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).