Congratulations, Maayan!

Congratulations to Maayan Abenina-Adar (BA 2012), who has recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles! After very successfully completing his specialist degree in our department, Maayan went on to McGill University and earned an MA in 2014, then continued to UCLA, where his dissertation in semantics and pragmatics, "Expressing ignorance with determiner phrases," was co-supervised by Dylan Bumford and Yael Sharvit and defended and completed in December 2020. Well done, Dr. Abenina-Adar; we are thrilled!

Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling

The Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft is hosting an online workshop on February 4 and 5: 'Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling', in conjunction with the a project, 'SPAGAD: Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse' funded by the European Research Council.

• Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Justin Leung (MA), along with their coauthors Roger Y. Lo (University of British Columbia) and Maxime A. Tulling (New York University), are presenting "What do Cantonese sentence­-final particles tell us about rhetorical questions?"

Naomi at York University next week

Naomi Nagy (faculty) is giving a talk next week for the Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact at Glendon College, York University: "Cross-generational change in heritage languages in Toronto?" This will be taking place on Wednesday, February 3, from 11 AM to 12 PM. Zoom details can be found at the link.

The Heritage Language Variation and Change project (Nagy 2009, 2011) is based on intergenerational comparisons (i.e. how many generations since the family immigrated to Toronto?) of speakers in language diaspora in Toronto. I will discuss some differences between the results of experimental studies and our variationist sociolinguistic studies based on spontaneous speech. The focus will be on the picture we see of intergenerational differences, as well as differences between homeland versus heritage varieties. In general, greater linguistic stability is illustrated by the variationist approach than experimental methods. The data are from studies of Voice Onset Time (VOT), case marking, and null subject pronoun variation. The languages discussed include Cantonese, Faetar (a Francoprovençal variety spoken in southern Italy), Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian.

Research Groups: Friday, January 29

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Qandeel Hussain (postdoc): "Phonetic correlates of stop laryngeal contrasts of Burushaski."

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Crystal Chen (MA): "Bare classifiers and definiteness in Cantonese."

Cheng and Sybesma (1999) claim that languages with numeral classifiers either use bare nouns or bare classifiers (Classifier-Noun) - but never both - to express definiteness. This claim was based on observations from Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin expresses definiteness through demonstratives and bare nouns while Cantonese employs demonstratives and bare classifiers. However, Simpson, Soh, and Normoto (2011) provide evidence against Cheng and Sybesma's claim by showing that speakers of Vietnamese, Hmong and Bangla - non-Sinitic languages with numeral classifiers - find bare nouns to be equally acceptable in instances where bare classifiers are used. Most importantly, they that this option exists in Cantonese too. Nevertheless, they conclude that despite the optionality, there is still a difference between the two constructions. More specifically, bare classifiers are used in instances involving contrast and sentential prominence, while bare nouns are licensed in the absence of contrast. I will show that despite agreeing with the claim of optionality, Cantonese bare nouns and classifiers are not distinguished by contrast. Therefore, while Cantonese shares similarities with non-Sinitic languages, there is still more to be done in determining the difference between bare nouns and classifiers in Cantonese.

Derek at TEDxUofT

Derek Denis (faculty) is giving a talk for TEDxUofT on Friday, January 29: "On the meaning and function of slang in our linguistically diverse city." The event, featuring several speakers, will run from 1:30 PM to 4 PM. Note that registration is free but that you will need a ticket in order to attend: see the bottom of the page.

Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Modification

The University of Tübingen is hosting an online workshop, Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Modification from January 28 through 30.

• Curt Anderson (faculty) is part of a talk with Wilhelm Geuder (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf): "What is manner modification?"

Congratulations, Paulina!

Congratulations to Paulina Łyskawa (BA 2014, MA 2015), who defended her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Maryland, "Coordination without grammar-internal feature resolution", on Friday, January 15. Paulina has been a part of the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) project under Naomi Nagy (faculty) since she was an undergraduate. At Maryland, she has conducted her doctoral dissertation research under the co-supervision of faculty members Omer Preminger and Maria Polinsky. Congratulations, Dr. Łyskawa!

Derek at TEDxUofT

Derek Denis (faculty) is giving a talk about Multicultural Toronto English for an afternoon panel hosted by TEDxUofT on Friday, January 29, from 1:30 PM to 4:00 PM. More details at the link!

Research Groups: Friday, January 22

Please note that today's meeting of the Fieldwork Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Guest speaker: Ken McRae (University of Western Ontario): "Event knowledge and semantic processing."

People constantly use concepts and word meaning to recognize entities and objects in their environment, to anticipate how entities will behave and interact with one another, to know how objects should be used, and to understand language. Over the years, there have been a number of theories regarding how concepts are organized and structured in semantic memory. For example, various theories stress that concepts (or lexical items) are linked by undifferentiated associations. Other theories stress hierarchical categorical (taxonomic) structure, whereas others focus on conceptual similarity spaces. In this talk, I will present evidence that people’s knowledge of real-world events and situations is an important factor underlying the structure and (contextually-determined) usage of concepts in semantic memory. I will present experiments spanning word, picture, and sentence processing. Evidence for the importance of event-based knowledge will cover a number of types of concepts, including verbs, nouns denoting living and nonliving things, and abstract concepts. I conclude that semantic memory is structured in the mind so that the computation and use of knowledge of real-world events and situations is both rapid and fundamental. In other words, event knowledge is an important force that shapes the dynamics of real-time, context-sensitive, semantic computations.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Marisa Brook (faculty) and Mirva Johnson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) on vowel trajectories over time through Finnish-to-English vowel shift in Sointula, British Columbia.

Guest speaker: Nicole Holliday (University of Pennsylvania)

We are delighted to have the chance to welcome Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania - a prolific, groundbreaking scholar of sociolinguistics, raciolinguistics, and suprasegmental phonology - as a virtual guest speaker for our department. Her talk, "Sociolinguistic variation and identity among black/biracial men", will be taking place on Friday, January 22, from 3 PM to 4:30 PM, via Zoom, and a reception will follow.

Over the past 50 years, sociolinguistic studies on black Americans have expanded in both theoretical and technical scope, and newer research has moved beyond seeing black speakers as a monolithic sociolinguistic community (Wolfram 2007, Blake 2014). Yet there remains a dearth of critical work on complex identities existing within black American communities as well as how these identities are reflected and perceived in linguistic practice. In this talk, I will present results from three studies that expand our knowledge of the rich tapestry of linguistic features employed by speakers who have not been traditionally considered in the sociolinguistic literature. Using a corpus of data from 20 biracial men who variably identify as black and/or biracial, aged 18-32, in the Washington D.C. area, I examine the ways in which racial identity is constructed via the use of intonational variables such as variable pitch accents and peak delay intervals, as well as a suite of morphosyntactic features associated with AAL. Results of a number of Bayesian and frequentist models suggest that speakers employ both intonational and morphosyntactic variation in the service of performing highly individualized racial identities, with speakers who self-identity as more black being more likely to utilize intonational features associated with AAL. In a complementary study on morphosyntactic variation within the same corpus, results revealed variation primarily conditioned by interlocutor race, as opposed to speaker identity, demonstrating that these speakers use different levels of variation to do different types of identity work (Eckert 2008, Benor 2010). Finally, I will discuss topic-based intonational variation in the same corpus, showing that these young men may alter their use of ethnically-linked intonational phenomena when discussing how their identity is performed and perceived in different contexts. In particular, I focus on intonational variation in identity performance in discussions of situations with speaker perception of material risk, such as interactions with law enforcement. The results of these three studies expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, as well as press on the boundaries of what we know about how speakers use variation to reflect who they are and who they want to be.

New paper: Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020)

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) and Bridget L. Jankowski (postdoc) have a paper out in the Journal of Pragmatics, 170: "Up north there: Discourse-pragmatic deixis in Northern Ontario."

In this paper we analyze the discourse-pragmatic use of the adverbs there/here, e.g., 'So, our grandson there is a real mixture', in four small northern Ontario towns. 1200 examples contrasted by type of reference, ambiguous locative or non-locative, were coded for social and linguistic factors and analysed using statistical modelling. The results reveal that the strongest predictor of discourse-pragmatic use is date of birth: middle-aged speakers use it most in each town, but no other social factors (e.g. perceived gender, education, job type) are significant. Importantly, the higher the proportion of Francophone populations in the community, the greater the use of there but not here. We argue that alignment between Francophones and Anglophones is a likely explanation. More generally this study highlights the value of discourse-pragmatic features for understanding styles of interaction and underscores the research potential for comparing these phenomena across communities.

Winter Michif Language Workshop

Following up from the end of November, as part of the Ciimaan/Kahuwe’ya/Qajaq project, the Centre for Indigenous Studies is holding a workshop on Michif on Wednesday, January 20 from 1 through 3 PM, featuring Joshua Morin from Michif Cultural Connections in Alberta. University of Toronto students and Indigenous community members (and those who are both) are welcome! Registration instructions can be found at the bottom of the image below.

New paper: Lima (2020)

Suzi Lima (faculty) has a new paper out in Cadernos de Linguística, 1(3): "Language maintenance and revitalization in Canada."

At least seventy indigenous languages are spoken in Canada. Studies indicate that most Canadian indigenous languages are endangered, in large part, due to the low rate of transmission of these languages as a first language. However, while Canadian census data show a decline in the transmission of indigenous languages as a first language, studies suggest a consistent increase in the number of second language speakers, due in part to linguistic revitalization programs in the country. In this article I give a brief overview of initiatives to maintain and revitalize indigenous languages in Canada, with a particular focus on Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) immersion schools, which have managed to create many fluent speakers of this language. These speakers have in turn helped new generations of learners both in communities and in academia. I emphasize the power of small and large initiatives to further the preservation and maintenance of languages.

Congratulations, Pocholo!

Earlier today, the Linguistic Society of America announced the winners of its annual awards and honours. We are thrilled that this year's recipient of the Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award is our own Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.). The Dayton Award, in the words of the LSA, recognizes "a graduate student pursuing a course of study in sociolinguistics who demonstrates a distinguished level of scholastic achievement". Congratulations, Pocholo - we can certainly attest to this being a thoroughly well-deserved honour!

New paper: Béjar, Massam, Pérez-Leroux, and Roberge (2020)

Susana Béjar (faculty), Diane Massam (faculty), Ana-Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), and Yves Roberge (faculty) have a chapter, "Rethinking complexity" in an edited volume, Syntactic architecture and its consequences I, edited by András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas, and Sten Vikner.

This paper addresses the nature of complexity of recursion. We consider four asymmetries involving caps on recursion observed in previous experimental acquisition studies, which argue that complexity cannot be characterized exclusively in terms of the number of iterations of Merge. While recursion is essentially syntactic and allowed for by the minimalist toolkit via Merge, selection, and labeling or projection, the complexity of recursive outputs arises at the interface.

New paper: Moulton, Block, Gendron, Han, and Nederveen (2020)

Keir Moulton (faculty), Trevor Block (Simon Fraser University), Holly Gendron (Simon Fraser University), Chung-hye Han (Simon Fraser University), and Sander Nederveen (former visiting student, now at Simon Fraser University) have a new paper in Glossa, 5(1): "Singular they in context."

There is a growing experimental and theoretical literature on singular they, much of it focusing on the nature of the antecedents it takes (Foertsch and Gernsbacher 1997; Bjorkman 2017; Doherty & Conklin 2017; Prasad 2017; Ackerman et al. 2018; Ackerman 2018a; Ackerman 2018b; Conrod 2018; Ackerman 2019; Camilliere et al. 2019; Conrod 2019; Konnelly and Cowper 2020). We conducted two experiments which, in contrast to earlier studies, manipulated whether the gender of the referent of singular they is known to the discourse participants and whether there is a linguistic antecedent for singular they. We found that the presence of an antecedent ameliorates the acceptability of singular they - even in a context where the gender of the referent may be known to the hearer. We interpret this novel finding as revealing how a linguistic antecedent can signal the irrelevance of gender in a discourse and thereby licenses singular they. We also find a trend, inversely correlated with age, toward higher acceptability of even deictic singular they in gender known contexts, partially bearing out findings in Bjorkman (2017), Conrod (2019), and Konnelly and Cowper (2020) about innovative users of singular they.