2023-2024 Cowper and Dresher Prizes - Congratulations Calvin and Yanfei!

Named after two emeriti professors in Linguistics Department, Elizabeth Cowper and Elan Dresher, the Cowper and Dresher Prizes are distinguished awards for graduate students of Linguistics. 

The 2023-2024 winners were announced earlier in June 2024.

Calvin Quick, a PhD student interested in Mediaeval Welsh poetry, won the Cowper Prize for his papers “Tense and finiteness in embedded bod-clauses” and “Problematizing Linear Approaches to Modifier-Head Adjacency Restrictions.”

For her paper, “An OT Analysis of Stress Patterns of Oneida (Iroquoian)” Yanfei Lu was awarded the Dresher Prize, a recognition within the LIN department for outstanding graduate student work in Phonology.

Yanfei Lu, winner of the
Dresher Prize.

We are so proud of both the students, congratulations!

Elaine Gold Receives the Governor General's Meritorious Service Award

Director Elaine Gold at Glendon Hall

Elaine Gold, retired from the Linguistics Department, and head of the Canadian Language Museum (CLM) has been awarded the Governor-General's Meritorious Service Award. Congratulations!!

The co-Chair of the International Network of Language Museums has seen her museum's exhibits touring across the world, including and especially those pertaining to Indigenous languages. 

Director Gold's star-studded career since retirement from our Department includes speaking about Canadian Indigenous Language policies at the Austronesian Languages Revitalization Forum in Taipei, September 2023.

She and the CLM are now collaborating with the Indigenous Languages Research Foundation to translate their booklet, Indigenous Languages in Canada, into Mandarin. 

The CLM also hosted the art exhibit Anthem: Expressions of Canadian Identity during the fall, which will be presented from May to September at the Canadian Embassy's Prince Takamado Gallery in Tokyo. On June 20th, she, her team, and four artists, will attend the exhibition's reception. 

Director Gold giving her presentation in Taipei, September 2023.

Currently on display in the CLM is "Toronto Voices," an exhibit created as part of community outreach, exploring and detailing the identity of young Torontonians through their vocabulary in collaboration with The Spot, a drop-in center in the Jane-Finch area. 

This recognition of Gold's tireless devotion to languages of Canada, and especially of Toronto, is a fantastic credit to her work in both national and international linguistic communities.

We are so inspired by Gold's impact on reconciliation and language revitalization, especially in the field of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Congratulations, Guillaume!

Congratulations to Guillaume Thomas (faculty) on receiving tenure! We're just thrilled!

Andrea and John in the U of T News

Andrea Johns (BA) and Ryan DeCaire (faculty) have been highlighted in the U of T News in conjunction with the First Nations House's graduation celebration. Andrea, who will be graduating in June, learned Kanien’kéhai/Mohawk and founded the Indigenous Languages Club while a student here, receiving recognition in 2019 from President Meric Gertler.

Congratulations, Alexei and Paul and coauthors!

Congratulations to Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College), and coauthors Jan Heegård Petersen (Københavns Universitet), Sikandar Kalas (Central Film School, London), and Taj Khan Kalash (Kalasha Heritage Conservation Initiative). As part of the Illustrations of the IPA series in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, this team has a forthcoming profile of the phonetics of Kalasha (Bumburet variety), and it has just been awarded the journal's first Most Illustrative Illustration Prize. Wonderful news!

Congratulations, Julien!

Congratulations to Julien Carrier (Ph.D. 2020), who is taking up a competitive SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship! He has recently joined the Université du Québec à Montréal to work under the supervision of UQAM faculty member Richard Compton (Ph.D. 2012), himself the recent recipient of an award for excellence in teaching, on morphosyntactic variation in varieties of Inuktitut. This will be quite the collaboration and is a thoroughly well-earned opportunity. Congratulations, Julien - and also Richard!

Congratulations, Ailís and Ana!

Every year, the Society for Language Development selects an article in its journal, Language Learning and Development, as the recipient of the Peter Jusczyk Best Paper Award. The winners of the award for 2020 are Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty) for "Leaving obligations behind: Epistemic incrementation in preschool English." Congratulations to both on this well-deserved honour!

New book: Bjorkman and Hall (eds.) (2020)

Following up from 2015's Workshop on Contrast in Syntax in honour of Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), editors Bronwyn Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University) and Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University) have helmed a volume of papers, Contrast and Representations in Syntax, that was released in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. The contents are as follows:

• Gabriela Albiou (postdoc 2002-03, now at York University) and Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "A feature-geometric approach to verbal inflection in Onondaga."
• Andrew Carnie (BA 1991, now at the University of Arizona) and Sylvia L. R. Schreiner (George Mason University): "Restricted and reversed aspectual contrasts."
• Elizabeth Ritter (former postdoc, now at the University of Calgary): "Sentience-based event structure: Evidence from Blackfoot."
• Maria Kyriakaki (Ph.D. 2011, now at the American College of Greece): "Definite expression and degrees of definiteness."
• Martha McGinnis (MA 1993, now at the University of Victoria): "Cross-linguistic contrasts in the structure of causatives in clausal nominalizations."
• Leslie Saxon (MA 1979, now at the University of Victoria): "The Tłı̨chǫ syntactic causative and non-nominal CPs."
• Carson T. Schütze (MA 1991, now at the University of California, Los Angeles): "Against some approaches to long-distance agreement without AGREE."
• Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University): "Contrast in syntax and contrast in phonology: Same difference?"

Congratulations, Pocholo!

Earlier today, the Linguistic Society of America announced the winners of its annual awards and honours. We are thrilled that this year's recipient of the Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award is our own Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.). The Dayton Award, in the words of the LSA, recognizes "a graduate student pursuing a course of study in sociolinguistics who demonstrates a distinguished level of scholastic achievement". Congratulations, Pocholo - we can certainly attest to this being a thoroughly well-deserved honour!

Congratulations, Diane!

Congratulations to Diane Massam (faculty), who is one of the winners of this year's Janice Colbert Poetry Award offered by the School of Continuing Studies! A well-deserved honour indeed.

Congratulations, Daphna!

We are delighted to have learned that Daphna Heller (faculty) has been awarded a six-month Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities by the Jackman Humanities Institute, in support of her project 'Sources of information and linguistic meaning: From typology to cognition'. Congratulations, Daphna!

Congratulations, Marisa and Nathan!

The Linguistics Graduate Course Union has announced their annual awards for Excellence in TA Supervision for 2019-20. This year, the award recognizes Marisa Brook (faculty), with an honorable mention to Nathan Sanders (faculty). Congratulations to both!

Congratulations, Peter!

Congratulations to faculty member Peter Jurgec on receiving tenure! We're delighted!

Three alumni recognized by the CJL

The work of three of our graduate alumni can be found among the ten most-downloaded articles of 2020 (so far) from the Canadian Journal of Linguistics.

In particular, Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019) is listed twice; his paper "The contrastive topic requirement on specificational subjects" and squib "Modifying Spatial P: A remark on Svenonius (2010)" both appear on the list. Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) and Isaac Gould (MA 2010, now at Ewha Women's University) are also represented.

Congratulations, Phil!

Congratulations to faculty psycholinguist Phil Monahan, who has received tenure at our Scarborough campus. Well-deserved!

Congratulations, Suzi!

Congratulations to Suzi Lima (faculty), who has been named this year's recipient of the new Early Career Researcher Award from the Canadian Linguistic Association! Their released statement describes Suzi's accomplishments as follows:

Dr. Suzi Lima is an early career researcher who has contributed substantially to language research, demonstrated innovation in research and dissemination, and engaged in practice and policy development in the broader community. Her theoretical focus is the pragmatics and semantics of number and quantity, and she has made contributions to formal semantics, typology, language acquisition, psychology, language documentation and revitalization, and the study of indigenous languages. She has held several research grants and has presented her work at the world's top conferences. She has published many peer-reviewed research works, and has also prepared, with the indigenous communities, a dictionary of verbs (Yudja) and a co-authored pedagogical grammar (Kawaiwete), to be published. She is also in demand as an invited speaker and as an innovative teacher and mentor. Dr. Lima holds a BA and MA from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. Since her 2014 graduation she has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and Assistant Professorships at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and in the Departments of Linguistics, and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. In 2019, she began her current position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Lima's research focuses on pragmatics, semantics, typology, language acquisition, and documentation and revitalization. She engages in experimental fieldwork, with a focus on indigenous languages of Brazil, most prominently on Yudja and Kawaiwete. In her dissertation and much of her following work, Dr. Lima has developed ingenious protocols for uncovering the mechanisms by which languages count and measure things and substances, making novel contributions to the semantics and typology of number and quantity. Her work is also innovative in investigating the acquisition of these concepts in under-studied languages, through the study of monolingual and bilingual speakers of indigenous languages and Brazilian Portuguese. She has also collaboratively investigated questions of general cognition, such as how mathematical reasoning relates to cultural practice. Dr. Lima has also been exemplary in the ways she has shared her research with academic and non-academic communities. For example, her collaborative work has resulted in a questionnaire which is a masterpiece in elicitation and experimental design, targeting detailed semantic properties by using methods such as translation, production, comprehension tasks, storyboards, and videos. This questionnaire was applied by specialists who presented their results at a 2017 workshop, now in press as a special volume of Linguistic Variation. One reading book (Kawaiwete songs) was published in 2015 by the Museu do Índio. This ambitious project (coorganized with Susan Rothstein) involved both under-represented scholars and languages, demonstrating Dr. Lima's qualities of leadership. Dr. Lima also reaches out to communities and activists in her work twice funded by United Nations/National Indian Foundation/Indian Museum in Brazil, to document the Kawaiwete language. This work has involved educational workshops for teachers and collaborations with community leaders and researchers, and has resulted in the production of educational materials such as a pedagogical grammar and a dictionary draft. Dr. Lima has also collaborated in creating a database featuring resources for documentation and methods for fieldworkers. Dr. Lima is also an inspiring teacher and mentor, demonstrated in particular by her research excursion program courses where she takes undergraduate students to Brazil for hands-on documentation and fieldwork experience. In summary, Suzi Lima is an extraordinary early career researcher who has already achieved distinction in a range of areas, including theoretical, experimental, and documentation linguistics, while also demonstrating innovation in teaching and community outreach. The Canadian Linguistic Association is delighted to recognize her achievements by awarding Dr. Suzi Lima our inaugural Early Career Researcher Award in 2020.

LGCU pub night with Susana

As announced at one of our recent department parties, the winner of the TA/Grader Supervision Excellence Award for 2018-19 from the Linguistics Graduate Course Union was Susana Béjar (faculty). She earned a certificate and a special pub night with the graduate students; Kaz Bamba (Ph.D.) has sent along this photo of himself and Susana from the official ceremony, which took place recently. Congratulations, Susana, and thanks for all your efforts!

Congratulations, Andrea!

We are thrilled to have learned that Andrea Johns (BA) is one of two Indigenous students recognized by President Meric Gertler for their commitment to academics and Indigenous outreach. Andrea, who is Kanien'kéha/Mohawk and currently a fourth-year student in Indigenous Studies, has thrown herself into advocating for Indigenous language rights. On top of herself learning the Kanien'kéha/Mohawk language in classes taught by Ryan DeCaire (faculty), she has established the Indigenous Languages Club here and studied abroad in New Zealand to investigate the language revitalization and other cultural reclamation efforts on the part of the Maori. Following her graduation, she intends to continue to advocate for linguistic human rights among the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Congratulations, Andrea, on this recognition, and all our best!

Congratulations, Barend and colleagues!

Congratulations to Ella Rabinovich (postdoc, Department of Computer Science), Julia Watson (BA 2018), Barend Beekhuizen (faculty), and Suzanne Stevenson (faculty, Department of Computer Science)! At the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), held on November 3 and 4 in Hong Kong, their presentation - "Say anything: Automatic semantic infelicity detection in L2 English indefinite pronouns" - won the conference's award for Best Paper for Research Inspired by Human Language Learning. Well done, all!

Congratulations, Paul and Piper!

Congratulations to Paul Poirier (MA) and his athletic partner Piper Gilles on their spectacular first-place finish in ice dancing at Skate Canada on Saturday the 26th! A video can be found at the link.