LSRL 50

The 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, is taking place online from July 1 through 8, with 2.5 hours of content via Zoom every day. Note that registration is free.

We have several alumni involved:

• Beth MacLeod (Ph.D. 2012, now at Carleton University): "Phonetic convergence in Mexican Spanish: Combining acoustic and perceptual assessments."
  
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): "DOM and the PCC: How many types?"
• Laura Colantoni (faculty), Ruth Martínez (Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese), Natalia Mazzaro (Ph.D. 2011, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Texas at El Paso), Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), and Natalia Rinaldi (Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese): "Gender marking under disguise: Phonetics and grammar in Spanish-English bilinguals."
• Recent faculty member Anne-José Villeneuve (University of Alberta) and Julie Auger (Université de Montréal): "Assessing change in a Gallo-Romance regional minority language: First plural verbal morphology and semantic reference in Picard."

Congratulations, Phil!

Congratulations to faculty psycholinguist Phil Monahan, who has received tenure at our Scarborough campus. Well-deserved!

Research Groups: Week of June 15-19

Wednesday, June 17, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM: Syntax Group
Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University): "Linearizing as best you can."

This talk looks at interactions among linearization, prosody, and vocabulary insertion, focusing on cases of verb doubling that appear to be motivated not by syntactic movement, but by the need for an otherwise-unsupported clitic to have a host. Drawing on examples of verb doubling in Ingush (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Breton (Celtic), I argue first that the linearization of syntactic structures is accomplished via the interaction of ranked and violable constraints, as in OT, rather than via a deterministic linearization algorithm of the type often assumed in syntax. Second, I argue that linearization and prosodification proceed in parallel, allowing verb doubling as a trade-off between prosodic well-formedness (the need of a clitic for a host) and optimal linearization - but that this evaluation occurs prior to both Vocabulary Insertion and the subsequent competition of segmental phonology. The final sections of the talk discuss the implications of this model for doubling more generally, and more particularly for our ability to explain the fact that certain movement configurations appear to lead to doubling in some languages but not in others. I discuss verb doubling in predicate focus, clitic doubling, and several other instances of apparent multiple realization.

Research Groups: Week of June 8-12

Wednesday, June 10, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM: Syntax Group
Paul Poirier (MA): "The spellout of the Japanese copula: Considerations from nominalization."

Department of Linguistics statement regarding current events

On behalf of the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Nathan Sanders (faculty) offers this message to the members of our linguistics community:

We are outraged and saddened by the continuing racist violence and abuses of power against racialized groups in the United States, Canada, and throughout the world, especially the long history of police brutality against Black people and Black communities that has once again gained worldwide attention. The faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto declare our explicit support for the Black Lives Matter movement and other networks that are working to end unjust power structures and the racism that drives them.

We believe it is also important to recognize our department's shortcomings on these issues and the need to redress them. The small number of Black scholars and students in the field of linguistics is a pervasive problem, and we acknowledge that we can do better with Black representation in our department and with fighting anti-Black racism more broadly. We have taken small steps, such as ongoing changes to our curriculum and applying for institutional opportunities such as the Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship for Black and Indigenous scholars, but there is much more uncomfortable work we need to do. As we make plans to put that work into action, we welcome voices from our community and beyond about how we as a department can best enact positive change.

Please consider joining some of the upcoming events sponsored by the Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office to help further much needed discussion and action: https://antiracism.utoronto.ca/reflect-restore-action/

For more information and resources on the important role of linguistics in racial justice, see the following statement from the Linguistic Society of America: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2020/06/03/lsa-issues-statement-racial-justice

Congratulations, Erin!

Congratulations to Erin Hall (Ph.D.), who has accepted a tenure-track position in linguistics and speech pathology at California State University, San Bernardino! We will miss Erin and her vibrant, positive presence, but are thrilled for her and CSUSB!

Research Groups: Week of June 1-5

Friday, June 5, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Casual meeting: check-in about what everyone's been up to.

Applications now open for LIN398 in 2020-21

Suzi Lima (faculty) is leading a year-long Research Opportunity Program course (LIN398) over the course of the 2020-21 academic year on the topic of 'Internationalized learning at home: Investigating African languages spoken in Toronto':

Statistics Canada (2019) reports that the Black population is steadily growing in Canada. In Toronto, this population has doubled in the last 20 years. In this population, 56% are first-generation (born outside Canada) and 35% are second-generation (born in Canada but at least one parent was born abroad). Statistics Canada (2019) also reports that the number of immigrants from Africa has increased significantly, making up about 65% of the population of Black immigrants (as opposed to 27.3% of immigrants from the Caribbean and Bermuda). At the University of Toronto the population of undergraduate students from Africa corresponded (in 2017) to 2.6% (415 students) of the international student population (Liang 2017). The official records of the University of Toronto (Liang 2017) also report that Nigeria is the 9th most common country of origin for international students. In this project, our goal is to describe some semantic aspects of African languages while engaging the first- and second-generation communities of speakers of these languages. The goals of this project will advance the description of African languages spoken in Toronto and promote the visibility of these languages and communities of speakers on campus.

Application instructions can be found here. Note that interested undergraduate students are highly encouraged to submit by Friday, June 12, as review of applications will begin very shortly thereafter.