University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
The Global Language Initiative at UofT has extended the invitation for faculty members and students to participate in their symposium titled Languages Towards a Planetary Education.
The deadline to submit your abstract is December 12th 2021. The Symposium will be hosted online on January 28th-29th 2022.
Spread the word to anyone you think would be interested!
Clarissa Forbes (PhD 2018) has a paper in the most recent volume of Natural Langauge and Linguistic Theory! The paper is entitled "Nominal types on Gitksan split absolutive agreement" and it studies a split absolutive-nominative agreement pattern found in Gitksan (Tsimshianic) that co-occurs with ergative agreement.
Is this ringing a bell for anyone? Forbes' PhD thesis offered a morphosyntactic analysis of the agreement patterns in the Tsimshanic language family, with a primary focus on Gitksan.
We love seeing how projects that began at UofT expand! Be sure to check out both her thesis and her new publication!
Sahar Taghipour (PhD Candidate) and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Faculty) have published a paper entitled "Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction". They argue that Laki, a dialect spoken in the city of Kahdadht in northwestern Iran, has split ergativity which comes from the presence of a single locus of Agreement on T in past intransitive and present clauses, versus two loci of Agreement on T and v in past transitive clauses.
This is a must-read for syntax and morphology lovers!
Taghipour, S., & Kahnemuyipour, A. (2021). Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction. In 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 417-426). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Congratulations to our students convocating on November 18!
We are especially excited that this included Kai Herzog-Hara, our current Undergrad Admin Assistant.
Virtual ceremony: https://www.utoronto.ca/convocation
YouTube Noon on November 18
Complex Sentences in South American Languages will be held virtually on November 17th-19th. The workshop's objective is to help researchers find common ground in how they describe the different phenomena involved in complex sentences.
There will be a UofT presence at this workshop: Suzi Lima (faculty) and Guillaume Thomas (faculty). Lima will be presenting her work on the acquisition of conjunctions in Yudja. Thomas, an invited speaker, will be presenting his work on restructuring and evidentiality in Mbyá Guaraní.
Our (almost) annual Welcome Party took place on October 8th 2021!
Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Grad Chair) welcomed the department and incoming students were introduced.
The awards for Excellence in TA Supervision for 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 were presented! For the 2018-2019 academic year, the award went to Marisa Brook (faculty)! Nathan Sanders (faculty) received an honourable mention! For the 2019-2020 year, Suzi Lima (faculty) took home the award. Another honourable mention went out to Nathan Sanders for being the runner-up once again!
Everyone enjoyed great food and drinks with the greatest company! Of course, we cannot leave out the lovely toast made by Jack Chambers (faculty)!
Major thank you goes out to Chris (staff), Mary (staff, always working behind the scenes and avoiding photos), Arsalan, and Kai (the new undergrad admin) for all their hard work in organizing this successful event!
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| Suzi accepting her award |
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| Marisa accepting her award |
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| Nathan Sanders |
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| Chris & Arsalan |
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| Kai |
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| Pedro & Suzi |
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| Chris |
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| 3 linguistics and their Jack-o'-lanterns |
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| Angela and Abram taking in the view |
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| The view |
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| Proof linguists can make excellent pumpkin carvers! |
Huge congratulations to Justin Leung (PhD Student) and Christopher Legerme (former MA student) for sweeping the runner up category for the Stueber Prize at NWAV49!
Leung presented work regarding variation in path encoding in motion events in Toronto Heritage Cantonese. He defined and described a new variable for Chinese languages and gave a thoughtful interpretation of the outcomes.
Legerme, who is now at MIT for his PhD, presented work regarding phonological variation and change in Haitian determiners. Sounding familiar? Legerme also won the NWAV student abstract award this year for his presentation!
Congrats to both Leung and Legerme for this excellent work!
We also want to give a shout-out to the winners:
Sadlier-Brown, Salles & Salomon, Exploring variation & change in a small-scale indigenous society: the case of (s) in Pirahã.
They did an excellent job grappling with the issue of determining how to interpret language variation and change in a context where no information on standards or norms is available, as well as countering reported descriptions of the language. They also contribute to ongoing debate about the reasons behind the generalization that women often lead linguistic change.
Professor Alexei Kochetov (Faculty) spoke at the SLUGS Fall Semester Academic Seminar! He presented his work on phonetic realization and the change-in-progress regarding Kalasha laterals! Kochetov was asked many questions by our eager undergraduate linguists!
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| Photo courtesy of SLUGS |
