Most contemporary treatments of polarity particles agree that these expressions are in some sense anaphoric to propositions (e.g., Krifka 2015, Roelofsen and Farkas 2015). When two particles of opposing polarity are used in a single response, as in (1), several questions arise, including: exactly which propositions are the particles picking up? How can such responses be modelled? I will provide some thoughts in response to these questions, using the framework laid out by Roelofsen and Farkas (2015) as the point of departure:

(1) Dorothy: [We’ve got] to do this shopping Peter.

Peter: Yeah, no it’s alright nanna, we’ve got 5 minutes. (Burridge and Florey 2002).

Department gathering in support of the Iranian community

We will be holding a gathering at 4 PM today in the department lounge in support of the Iranians and Iranian-Canadians among us in the wake of the loss of Ukraine International Airlines PS752. Everyone will be welcome to say a few words.

Suzi in BBC News

Suzi Lima (faculty) is one of several linguists interviewed in the BBC about how minority languages handle specialized scientific/technical vocabulary that originated in majority languages.

Visiting scholars: Robert Grošelj and Tamara Mikolič Južnič (University of Ljubljana)

Peter Jurgec's Erasmus+ Mobility Grant from the EU Commission has allowed for a two-year period of research and teaching exchange. In conjunction with this, we are delighted to welcome two visiting linguists: Robert Grošelj and Tamara Mikolič Južnič, both Assistant Professors in the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana. Between them, they will be giving eight talks, as follows. All current departmental members and friends are welcome!

1. Monday, January 20, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A contrastive look at linguistic gender categories: Slovene and Italian names of public offices" (Robert Grošelj):

The contrastive lecture on the representation of linguistic gender categories – grammatical, lexical, referential and social gender – in Slovene and Italian will focus on personal nouns denoting selected public offices such as Slovene minister, ministrica ‘minister-male, minister-female’, župan, županja ‘mayor-male, mayor-female’ and the synonymous Italian il ministro, la ministra, il sindaco, la sindaca (sindachessa). Both languages have grammatically and lexically feminine and masculine personal nouns; referential gender of masculine nouns is wider, as they can refer to male, male and/or female referents, in Italian also exclusively to female referents. The agreement is controlled mainly by grammatical (and the corresponding lexical) gender, although in some cases (cf. gender exclusive categories) the agreement can be triggered also by referential gender. The selected public offices could be held by women only in the 1940s; the men are still the predominant holders of these offices (judges being the exception) which indicates their male social gender.

2. Monday, January 20, from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Connectors in spoken and written discourse in the multimodal corpus EPTIC" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

With its multimodal and multilingual design, the EPTIC corpus fosters a range of different research perspectives, involving interpreting and translation and different types of comparisons of the different combinations of subcorpora. It consists of original speeches from the European Parliament, their written verbatim reports, their Slovene interpretations and the translations of the verbatim reports. The initial research on EPTIC-SI, the Slovene component of EPTIC, has focused on interpreted discourse in contrast with the corresponding translations and the corresponding source texts. In this lecture, the aim is to expand this research paradigm, by using data from EPTIC-SI and contrasting it with a corpus of spoken Slovene (GOS) and a corpus of written Slovene (KRES), to shed light on the differences between the spoken and the written varieties of Slovene. The aim is to explore the differences in frequency in the two corpora, the differences between interpreted and freely spoken texts and the differences between translations and original texts in the target language.

3. Tuesday, January 21, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Nominalization in Italian and Slovene: A systemic functional linguistics view" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

The lecture focuses on a contrastive analysis of nominalization in Italian and Slovene within the framework of systemic functional grammar as described by M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues. Nominalization is viewed as a type of grammatical metaphor whereby processes which are congruently realized by verbs are metaphorically realized by nouns expressing the same process as those verbs. The frequency of nominalization varies greatly among languages as well as among genres within a language, and may cause problems when two languages interact, e.g. in translation, especially when one of the two languages seems less prone to use this kind of grammatical metaphor than the other. In the present study, an analysis is carried out of a 2.5 million token parallel corpus of Italian source texts and their Slovene translations, particularly with regard to the different translation equivalents that may appear in the translated texts, which is partly dependent of the type of process involved.

4. Wednesday, January 22, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Vojvodina Rusyn language: A short presentation of a South Slavic microlanguage and its phoneme inventory" (Robert Grošelj):

The main aim of the lecture will be the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn as a specific South Slavic (literary) microlanguage. The introductory part of the lecture will focus on the concept of Slavic (literary) microlanguage, introduced and developed by the Russian-Estonian linguist A. Duličenko; the analysis of the concept will take into account its defining characteristics, geographical classification and sociolinguistic parameters (name, vernacular base, time period of the literary tradition, script, time period of codification, functional status). The following part will be dedicated to the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn, a South Slavic microlanguage spoken in Vojvodina (Serbia); the analysis will focus on Vojvodina Rusyn history, language system, literary production, standardisation and contemporary sociolinguistic issues. In the last part of the lecture, the Vojvodina Rusyn phoneme inventory will be briefly analysed.

5. Wednesday, January 22, 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A corpus study of pronominal subjects in translated and non-translated texts" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

Pronominal subject use constitutes a potential challenge in translation because of cross-linguistic differences: while the subject must be expressed in non-null subject languages, this is not necessary in null subject languages. The aim of the lecture is twofold: first, to show that the type of source language influences the frequency of personal pronouns in translation, and second, to establish whether translations into a null subject language differ from comparable target language originals in terms of pronominal subject use. The study is based on the analysis of a 625,000-word corpus comprising original and translated popular science texts in Slovene and the corresponding source texts in English and Italian. The results confirm that pronominal subjects are more frequent in translations from English, a non-null subject language; furthermore, they are more frequent in translations than in comparable originals. Atypical cohesive patterns are identified in translations and possible reasons for their presence are explored.

6. Wednesday, January 22, 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Italian pronunciation in dictionaries for young learners" (Robert Grošelj):

The aim of the lecture will be the representation of Italian pronunciation features in dictionaries for Slovene young learners. The analysis will include five categories of phonetic-phonological features, important for pronunciation learning: pronunciation guides, phonetic transcription, phonemes, consonant length and accent. The representation of these features in a dictionary for young learners should be clear and coherent, in some cases (especially in dictionaries for the youngest users) accompanied by audio pronunciations. After a brief presentation of foreign language/second language pronunciation teaching and learning and the role dictionaries play in it, the Italian pronunciation in Slovene dictionaries for young learners will be analysed. The dictionaries analysed are incomplete with regard to the presentation of pronunciation features: most of them do not include audio recordings; phonological transcriptions of the entries and pronunciation guides – when a dictionary includes them – are incomplete; some dictionaries do not include any useful information about Italian pronunciation which limits the possibility of their use.

7. Thursday, January 23, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "Structural gaps and how to bridge them – the case of the nominalized infinitive" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

The lecture will present a textual shift that was observed in a comparison between the Italian nominalized infinitive and its Slovene translations. The nominalized infinitive essentially allows a process to be worded as a nominal structure, while (at least partly) retaining its verbal nature; in the framework of systemic functional grammar, it is explained as a type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. nominalization. The absence of a parallel structure in the grammar of Slovene requires the translator to look for other means of expression. A corpus analysis, carried out with the aid of a parallel corpus which comprises both literary and non-literary Italian texts and their Slovene translations, shows that the dual (nominal and verbal) nature of the nominalized infinitive is reflected in two main types of translation equivalents and several minor ones. It is argued that the strategies displayed in the choice of these translation equivalents can be viewed as instances of obligatory explicitation, either norm-governed or strategic. Thus the main goals of the paper are to identify the textual shifts and strategies found in the parallel corpus and to see whether they can be explained as manifestations of explicitation.

8. Thursday, January 23, 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "The supine and the supine clause in South Slavic languages" (Robert Grošelj):

The topic of the lecture will be the evolution of the supine (a nonfinite verb form used after verbs of movement, indicating their goal) and the supine clause in South Slavic languages. The analysis of the historical and contemporary language situations shows a gradual loss of the supine from the South-East toward the North-West. The supine, still present in Old Church Slavonic, has been completely replaced by the analytic da-clause in Bulgarian and Macedonian, and by the infinitive in Štokavian (in most dialects) and Čakavian. On the other hand, the supine is still preserved in Kajkavian and Slovenian, although the situation varies diachronically and diatopically (e.g. in some dialects it has merged with the infinitive). The lecture will present, in addition, a number of clause types (the final finite clause, the infinitive clause, the za ‘for’ + infinitive construction) that replaced the supine clause or still compete with it in South Slavic languages.

Research Groups: Friday, January 17

Note the irregular times and/or places for group meetings this week (and for most of the rest of the semester).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in SS 560A: Phonology Group
TBA

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in BA 2139: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: group discussion of ideas and insights!

1:15 PM - 2:45 PM in SS 560A: Fieldwork Group
Breanna Pratley (MA) leading a discussion of: Woodward, James (2018). Endangered sign languages: An introduction. In Kenneth L. Rehg and Lyle Campbell (eds.), The Oxford handbook of endangered languages, 167–202. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guest speaker: Christopher Hammerly (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Our department is pleased to welcome Christopher Hammerly, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on psycholinguistics and morphosyntax, and he has a particular interest in Ojibwe/Anishinaabemowin in accordance with his own heritage. He will be giving a talk, "Number representation and memory in agreement processing," in SS 560A at 3:00 PM on Friday, January 17.

Agreement attraction occurs when there is a disruption in the regular pattern of number agreement between the subject and the verb due to the presence of a number mismatching distractor noun. For example, many studies have shown that more plural verb forms are produced in the mismatch sentences in (1a) compared to the match baseline in (1b), despite the subject being singular in both cases. 

(1a) The key to the cabinets... (mismatch)
(1b) The key to the cabinet... (match)

Over the nearly 30 years that this phenomenon has been investigated, different theories have emerged to capture these effects in sentence production versus comprehension. Production errors have been explained by an encoding account (e.g. Marking andMorphing), where the number of the singular subject is misrepresented as plural in memory. Comprehension errors have been explained by a retrieval error (e.g. as implemented in ACT-R), where the attractor is mistakenly computed as the controller of agreement. In this talk, I argue for a unified processing source for agreement attraction by extending the encoding account to comprehension. This extension is based on two key findings. First, that agreement attraction in comprehension can be observed in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. This is predicted under current encoding accounts, but not memory retrieval accounts, and stands in contrast to previous experimental results that found attraction only in ungrammatical sentences. Second, I show that the size of agreement attraction effects is a function of syntactic distance between the attractor noun and the subject, a result directly predicted by current encoding theories.

Congratulations, Karlien!

Congratulations to Karlien Franco (postdoc), who has accepted a postdoc position at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Leuven in Belgium. As of February 10, she will be working on the project 'Nephological Semantics' under the direction of Dirk Geeraerts. The endeavour will be using computational techniques to help ascertain where the boundaries are around sociolinguistic variables; Karlien's contributions will be focusing on the crossroads of lexical semantics and sociolinguistic variation.

We'll miss you, Karlien, but this opportunity is so well-earned. All the best, and keep in touch!

Newcomers for the beginning of 2020

Two colleagues have joined us at the beginning of the new semester:

Naomi Francis (MA 2014), who completed her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September and is now joining our faculty as a Sessional Lecturer in semantics.

Fahimeh Khodaverdi (Allameh Tabataba'i University), a Ph.D. student from Iran, here working with Yoonjung Kang on sound change and the phonetics-phonology interface.

Welcome!

Report from LSA 2020 and so on

The 94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, from January 2 through 5, and alongside them the annual meetings of seven 'sister societies' as usual. More than two dozen current U of T linguists and alumni were involved, including all of these folks!

Volunteers: Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Greg Antono (MA), and Rosie Owen (BA). (Photo courtesy of Greg.)

Presenters: Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Karlien Franco (postdoc), Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), and Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019). (Photo by Kenji Oda.)

 Alumni: Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University), Derek Denis (faculty, and also Ph.D. 2015),
Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019), and Kenji Oda (Ph.D. 2012, now at Syracuse University).

Chalkboard throwback #1: *OT (Spring 2011)

In which Optimality Theory is not the optimal candidate. (Origins obscure.)

Research Groups: Friday, January 10

Note that since Fridays are going to be very busy in our department throughout the semester, our research group schedule will be decidedly irregular.

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM in SS 4043: Psycholinguistics Group

Ella Rabinovich (postdoc, Department of Computer Science): "Say anything: Automatic semantic infelicity detection in L2 English indefinite pronouns."

Computational research on error detection in second language speakers has mainly addressed clear grammatical anomalies typical to learners at the beginner-to-intermediate level. We focus instead on acquisition of subtle semantic nuances of English indefinite pronouns by non-native speakers at varying levels of proficiency. We first lay out theoretical, linguistically motivated hypotheses, and supporting empirical evidence, on the nature of the challenges posed by indefinite pronouns to English learners. We then suggest and evaluate an automatic approach for detection of atypical usage patterns, demonstrating that deep learning architectures are promising for this task involving nuanced semantic anomalies.

11:45 AM - 1:15 PM in SS 560A: Syntax Group

Yadira Álvarez López (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "From meteorology to linguistics: Re-examining precipitation verbs in English (and beyond)."