University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
The Department graciously hosted the End of Term Party at the Madison Avenue Pub (a UofT Classic)! The afternoon was full of food, drinks, laughter and LOTS of sunshine! ☀️ 🍻
It was an amazing event and it was wonderful to connect face-to-face!
We would like to thank all the staff who helped to organize the party!
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| Nathan Sanders was happy to be there....We promise! |
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| Everyone was soaking up the sun ☀️ |
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| One 1/2 of the group enjoying each other's company |
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| The other 1/2 of the group! |
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| A SLUGS selfie! |
The Canadian Linguistic Association will be hosting their Annual Conference from June 1st - 4th! It will be held virtually via Zoom and Discord. There will be a strong UofT presence this year! See below for the list of presenters for each day!
June 1st:
The first Heritage Languages around the World conference brought together practitioners and linguists from sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language documentation to share knowledge about heritage languages through diverse lenses.
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| (L-to-R) Invited speakers Peter Austin, Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer, Jason Rothman, Organizer Ana Lúcia Santos, Invited speaker Naomi Nagy (UofT), Organizers Cristina Flores and Luis Amaral. (Photo by Anabela Rato.) |
Other University of Toronto presenters include Anabela Rato & Vanina Machado (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese), and Mona El Samaty (OISE).
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| The Humanities Building, Universidade de Lisboa |
Naomi's talk:
“Promoting linguistic and cultural diversity through Heritage Language Sociolinguistics”
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| Naomi gets into her talk. (Photo by Anabela Rato) |
The 6th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL) is a biennial conference that focuses on new advances in Cantonese linguistics, such as innovation in methodologies, tools, and or computing software. This year it will be held virtually by Ohio State University on May 27th - May 28th 2022.
Justin Leung (Graduate Student), Brian Diep (Undergraduate Student) and Naomi Nagy (Faculty) will be presenting their work on " 'Lazy pronunciation' in Toronto Heritage Cantonese: The case of (n-/l-)"! They will be presenting on May 27th. Their abstract can be found below!
The event is free of change but registration is required. We encourage all to attend!
'Lazy pronunciation' in Toronto Heritage Cantonese: The case of (n-/l-)
In Hong Kong Cantonese, there is a group of sound changes in progress colloquially known as 懶音 ‘lazy pronunciation’. A well-known example is the alternation between syllable-initial /n/ and /l/, which is often characterized as a merger of /n/ to /l/ (Zee 1999; To et al. 2015; i.a.), e.g., pronouncing 南 /naːm²¹/ ‘south’ like 藍 /laːm²¹/ ‘blue’. While this merger is sometimes reported to be complete or near-completion (Zee 1999; To et al. 2015), some variation is observed, with age and gender suggested as important factors conditioning variant choice (Ng 2017; Liang 2018), as well as an expectation that heritage speakers may differ from homeland speakers. For example, Cantonese-English bilinguals in Vancouver are found to differentiate /n/ and /l/ in English but merge the two phonemes in Cantonese (Soo et al. 2021). However, little work has teased apart the linguistic and social factors that contribute to this variation. We investigated the factors that contribute to variation and compare the realization of /n-/ and /l-/ in heritage speakers in Toronto and homeland speakers in Hong Kong. If there is influence from English, which differentiates /n/ and /l/, we expect heritage speakers to have less [l] for /n-/ and [n] for /l-/. However, if heritage speakers amplify the change (due to less pressure to conform to a standard, less exposure to homeland speech, or categorical perception as /l/), we would expect them to have greater (perhaps categorical) usage of [l]. We analyzed spontaneous spoken data from sociolinguistic interviews (14 speakers) in Cantonese from the Heritage Language Documentation corpus (Nagy 2011). The corpus includes homeland speakers in Hong Kong and three generations of heritage speakers in Toronto. Tokens of syllables with /n-/ or /l-/ as the onset were extracted and coded impressionistically (and cross-checked) for the variable (n-/l-) and linguistic factors (vowel backness, vowel height, vowel length, tone, previous segment). We also considered the social factors of generation, ethnic orientation and gender of the speakers. The tokens were classified as underlyingly /n-/ or /l-/ based on 19th-century sources (from 粵音資料集叢 https://jyut.net), and these were accordingly analyzed in separate mixed-effects logistic regression models. 504 tokens were extracted (418 /n-/, 86 /l-/) after excluding characters categorically realized as [l]. For the /n-/ tokens, there is more retention of [n] after a previous (coda) nasal, conditioning by the tone and following vowel, as well as significant differences by generation, gender and ethnic orientation. Although generation is significant, there is no monotonic relationship suggesting an advance of the change across heritage generations. In contrast, for the /l-/ tokens, a nasal coda in the preceding syllable significantly favoured realization as [n], and there was no other conditioning. That is, in both datasets, there is a preference to produce [n] after a nasal. The results also confirm one finding in the literature, that /l-/ is less likely to surface as [n] than the other way around, but do not provide any evidence of a different pattern between heritage and homeland speakers.
References
Liang, Y. 2018. 再探討香港粵語聲母 /n-/、/l-/ 不分. Current Research in Chinese Linguistics 97(1): 101–110.
Nagy, N. 2011. A multilingual corpus to explore geographic variation. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 43(1–2): 65–84.
Ng, C. L. C. 2017. Merger of the syllable-initial [n-] and [l-] in Hong Kong Cantonese. Outstanding Academic Papers by Students. http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk/handle/2031/100.
Soo, R., Johnson, K. A., & Babel, M. 2021. Sound change in spontaneous bilingual speech. Proceedings of Interspeech 2021, 421–425.
To, C. K. S., McLeod, S., & Cheung, P. S. P. 2015. Phonetic variations and sound changes in Hong Kong Cantonese. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 29(5): 333–353.
Zee, E. 1999. Change and variation in the syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants in Hong Kong Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 27(1): 120–167.
The Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop (TOM 14) will be hosted this year by the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University! The workshop will take place on May 28th 2022 on Zoom. The event is free to attend and we encourage all our semanticist to join!
Crystal Chen (PhD Student) and Michela Ippolito (Faculty) will be presenting their work on "Exclamatives Interrogatives"
Dr. Ai Taniguchi (UTM Faculty) will also be presenting at TOM! She will be sharing her work on "Semantics and Pragmatics in a Justice-Centered Introductory Linguistics Textbook: Reflection from Updating an Open Educational Resource"
Erin Hall (California State University, San Bernardino) and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (Faculty) have published "Children's Comprehension of NP Embedding" in Glossa: a journal of general linguistics!
They used a colour task to examine children's comprehension of sentences containing complex NPs, comparing PP modifiers to coordinated NPs, where both referents are accessible. They propose that error patterns for comitative prepositions can be explained by the assumption that children's errors align with the direction of systematic language change.
Be sure to read the whole paper to learn more!
Hall, E. & Pérez-Leroux, A. T., (2022) “Children’s comprehension of NP embedding”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5816
Congratulations Martin Renard (PhD Student)! He is one of this year's recipients of the LSA's prestigious fellowship to participate in CoLang! The Linguistic Society of America sponsors The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (aka CoLang), a summer training institute where linguists gain hands-on experiences in the best practices for language documentation, descriptive linguistics and language revitalization.
Martin is a 1st year PhD student and is interested in Indigenous language revitalization and collaborative linguistic research. He has mostly worked on the endangered Northern Iroquoian Language Kanien'kéha (also known as Mohawk).
Congratulations Renard!! We are excited to hear about your experience and are eager to see you put your new skills to work!
The University of Vienna hosted the 11th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe!
Naomi Nagy (Faculty) presented her work, co-authored with Chiara Celata, on "Lexical Frequency Effects in Italian VOT: Minority vs. Majority language effects"! Nagy was very busy at iCLaVE as she also presented "Prodrop in Six Languages: Very similar and not influenced by English contact", part of a panel of pronombristas.
Be sure to ask Nagy questions regarding her presentations when she returns from France and Portugal!
It was a Zoom conference, so no photos there, but here is Naomi relaxing with partner Craig Diegel and fellow linguists Anna Ghimenton & Giovanni Depau in Grenoble after the conference (photo credit Aléni Depau).
The Department of Linguistics at the University of California San Diego hosted the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics in early April (2022). Several UofT linguists attended.
Avery Ozburn (Faculty), Gabriel Palmieri (PhD Student) and Madeline Glover (Undergrad UTM Student) presented their work on ATR Phonetics in Keiyo!
Avery Ozburn (Faculty), Gianna F Giovio Canavesi (Undergrad student at UTM who will be graduating this June) and Samuel Akinbo (University of British Columbia) presented on the Perception of ATR in Dágáárè!
Busy conference for Avery Ozburn! We appreciate all the hard work she and her students put into their work!
The Department of Linguistics at Stanford University will be hosting the 40th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL40)! This conference will take place virtually from May 13th-15th 2022.
Guillaume Thomas (Faculty) is one of the invited speakers! He will be speaking on "Switch-reference, discourse coherence and centering". Abstract is shared below!
Switch-Reference Discourse Coherence and Centering
Switch Reference (SR) is a family of grammatical devices whose primary function is to indicate whether two linked clauses have coreferential pivots, where the pivot is a prominent argument of some sort. In some languages, in addition to their function of reference tracking, SR markers can be used to indicate whether the events or situations described by the linked clauses differ with respect to some parameter, such as time, place or actuality. This phenomenon is known as non-canonical switch-reference. One of the open questions in studies of SR is whether canonical and non-canonical SR are different manifestations of a single process, whether they are facets of a single phenomenon that are triggered by different configurations, or whether they are different phenomena altogether, with independent syntax and semantics. This talk will discuss the relation between canonical and non-canonical SR in Mbyá. Based on an analysis of a corpus of 760 occurrences of SR markers from Mbyá narratives, we argue that canonical and non-canonical SR marking in Mbyá are different manifestations of a single probabilistic process, from which non-canonical uses of SR markers emerge as less likely outcomes than canonical uses.
We are sure WCCFL40 will be an absolute success and we cannot wait to hear about it!
On April 22nd Emory University's Program in Linguistics hosted the third annual Emory Undergrad Linguistic Conference (EULC3)!
One of our undergraduate students, Runze Qian (Undergrad Student at UTSG), presented his work on "The Application of Turkish Vowel Harmony to English Proper Nouns: An Experimental Phonetic Analysis"! His abstract is below.
Runze Qian will be graduating this June and will be heading to the University of Ottawa to purse his Master's of Linguistics! We are excited to see the amazing work he will do there!
The Application of Turkish Vowel Harmony to English Proper Nouns: An Experimental Phonetic Analysis
Turkish vowel harmony (VH) is a phonological process which dictates that all vowels in non-compounded words of Turkish origin must agree in backness and/or rounding (Kabak 2011). The same rule applies to suffixes that are agglutinated to the word stem. However, there are no rules regarding how VH would apply to suffixes that are attached to words from another language which include phonemes that do not exist in Turkish as shown in example (1) and (2). This project aimed to investigate how native speakers of Turkish who are bilingual in English would apply VH to English proper nouns with vowel phonemes in the word-final position that do not exist in Turkish by conducting acoustic phonetic analyses.
English Gloss Possible Harmony Structures
(1) ‘in/at Los Angeles’ Los Angeles'ta Los Angeles'te
(2) ‘of Boston’ Boston'ın Boston'un
Participants were presented with an elicitation task including five paragraphs written only in English. Each paragraph was designed to have structures that would require the use of a Turkish suffix agglutinated on an English proper noun. An example sentence one of the constructed paragraphs is shown in (3). The participants were asked to do on-site translation of the paragraphs (into Turkish) and their choice of vowels in the agglutinated suffixes were recorded. After finishing translating all paragraphs, participants were asked how they would say each structure in Turkish in isolation to test if the speakers would use different vowels if they were conscious about the structure. The acoustic properties of each vowel were measured and compared with each other. It was found that even with the speakers being bilingual, while pronouncing English proper nouns in a Turkish context, the acoustic qualities of their vowels would shift towards the qualities of Turkish vowels. It is possible for speakers to pronounce the vowels differently while being conscious about the structure, but it is not a universal trend. It was also found that when a suffix is agglutinated, the vowels used to satisfy VH would match with the final vowel of the stem disregarding how the vowel is realized in orthography. This proved evidence for VH being a natural phonological process underlyingly represented in our cognition, rather than a set of grammar rules that need to be remembered.
(3) I am from Adana, but now I live in Los Angeles.
The next steps of the project will be to examine how would heritage speakers and foreign language learners of Turkish use vowels to satisfy VH in such structures, and compare with the data collected from native speakers to see if there are any similarities. Further researches will also examine how do different groups of speakers pronounce the vowels in proper nouns differently and if that can be reflective of their acquisition of the Turkish language.
