New HLCV Publication - Phonology in Italian

    We are proud to announce that there has been a new publication form the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC) Project! The paper looks at phonological variation in Italian. It focuses on apocope in heritage Italian from three generations of heritage Calabrian Italian speakers and compares results to a homeland sample.

Baird, A., A. Cristiano & N. Nagy. Apocope in Heritage Italian. Special issue Social and Psychological Factors in Bilingual Speech Production in Languages. [Abstract]

     On the publication team we have Anissa Baird, Angela Cristiano and Naomi Nagy. The study builds off the findings for Professor Nagy’s own dissertation research:

Nagy, N. 1996. Language contact and language change in the Faetar speech community. University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation. Philadelphia: IRCS. 

    Anissa Baird is a current MA student in our department and Angela Cristiano is a MA student at the Università di Bologna in Italy. Cristiano will be a visiting student in our department this Fall, and we cannot wait to have her in the department! 

    Baird  started this research as an undergraduate student, working with Rachel Keir, while taking LIN456 here at UofT. They presented their original findings at The Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON) in 2019. To read their original findings, see their TULCON abstract.

Photo courtesy of the ITA phonology team  

    Congratulations to Baird, Cristiano and Nagy for their great accomplishment! We love to see how research in the department can be built upon by our ambitious and intelligent students! We recommend reading Nagy’s dissertation (abstract), then Baird and Cristiano's TULCON abstract followed by their new publication to see how their research grew!