Congratulations to Lex Konnelly!

The SGS Awards Committee has selected Lex Konnelly (PhD 2023) as the sole winner of the University of Toronto’s 2024 John Leyerle-CIFAR Prize for Interdisciplinary Research. This award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research and significant contributions to both the academic community and to Canadian society. Note that the award is open to candidates from all SGS programs, not just Social Sciences and Humanities. Many thanks to Lex for putting Linguistics in the spotlight among all these disciplines!

 

Lex’s dissertation (committee members: Prof. Atiqa Hachimi, Prof. Susan Ehrlich and Prof. Derek Denis) explores the linguistic strategies employed by non-binary patients to negotiate medical expectations while expressing their gender identities authentically, highlighting the interplay between language, identity, and healthcare access. Lex’s work not only puts in conversation the fields of linguistics, (trans)gender studies,  and studies of health communication, but also identifies barriers to accessing competent, truly affirming healthcare [quoted from the dissertation].

 

Please join me in congratulating Lex for their distinguished work!

Thanks to Guillaume for the text.

Julien Carrier goes to Kentucky

Dr. Julien Carrier, who earned his PhD in our Department in 2021, and then held a postdoc position at UQAM (working with former UofT student Richard Compton), is excited to be starting a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky.  

He says, "This is a great place for me because people there really like the fact that my research is in socio-syntax."

We wish him all the best in his new job!  Félicitations!

LGCU has started a new newsletter!

The LGCU has started a monthly newsletter to be sent out to members of the Department. If you are looking to advertise any events, post announcements, or simply share some linguistic fun facts or positivity, send it on over! Submissions for the next (April) newsletter close on March 28. Please submit to aliya.zhaksybek@mail.utoronto.ca.

Spring is coming (!) (?)

People, especially prospective students, often ask what the weather is like in Toronto. So here's some evidence. This week is the first day of Spring, according to the calendar. We had a very mild winter with little snow, but it's been coming this week. 

Please add your favourite shots from your commute!

Crocuses

Daffodils and irises

Forsythia

New paper by Prof. Samuel Akinbo in Glossa!

A new paper by Prof. Samuel Akinbo entitled "Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal" has recently appeared in Glossa. The paper presents evidence in favour of iconicity in the core morphophonological grammar.

Here is the abstract:

We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.

Congratulations Prof. Akinbo! 

Congratulations to Prof. Suzi Lima for her new paper in Language Documentation and Description

Congratulations to Professor Suzi Lima whose new article entitled "On Quotatives and Speech Verbs in Yudja" has recently appeared in the journal Language Documentation and Description. The article examines the argument structure of speech verbs in Yudja, an indigenous language spoken in Brazil.

Here is the abstract:

Much literature has debated the argument structure of speech verbs. For example, Munro (1982) has provided evidence to show that, in many languages, quotations do not pattern like the complements of transitive verbs. In this paper, I analyze the distribution of four speech verbs in Yudja (Juruna branch, Tupi), an Indigenous language spoken in Brazil, and compare them with bona fide transitive verbs. I provide morphosyntactic evidence to argue that direct quotations are not complements of speech verbs based on the distribution of such verbs both in quotative and non-quotative constructions.

Happy reading!

Colloquium Talk: Prof. Matt Wagers (UCSC), Friday March 15

Prof. Matt Wagers (University of California Santa Cruz) will be delivering a colloquium talk this Friday. Please find below the details for the meeting and the abstract:

Title: (Re-)encoding Interference

Presenter: Prof. Matt Wagers

Time: Friday, March 15, 3:30pm-5:00pm

Abstract:  

2024 IGNITE grant recipients

 Congratulations to Samuel Akinbo and Suzi Lima! 

They got a 2024 IGNITE grant which supports "interdisciplinary research led by Black faculty, librarians, post-doctoral scholars, clinical scientists and medical research fellows/residents at the University of Toronto." These funds will help support their "project to document the preparation of traditional foods and investigate the grammar of counting and measuring in Gã and Yoruba, two closely related languages spoken in Ghana and Nigeria, respectively. Collaborating with universities in Ghana and Nigeria, one of the project’s key goals is to preserve and revitalize stigmatized traditional foods."

See great photos and more about other winners here:
https://brn.utoronto.ca/announcing-the-2024-brn-ignite-grant-recipients/

New paper from Michela Ippolito in the Journal of Semantics!

Faculty member Michela Ippolito has recently published a new paper in the Journal of Semantics entitled "The Hell with Questions." The paper examines current approaches to wh-the-hell questions, and proposes a new theory based on the idea of doxastic dissonance.

Here is the abstract:

We discuss previous proposals for the semantics of wh-the-hell questions (domain widening theories and domain restriction theories), highlighting the challenges these accounts face in trying to explain the different properties of wh-the-hell questions and capture the contribution this expression makes to the semantics of the question. We review the semantic properties of wh-the-hell questions discussed in the literature and propose a new analysis according to which the hell signals doxastic dissonance. We argue that this proposal accounts for the semantic properties of this type of expletive question, and has the potential to extend to the class of wh-the-hell questions we see across languages.

Congratulations Michela! 

Linguistics Open House on Feb 26

On Monday Feb 26th we had an open house for all our undergraduates who will soon choose their Programs of Study. Students had the opportunity to chat with faculty, staff and current students about all things Linguistics at U of T. 

Program selection begins March 1st for students, if you have any questions about joining our program please email undergrad.linguistics@utoronto.ca

(Thanks to Kai Herzog-Hara for text and photo credit)