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.