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.