UofT Linguists at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Several members of our UofT community presented talks at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics hosted by McGill University, between May 2nd and May 4th. 

A complete list of UofT attendees and presenters can be found below. 

Liam McFadden, Assistant Professor Samuel Akinbo, PhD Candidate Gregory Antono, Yi-Ting Deng, and Assistant Professor Avery Ozburn presented their work, Mapping African languages. 

His first conference outside of UofT, McFadden is an undergraduate student at UofT, who got to combine his knowledge of linguistics and GIS (Geographic Information System) to navigate through the field of language mapping with the goal of engaging the linguistics community in a project of making better maps. 

McFadden and the team are excited to see the development of their work in future years, and we at the WHITL are excited to see ACAL 56!

UofT Linguistics Department Presence: 

Speakers: 

Laura Griffin, Alexander Angsongna - An Analysis of Tone Delinking in Future Contexts in Central Dàgáárè

Liam McFadden, Samuel Akinbo, Gregory Antono, Yi-Ting Deng, Avery Ozburn - Mapping African languages

Keffyalew Gebregziabher - Polar and Wh-questions in Tigrinya 

Samuel Akinbo, Tongpan Rabo Fwangwar - Grammatical tones in the Derivation of Verbs from Ideophones in Mwaghavul

Atiqa Hachimi, Gareth Smail - Stylized performance of “mock Berber” in a Moroccan Stand-Up comedy talent show

Juvénal Ndayiragije, Patrick Kinchsular - A comparative analysis of transitive expletive constructions in Kirundi and Germanic

Poster:

Avery Ozburn, Gregory Antono, Saba Mirabolghasemi - Community- and context-based approaches to African linguistics: the Language Profiles Project

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! 

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 by Prof. Avery Ozburn and Prof. Samuel Akinbo

A new paper coauthored by Avery Ozburn (Faculty), Gianna Canavesi (PhD Student), and Samuel Akinbo (Faculty) has appeared in the Journal for the Association of Laboratory Phonology. The paper entitled "Perception of ATR in Dàgáárè" examines how well speakers of Dàgáárè (Mabia; Ghana) distinguish ATR contrasts and looks at the effects of harmony and disharmony on perception.

Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on two related perception studies about the property Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) in Dàgáárè (Mabia; Ghana). We examine how well native speakers are able to distinguish ATR contrasts as well as the effects of harmony and disharmony on perception, thereby testing hypotheses that have been made in the literature about the perceptual motivations of harmony systems. We find that, as expected, ATR mid vowels and Retracted Tongue Root (RTR) high vowels are the hardest to distinguish in Dàgáárè, but contrary to expectations, harmony does not improve accuracy in discriminating ATR contrasts. Nonetheless, we find the accuracy on disharmonic disyllabic forms is significantly worse than the accuracy in monosyllabic forms, which may indicate that disharmony hurts perception. We examine the implications for our understanding of the motivations of harmony systems and discuss how this paper contributes to the very minimal existing literature on perception in African languages.

Congratulations Avery, Gianna, and Samuel! We're excited to see so many wonderful collaborations within our department.

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! 

UofT presents at Annual Conference on African Linguistics!

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!