New paper: Konnelly (2021)

Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) has a paper out in the Journal of Language and Sexuality, 10(1): "Nuance and normativity in trans linguistic research."

While normativity has been central to queer linguistic research, the emergent field of trans linguistics provides opportunities for greater nuance and elaboration on the concept. Drawing from interviews with non-binary people documenting their narratives of doctor-patient visits, I present a series of recounted interactional moments where what might be considered 'normative' is in fact a survival strategy, highlighting how we might view certain invocations of the transnormative (Johnson 2016) in more complicated ways. Notions of normativity and authenticity, which are too often weaponized against trans people as a means to measure their 'success' in approximating cisheteronormative ideals, are not easily transported from queer linguistics to trans linguistics. As concepts imbricated with a history of violence for trans people, they must be treated with care and responsibility, as part of an active devotion to dismantling transphobia.

Congratulations, Julien!

Congratulations to Julien Carrier (Ph.D. 2020), who is taking up a competitive SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship! He has recently joined the Université du Québec à Montréal to work under the supervision of UQAM faculty member Richard Compton (Ph.D. 2012), himself the recent recipient of an award for excellence in teaching, on morphosyntactic variation in varieties of Inuktitut. This will be quite the collaboration and is a thoroughly well-earned opportunity. Congratulations, Julien - and also Richard!

New paper: Fu and Monahan (2021)

Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.) and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a paper out in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15: "Extracting phonetic features from natural classes: A mismatch negativity study of Mandarin Chinese retroflex consonants."

How speech sounds are represented in the brain is not fully understood. The mismatch negativity (MMN) has proven to be a powerful tool in this regard. The MMN event-related potential is elicited by a deviant stimulus embedded within a series of repeating standard stimuli. Listeners construct auditory memory representations of these standards despite acoustic variability. In most designs that test speech sounds, however, this variation is typically intra-category: All standards belong to the same phonetic category. In the current paper, inter-category variation is presented in the standards. These standards vary in manner of articulation but share a common phonetic feature. In the standard retroflex experimental block, Mandarin Chinese speaking participants are presented with a series of 'standard' consonants that share the feature [retroflex], interrupted by infrequent non-retroflex deviants. In the non-retroflex standard experimental block, non-retroflex standards are interrupted by infrequent retroflex deviants. The within-block MMN was calculated, as was the identity MMN (iMMN) to account for intrinsic differences in responses to the stimuli. We only observed a within-block MMN to the non-retroflex deviant embedded in the standard retroflex block. This suggests that listeners extract [retroflex] despite significant inter-category variation. In the non-retroflex standard block, because there is little on which to base a coherent auditory memory representation, no within-block MMN was observed. The iMMN to the retroflex was observed in a late time-window at centro-parieto-occipital electrode sites instead of fronto-central electrodes, where the MMN is typically observed, potentially reflecting the increased difficulty posed by the added variation in the standards. In short, participants can construct auditory memory representations despite significant acoustic and inter-category phonological variation so long as a shared phonetic feature binds them together.

Research Groups: Friday, March 26

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Group discussion led by Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.) of a paper: D'Onofrio, Annette (forthcoming). Age-based perceptions of a reversing regional sound change. Journal of Phonetics, 86.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Marjorie Leduc (MA): "Vowel harmony in Karajá."

This talk will present a preliminary OT analysis of Karajá’s ATR harmony accounting for the regressive properties of the pattern as well as the icy target behaviour of the high vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, which harmonize to [i] and [u], but then block harmony from proceeding past them. This contrasts with underlying /i/ and /u/, which are trigger to the harmony process, creating a distinction between underlying and derived vowel behaviour which can be difficult to deal with in surface-oriented frameworks like OT.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Semantics Research Group
Laurestine Bradford (MA): "Using communicative need to predict colexification in CLICS-3."

There is a cross-linguistic tendency for the more complex systems of vocabulary to be the ones with the most communicative power (Kemp, Xu, and Regier, 2017). Recently, a new cross-linguistic and cross-domain tool, that can help test such generalizations about vocabulary, was published: the third edition of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS3; Rzymski, Tresoldi, et al., 2019). Using this, we can ask to what extent communicative efficiency predicts amounts of colexification. That is, do languages colexify more words in domains that are less often needed? In my project, I attempt to compare the frequency of selected domains, in different languages' corpora, with the amount of domain-internal colexification attested in CLICS3. I will explain some of the theoretical and practical issues that have come up so far, as I attempt to quantify amounts of colexification and make use of potentially noisy data.

Myrto in Arts and Science News

Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty) has been interviewed for the Arts and Science News talking about her research and the roots of the modern subfield of language acquisition. Check it out!

New paper: Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte (2021)

Former postdoc Melanie Röthlisberger (now at the University of Zurich) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) have a new paper in Language Variation and Change, 32(3): "The social embedding of a syntactic alternation: Variable particle placement in Ontario English."

The present work investigates the effects of social constraints on word order variation in particle placement in Ontario English, Canada. While previous research has documented numerous linguistic factors conditioning the choice of variant, social correlates have so far remained unexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 6,047 variable phrasal verbs from the vernacular speech of six communities in Ontario. These data were coded for length of the direct object, verb semantics, community, and the individual's education, gender, age, and occupation. Our analyses confirm previous findings that variation in particle placement is predominantly determined by direct object length. However, we also expose significant social and geographic factors, and importantly an effect of age, with younger speakers using the joined variant more than older speakers. Further analysis confirms that the latter effect is consistent across communities, indicating a change in progress, possibly due to ongoing grammaticalization of particles in the verb phrase.

Paulina Łyskawa at York University this week

This week, Paulina Łyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland) is giving a virtual talk for York University. Paulina, a syntactician with an interest in heritage languages and endangered languages, recently completed her Ph.D. under the joint supervision of Masha Polinsky and Omer Preminger. Her talk, "When your grammar is not enough: Agreement with coordinate structures", will be taking place on Zoom on Friday, March 26, from 3 to 4 PM. See the email for a link.

Natural languages reflect the grammatical features of [person], [number] and [gender/noun-class] features (henceforth, phi-features); in many languages, the phi-features of a nominal phrase determine the overt morphophonology of the verb or auxiliary, thus controlling agreement morphology: 

(1) Phi-feature agreement in Polish
Papugi krzyczał-y.
Parrot(3pl.fem) scream.past-3pl.fem
'The parrots were screaming.'

In my work, I investigate the ways natural languages negotiate agreement with coordinate structures, e.g.: 

(2) The cat (3sg) and the dog (3sg) are (3pl) barking loudly.

In a typical coordination structure, involving two nominal conjuncts, each conjunct bears its own independent set of phi-features. This constitutes a surplus of information, as far as the needs of the rest of the clause are concerned, because the verb or auxiliary does not have separate agreement slots to reflect the phi-features of each conjunct. This surplus of phi-features in a coordinate structure needs to be somehow reduced. The question I address here is whether this reduction mechanism is part of the grammar, as is usually assumed, or is instead extra-grammatical. I argue that by situating the feature reduction mechanism outside of the grammar, we have a better handle on the empirical state of affairs (in particular, the preponderance of variability when agreement is controlled by coordination), while maintaining a simpler linguistic theory overall.

Research Groups: Friday, March 19

 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
1. Guest speaker: Juliette Millet (Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7): "Inductive biases, pretraining and fine-tuning jointly account for brain responses to speech."

Our ability to comprehend speech remains, to date, unrivaled by deep learning models. This feat could result from the brain's ability to fine-tune generic sound representations for speech-specific processes. To test this hypothesis, we compare i) five types of deep neural networks to ii) human brain responses elicited by spoken sentences and recorded in 102 Dutch subjects using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Each network was either trained on an acoustics scene classification, a speech-to-text task (based on Bengali, English, or Dutch), or not trained. The similarity between each model and the brain is assessed by correlating their respective activations after an optimal linear projection. The differences in brain-similarity across networks revealed three main results. First, speech representations in the brain can be accounted for by random deep networks. Second, learning to classify acoustic scenes leads deep nets to increase their brain similarity. Third, learning to process phonetically-related speech inputs (i.e., Dutch vs English) leads deep nets to reach higher levels of brain-similarity than learning to process phonetically-distant speech inputs (i.e. Dutch vs Bengali). Together, these results suggest that the human brain fine-tunes its heavily-trained auditory hierarchy to learn to process speech.

2. Julia Watson (MSc., Department of Computer Science), Jai Aggarwal (MSc., Department of Computer Science), and Anna Kapron-King (MSc., Department of Computer Science): "Come together: Integrating perspective taking and perspectival expressions."

Conversational interaction involves integrating the perspectives of multiple interlocutors with varying knowledge and beliefs. An issue that has received little attention in cognitive modeling of pragmatics is how speakers deal with the choice of words like come that are inherently perspectival. How do such lexical perspectival items fit into a speaker's overall integration of conversational perspective? We present new experimental results on production of perspectival words, in which speakers have varying degrees of certainty about their addressee's perspective. We show that the Multiple Perspectives Model closely fits the empirical data, lending support to the hypothesis that use of perspectival words can be naturally accommodated as a type of conversational perspective taking.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.): "A POS tagger for Nahuatl."

Nahuatl is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico; it enjoys the attention of many academics and scholars in the country and abroad; and it has an active community of native researchers and young advocators. Yet, there aren´t many language resources for Nahuatl speakers. In this talk, I will look at the practical issues that stand in the way of progress in this particular case, and I present the first part-of-speech tagger for Nahuatl (still under construction).

Guest speaker: J Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Our departmental Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative is very pleased to be hosting a talk by J Calder (University of Colorado, Boulder); they are a faculty member in sociolinguistics working on language, gender and sexuality, marginalization, stylization, and sociophonetics. Their talk, "Moving beyond the white and cisgender speaking subject in variationist research," will be held online from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, to be followed by a reception. Note that the talk will be recorded, and that access to the recording will be available on request; for further details, contact Nathan Sanders (faculty).

While the study of gender has largely concerned the practices of white, cisgender speakers in variationist sociolinguistic research, this talk encourages the field to consider a wider range of gendered perspectives, including non-white and non-cisgender ones, in order to facilitate epistemic justice (see also King 2020). An exploration of the realization of /s/ across multiple non-white and non-cisgender communities reveals that gendered linguistic patterns don’t always conform to those found among the white, cisgender subjects prevalent in previous research. In addition, I argue that the social interpretations of these patterns runs the risk of reifying problematic controlling images (Hill Collins 1986) about marginalized populations, if they aren’t grounded and contextualized within local epistemologies. A discussion of the patterns and epistemologies of various non-white and non-cisgender communities illuminates that indexicality is ditransitive - i.e., variables index particular subsets of social meanings for particular populations. In other words, the sociolinguistic epistemologies researchers have gained through studies of the majority population are not always adequate and accurate in explaining the patterns found in underrepresented and understudied communities. Local epistemologies should be considered in variationist analysis to ensure that the way we represent the sociolinguistic motivations behind particular linguistic patterns is epistemically just.

Nathan on Word to the Whys

Nathan Sanders (faculty) has recently been featured on Word to the Whys, which is a podcast created by a collective of linguistics instructors in Canada. In this episode, 'Why we do phonetics', Catherine Anderson (McMaster University) interviews Nathan about his research, particularly as involving phonetics and sign languages. (In the opposite direction, Nathan interviews Catherine about language acquisition here!)

Guest speaker for Spanish and Portuguese: Elena Nicoladis (University of Alberta)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, along with the Heritage Vowels and Agreement Project, is hosting a virtual talk by Elena Nicoladis, who is a faculty member in psychology at the University of Alberta. She primarily works on bilingual L1 acquisition, especially with respect to morphology and the lexicon, as well as adjacent areas of developmental psychology. Her talk, "Weak vocabulary = lots of gestures? Evidence from bilingual children," will be taking place virtually on Friday, March 19, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM. Registration can be found here.

Bilingual children often have lower scores on vocabulary tests within one language than monolingual children. Their cognitive development is, however, age-appropriate. Given that they have more complex thoughts than their language skills might allow them to convey, might they use gestures to help convey their message? Among monolinguals, gestures can be used to help construct the message a speaker wishes to communicate and access words to go along with that message. In this talk, I review evidence from some of my studies with bilingual children that address that question.

Yining Nie at McMaster this week

As part of McMaster University's 2020-21 Cognitive Science of Language lecture series, Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) will be giving an online talk. After her MA in our department, Yining earned her Ph.D. in 2020 from New York University with a focus on morphosyntax, especially argument structure and event structure. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on cognitive aspects of L1 acquisition. Yining's talk, "Event distinctness and the cross-linguistic expression of causation," will be taking place on Tuesday, March 16, from 10:30 AM to 12 PM. See the email for a Zoom link.

Causative sentences with transparent causative marking are often assumed to encode distinct causing and caused events (e.g. Someone made the plate break), while causatives with no overt marking have non-distinct or overlapping events (e.g. Someone broke the plate). In this talk, I show that transparent causatives differ cross-linguistically in event distinctness, using several syntactic diagnostics. While transparent causatives in language such as English and Japanese encode two distinct events, transparent causatives in many languages such as Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian; Philippines) encode only one event. I also present evidence of spurious causative marking in both child and adult languages. I conclude that event distinctness does not apply equally across languages, nor in language development.

Affirming Writing workshop

As a joint initiative of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Writing-Integrated Teaching (WIT) programs in our department, we are holding a writing workshop online on Tuesday, March 16 from 10 AM to 11:30 AM. It will be anchored by Nathan Sanders (faculty), Virgilio Partida Peñalva (Ph.D.), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), and Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.). The focus will be on how to describe marginalised communities in a way that is respectful and thoughtful, particularly if the researcher is not a member of the in-group. More details are available here.

PɸF and PSST 2021

Princeton University is the host of this year's Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF) and Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST), taking place online in parallel sessions on March 19 and 20. We have several alumni involved:

• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware): "Dependency paths and extraction constraints."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) has a talk with Florian Lionnet (Princeton University): "Phantom structure: A representational account of floating tone association."
• Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc): "When syncretism can (or can't) fix feature mismatches."

Research Groups: Friday, March 12

As this Friday is our annual prospective graduate students' day (by invitation), we are having our customary research-group extravaganza. Via Zoom this time, all six of our current research groups are holding sequences of mini-presentations (anywhere between 3 and 12 minutes to highlight ongoing work.

10:05 AM - 10:55 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Dave Kush (faculty), Priscilla Fung (Ph.D., Department of Psychology), Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty), Julia Watson (MSc., Department of Computer Science), Jai Aggarwal (MSc., Department of Computer Science), and Anna Kapron-King (MSc., Department of Computer Science).

11:05 AM - 11:55 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Vidhya Elango (MA), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Naomi Nagy (faculty), and Jeremy Needle (postdoc).

12:05 PM - 12:55 PM: Syntax Group
Andrew Peters (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), and Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.).

1:05 PM - 1:55 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Heather Yawney (Ph.D.), Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.), Talia Tahtadjian (MA), Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French), Nathan Sanders (faculty), and Photini Coutsougera (faculty).

2:05 PM - 2:55 PM: Fieldwork Group
Keren Rice (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Guillaume Thomas (faculty), Pedro Mateo Pedro (faculty), Ryan DeCaire (faculty), Suzi Lima (faculty), Jessica Denniss (Ph.D.), and Virgilio Partida-Peñalva (Ph.D.).

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM: Semantics Research Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.) and Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.).

New paper: Jaker and Kiparsky (2020)

Alessandro Jaker (postdoc) and Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University) have a new paper in Phonology, 37(4): "Level ordering and opacity in Tetsǫ́t’ıné: A Stratal OT account."

Dene (Athabaskan) verbs are widely known for their complex morphophonology. The most complex patterns are associated with two conjugation markers, /s/ and /n/, which are associated with a floating H tone to their immediate left. In this paper, we provide an analysis of /θe/ and /ɲe/, the reflexes of the /s/ and /n/ conjugations in Tetsǫ́t’ıné. Whereas previous accounts of these conjugations have relied heavily on morphological conditioning, we show that, once level ordering, autosegmental phonology and metrical phonology are brought to bear on the problem, morphological conditioning is not required. Within the framework of Stratal OT, we propose the Domain Reference Hypothesis, by which phonological constraints may only refer to morphological domains and their edges. In addition, we show that in Tetsǫ́t’ıné there is a correlation between phonological opacity and morphological structure, as predicted by the Stratal OT model.

Penn Linguistics Colloquium 45

The 45th Penn Linguistics Colloquium is being virtually hosted by the University of Pennsylvania from March 19 through 21, and two of our alumni are on the program:

• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) is part of a talk with Myung Hye Yoo (University of Delaware): "Is memory interference due to similarity-based effects or effect of NP type?"
• Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is part of a talk with Soo-Hwan Lee (New York University): "Korean case stacking and the nominal template."

Guest speaker: Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University)

The Department of French is hosting a talk by Lyn Tieu (BA 2007, MA 2008), who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2013. She is now a Research Fellow at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Macquarie University, and works extensively on semantic and morphosyntactic aspects of L1 acquisition. Her talk, "L'étude psycholinguistique des inférences linguistiques" ("The psycholinguistic investigation of linguistic inferences"), is taking place on Thursday, March 11, at 4:00 PM. Note that the language of the talk is French. Guests from departments aside from French are welcome to attend; to register, send an email to the Departmental Secretary, whose address can be found here.

(Language allows us to convey a wealth of information by means of linguistic inferences - the subject of a large number of studies in contemporary academic linguistics. For instance, the sentence 'Marie likes some of her classes' expresses a positive sentiment on Marie's part towards her classes, but can also convey the negative message that she doesn't like all of her classes. The ability to disentangle the many complexities of linguistic meaning and navigate the various inferences ubiquitous in everyday conversation is central to linguistic communication, and we typically use this ability without even having to think about it. But what is the precise nature of this ability, and where does it come from? My research primarily focuses on the nature of linguistic inferences - their representation in the grammar, their acquisition in childhood, and where they might originate in terms of cognition. In this presentation, I will discuss two recent discoveries from my research. First, some inferences emerge earlier than others in early childhood development, which could illuminate the grammatical representation of linguistic inferences. Second, I will show that even nonlinguistic objects such as gestures or sound effects or emoji can yield linguistic inferences, which suggests that the cognitive source of linguistic inferences is more general than has been proposed to date. These two findings demonstrate that, taken together, psycholinguistic methods and formal linguistic theory can bring us to a better understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying linguistic meaning.)

Guest speaker: Nico Nassenstein (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

This semester's Field Methods class, taught by Suzi Lima (faculty), is very pleased to welcome virtual guest speaker Nico Nassenstein, a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. His talk, "Linguistic change in Lingala: Urban language use and the emergence of new registers", will be taking place on Wednesday, March 10, at 6:00 PM. Please note that registration is required by March 9; see the email from Suzi for details.

Lingala is a Bantu language classified by Maho (2009) as C.30b [lin], which is spoken by approximately 40-45 million speakers (or more), see Meeuwis (2020) for an overview. Over the course of its history, Lingala (and its pidginized predecessor based on Bobangi; Meeuwis 2019) has been subject to interventions and adaptations by colonial agents, missionaries and linguists since the 1890s, and has given rise to a multitude of registers and ideas how and which Lingala represents 'correct' or 'incorrect' varieties (see for instance the list discussed in Sene Mongaba 2013, including Lingala ya basango, literary Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala etc.). Apart from Bangala, Lingala’s closest sister language in the northeastern parts of DR Congo (classified by Maho 2009 as C30a), and the northwestern dialect of Lingala, the variety used in the capital Kinshasa has been treated in most of the available recent studies (Motingea 2006, Meeuwis 2010, 2020). However, Kinshasa Lingala is no homogenous language but varies and is interpreted by different speakers depending upon the context of their interactions. What Sesep (1990) still labelled as Indoubil/Hindubil or the language of Kinshasa’s cowboys (Gondola 2016), is nowadays known as Lingala ya Bayankee or Yanké (van Pelt 2000, Nassenstein 2014) and is slowly changing from a youth language practice and 'street language' to a common medium of communication in urban Kinshasa, developing into an urban contact dialect or urban register (Wiese and Kerswill 2021). As a parallel development, Lingala speakers all around the world make increased use of a public language game or ludling, Langila (Nassenstein 2015), which expresses strong language ideologies of worldliness, global repertoires and 'fashionable' language use – especially across social media such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In my talk, I trace processes of current linguistic change that are observable in these urban and global language practices based on Lingala and bring them into relation to general patterns of contact and change in Bantu languages. I therefore try to connect early processes of change and compare them with current Kinshasa Lingala and its diverse registers. From a perspective of microvariation, my hypothesis is that despite the linguistic manipulations and agentive language use by urban youth etc. specific morphosyntactic changes in Lingala correspond with those found in other Bantu languages prone to urban diversification and multi-register emergence, e.g. Kiswahili (G.40), Kinyarwanda (JD.60) and Luganda (JE15).

Congratulations, Phil!

Congratulations to Phil Howson (Ph.D. 2018, now at the University of Oregon), who has accepted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral research in Europe. He will be spending the next two years at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin, working on phonetic and phonological aspects of acquisition in multilingual Sorbian/German speakers under the supervision of Marzena Żygis. All the best, Phil, on this very exciting new opportunity in Germany!

Research Groups: Friday, March 5

Please note that this week's meeting of the Syntax Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Guest speaker: Basile Roussel (University of Ottawa): "In search of lost (vernacular) French: A real time look at Acadian French."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Alessandro Jaker (postdoc) and Phil Howson (Ph.D. 2018, now at the University of Oregon): "An acoustic study of Tetsǫ́t’ıné stress."

Ryan at TEDxToronto

Ryan DeCaire (faculty) is giving a talk for TEDxToronto's virtual "Uncharted" lecture series on Thursday, March 4, as part of a session from 7 PM to 8:30 PM, and a recording will become available in the coming months. More details can be found here!

TULCON 14

The 14th Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON 14) is taking place online on March 6 and 7, hosted by our own SLUGS. Note that if you would like to attend (and are not already involved as a presenter and/or organizer), you will need to register here.

Undergraduates of ours who are presenting talks are:

• Eloisa Cervantes (BA): "Variation of /ʎ/ in Toronto heritage speakers of Calabrian Italian: Support for the effect of language use."
• Diana Gil Hamel (BA): "An-game nó an-ghame: Irish consonant mutations in English loanwords."
• Anastasia Koutlemanis (BA): "Generational usage of 'Greeklish'."
• Nathan Leung (BA): "Tonal assignment of loanwords in Medan Hokkien."
• Anna Pyrtchenkov (BA), Maya Blumenthal (BA), and Lee Jiang (BA): "Truth be told: A corpus-based study of adjectives of truth and reality across languages."
• Haili Su (BA): "Disyllabic contraction in Taiwan Mandarin: Modelling the complexity of variation with Optimality Theory."

SULC 8

 

The eighth annual Scarborough Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SULC 8) is taking place online on Friday, March 5, from 12 PM to 4 PM. The plenary speaker is Derek Denis (faculty), on Multicultural Toronto English. Zoom details are in the image above and on the Facebook page of the Linguistic Student Association at the Scarborough campus.

Guest talk for Spanish and Portuguese: Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Heritage Vowels and Agreement Project are hosting a virtual talk by Karen Miller, an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and the Co-Director of the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. Her talk, "Children's acquisition of sociolinguistic variation," will be taking place on Friday, March 5, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM. Registration can be found here.

In this talk I will present data on children's acquisition of sociolinguistic variation and present a 4-step developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation, that I am currently developing with Naomi Shin (University of New Mexico). Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The talk will focus primarily on acquisition of variable forms in Spanish-speaking children, including variable clitic placement, /s/ lenition and plural marking, and subject-verb (non)inversion, and acquisition of variable forms in English-speaking children, including the impact of variable agreement marking on the Root Infinitive Stage. I will suggest ways to test our 4-step developmental pathway to the acquisition of variable forms, drawing on corpus data and experimental studies.