Reunited at DiGS 23!!

From right to left: Erin Hall, Ana Pérez-Leroux, Ailis Cournane

 

 

 

The Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference, held at NYU,  took place June 8-10.  DiGS 23 had a special workshop on "Child learners in syntactic change: Theory and methods"! This workshop hosted presentations and discussions on topics combining theoretical syntax, child language acquisition, variationist sociolinguistics and computational modelling of language change.

Erin Hall (PhD Alum 2020, now assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino) and Ana Pérez-Leroux (Faculty) presented their work entitled "Children take steps toward cyclic and non-cyclic diachronic changes". The pair examine the role of child language acquisition in systematic, cyclic processes of grammaticalization, and non-cyclic changes in progress. They propose that there are 2 different processes involved in child language acquisition.

Not only did this workshop allow for Hall and Pérez-Leroux to share their amazing work, but they also got to reunite with Ailis Cournane! Cournane is a PhD alum, class of 2015, and is now an assistant professor at NYU! 

Overall, UofT faculty and alum had a successful time at DiGS 23! 

UofT Publications in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics !

We are pleased to share that there are TWO UofT publications in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics! 

Cassandra Chapman (former Postdoctoral Fellow) and Keir Moulton (Faculty) have recently published "Second chances in antecedent retrieval: The processing of reflexives in two types of reconstruction environments." Here they investigate the phenomenon where reflexives in wh-predicate fronting constructions launch a search that is not structurally guided. They ask whether non-structurally guided retrievals of this sort result in comprehenders ever commit to ungrammatical antecedents. 

A great read for those interested in psycholinguistics! 

Elizabeth Cowper (Faculty Emirita) and Daniel Currie Hall (alum, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S) have their paper "Morphosemantic features in Universal Grammar: What we can learn from Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives" published as well! They analyze Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives. Cowper and Currie Hall argue that both privative and binary morphosemantic features are necessary, and that these two types coexist in a single domain. 

A can't-miss paper for all our morphologists and semantics! 

Featured Article: Non-Auditory Effects of Environmental Noise

Marshall Chasin's (Faculty) paper "Non-Auditory Effects of Environmental Noises" is the Featured Story in Canadian Audiologist, the official publication of the Canadian Academy of Audiology! Chasin's work stands out as the study of non-auditory effects of everyday environmental noises (e.g sleep disruptions and annoyances) that are not typically considered in audiology. 

Chasin examines reviews done by the World Health Organization on the effects of non-auditory noise on stress and cardiovascular effects, sleep disruption patterns, cognition, adverse birth outcome issues and general annoyance. His paper summarizes and delineates the difficulties in researching non-auditory effects of everyday noises and provides insight into the conclusions from the WHO's general recommendation for dealing with non-auditory environmental noises. 

This is an interesting read for all our audiologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists!

Undergrad Award Recipient 🎓🎉

Huge congratulations to Gianna Francesca Giovio Canavesi (now UTM undergrad alum) for graduating and receiving two esteemed awards! 

She is the recipient of the UofT Excellence Award for her work on "Production and Perception of Keiyo Vowels,"a research project supervised by Dr. Avery Ozburn. She also received the Outstanding Program Performance Award in Language Studies at UTM! 

Congrats Gianna! Your hard work has paid off and we are excited to see the amazing things you'll accomplish as you pursue your Masters in Speech-Language Pathology! 

Podcast on Computational Linguistics!

You have all probably binge-listened to the Gender in Language Podcasts from the JAL355 class, and we will we now share ANOTHER amazing listen from within the department! 

Frederick Gietz (PhD Candidate) was a guest on the Learn Real Good Podcast, a science-comedy podcast! His episode, "Teaching Semantics to Computers with Frederick Gietz" talks about teaching computers how to use verbs in the many complex ways humans do. As Gietz uses semantic and psychological theories to better understand language processing, he made for an excellent and engaging podcast guest! 

We highly recommend listening to his episode on your next daily walk! 

Associate Professor Keir Moulton!

 

We offer big CONGRATULATIONS Keir,  

who has been awarded Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor in our Department. 

He will now have time to perfect his risotto and other culinary undertakings.

Graduation Tea 🫖🎓🎉

All undergrad linguists spend years working towards the goal of attending the Graduation Tea! This year, members of the graduating class joined faculty members on Wonder where they reminisced on their undergrad years and chatted about future plans! We are pleased to hear many are continuing their studies in linguistics at various institutions around the world! 

Congrats to all students who are graduating this year! We cannot wait to hear about all the amazing things you'll do in the future! 

 

Ba-TOM 1!

The First Toronto-Montreal Bantu Colloquium (Ba-TOM) was hosted (IN PERSON!) on our Scarborough Campus from May 27th -28th! 

Students from the Winter Semester Field Method courses at the University of Toronto and at McGill's linguistics department presented their final papers at Ba-Tom 1. 

Here we have almost all the UofT presenters! 

Check out the program to see how many UofT names you can recognize!

This was an amazing event and the department is excited to see Ba-TOM continue in the years to come! 

Workshop: Semantics of NPs, DPs, and Modality!

On June 9th the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are co-organizing this workshop:

Semantics of NPs, DPs, and Modality

Thursday June 9, 2022 NFC, Victoria College VC102

Registration: https://uoft.me/semantics

Professor Roberta Pires de Oliveira, a specialist on modality and bare nominals in Brazilian Portuguese, is the invited speaker and will be sharing their work on Semantics, Language Variation and Experiments! 

Students working on related topics will also be presenting their work during the workshop! Student Talks include: 

• Sophie Harrington: "More than a mood": Uniting structure and interpretation through prominalized complements 
• Crystal Chen (PhD Student): That Kind-of demonstrative: A Semantic Analysis of English Demonstratives 
• Samuel Jambrović: Names, articles, and unique individuals 
• Ohanna Severo: The syntactic properties of bare nouns in a Spanish-Portuguese contact situation
•  Gregory Antono (PhD Student), Daphna Heller (Faculty) and Craig Chambers  (cross-appointed with the Department of Psychology): Linearizing classifiers, numerals, and nouns in the noun phrase. Does artificial language learning reflect cognitive biases? 

If you'd like to attend this intriguing workshop, please register in advance! 

 Program

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.
Sophie Harrington
"More than a mood": Uniting structure and interpretation through pronominalized complements

11:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Roberta Pires de Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina/CNPq PQ-1C) Invited talk: Bare arguments and kinds: The case of Brazilian Portuguese

12:00 – 1:30 p.m. Lunch

1:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Crystal Chen
That Kind-of demonstrative: A Semantic Analysis of English Demonstratives

2:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Samuel Jambrović
Names, articles, and unique individuals

2:30 – 2:45 pm Coffee break

2:45 – 3:15 p.m.
Ohanna Severo
Investigating bare nouns in Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals

3:15 – 3:45
Gregory Antono, Daphna Heller, Craig Chambers
Linearizing classifiers, numerals, and nouns in the noun phrase. Does artificial language learning reflect cognitive biases?

3:45 – 4:00 p.m. Closing remarks 

Cantonese "lazy pronunciation" gets another round

This may sound a bit familiar, but...

Brian Diep (undergrad), Justin Leung (PhD student) and Naomi Nagy (faculty) are presenting about variation in heritage and homeland Cantonese at another conference this weekend: 

第五屆粵語語言學論壇 The Fifth Forum on Cantonese Linguistics (FoCaL-5)

 The talk is at 10am Saturday, 4 June (Hong Kong time!!!):

邊啲人[naːn23]啲? (n-/l-) in Cantonese in Hong Kong and Toronto

This will present some further developments since the talk at WICL last weekend.

Here is Justin, happy to have finished that talk:

 

 

Two other WICL talks also reported on findings from the HLVC Project:

 

Katrina Kechun Li, Christopher Bryant & Li Nguyen (University of Cambridge)

Tonal aspects of Cantonese-English code-switching in HLVC corpus

and 

Holman Tse (Asst. Professor at St. Catherine University, previously a visiting student in our Department):

Is there cross-linguistic influence of English /u/ on Toronto Cantonese high round vowels? 

(Sorry, not good shots of Holman, but here's his slides.)

 

New Publication: Licensing Unergative Objects in Ergative Languages: The View from Polynesian

Rebecca Tollan (University of Delaware) and Diane Massam (Emerita Faculty) have published "Licensing Unergative Objects in Ergative Languages: The View from Polynesian" in Syntax! 

They examine how objects of unergative verbs are case licensed when they are present, focusing on a contrast between Samoan and Niuean, two related Polynesian languages. Their comparative analysis highlights the salients of considering unergative constructions when determining the underlying syntax of any given case system. 

Tollan, R., & Massam, D. Licensing unergative objects in ergative languages: The view from Polynesian. Syntax.

Daphna & Breanna at the 2nd Experiments in Linguistic Meaning Conference!

The 2nd Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) Conference was hosted by the University of Pennsylvania from May 18-20 2022. 

Si On Yoo, Breanna Pratley (former MA student now at UMass) and Daphna Heller  (Faculty) presented their work on "Referential domains, priming and the effect of invisible objects".  This study examines whether unmentioned earlier objects can also be part of the referential domain and whether earlier and current objects are part of a single referential domain.

For those who did not attend, be sure to check out their abstract!