From Canada to Guatemala: Connecting Knowledge and People through ICM

We're delighted to feature this posting by guest blogger Ilona Semchuk!

 

The Faculty Club

 A few linguistics profs get out together after a long week and brave the weather to participate in a Linguistics Review Panel. 

Graduation Lunch & Eclipse

 

How often do we have 2 such exciting things on the same day? 

On April 8, about 20 of our amazing undergrads joined us for a delicious lunch, a live feed to astronomical experts sharing their wisdom about eclipses, and we all got to see the sun disappear (behind the moon, behind the clouds, whatever...). 

Congratulations to our undergrads completing their Majors, Minor and Specialist POSts in linguistics!!!

Here are some highlights from the day:

the actual eclipse (Nathan's pic)

a cake eclipse -- watch the chocolate pass over the lemon, then disappear (Naomi's pic)

Nathan rocks his solar glasses

Picture-in-picture (Craig's pic)

And, if that's not enough, here's more from The Bulletin Brief <bulletin.brief@utoronto.ca>:

Skies darkened and temperatures dropped as the solar eclipse swept across U of T’s three campuses Monday, bringing community members together to marvel at the celestial spectacle. See how the day unfolded through the lenses of photographers at the university.

Prof. Naomi Nagy & MA alum Julia Petrosov published in Languages

Congratulations to Prof. Naomi Nagy and former MA student Julia Petrosov who have published a new paper entitled (Heritage) Russian Case Marking: Variation and the Paths of Change in the Journal Languages. The paper adjudicates between conflicting claims regarding the prominence of morphological levelling in Heritage Russian case marking.

We have included the abstract below: 

Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. One study from 2006 showed that Heritage Russian speakers in the USA produced canonical or prescribed markers for only 13% of preposition+nominal sequences. Conversely, another study from 2020 found that Heritage Russian speakers in Toronto produce a 94% canonical case marker rate in conversational speech. To explore the effects of methodological differences across several studies, the current paper circumscribes the context to preposition+nominal sequences in Heritage Russian speech from the same Toronto corpus as used by the 2020 study but mirroring the domain investigated by Polinsky and including a Homeland comparison to consider changes in both the rates of use of canonical case marking and distributional patterns of non-canonical use. Regression models show more canonical case marking in more frequent words, an independent effect of slightly more mismatch by later generations, but less morphological levelling than reported by Polinsky. Lexicon size does not predict case marking rates as strongly as language usage patterns do, but generation, since immigration, is the best-fitting social predictor. We confirm (small) rate changes in Heritage (vs. Homeland) Russian canonical case marking but not in patterns of levelling.

Congratulations Naomi and Julia!

Congrats Karina!

Congrats to Karina Cheung! 

She presented her research at TULCON and then at Vic's Research Day. For the second, she won the Student Choice Research Award (Voted on by UofT Community) for her paper, "The effects of Heavy-NP Shift on Tagalog Word Order Preferences,"  based on work supervised by Dr. Ivan Bondoc.