New paper: Tagliamonte and Smith (2021)

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) and Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) have a new paper in Language Variation and Change, 33(1): "Obviously undergoing change: Adverbs of evidentiality across time and space."

Increasingly globalized communication networks in the modern world may influence traditional patterns of linguistic change: in contrast to an orderly sequential pathway of change, more recently a number of 'mega trends' have been identified, which accelerate simultaneously in time and space. The rise of obviously within the cohort of adverbs of evidentiality - naturally, evidently, clearly, and of course - may be one such trend. To examine this possibility, we conduct a large-scale sociolinguistic analysis of circa 12,000 adverbs of evidentiality across over thirty communities in the UK and Canada. The results reveal parallel development across time and space: obviously advances rapidly among individuals born in the 1960s in both countries. The rise of obviously illustrates key attributes that are beginning to emerge from other rapidly innovating features: 'off the shelf' changes that (1) are easily borrowed, (2) receptive to global trends, but (3) exhibit parallel patterns as the change progresses.

New paper: Kastronic and Poplack (2021)

Laura Kastronic (faculty, Department of French) and Shana Poplack (University of Ottawa) have a new paper in Language Variation and Change, 33(1): "Be that as it may: The unremarkable trajectory of the English subjunctive in North American speech."

The English subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Since then, the mandative variant was reported to have revived, while the adverbial subjunctive continued to diminish. American English is heavily implicated in these developments; it is thought to be leading the revival of the former but lagging in the decline of the latter. Observing that most references to these changes are based on the written language, we examine the diachronic trajectory of the subjunctive in North American English speech. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of subjunctive use under hundreds of triggers. Results show that, despite the differences in their diachronic trajectories, today both types are not only extremely rare but heavily lexically constrained. We implicate violations of the Principle of Accountability in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to subjunctive use in North American English.

New paper: Hussain and Mielke (2021)

Qandeel Hussain (postdoc) and Jeff Mielke (North Carolina State University) have a new paper in the Journal of Phonetics, 78: "An acoustic and articulatory study of rhotic and rhotic-nasal vowels of Kalasha."

Kalasha, an endangered Dardic language (Indo-Aryan), is described as having series of retroflex and retroflex-nasal vowels, each with five contrasting vowel qualities. This study provides the first articulatory description of these vowels using lingual ultrasound imaging, showing that the vowels described as retroflex are produced not with tongue tip retroflexion but with bunching of the tongue body. Relative to their non-rhotic counterparts, these rhotic vowels are produced with more retracted tongue root and tongue blade, and they exhibit tongue dorsum concavity, much like bunched rhotic vowels in other languages. The five-way quality contrast between rhotic vowels is achieved using lip rounding as well as differences in tongue dorsum height, backness, and tongue root retraction. The lingual differences are reduced in comparison to the non-rhotic vowels, as they are constrained by the articulatory gestures used to achieve rhoticity.

Mutual Knowledge 40

The 40th Mutual Knowledge workshop is taking place online on June 25 and 26, hosted by University College London.

• Daphna Heller (faculty) is giving an invited talk: "Cognitive mechanisms for sentence processing: From common ground to multiple perspectives."
• Craig Chambers (faculty) and Tiana Simovic (Ph.D., Department of Psychology) have a poster: "Pronoun interpretation in the context of dynamic action: A test of the retrieval hypothesis."
• Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty) is giving a talk with Anna Papafragou (University of Pennsylvania): "Speaker adjustments to addressees during language production."
• Craig Chambers (faculty) also has a poster with Karolina Wieczorek (University of Calgary), Elizabeth Morin-Lessard (University of Calgary), and Susan Graham (University of Calgary): "Preschoolers' use of emotional prosody to resolve communicative ambiguity as a function of speaker conventionality."

Research Groups: Week of June 21-25

Friday, June 25, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Tiana Simovic (Ph.D., Department of Psychology): "What is the role of antecedent semantics in pronoun resolution?"

Pronoun resolution involves linking semantically impoverished expressions to entities in the comprehender's mental model of discourse. These entities have often been previously mentioned and are characterized as 'linguistic antecedents'. Past work has shown that pronouns need not 'match' antecedents with the same surface form (e.g., "I need a knife, where do you keep them?"), yet the notion of retrieval is often evoked in psychological frameworks. So, what exactly is the content of the relevant mental models? In this study, I explore whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved during real-time pronoun interpretation. Most generally, the results show that antecedent semantics are not relied on in any direct way, suggesting that frameworks that are less grounded in memory mechanisms may hold greater explanatory promise.

Virtual Pride Concert featuring Jeremy Dutcher

The University of Toronto is holding a Pride concert featuring two Indigenous performers: Jeremy Dutcher and Nenookaasi, both Two-Spirit. The event is co-sponsored by the Sexual and Gender Diversity Office, Hart House, First Nations House, Office of Indigenous Initiatives, and the UTM Indigenous Centre. Note that while the concert will not be recorded, it will be available via livestream on Tuesday, June 22, from 3 PM through 5 PM, and will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Dutcher won the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and a 2019 Juno Award for his bilingual debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, building on anthropological documentation of music from his community:

Jeremy Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor and composer who takes every opportunity to blend his Wolastoq First Nation roots into the music he creates, blending distinct musical aesthetics that shape-shift between classical, traditional, and pop to form something entirely new. Dutcher’s debut release, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, involves the rearrangement of early 1900s wax cylinder field recordings from his community. “Many of the songs were lost because our musical tradition was suppressed by the Canadian government. I'm doing this work as there's only about a hundred Wolastoqey speakers left. It's crucial that we're using our language because, if you lose the language, you're losing an entire distinct way of experiencing the world.”

Registration is available here. Students, staff, faculty, librarians, alumni, and friends of the U of T are welcome.

NAPhC2021

The North Atlantic Phonology Conference (NAPhC) 2021 is being held online in two parts, hosted by Concordia University. The first part is the Substance-Free Phonology Student Forum Panel (SPF), which was held on June 12, and the second - a sequence of three invited talks - will be on June 27.

• Marjorie Leduc (MA) has a talk: "Karajá ATR harmony in Substance-Free Logical Phonology."

Congratulations, Paulina!

Congratulations to Paulina Łyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland), who has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arctic University of Norway to work on the project 'Experimental approaches to syntactic optionality' led by Bjørn Lundquist and Gillian Ramchand. Congratulations, Paulina - well-deserved!

12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics

The 12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics is taking place from June 14 through 18 online, hosted by the University of Oslo. We have several current and former department members giving talks:

• Elan Dresher (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University), and Sara Mackenzie (Ph.D. 2009, now at Memorial University of Newfoundland): "The role of contrastive feature hierarchies in the establishment of phoneme inventories."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia): "Endangered languages as heritage languages: Divergent attainment and phonological regularization of diminutive reduplication in Comox-Sliammon (Salish)."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) and Amanda Cardoso (University of British Columbia): "Investigating phonemic inventories without minimal pairs: Defining contrast in the vowel inventory of Comox-Sliammon (ʔayʔaǰuθəm)."

CLA-ACL 2021

This year's meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique is being held online from June 4 through 7, and many University of Toronto linguists of past and present are involved.

• Laura Colantoni (faculty) and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty) are part of a talk with Yadira Alvarez López (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Miguel Barreto (BA), Irinia Marinescu (Ph.D. 2012, Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Jierui Yang (BA), and colleague Alejandro Cuza (Purdue University): "The modular interaction hypothesis: When the exponent of gender is an unstressed vowel."
• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University), Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), and Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University), with Louise Koren (Carleton University), Jennice Hinds (Carleton University), and Dan Siddiqi (Carleton University): "Morphological upstaging and markedness."
• Anabela Rato (faculty, Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and Yasaman Rafat (Ph.D. 2011, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Western Ontario) are part of a talk with Martha Black (University of Western Ontario): "The effect of stimuli repetition on approximant-stop discrimination in Spanish-dominant and English-dominant late bilinguals."
• Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), Erin Vearncombe (faculty, WIT program), and Nathan Sanders (faculty) are giving a pedagogy talk: "Grading grading: Training for consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness in marking linguistics writing."
• Cristina Cuervo (faculty), Ohanna Severo (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Sophie Harrington (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), and Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Features and forms in L2 Spanish verbal inflection."
• Songül Gündoğdu (postdoc), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty), and Marcel den Dikken (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): "Ezafe in the context of CPs in Persian and Kurmanji."
• Cristina Cuervo (faculty) and Hong-Yan Liu (Ph.D.): "The path of Mandarin Ps: from V to P (and back)."
• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): "Acoustics of Persian uvular lenition."
• Vidhya Elango (MA) and Derek Denis (faculty): "Fom and friends: Variable BAN-laxing in Multicultural Toronto English."
• Suzi Lima (faculty): "Relative measures in Brazilian Portuguese."
• Michelle Troberg (faculty): "Towards a syntactic typology of prepositions in French."
• Curt Anderson (faculty) has a poster: "Perceivable properties and inference to mental states."
• Ai Taniguchi (Toronto) is giving a pedagogy talk: "Teaching academic writing via theoretical linguistics: Towards authentic assessments in introductory linguistics classes."
• Samantha Jackson (postdoc): "Pronoun acquisition in a varilingual context."
• Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.): "Restrictions on transitivity in Inuktitut subordinate clauses."
• Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "How to adjoin adverbial clauses, and make verb clusters: Lessons from Mongolian converbs."
• Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.): "Deriving two types of applicatives: The case of Persian psych predicates."
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Obviating lexicalism: A structural account of exocentricity and metaphorical extension."
• Omar Gamboa Gonzalez (Ph.D., Department of French): "Double aspect des nominalisations du français obtenues par conversion."
• Andrew McCandless (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) has a poster: "Phonetic training of Spanish /u/ in L2 Spanish learners with L1 Canadian English."
• Hilary Walton (Ph.D., Department of French): "Does language learning context influence the dynamics of L2 learner groups? An investigation of social identity in Canadian French-as-a-second-language programs."
• Marjorie Leduc (MA) has a poster: "Icy targets: The case of Karajá."
• Nicoline Butler (MA) also has a poster: "Sound symbolism in electric, rock, and ground-type Pokémon names."
• Heather Burnett (former postdoc, now at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique) with Yiming Liang (University of Paris) and Pascal Amsili (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle): "Revisiter l’omission du complémenteur que en français montréalais : Exploration de facteurs cognitifs."
• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University): "Representing and resolving feature conflicts."
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) and Sandrine Tailleur (Ph.D. 2012, now at l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi): "Where do maybes come from?"
• Olga Tararova (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Western Ontario) is giving a talk with Martha Black (University of Western Ontario): "Multilingual advantage for adult-instructed acquisition of morphosyntax and the effect of processing modality."
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): "DOM co-occurrence restrictions in Romance: Beyond clitic clusters."
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) also hasa poster with Tova Rapoport (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): "The nature of a predicate: The case of depictives."
• Bethany MacLeod (Ph.D. 2012, now at Carleton University) and Sabrina M. Di Lonardo Burr (Carleton University): "Imitation of the acoustic realization of Spanish stress: Production and perception."
• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) and Kang Jungu (Sogang University): "Prosodic spell-out of nominals in Mongolian."
• Jila Ghomeshi (Ph.D. 1996, now at the University of Manitoba): "T-relatives in Persian."
• Lyn Tieu (MA 2008, now at Western Sydney University): "Scalar implicatures in French: Children’s production mirrors their comprehension."
• Recent faculty member Anne-José Villeneuve (now at the University of Alberta), David Rosychuk (University of Alberta), and Davy Bigot (Concordia University): "Langue de ville et langue de soirée: Variation stylistique et maintien des contraintes en français québécois soutenu."
• Anne-José Villeneuve (University of Alberta) is also part of talk with Tracie Pospisil (University of Alberta), and Kristan Marchak (University of Alberta): "D’où elle est? : Perception dialectale et diversité du français parlé en Albe."
• Recent visiting student Sander Nederveen (University of British Columbia): "Semantics and morphosyntax of double perfects in Alemannic."
• For the Pedagogy Roundtable session, we have several participants. Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Nathan Sanders are presenting "The Diverse Names Database: A tool for creating more equitable, diverse, and inclusive linguistic example sentences." Sophia Bello (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is presenting "Effectiveness of interactive digital applications: Assessment of student engagement." Julianne Doner (Ph.D. 2019) is presenting "Lessons from being the Online Support TA in summer 2020."
• Among those taking part in the career panel for linguistics-related jobs outside academia are Christopher Spahr (Ph.D. 2015, now at Rune Labs) and Carrie Gillon (MA 1999, now working with the Squamish Nation).

Congratulations, Guillaume!

Congratulations to Guillaume Thomas (faculty) on receiving tenure! We're just thrilled!

Sali on The Sunday Magazine

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) has been interviewed lately on CBC Radio's The Sunday Magazine, talking about variation between Canadian English words for summer properties outside the city.

Andrea and John in the U of T News

Andrea Johns (BA) and Ryan DeCaire (faculty) have been highlighted in the U of T News in conjunction with the First Nations House's graduation celebration. Andrea, who will be graduating in June, learned Kanien’kéhai/Mohawk and founded the Indigenous Languages Club while a student here, receiving recognition in 2019 from President Meric Gertler.

Research Groups: Week of May 31-June 4

Wednesday, June 2, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM: Syntax Group
The second of two sets of practice talks for the Canadian Linguistic Association meeting in June:

1. Cristina Cuervo (faculty), Ohanna Severo (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Sophie Harrington (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), and Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Features and forms in L2 Spanish verbal inflection."

2. Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "How to adjoin adverbial clauses, and make verb Clusters: Lessons from Mongolian converbs."

3. Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.): "Deriving two types of unaccusatives: The case of Persian."

Move and Agree Forum 2021

The University of British Columbia and McGill University are co-hosting an online workshop on Move and Agree from May 31 through June 4.

• Susana Béjar (faculty) and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) are giving a presentation: "Agr in binominal copular clauses."
• Nicholas Welch (former postdoc, now at Memorial University of Newfoundland) also has a talk: "Move, agree, and copula."