UTM Faculty Dr. Samantha Jackson and Derek Denis Publish their Research into Accent-Based Biases in the GTA

Postdoctoral Fellow of Language Studies at UTM, Dr. Samantha Jackson, and Associate Professor of Linguistics, Derek Denis, have recently published their work titled What I say, or how I say it? Ethnic accents and hiring evaluations in the Greater Toronto Area.

Jackson’s work, focusing on sociolinguistics, investigates how immigrants to Canada speaking with an identifiably non-Canadian accent are perceived by prospective employers. She investigates strategies to reduce such workplace discrimination and target other societal problems. 

Denis' interests follow variationist sociolinguistics (language change), and how human language faculty allows for variation both within the individual’s grammar and the larger context of the society in which it exists.

During their study, they recorded 12 women giving scripted 6 answers to interview questions, (3 good, 3 bad) and asked Human Resources students at universities and colleges in the GTA to rank the content of responses, as well as the employability of each voice. They were also asked to determine for which, if any, job interview to recommend these individuals. 

Jackson and Denis analyzed the results using conditional inference tree modeling and random forest analysis.

They found that the accent heard by participants affected their ratings of all these scripted responses, viewing Canadian accents as superior to those of non-Canadians – specifically, the most disadvantaged being Chinese, Nigerian, and German accents. These were least likely to be recommended for customer-facing and, importantly, higher-ranking jobs. 

Presented at online conferences in 2021 and 2022, in Germany and in Vancouver, a full thematic analysis of comments from the full study’s sample will be presented in June at the CLA (Canadian Linguistics Association) Conference, held in Ottawa. Watch out for WHITL’s coverage of that event, coming soon. 

As for this publication, major recommendations from the report include (1) adding language to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s grounds for discrimination, among others, which can be found in their full published work. It will also be available in the June issue of Language. 

Though linguistic protection is an idea covered in sections 15 (Equality Rights), and 23 (Minority language and educational rights) of the Canadian Charter, Jackson and Denis’ work puts a spotlight on the need for specific and targeted legislation to protect Canadians with non-Canadian accents in the workplace.

Real change in public policy and legislation which emerges from projects like these are some of the most exciting moments we get to watch as they evolve. Looking forward to seeing this work at the CLA Conference in June.

An important p.s.: Dr. Jackson will join the UofT Department of Linguistics in January 2025. We can't wait!

UofT at the 37th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference

The University of Michigan’s Linguistics Department hosted the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Ann Arbor May 16th-18th. A full list of UofT participants can be found below.

UofT Linguistics presenters gave talks at this exciting conference, including Tiana Simovic of the Department of Psychology, her supervisor Dr. Craig Chambers, focusing on Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science, and Wesley Orth, a Postdoctoral Fellow who completed his PhD at Northwestern University.

That presentation by Simovic and Chambers looked at how pragmatics (mental state reasoning) is involved in pronoun resolution, a relatively unexplored field.

At HSP 2023, they explored "how reasoning is involved in language processing." 

Orth's talk at the conference was a collaborative effort in relative clauses in Hungarian, a relatively understudied language. Unique properties of its structure allowed Orth and co. to test new hypotheses, testing variants which read to different reading behaviours, offering insights into the role of memory and prediction in processing. Their work will have an impact on tools for investigating such understudied languages.

Some posters from our UofT linguists included Dave Kush's poster on Active expectation in the processing of Urdu and Hindi correlative structures, in collaboration with Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, and Hayah Siddiqui. 

Their work developed a variant of the "violated expectation paradigm," used in work on expectations and prediction. Hypothesizing surprise if readers were presented with something other than a demonstrative pronoun at the start of a sentence after seeing a correlative, they measured reading time to gauge "surprise" in readers presented with a name at the start of a second sentence instead of a pronoun. Indeed, they found this surprise value. 

Future work will clarify whether these results show prediction of a pronoun as a subject of the next clause, or the pronoun as the first thing in the sentence - a challenging task due to Urdu and Hindi's flexible word order. 

Other posters included Ivan Bondoc’s on the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog; Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations, co-authored by Lyn Tieu, assistant Professor in the French Department; and a poster on children’s interpretation of the hotly-debated ambiguous singular “they” by Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, and Emily Atkinson.

Notable alums presenting at the conference include Ailís Cournane, who earned her Master of Arts and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and who now leads the Child Language Lab at New York University.

The Linguistics Department was proud to see so many of our own linguists forging new paths in their fields, and can't wait for HSP Conference #38!

Presentations and talks by UofT Linguists:

Talks:

Tiana Simovic and Craig Chambers: Pronoun Interpretation Highlights the Robustness of Social Perspective Reasoning

Sonny Wang and Craig Chambers: The Trait-Like Nature of Bridging and Instrument Inferences in Younger and Older Adults: An Individual Differences Study

Wesley Orth, Dávid Nemeskey, and Eszter Ronai: Hungarian relative clause processing: Diverging Results in L-maze and A-Maze

Posters by current UofT linguists:

Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, Hayah Siddiqui, Dave Kush: Active expectations in processing Urdu and Hindi correlative structures

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu, Mara Panaitescu, Gabriela Bîlbîie, Anton Benz, Andreea Nicolae: Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations

Ivan Bondoc, Dave Kush: Animacy does not modulate the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog

Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, Emily Atkinson: Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Singular "They"

Presentations by UofT Linguistics Alum: 

Maxime Tulling, Vishal Arvindam, Ailís Cournane: Maybe now, not later: online processing of possibility and negation in adults and 2-year-olds

Welcome to a new postdoc!

 

Mojgan Osmani received her PhD from Tarbiat Modares University in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘The Study of Phases in the Structure of Kurdish Sentences’. Her primary areas of research interest are case and agreement systems, in particular ergativity. Dr. Osmani has just started working as a University of Toronto Mississauga Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities under the supervision of Professor Arsalan Kahnemuyipour. She is based in the Department of Language Studies at UTM, but also spends time at the Department of Linguistics, UTSG. Her postdoctoral work is focused on the syntax of clitics in Iranian languages, especially central Kurdish (Sanandaji). Her research dataset has recently been expanded to include additional Iranian languages. The variation found in the distribution of clitics in Iranian languages, despite lots of syntactic similarities otherwise, makes them a perfect test case for a microparametric study. Dr. Osmani has also joined the Syntax of Nominal Linkers project (PI: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour).

New paper: Hussain and Mielke (2021)

Qandeel Hussain (postdoc) and Jeff Mielke (North Carolina State University) have a new paper in the Journal of Phonetics, 78: "An acoustic and articulatory study of rhotic and rhotic-nasal vowels of Kalasha."

Kalasha, an endangered Dardic language (Indo-Aryan), is described as having series of retroflex and retroflex-nasal vowels, each with five contrasting vowel qualities. This study provides the first articulatory description of these vowels using lingual ultrasound imaging, showing that the vowels described as retroflex are produced not with tongue tip retroflexion but with bunching of the tongue body. Relative to their non-rhotic counterparts, these rhotic vowels are produced with more retracted tongue root and tongue blade, and they exhibit tongue dorsum concavity, much like bunched rhotic vowels in other languages. The five-way quality contrast between rhotic vowels is achieved using lip rounding as well as differences in tongue dorsum height, backness, and tongue root retraction. The lingual differences are reduced in comparison to the non-rhotic vowels, as they are constrained by the articulatory gestures used to achieve rhoticity.

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).

New paper: Franco and Tagliamonte (2021)

Karlien Franco (former postdoc, now at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) have a paper out in American Speech, 96(2): "Interesting fellow or tough old bird?: Third-person male referents in Ontario."

English has many words to refer to an adult man (e.g., man, guy, dude), and these are undergoing change in the Ontario dialects. This article analyzes the distribution of these and related forms using data collected in Ontario, Canada. In total, 6,788 tokens for 17 communities were extracted and analyzed with a comparative sociolinguistics methodology for social and geographic factors. The results demonstrate a substantive language change in progress with two striking patterns. First, male speakers in Ontario were the leaders of this change in the past. However, as guy gained prominence across the twentieth century, women started using it as frequently as men. Second, these developments are complicated by the complexity of the sociolinguistic landscape. There is a clear urban versus peripheral division across Ontario communities that also involves both population size and distance from the large urban center, Toronto. Further, social network type and other local influences are also important. In sum, variation in third-person singular male referents in Ontario dialects provides new insight into the co-occurrence and evolution of sociolinguistic factors in the process of language change.

New paper: Hussain (2021)

Qandeel Hussain (postdoc) has a paper out in Speech Communication, 126: "Phonetic correlates of laryngeal and place contrasts of Burushaski."

Burushaski is an endangered language isolate spoken in Hunza, Nager, and Yasin valleys of Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Hunza Burushaski’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated) across five places of articulation (bilabial, dental, retroflex, palatal, and velar). A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), fundamental frequency (f0), first four formants (F1, F2, F3, and F4), spectral moments of stop release bursts (spectral center of gravity, spectral standard deviation, spectral skewness, and spectral kurtosis), and spectral tilt (H1*–H2*, H1*–A1*, H1*–A2*, and H1*–A3*). The data were collected from four Burushaski speakers. The findings indicated that voiceless aspirated consonants exhibited longer Voice Onset Time and higher spectral tilt onsets than their voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated counterparts. The fundamental frequency was raised in both voiceless series. Some acoustic measures (e.g., Voice Onset Time and fundamental frequency) were better indicators of the laryngeal contrasts while others (spectral moments) more reliably distinguished the place contrasts. The results of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) showed that a combination of spectral tilt and Voice Onset Time are the best descriptors of the three laryngeal categories of Burushaski.

New paper: Paquette-Smith, Cooper, and Johnson (2020)

Melissa Paquette-Smith (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Psychology, now at the University of California, Los Angeles), Angela Cooper (former postdoc, Department of Psychology, now at BEworks) and Elizabeth Johnson (faculty) have a paper out in the Journal of Child Language, 48(2): "Targeted adaptation in infants following live exposure to an accented talker."

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent. However, after face-to-face interaction with a Mandarin-accented talker, infants showed enhanced recognition for words produced in Mandarin English compared to Australian English. Infants with live exposure to an Australian talker were not similarly facilitated, perhaps due to the lower vocabulary scores of the infants assigned to the Australian exposure condition. Thus, live exposure can facilitate accent adaptation, but this ability is fragile in young infants and is likely influenced by vocabulary size and the specific mapping between the speaker and the listener's phonological system.

New paper: Röthlisberger and Tagliamonte (2021)

Former postdoc Melanie Röthlisberger (now at the University of Zurich) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) have a new paper in Language Variation and Change, 32(3): "The social embedding of a syntactic alternation: Variable particle placement in Ontario English."

The present work investigates the effects of social constraints on word order variation in particle placement in Ontario English, Canada. While previous research has documented numerous linguistic factors conditioning the choice of variant, social correlates have so far remained unexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 6,047 variable phrasal verbs from the vernacular speech of six communities in Ontario. These data were coded for length of the direct object, verb semantics, community, and the individual's education, gender, age, and occupation. Our analyses confirm previous findings that variation in particle placement is predominantly determined by direct object length. However, we also expose significant social and geographic factors, and importantly an effect of age, with younger speakers using the joined variant more than older speakers. Further analysis confirms that the latter effect is consistent across communities, indicating a change in progress, possibly due to ongoing grammaticalization of particles in the verb phrase.

Research Groups: Friday, March 12

As this Friday is our annual prospective graduate students' day (by invitation), we are having our customary research-group extravaganza. Via Zoom this time, all six of our current research groups are holding sequences of mini-presentations (anywhere between 3 and 12 minutes to highlight ongoing work.

10:05 AM - 10:55 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Dave Kush (faculty), Priscilla Fung (Ph.D., Department of Psychology), Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty), Julia Watson (MSc., Department of Computer Science), Jai Aggarwal (MSc., Department of Computer Science), and Anna Kapron-King (MSc., Department of Computer Science).

11:05 AM - 11:55 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Vidhya Elango (MA), Tim Gadanidis (Ph.D.), Lauren Bigelow (Ph.D.), Naomi Nagy (faculty), and Jeremy Needle (postdoc).

12:05 PM - 12:55 PM: Syntax Group
Andrew Peters (Ph.D.), Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), and Zoë McKenzie (Ph.D.).

1:05 PM - 1:55 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Heather Yawney (Ph.D.), Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.), Talia Tahtadjian (MA), Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.), Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French), Nathan Sanders (faculty), and Photini Coutsougera (faculty).

2:05 PM - 2:55 PM: Fieldwork Group
Keren Rice (faculty), Avery Ozburn (faculty), Guillaume Thomas (faculty), Pedro Mateo Pedro (faculty), Ryan DeCaire (faculty), Suzi Lima (faculty), Jessica Denniss (Ph.D.), and Virgilio Partida-Peñalva (Ph.D.).

3:05 PM - 3:55 PM: Semantics Research Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.) and Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.).

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.

Research Groups: Friday, March 5

Please note that this week's meeting of the Syntax Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Guest speaker: Basile Roussel (University of Ottawa): "In search of lost (vernacular) French: A real time look at Acadian French."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Alessandro Jaker (postdoc) and Phil Howson (Ph.D. 2018, now at the University of Oregon): "An acoustic study of Tetsǫ́t’ıné stress."

CUNY 34

The 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 34) is taking place online from March 4 through 6, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. We have many faculty members and alumni involved:

• Nayoun Kim (recent postdoc, now at Sungkyunkwan University), Keir Moulton (faculty), and Daphna Heller (faculty): "Processing embedded clauses in Korean: Silent element or a dependency formation?"
• Keir Moulton (faculty), Cassandra Chapman (postdoc), and Nayoun Kim (recent postdoc, now at Sungkyunkwan University): "Predicting binding domains: Evidence from fronted auxiliaries and wh-predicates."
• Breanna Pratley (MA 2020) and Phil Monahan (faculty): "Can English idioms undergo the dative alternation? A priming investigation."
• Breanna Pratley (MA 2020) and Daphna Heller (faculty) are part of a talk with Si On Yoon (University of Iowa): "Invisible, unmentioned entities affect referential forms."
• Tiana V. Simovic (Ph.D., Department of Psychology) and Craig Chambers (faculty): "The role of prior discourse in the context of action: Insights from pronoun resolution."
• Dave Kush (faculty) is presenting with Anna Giskes (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): "What to expect when you are expecting an antecedent: Processing cataphora in Dutch."
• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) is part of a talk with Bilge Palaz (University of Delaware): "The dual nature of subjecthood: Unifying subject islands and that-trace effects."
• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019, now at the University of Delaware) is part of a talk with Myung Hye Yoo (University of Delaware): "Semantic interference in dependency formation: NP types in cleft sentences."
• Giuseppe Ricciardi (MA 2016, now at Harvard University) is part of a presentation with Yuhan Zhang (Harvard University) and Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University): "How many response options in a TVJT? It depends."

TU+6

Our department is hosting the Sixth Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+6), which is taking place virtually on February 19 and 20. Two of those presenting are from our department as well:

• Qandeel Hussain (postdoc): "Stop laryngeal contrasts of Indo-Iranian and Transeurasian languages."
• Heather Yawney (Ph.D.): "Acoustic properties for the Kazakh velar and uvular distribution."

The organizing committee consists of Andrew Peters (Ph.D.), Songül Gündoğdu (postdoc), and Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.), with faculty liaison Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty). The full program for the workshop is available here. Please note that registration ahead of time is required for access to the Zoom and Gather sessions.

NWAV AP 6

The sixth New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Asia-Pacific conference (NWAV-AP 6) is taking place online from February 17 through 20, hosted by the National University of Singapore.

• Yoonjung Kang (faculty) and Suyeon Yun (former postdoc, now at Ehwa Womans University) are part of a talk with Sungwoo Han (Inha University): "Vowel length contrasts in Northern dialects of Korean."
• Naomi Nagy (faculty) is presenting "Pro-drop in Heritage Cantonese and Korean is not influenced by English contact."
• Kevin Heffernan (Ph.D. 2007, now at Kwansei Gakuin University) and Keiko Nishino (Kwansei Gakuin University) are presenting "Rethinking the stereotype that men explain: Evidence from Japanese public speaking."

New paper: DeCaen and Dresher (2020)

Vincent DeCaen (former postdoc, now at DeCaen and Associates) and Elan Dresher (faculty) have a paper, "Pausal forms and prosodic structure in Tiberian Hebrew," in an edited volume, Studies in Semitic vocalisation and reading traditions, edited by Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan.

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, Nayoun!

This month we bid a fond farewell, for the best possible reason, to Nayoun Kim (postdoc), who has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Language at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. She will be leaving Toronto shortly and beginning her new job at the end of February. Congratulations, Nayoun! We'll miss you around here, but we're so thrilled about your news. All the best!

Research Groups: Friday, January 29

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Qandeel Hussain (postdoc): "Phonetic correlates of stop laryngeal contrasts of Burushaski."

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Crystal Chen (MA): "Bare classifiers and definiteness in Cantonese."

Cheng and Sybesma (1999) claim that languages with numeral classifiers either use bare nouns or bare classifiers (Classifier-Noun) - but never both - to express definiteness. This claim was based on observations from Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin expresses definiteness through demonstratives and bare nouns while Cantonese employs demonstratives and bare classifiers. However, Simpson, Soh, and Normoto (2011) provide evidence against Cheng and Sybesma's claim by showing that speakers of Vietnamese, Hmong and Bangla - non-Sinitic languages with numeral classifiers - find bare nouns to be equally acceptable in instances where bare classifiers are used. Most importantly, they that this option exists in Cantonese too. Nevertheless, they conclude that despite the optionality, there is still a difference between the two constructions. More specifically, bare classifiers are used in instances involving contrast and sentential prominence, while bare nouns are licensed in the absence of contrast. I will show that despite agreeing with the claim of optionality, Cantonese bare nouns and classifiers are not distinguished by contrast. Therefore, while Cantonese shares similarities with non-Sinitic languages, there is still more to be done in determining the difference between bare nouns and classifiers in Cantonese.

New paper: Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2020)

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) and Bridget L. Jankowski (postdoc) have a paper out in the Journal of Pragmatics, 170: "Up north there: Discourse-pragmatic deixis in Northern Ontario."

In this paper we analyze the discourse-pragmatic use of the adverbs there/here, e.g., 'So, our grandson there is a real mixture', in four small northern Ontario towns. 1200 examples contrasted by type of reference, ambiguous locative or non-locative, were coded for social and linguistic factors and analysed using statistical modelling. The results reveal that the strongest predictor of discourse-pragmatic use is date of birth: middle-aged speakers use it most in each town, but no other social factors (e.g. perceived gender, education, job type) are significant. Importantly, the higher the proportion of Francophone populations in the community, the greater the use of there but not here. We argue that alignment between Francophones and Anglophones is a likely explanation. More generally this study highlights the value of discourse-pragmatic features for understanding styles of interaction and underscores the research potential for comparing these phenomena across communities.