University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
SLUGS will be hosting the fifteenth Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference on March 5th-6th 2022. TULCON will be hosts online via Gathertown.
Come and see the amazing work of undergrad linguists and hear talks from keynote speakers Marisa Brook (Faculty) and Samuel Jambrović (PhD Student)! Full schedule is now available.
Please Register before the event!
A lecture, as part of the Iranian Languages and Linguistic Lecture Series, was held Friday, February 25th at 11:00am EST. Our guest speaker was Professor Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam from the Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran, Iran.
The title of Dabir-Moghaddam's talk is "Khorasan: An Untapped Linguistic Area of Iran". See the poster below for the abstract!
Gardner was at UofT from 2010-2017 working on his PhD on variation and change in Canadian English. Gardner used methods of theoretical phonology, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and variationist sociolinguistics to study how dialects of Eastern Canada fit into the broader Canadian English Dialect. Gardner was also an instructor for LIN100, LIN201 and LIN256 as well as a TA for LIN228, LINA01, LINA02, LIN351, LIN204 and LIN362
Best of luck in your new position!
In need of a new and innovative podcast to listen to? Well, Lex Konnelly (PhD Candidate) has you covered! Konelly, who was the instructor for JAL355 (Gender in Language) last semester (Fall 2021), gave their students a creative assignment!
Students were instructed to create podcasts on topics relating to gender and language, and we are not left disappointed! Konelly's students made podcasts that bring to light the role gender has in language in fun and entertaining ways!
Follow this link for more details: https://bit.ly/3gxwO1a
We hope to see these undergrads continue their innovative work on this up and coming subject!
The department is hosting a colloquium this Friday, February 18th with guest speaker Jennifer Culbertson (University of Edinburgh)!
Culbertson will be speaking on the topic of Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology. Abstract is shared below.
If you are interested in attending, please contact Avery Ozburn (Faculty and Colloquium Committee Member) for the Zoom login information.
Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology
One of the most controversial hypotheses in linguistics is that individual-level biases in learning shape language typology at the population-level. While this hypothesis has been around a long time, it has often been supported by less than robust empirical evidence. In this talk, I present a number of studies aimed at providing new sources of evidence linking learning to key features of language. In the first part of the talk, I focus on a classic set of "language universals" which describe common word order patterns. One such pattern is word order harmony, the tendency for syntactic heads and dependents to align across phrases within a language. While harmony has long been claimed to have some special cognitive status, there is also compelling evidence that it may be driven by cognition-external processes of language change. I show that harmony is in fact favoured during learning, influencing how adults and children make inferences under noisy learning conditions, and how they extrapolate to new constructions. I then turn to a more complex pattern of word order which has been proposed to derive from constraints on syntactic representations. I report experimental and quantitative corpus-based evidence to suggest an alternative explanation of this pattern, but one nevertheless driven by learning. In the second part of the talk, I discuss the role of learning in shaping morphosynactic patterns like grammatical gender. I argue that the different biases of children and adults during learning work together to constrain how such patterns emerge and change over time. Finally, I discuss the implications of this work for linguistic theories and models of language evolution.
Professor Emeritus B. Elan Dresher wrote an article (with Aditi Lahiri) entitled "The Foot in the History of English". This paper has been published in the book English Historical Linguistics containing articles based on the papers delivered at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018)
Dresher and Lahiri propose that Old English shows that different phonological processes are sensitive to the same metrical structure!
Dresher, B. E., & Lahiri, A. (2022). The foot in the history of English. English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning. Papers from the XXth ICEHL, 358, 41.
... on a box of cereal!
Paul Poirier (MA) has really hit the big time!
SLUGS will be hosting an academic seminar this semester on the topic of psycholinguistics! Prof. Myrtro Grigorolou is the invited speaker. Prof. Grigorolou will be presenting on the topic of audience design in children. Abstract posted below.
The seminar will take place virtually on February 17th from 5:00pm - 6:00pm. The Zoom link will be provided after registration.
Audience design in children
ABSTRACT
On traditional views of speech planning, speakers design utterances to match their listeners’ particular informational needs (e.g., by telling listeners things they cannot see but need to know). However, not all choices in production are made for the sake of a specific listener. For instance, adults mention atypical instruments more often than typical instruments in stories (cf. stab someone with an ice pick vs. a knife) because atypical components are highly unpredictable for any ‘generic’ comprehender. Developmental research has focused on children’s ‘particular’ adjustments (mostly to a listener’s visual perspective) and has produced mixed findings. In this seminar, I will present a series of experiments exploring children’s ability to adjust their speech to generic and particular needs of their addressees and will sketch implications for current models of audience design.
Qandeel Hussain (Postdoctoral Fellow) and Alexei Kochetov (Faculty) have published "Acoustic Classification of Coronal Stops of Eastern Punjabi" in Phonetica!
Their paper examines how various coronal place and laryngeal contrasts are distinguished acoustically both within and across word positions!
Excellent work Hussain and Kochetov!
Hussain, Q., & Kochetov, A. (2021). Acoustic classification of coronal stops of Eastern Punjabi. Phonetica.
We are excited to share a collaborative Lecture Series organized by the Elahe Omidyar Mir-Djajali Institute of Iranian Studies (UofT) and our Linguistics Department!
Come and enjoy the 5 talks that cover a range of linguistic topics regarding Iranian languages!
Talks include:
These events are open to the public, make sure to register to obtain Zoom links!
We are excited to share that Diane Massam (Professor Emeritus) was the winner of the Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest! Massam won the Poetry category with her piece entitled "Late(ral) Move".
Congrats Diane Massam! This goes to show that linguists can get pretty creative with their words!
