Naomi Nagy, Linguistics Chair, Publishes Book about Heritage Language Variation and Change!

On June 27th, 2024, Department of Linguistics Chair, Naomi Nagy, published her book, Heritage Languages: Extending variationist approaches. [Click link to purchase :-) or get it from UofT's library]. 

In Canada, the term, "heritage language" refers to a language learned in the home by children, if that language is not one of Canada's official languages (French, English). Half the people in Toronto are heritage-language speakers!

This book seeks to dispel stigma surrounding the use of one's heritage language by investigating cross-generational variation and change in conversations with 400+ speakers, in 8 different heritage languages, in Toronto. The findings reveal many similarities between heritage and homeland varieties.

"Introduc[ing] new methodology to help readers understand and apply variationist sociolinguistic approaches to quantitatively analyze spontaneous speech," this novel approach to heritage language research showcases how change in grammar of heritage languages resembles change patterns seen hegemonic, majority languages, contradicting findings of "simplification/attrition patterns in experimental heritage language studies." [quoted from the publicity blurbs]

Comparing patterns not only across languages, but across generations, this research quotes heritage speakers to give voice and pride to the use of their languages. 

Nagy presented some of this research at BAM's Language Research Day, as her talk on Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC), which we covered on the blog earlier in July. Other findings are on the project's webpage.

This book promises to be a veritable toolbox for those interested in learning about or researching heritage languages, dedicated to language revitalization.

Currently, the Department Chair is in Italy conducting research also relevant to this pursuit - about the variation in Franco-Provencal language varieties over time and space, and how to connect speakers of different varieties via social media.

 

 

The author reports that this book was much more fun to write than her dissertation!

Arcadian Greek vs. Standard Greek: Dr. Photini Coutsougera Publishes A Dictionary with the Answers

From Dr. Coutsougera: 

"""

Dr. Photini Coutsougera of Mississauga Campus' Language Studies Department has recently published a new book, A Dictionary of Northeastern Arcadian Greek [in Greek] with Patakis Publications, Athens, Greece (2024)/ 320 pages. 

A Look Inside: Letter Αα, p. 66

The Dictionary of Northeastern Arcadian Greek comprises 4.200 entries and 5.120 senses. These entries were primarily collected during field work, over a period of approximately thirteen years, and from existing written sources. 

Subsequently, they were verified one by one  by a group of native speakers of the dialect, aged 80 and over. Each entry contains semantic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and stylistic information. It also contains a plethora of authentic examples in use, synonyms, antonyms, idioms and idiomatic phrases, proverbs, sayings, and verses from local folk poetry. Finally, a 28-page Prologue includes a compact grammar of the dialect, lays out the research methodology employed in the data collection, and defines Arcadian Greek on the basis of linguistic criteria which systematically differentiate it from Standard Greek. 

This book aspires to bring the Peloponnesian varieties of Greek to the fore as they have been conspicuously absent from the literature.

                                                                 """

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. Pedro Mateo Pedro in Linguistic Variation

Congratulations Prof. Pedro Mateo Pedro and coauthors Philip T. Duncan (University of Kansas) and Harold Torrence (UCLA) for their new paper 'Indeterminate pronouns in Kaqchikel' in Linguistic Variation. The article examines the morphology, syntax, and semantics of certain non-interrogative structures involving wh-expressions in the Mayan language Kaqchikel.

Abstract:

This paper investigates the morphology, syntax, and semantics of five non-interrogative constructions that involve wh-expressions in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language of the K’ichean branch spoken in Guatemala. We focus on the properties of maximal free relative clauses, existential free relative clauses, ever free relative clauses, free choice items and negative indefinites. We show that the interpretive properties of these constructions are strikingly similar to those found in a number of unrelated languages.

Happy reading!

MoMOT @ UofT

Last weekend UofT hosted the 7th annual Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Morphology Meeting (MoMOT). This meeting was organized by members of the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.  The two-day event welcomed some new and familiar faces as they presented their work on a range of topics in morphology. 

The keynote speakers this year were:

Ivana Kučerová (McMaster) who presented her work on The syntax of gender features: The morphologist’s guide to feature-bundling traps

and 

James Crippen (McGill) who presented his work entitled Verb morphology in Tlingit is ordinary syntax

Other presenters included both current and former UofT students (see list of presenters below). Be sure to ask them about their work when you see them!

Martin Renard (PhD Student). Two Types of Noun Incorporation in Kanien’kéha: A Categorization Analysis

Samuel Jambrović (PhD Candidate). Capturing the third-person gap in Spanish pronoun-noun constructions

Will Oxford (Alumni). When a 1 > 2 hierarchy is actually a 2 > 1 hierarchy

Patrick Kinschular (Undergrad). Morphological Alternation in Kinyarwanda External Possession Constructions

Liam Donohue (PhD Candidate). Perfect Readings in the Absence of Perfect Morphology

Big thanks to the organizers, volunteers, presenters, and attendees for making this meeting a success!

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! 

Colloquium Feb. 18: Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology.

The department is hosting a colloquium this Friday, February 18th with guest speaker Jennifer Culbertson (University of Edinburgh)! 

Culbertson will be speaking on the topic of Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology. Abstract is shared below. 

If you are interested in attending, please contact Avery Ozburn (Faculty and Colloquium Committee Member) for the Zoom login information.

Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology

One of the most controversial hypotheses in linguistics is that individual-level biases in learning shape language typology at the population-level. While this hypothesis has been around a long time, it has often been supported by less than robust empirical evidence. In this talk, I present a number of studies aimed at providing new sources of evidence linking learning to key features of language. In the first part of the talk, I focus on a classic set of "language universals" which describe common word order patterns. One such pattern is word order harmony, the tendency for syntactic heads and dependents to align across phrases within a language. While harmony has long been claimed to have some special cognitive status, there is also compelling evidence that it may be driven by cognition-external processes of language change. I show that harmony is in fact favoured during learning, influencing how adults and children make inferences under noisy learning conditions, and how they extrapolate to new constructions. I then turn to a more complex pattern of word order which has been proposed to derive from constraints on syntactic representations. I report experimental and quantitative corpus-based evidence to suggest an alternative explanation of this pattern, but one nevertheless driven by learning. In the second part of the talk, I discuss the role of learning in shaping morphosynactic patterns like grammatical gender. I argue that the different biases of children and adults during learning work together to constrain how such patterns emerge and change over time. Finally, I discuss the implications of this work for linguistic theories and models of language evolution.

MoMOT 5!

UofT had a strong graduate presence at MoMOT 5! 

Nadia Takaganova (PhD Student) presented  'Adopositions in bilingual speech: the case of Spanish de in Náhuatl'. 

Omar Gamboa Gonzalez (PhD student in the department of French) shared 'Double aspect of French converted nominalizations'. 

Martin Renard (PhD student)  presented virtually in a poster session regarding 'The "Root Word Method": Theoretical implications of the use of a morpheme-based teaching method in L2 Indigenous Language Revilatlization'.

Great work everyone!

Alumna Publication: Nominal types on Gitksan split absolutive agreement

Clarissa Forbes (PhD 2018) has a paper in the most recent volume of Natural Langauge and Linguistic Theory! The paper is entitled  "Nominal types on Gitksan split absolutive agreement" and it studies a split absolutive-nominative agreement pattern found in Gitksan (Tsimshianic) that co-occurs with ergative agreement.

Is this ringing a bell for anyone? Forbes' PhD thesis offered a morphosyntactic analysis of the agreement patterns in the Tsimshanic language family, with a primary focus on Gitksan. 

We love seeing how projects that began at UofT expand! Be sure to check out both her thesis and her new publication! 

New Publication: Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction

Sahar Taghipour (PhD Candidate) and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Faculty) have published a paper entitled "Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction". They argue that Laki, a dialect spoken in the city of Kahdadht in northwestern Iran, has split ergativity which comes from the presence of a single locus of Agreement on T in past intransitive and present clauses, versus two loci of Agreement on T and v in past transitive clauses.

This is a must-read for syntax and morphology lovers! 

Taghipour, S., & Kahnemuyipour, A. (2021). Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction. In 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 417-426). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Restarting the Morphology Research Group!

Martin Renard (PhD Student) has brought back the Morphology Research Group alongside Gavin Bembridge (York U)! 

This group is meant to be an informal space to discuss issues related to the field of morphology (based on members' research, work and/or interest).  Members are invited to present and suggest discussion topics for future meetings! 

To participate, please email Martin (martin.renard@mail.utoronto.ca) to sign up for the email list! 

North East Linguistics Society 52

Rutgers University will be hosting The North East Linguistics Society 52 this year from October 29th-31st.  PhD student Samuel Jambrović (in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is scheduled to present on October 31st! Jambrović will be presenting work on the Evidence for Predicativism in Restrictive Apposition and the Proprial Article. 

This is a presentation you do not want to miss! 

Information regarding registration has yet to come! 

12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics

The 12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics is taking place from June 14 through 18 online, hosted by the University of Oslo. We have several current and former department members giving talks:

• Elan Dresher (faculty), Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University), and Sara Mackenzie (Ph.D. 2009, now at Memorial University of Newfoundland): "The role of contrastive feature hierarchies in the establishment of phoneme inventories."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia): "Endangered languages as heritage languages: Divergent attainment and phonological regularization of diminutive reduplication in Comox-Sliammon (Salish)."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) and Amanda Cardoso (University of British Columbia): "Investigating phonemic inventories without minimal pairs: Defining contrast in the vowel inventory of Comox-Sliammon (ʔayʔaǰuθəm)."

CLA-ACL 2021

This year's meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique is being held online from June 4 through 7, and many University of Toronto linguists of past and present are involved.

• Laura Colantoni (faculty) and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty) are part of a talk with Yadira Alvarez López (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Miguel Barreto (BA), Irinia Marinescu (Ph.D. 2012, Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Jierui Yang (BA), and colleague Alejandro Cuza (Purdue University): "The modular interaction hypothesis: When the exponent of gender is an unstressed vowel."
• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University), Elizabeth Cowper (faculty), and Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University), with Louise Koren (Carleton University), Jennice Hinds (Carleton University), and Dan Siddiqi (Carleton University): "Morphological upstaging and markedness."
• Anabela Rato (faculty, Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and Yasaman Rafat (Ph.D. 2011, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Western Ontario) are part of a talk with Martha Black (University of Western Ontario): "The effect of stimuli repetition on approximant-stop discrimination in Spanish-dominant and English-dominant late bilinguals."
• Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), Erin Vearncombe (faculty, WIT program), and Nathan Sanders (faculty) are giving a pedagogy talk: "Grading grading: Training for consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness in marking linguistics writing."
• Cristina Cuervo (faculty), Ohanna Severo (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Sophie Harrington (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese), and Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Features and forms in L2 Spanish verbal inflection."
• Songül Gündoğdu (postdoc), Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty), and Marcel den Dikken (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): "Ezafe in the context of CPs in Persian and Kurmanji."
• Cristina Cuervo (faculty) and Hong-Yan Liu (Ph.D.): "The path of Mandarin Ps: from V to P (and back)."
• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): "Acoustics of Persian uvular lenition."
• Vidhya Elango (MA) and Derek Denis (faculty): "Fom and friends: Variable BAN-laxing in Multicultural Toronto English."
• Suzi Lima (faculty): "Relative measures in Brazilian Portuguese."
• Michelle Troberg (faculty): "Towards a syntactic typology of prepositions in French."
• Curt Anderson (faculty) has a poster: "Perceivable properties and inference to mental states."
• Ai Taniguchi (Toronto) is giving a pedagogy talk: "Teaching academic writing via theoretical linguistics: Towards authentic assessments in introductory linguistics classes."
• Samantha Jackson (postdoc): "Pronoun acquisition in a varilingual context."
• Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.): "Restrictions on transitivity in Inuktitut subordinate clauses."
• Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "How to adjoin adverbial clauses, and make verb clusters: Lessons from Mongolian converbs."
• Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.): "Deriving two types of applicatives: The case of Persian psych predicates."
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Obviating lexicalism: A structural account of exocentricity and metaphorical extension."
• Omar Gamboa Gonzalez (Ph.D., Department of French): "Double aspect des nominalisations du français obtenues par conversion."
• Andrew McCandless (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) has a poster: "Phonetic training of Spanish /u/ in L2 Spanish learners with L1 Canadian English."
• Hilary Walton (Ph.D., Department of French): "Does language learning context influence the dynamics of L2 learner groups? An investigation of social identity in Canadian French-as-a-second-language programs."
• Marjorie Leduc (MA) has a poster: "Icy targets: The case of Karajá."
• Nicoline Butler (MA) also has a poster: "Sound symbolism in electric, rock, and ground-type Pokémon names."
• Heather Burnett (former postdoc, now at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique) with Yiming Liang (University of Paris) and Pascal Amsili (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle): "Revisiter l’omission du complémenteur que en français montréalais : Exploration de facteurs cognitifs."
• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former postdoc, now at Queen's University): "Representing and resolving feature conflicts."
• Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015, now at New York University) and Sandrine Tailleur (Ph.D. 2012, now at l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi): "Where do maybes come from?"
• Olga Tararova (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, now at the University of Western Ontario) is giving a talk with Martha Black (University of Western Ontario): "Multilingual advantage for adult-instructed acquisition of morphosyntax and the effect of processing modality."
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): "DOM co-occurrence restrictions in Romance: Beyond clitic clusters."
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2012, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) also hasa poster with Tova Rapoport (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): "The nature of a predicate: The case of depictives."
• Bethany MacLeod (Ph.D. 2012, now at Carleton University) and Sabrina M. Di Lonardo Burr (Carleton University): "Imitation of the acoustic realization of Spanish stress: Production and perception."
• Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) and Kang Jungu (Sogang University): "Prosodic spell-out of nominals in Mongolian."
• Jila Ghomeshi (Ph.D. 1996, now at the University of Manitoba): "T-relatives in Persian."
• Lyn Tieu (MA 2008, now at Western Sydney University): "Scalar implicatures in French: Children’s production mirrors their comprehension."
• Recent faculty member Anne-José Villeneuve (now at the University of Alberta), David Rosychuk (University of Alberta), and Davy Bigot (Concordia University): "Langue de ville et langue de soirée: Variation stylistique et maintien des contraintes en français québécois soutenu."
• Anne-José Villeneuve (University of Alberta) is also part of talk with Tracie Pospisil (University of Alberta), and Kristan Marchak (University of Alberta): "D’où elle est? : Perception dialectale et diversité du français parlé en Albe."
• Recent visiting student Sander Nederveen (University of British Columbia): "Semantics and morphosyntax of double perfects in Alemannic."
• For the Pedagogy Roundtable session, we have several participants. Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), Pocholo Umbal (Ph.D.), and Nathan Sanders are presenting "The Diverse Names Database: A tool for creating more equitable, diverse, and inclusive linguistic example sentences." Sophia Bello (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is presenting "Effectiveness of interactive digital applications: Assessment of student engagement." Julianne Doner (Ph.D. 2019) is presenting "Lessons from being the Online Support TA in summer 2020."
• Among those taking part in the career panel for linguistics-related jobs outside academia are Christopher Spahr (Ph.D. 2015, now at Rune Labs) and Carrie Gillon (MA 1999, now working with the Squamish Nation).

WSCLA 25

The 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25) is taking place online from May 28 through 30, hosted by Sogang University. Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) and Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego) are two of the three organizers.

• Guillaume Thomas (faculty) is giving one of the invited talks: "Restructuring evidentials in Mbyá."
• Virgilio Partida-Peñalva (Ph.D.) has a presentation: "The stative-inchoative alternation in Mazahua: A morphosyntactic account of the derivation of inchoatives."
• Rosemary Webb (BA 2019, now at Simon Fraser University) is also giving a presentation: "Viewpoint in Hul'q'umi'num co-speech gestures."

New book: Fábregas, Acedo-Matellán, Armstrong, Cuervo, and Payet (eds.) (2021)

Congratulations to Cristina Cuervo (faculty) and her co-editors Antonio Fábregas (University of Tromsø/Arctic University of Norway), Víctor Acedo-Matellán (University of Oxford), Grant Armstrong (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Isabel Pujol Payet (Universitat de Girona) on the publication of the Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology! In spite of recent extenuating circumstances, this landmark effort consisting of 42 chapters has reached publication on schedule. Well done, all!

GLOW 44

The 44th Generative Linguistics in the Old World conference is taking place online from April 15 through 17, hosted by the international team making up the GLOW board. We have two alumni on the program:

• Julie Goncharov (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Tromsø) and Lavi Wolf (Ben Gurion University of the Negev): "Polarity and granularity properties of 'some' polarity items and minimizers."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Indivisible portmanteaux and the timing of ellipsis."

WCCFL 39 and SAIL 2021

The 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, along with this year's Symposium on American Indian Languages, is taking place from April 9 through 11, online, hosted by the University of Arizona.

• Keren Rice (faculty) is giving one of the invited plenary talks: "Can formal linguistics help language reclamation?"
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is presenting a poster: "When roots become names: An issue of locality."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) is presenting a poster: "Reduplicative morphemes and their non-reduplicative allomorphs in Stratal OT: Stem-level and word-level reduplication in Hul’q’umi’num’."
• Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego) is part of a talk with Gabriela Caballero (University of California, San Diego) and Claudia Juárez Chávez (University of California, San Diego): "The representation of tone in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological and orthographic implications."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Indivisible portmanteaux and the timing of ellipsis."
• Spanish and Portuguese MA graduate Filipe H. Kobayashi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Sherry Yong Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Tracking down (c)overt movement with adverbial distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese."

New paper: Jaker and Kiparsky (2020)

Alessandro Jaker (postdoc) and Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University) have a new paper in Phonology, 37(4): "Level ordering and opacity in Tetsǫ́t’ıné: A Stratal OT account."

Dene (Athabaskan) verbs are widely known for their complex morphophonology. The most complex patterns are associated with two conjugation markers, /s/ and /n/, which are associated with a floating H tone to their immediate left. In this paper, we provide an analysis of /θe/ and /ɲe/, the reflexes of the /s/ and /n/ conjugations in Tetsǫ́t’ıné. Whereas previous accounts of these conjugations have relied heavily on morphological conditioning, we show that, once level ordering, autosegmental phonology and metrical phonology are brought to bear on the problem, morphological conditioning is not required. Within the framework of Stratal OT, we propose the Domain Reference Hypothesis, by which phonological constraints may only refer to morphological domains and their edges. In addition, we show that in Tetsǫ́t’ıné there is a correlation between phonological opacity and morphological structure, as predicted by the Stratal OT model.

Guest talk for Spanish and Portuguese: Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Heritage Vowels and Agreement Project are hosting a virtual talk by Karen Miller, an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and the Co-Director of the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. Her talk, "Children's acquisition of sociolinguistic variation," will be taking place on Friday, March 5, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM. Registration can be found here.

In this talk I will present data on children's acquisition of sociolinguistic variation and present a 4-step developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation, that I am currently developing with Naomi Shin (University of New Mexico). Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The talk will focus primarily on acquisition of variable forms in Spanish-speaking children, including variable clitic placement, /s/ lenition and plural marking, and subject-verb (non)inversion, and acquisition of variable forms in English-speaking children, including the impact of variable agreement marking on the Root Infinitive Stage. I will suggest ways to test our 4-step developmental pathway to the acquisition of variable forms, drawing on corpus data and experimental studies.