New paper: Becker and Jurgec (2020)

Michael Becker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Peter Jurgec (faculty) have a new paper in Phonology, 37(3): "Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian."

We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika]‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.

AMP 2020

The 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place online from September 18 through 20, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Note that registration is free but will close on September 13.

Current members of the department who are presenting:

• Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): "Variable hiatus in Persian is affected by suffix length."
  
• Alexei Kochetov (faculty), along with Jason Shaw (Yale University), Sejin Oh (CUNY Graduate Center), and Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University): "Distinguishing complex segments from consonant clusters using gestural coordination."
• Peter Jurgec (faculty) is also co-presenting a poster with Jesse Zymet (University of California, Berkeley): "Slovenian speakers learn the lexical propensities of individual affixes."

Alumni:

• Fulang Cater Chen (MA 2017, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "On the left-/right-branching asymmetry in Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) and Suzanne Urbanczyk (University of Victoria): "Binarity in prosodic morphology and elsewhere."
• Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010, now at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) and John Merrill (Princeton University): "Tone-driven vowel epenthesis is possible: Evidence from Wamey."

In addition, please note that next year's Annual Meeting on Phonology will be co-hosted by the University of Toronto and York University. It will be held online from October 1 through 3, 2021.

New paper: Jurgec and Schertz (2019)

Peter Jurgec (faculty) and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty) have a new paper out in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory: "Postalveolar co-occurrence restrictions in Slovenian."

This paper shows that a postalveolar co-occurrence restriction (Obligatory Contour Principle, OCP) is a productive component of Slovenian phonology. We first examine whether an apparent OCP-based restriction on derived palatalization, previously observed in corpus data (Jurgec 2016), extends to novel forms via a goodness-rating task. We then explore the generality of the restriction across the lexicon, in non-derived novel words as well as derived forms. Our results confirm that native speakers judge derived palatalized nonce forms to be less acceptable when the stem contains another postalveolar, reflecting the pattern found in the previous corpus study. We further demonstrate that multiple postalveolars are dispreferred even in non-derived words, which suggests that the effect is a general case of OCP. This is additionally supported by effects of proximity (the restriction is stronger for postalveolars separated only by a single vowel than for those further apart from one another) and identity (the restriction is stronger for identical than non-identical postalveolars), reflecting cross-linguistic tendencies in the manifestation of OCP and non-local consonant dissimilation. Finally, we show that the restriction does not appear to apply to all places of articulation, suggesting that the co-occurrence restriction in Slovenian specifically targets postalveolars, and adding a previously unattested pattern to the typology of OCP phenomena on consonant place.

Visiting scholars: Robert Grošelj and Tamara Mikolič Južnič (University of Ljubljana)

Peter Jurgec's Erasmus+ Mobility Grant from the EU Commission has allowed for a two-year period of research and teaching exchange. In conjunction with this, we are delighted to welcome two visiting linguists: Robert Grošelj and Tamara Mikolič Južnič, both Assistant Professors in the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana. Between them, they will be giving eight talks, as follows. All current departmental members and friends are welcome!

1. Monday, January 20, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A contrastive look at linguistic gender categories: Slovene and Italian names of public offices" (Robert Grošelj):

The contrastive lecture on the representation of linguistic gender categories – grammatical, lexical, referential and social gender – in Slovene and Italian will focus on personal nouns denoting selected public offices such as Slovene minister, ministrica ‘minister-male, minister-female’, župan, županja ‘mayor-male, mayor-female’ and the synonymous Italian il ministro, la ministra, il sindaco, la sindaca (sindachessa). Both languages have grammatically and lexically feminine and masculine personal nouns; referential gender of masculine nouns is wider, as they can refer to male, male and/or female referents, in Italian also exclusively to female referents. The agreement is controlled mainly by grammatical (and the corresponding lexical) gender, although in some cases (cf. gender exclusive categories) the agreement can be triggered also by referential gender. The selected public offices could be held by women only in the 1940s; the men are still the predominant holders of these offices (judges being the exception) which indicates their male social gender.

2. Monday, January 20, from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Connectors in spoken and written discourse in the multimodal corpus EPTIC" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

With its multimodal and multilingual design, the EPTIC corpus fosters a range of different research perspectives, involving interpreting and translation and different types of comparisons of the different combinations of subcorpora. It consists of original speeches from the European Parliament, their written verbatim reports, their Slovene interpretations and the translations of the verbatim reports. The initial research on EPTIC-SI, the Slovene component of EPTIC, has focused on interpreted discourse in contrast with the corresponding translations and the corresponding source texts. In this lecture, the aim is to expand this research paradigm, by using data from EPTIC-SI and contrasting it with a corpus of spoken Slovene (GOS) and a corpus of written Slovene (KRES), to shed light on the differences between the spoken and the written varieties of Slovene. The aim is to explore the differences in frequency in the two corpora, the differences between interpreted and freely spoken texts and the differences between translations and original texts in the target language.

3. Tuesday, January 21, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Nominalization in Italian and Slovene: A systemic functional linguistics view" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

The lecture focuses on a contrastive analysis of nominalization in Italian and Slovene within the framework of systemic functional grammar as described by M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues. Nominalization is viewed as a type of grammatical metaphor whereby processes which are congruently realized by verbs are metaphorically realized by nouns expressing the same process as those verbs. The frequency of nominalization varies greatly among languages as well as among genres within a language, and may cause problems when two languages interact, e.g. in translation, especially when one of the two languages seems less prone to use this kind of grammatical metaphor than the other. In the present study, an analysis is carried out of a 2.5 million token parallel corpus of Italian source texts and their Slovene translations, particularly with regard to the different translation equivalents that may appear in the translated texts, which is partly dependent of the type of process involved.

4. Wednesday, January 22, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Vojvodina Rusyn language: A short presentation of a South Slavic microlanguage and its phoneme inventory" (Robert Grošelj):

The main aim of the lecture will be the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn as a specific South Slavic (literary) microlanguage. The introductory part of the lecture will focus on the concept of Slavic (literary) microlanguage, introduced and developed by the Russian-Estonian linguist A. Duličenko; the analysis of the concept will take into account its defining characteristics, geographical classification and sociolinguistic parameters (name, vernacular base, time period of the literary tradition, script, time period of codification, functional status). The following part will be dedicated to the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn, a South Slavic microlanguage spoken in Vojvodina (Serbia); the analysis will focus on Vojvodina Rusyn history, language system, literary production, standardisation and contemporary sociolinguistic issues. In the last part of the lecture, the Vojvodina Rusyn phoneme inventory will be briefly analysed.

5. Wednesday, January 22, 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A corpus study of pronominal subjects in translated and non-translated texts" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

Pronominal subject use constitutes a potential challenge in translation because of cross-linguistic differences: while the subject must be expressed in non-null subject languages, this is not necessary in null subject languages. The aim of the lecture is twofold: first, to show that the type of source language influences the frequency of personal pronouns in translation, and second, to establish whether translations into a null subject language differ from comparable target language originals in terms of pronominal subject use. The study is based on the analysis of a 625,000-word corpus comprising original and translated popular science texts in Slovene and the corresponding source texts in English and Italian. The results confirm that pronominal subjects are more frequent in translations from English, a non-null subject language; furthermore, they are more frequent in translations than in comparable originals. Atypical cohesive patterns are identified in translations and possible reasons for their presence are explored.

6. Wednesday, January 22, 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Italian pronunciation in dictionaries for young learners" (Robert Grošelj):

The aim of the lecture will be the representation of Italian pronunciation features in dictionaries for Slovene young learners. The analysis will include five categories of phonetic-phonological features, important for pronunciation learning: pronunciation guides, phonetic transcription, phonemes, consonant length and accent. The representation of these features in a dictionary for young learners should be clear and coherent, in some cases (especially in dictionaries for the youngest users) accompanied by audio pronunciations. After a brief presentation of foreign language/second language pronunciation teaching and learning and the role dictionaries play in it, the Italian pronunciation in Slovene dictionaries for young learners will be analysed. The dictionaries analysed are incomplete with regard to the presentation of pronunciation features: most of them do not include audio recordings; phonological transcriptions of the entries and pronunciation guides – when a dictionary includes them – are incomplete; some dictionaries do not include any useful information about Italian pronunciation which limits the possibility of their use.

7. Thursday, January 23, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "Structural gaps and how to bridge them – the case of the nominalized infinitive" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):

The lecture will present a textual shift that was observed in a comparison between the Italian nominalized infinitive and its Slovene translations. The nominalized infinitive essentially allows a process to be worded as a nominal structure, while (at least partly) retaining its verbal nature; in the framework of systemic functional grammar, it is explained as a type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. nominalization. The absence of a parallel structure in the grammar of Slovene requires the translator to look for other means of expression. A corpus analysis, carried out with the aid of a parallel corpus which comprises both literary and non-literary Italian texts and their Slovene translations, shows that the dual (nominal and verbal) nature of the nominalized infinitive is reflected in two main types of translation equivalents and several minor ones. It is argued that the strategies displayed in the choice of these translation equivalents can be viewed as instances of obligatory explicitation, either norm-governed or strategic. Thus the main goals of the paper are to identify the textual shifts and strategies found in the parallel corpus and to see whether they can be explained as manifestations of explicitation.

8. Thursday, January 23, 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "The supine and the supine clause in South Slavic languages" (Robert Grošelj):

The topic of the lecture will be the evolution of the supine (a nonfinite verb form used after verbs of movement, indicating their goal) and the supine clause in South Slavic languages. The analysis of the historical and contemporary language situations shows a gradual loss of the supine from the South-East toward the North-West. The supine, still present in Old Church Slavonic, has been completely replaced by the analytic da-clause in Bulgarian and Macedonian, and by the infinitive in Štokavian (in most dialects) and Čakavian. On the other hand, the supine is still preserved in Kajkavian and Slovenian, although the situation varies diachronically and diatopically (e.g. in some dialects it has merged with the infinitive). The lecture will present, in addition, a number of clause types (the final finite clause, the infinitive clause, the za ‘for’ + infinitive construction) that replaced the supine clause or still compete with it in South Slavic languages.

Peter at Symposium Obdobja 38

Peter Jurgec (faculty) will shortly be off to the Symposium Obdobja 38 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, taking place from October 23 through 25. Based on extensive research that he and research assistants have been conducting, Peter will be presenting "Phonological studies of Slovenian dialects at the University of Toronto."

This paper summarizes the results of three recent phonological studies of Slovenian di­alects at the University of Toronto: compensatory lengthening in the speech of Šmartno, nasal harmony in Mostec, and palatalization consonant harmony in the Zadrečka Valley. We use new methods for acoustic and articulatory analysis (ultrasound and nasalance mask) to uncover previously misunderstood phenomena, which complement our know­ledge of possible variation in the world’s languages.

Goodbyes and hellos for 2019-20

At the beginning of the new academic year, we say farewell to:

• Amos Key (faculty), stepping into the role of Vice-Provost, Indigenous Engagement at Brock University.
• Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D. 2019), joining the Department of Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University as a teaching-stream Assistant Teaching Professor.
• Becky Tollan (Ph.D. 2019), joining the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in syntax and psycholinguistics.
• ...and our 8 new MA alumni.

We welcome:

• Cassandra Chapman (postdoc), working with Keir Moulton.
• Songül Gündoğdu (postdoc), working with Arsalan Kahnemuyipour.
• Nayoun Kim (postdoc), working with Daphna Heller and Keir.
• Arvind Iyengar (visiting scholar), from the University of New England in Australia, working with Keren Rice.
• Sander Nederveen (Simon Fraser University), a visiting MA student working with Keir.
• Žiga Povše (University of Ljubljana), a visiting MA student working with Peter Jurgec.

Best of luck to Naomi Nagy as she begins a well-deserved sabbatical, and to Guillaume Thomas, who has a half-year's leave. Conversely, we welcome back faculty members Michela Ippolito, Alexei Kochetov, and Keren Rice.

We also have 17 students beginning graduate programs in 2019: 6 in the Ph.D. and 11 MAs. Welcome!

New paper: Jurgec (2019)

Peter Jurgec (faculty) has a new paper in Phonology, 36(2): "Opacity in Šmartno Slovenian."

Šmartno is a critically endangered dialect of Slovenian that exhibits three interacting processes: final devoicing, unstressed high vowel deletion and vowel–glide coalescence. Their interaction is opaque: final obstruents devoice, unless they become final due to vowel deletion; high vowels delete, but not when created by coalescence. These patterns constitute a synchronic chain shift that leads to two emergent contrasts: final obstruent voicing and vowel length (due to compensatory lengthening). The paper examines all nominal paradigms, and complements them with an acoustic analysis of vowel duration and obstruent voicing. This work presents one of the most thoroughly documented instances of counterfeeding opacity on environment.

Congratulations, Peter!

Peter Jurgec (faculty) has been awarded an Erasmus+ Mobility Grant, which provides considerable funding for inter-institutional exchange. We will be sending a graduate student from our department to visit Slovenia next autumn; a graduate student from Ljubljana will visit us at the same time. Two of our faculty members will be visiting Slovenia (and vice versa) for a week each sometime in the next two years. We anticipate that the grant will further strengthen our department's interests in Slavic languages from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Congratulations to Peter on the recognition and on opening up this tremendously valuable opportunity for all of us!

AMP 6

The 6th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 6) is being held from October 5-7 at the University of California, San Diego. We are being represented by faculty member Peter Jurgec and several recent undergraduate alumni.

Peter and George Steel (BA 2016) are presenting a demonstration:

"PhonoApps: Learning phonology online."

Peter, Rachel Evangeline Chiong (BA 2018), Andrea Macanović (BA 2018), and Peter Weiss (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

"True transparency and limited blocking in Slovenian palatalization consonant harmony."

SPF 2018

This year's Summer Phonology Forum took place on Thursday, August 2 and drew participants from every level in our department – as well as a couple of visitors. Worthy of note was that a large number of undergraduate students took part this year.

Fiona Wilson (Ph.D.) gave the B. Elan Dresher Phonology Prize Talk:
"Hiatus resolution cross-linguistically: A Harmonic Serialism approach."

The other speakers were:

Wenxuan Chen (BA) and Peter Jurgec (faculty):
"ATR harmony in Slovenian."

Nazia Mohsin (BA) and Yoonjung Kang (faculty):
"Gender phonology of Urdu first names."

Rachel Soo (MA) and Phil Monahan (faculty):
"Lexical-phonological interactions in Cantonese: Investigating tone merger in native and heritage speakers."

Nathan Sanders (faculty):
"Articulation versus perception in sign language movement."

Connie Ting (MA), Rachel Soo (MA), and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty):
"Investigating the use of visual gender cues in English stop voicing perception."

Gauri Chaudhari (BA), Crystal Chow (BA), Sarah Khan (BA), Anna Lyashenko (BA), and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty):
"Perception of Hindi and Urdu voiced aspirates."

Alex Jaker (postdoc):
"Consonant-vowel and sonority-prosody interactions in Dëne Su̢łiné optative paradigms."

Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.):
"Pre-nasal raising in Vernacular Tehrani Persian (VTP)."

Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.):
"OT and diachrony: Applications and implications."

Kiranpreet Nara (Ph.D.):
"Imitation of Mandarin tones by L2 learners."

Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D.):
"Training Mandarin listeners to produce and perceive Korean vowels: The role of explicit and implicit phonetic instruction."

Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.):
"Phonology of gender in French and English given names."

Heather Yawney (Ph.D.):
"Velars and uvulars in Kazakh."

Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University) and Avery Ozburn (MA 2014, now at the University of British Columbia):
"Uyghur vowel harmony and derived transparency revisited."

Binny Abraham (Central University of Kerala) and Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College/Canadian Institute of Linguistics):
"Mud. uga vowels: Preliminary results of an acoustic and historical-comparative study."

Eon-Suk Ko (Chosun University):
"Mothers would rather speak clearly than spread innovation: The case of Korean VOT."

Geoff Nathan (Wayne State University):
"How are sounds stored? On UG, emergence, embodiment, and phonemes."

The workshop was organized by Alessandro Jaker (postdoc), Peter Jurgec (faculty), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Phil Monahan (faculty), Keren Rice (faculty), Nathan Sanders (faculty), and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty). Well done to everyone involved!

Undergraduate Research Forum

The Undergraduate Research Forum took place in the Great Hall at Hart House on March 14. Linguistics undergrads were well-represented by 3 research posters:

1. Anna Pechkina, supervised by Naomi Nagy, “Heritage Russian Case Variability", a Summer 2017 ROP299 project.
2. Rachel Evangeline Chiong, Andrea Macanovic, supervised by Peter Jurgec, “Long-distance palaltalization in Zadrečka Valley Slovenia", a Summer 2017 LIN398 project.
3. Charlotte Fiegenbaum, Ariel Gomes, Morgan Marden, Olivia McManus, Si Yuan Jeffrey Wang, supervised by Sali Tagliamonte, “Catching language change: A Trans-Atlantic perspective on really reat intensifiers", a Winter 2018 ICM Project.

Students interested in these sorts of opportunities should check out: http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/current/focus/research

Andrea Macanovic and her poster (along with Rachel Evangeline Chiong, Peter Weiss of ZRC SAZU, and Peter Jurgec)

4th Workshop on Slovenian Phonology

On Tuesday, March 6, our department will host the 4th Workshop on Slovenian Phonology. Linguistics undergraduate students will present their research projects on Slovenian (supervised by faculty member Peter Jurgec). To help us plan, please, register at https://goo.gl/forms/7AqCjkbCXPlf75z03 before Sunday, March 4, noon. The registration is free; pizza will be provided for lunch. 

Tuesday, March 6, 2018
O.I.S.E. OI 2286

9:45 Coffee & Cookies

10:00 Reilley Marston: Centralized vowels in Resian
10:30 Wenxuan Chen: Vowel harmony in Slovenian
11:15 Fernanda Lara Peralta and Hanna Smolyanitsky: Nasal harmony in Mostec and beyond

12:15 Lunch Break

1.45 Anissa Baird and Richard Gan: Mapping Slovenian (Demos)
2:15 Rachel Evangeline Chiong and Andrea Macanović: Palatalization consonant harmony in Zadrečka Valley
3:15 Fernanda Lara Peralta & Jeffrey Wang: PhonoApps: Computational and learning tools for phonologists (Demo)
3:45 Nicole Breakey, Juan Murillo Vargas, Shankhalika Srikanth, and Sharon Tung: Binomials in Slovenian

4:15 Discussion & Conclusion

Photos from 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (2017)

The 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) was recently held at New York University (click here for list of UofT talks). Here are some pictures from the conference.

Poster by Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Laura Colantoni (Spanish & Portuguese), & Jeffrey Steele (French Dept.)

Talk by Mia Sara Misic (MA), Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta (BA), Karmen Kenda-Jež (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) & Peter Jurgec (faculty)

Poster by Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) & Yoonjung Kang (faculty)

5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (2017)

The 5th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) is being held at New York University from September 15 to 17 (2017). Alumna Yining Nie (MA 2015; now PhD NYU) was one of the student organizers of the conference. Presentations from UofT:

Mia Sara Misic (MA), Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta (BA), Karmen Kenda-Jež (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) & Peter Jurgec (faculty): Nasal harmony and nasalization in Mostec Slovenian

Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) & Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects

Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Laura Colantoni (Spanish & Portuguese), & Jeffrey Steele (French Dept.): Gradient and categorical effects in native and non-native nasal-rhotic coordination

Nicholas Rolle (MA 2010; now PhD at University of California, Berkeley), Transparadigmatic output-output correspondence

Sharon Rose (BA 1990; now Professor and Chair at University of California, San Diego), ATR Harmony: new typological patterns and diagnostics 

2017 CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop

The annual CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop hosted by our department took place on Tuesday, August 15th. Here were the presentations:

Jessamyn Schertz (faculty): Listening differently to accented talkers: Use of acoustic and contextual cues in perception of native vs. non-native speech

Na-Young Ryu (PhD): Effects of cross-language acoustic similarity on non-native speakers’ perception of Korean vowels

Rachel Soo (incoming MA) and Philip J. Monahan (faculty): Phonemic perception and lexical access: Evidence for speech factor levels in Cantonese heritage speakers

Julian Bradfield (The University of Edinburgh): The Sound of a Spherical Cow

Karina Kung (BA UTSC), Luan (Jessie) Li (BA UTSC), Connie Ting (incoming MA), Jasmine Yeung (BA UTSC), and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Compensating for speech rate variation in English stop perception

Rachel Evangeline Chiong (BA), Andrea Macanović (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Secondary palatalization in Zadrečka Valley Slovenian

Andrei Munteanu (MA): Co-occurrence restrictions in English: A corpus study

Paul Arsenault (PhD 2012, now at Tyndale University College) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Retroflex vowel harmony in Kalasha: A preliminary acoustic analysis

Wenxuan Chen (BA) and Peter Jurgec (faculty): Vowel harmony in Slovenian

Nathan Sanders (faculty): Some issues in the perceptual phonetics of sign language: Motion-in-depth and the horizontal-vertical illusion

Mercedeh Mohaghegh (PhD 2016) and Craig Chambers (UTM Psychology faculty): Perceptibility of the place of articulation in nasal and oral stops and recognition of assimilated words

Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc): Quantifying sonority contour

Katherine Sung (BA) and Alexei Kochetov (faculty): Allophonic variation in English coronal stops: An EPG corpus study

Deepam Patel (BA), Rosemary Webb (BA), and Peter Jurgec (faculty): The rise and fall of the palatal nasal glide in Slovenian

Suyeon Yun (UTSC post-doc) and Yoonjung Kang (faculty): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in Korean dialects

LIN398 to Slovenia for fieldwork and workshop

In July, the students of LIN398 Research Excursion Program will visit Slovenia to conduct fieldwork on nasal harmony, palatalization and vowel harmony with Peter Jurgec (faculty). The trip will also feature a Workshop on Slovenian Phonology. Presentations from UofT:

• Deepam Patel & Rosemary Webb: Examining nasal harmony in Slovenian
• Rachel Chiong & Andrea Macanovic: Secondary palatalization in Zadrečka Valley Slovenian
• Wenxuan Chen: Vowel harmony in Slovenian
• Peter Jurgec: The phonology of binomials in Slovenian

TULCON 10 (March 4th and 5th, 2017)

This past weekend, the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS) held the 10^th annual Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON). Students from nine different universities around North America presented original research talks on all aspects of linguistics. There were also four posters presented during a Saturday afternoon poster session. The conference featured two keynote talks: we opened with Professor Naomi Nagy presenting Cross-Cultural Sociolinguistic Surprises and closed with PhD student Alex Motut presenting What naturalness ratings and eye-tracking can tell us about the syntax of non-obligatory control. The organizing committee, headed by undergraduate students Katharine Zisser and Cedric Ludlow, did a fantastic job – overall TULCON10 was a great success!

A link to all conference abstracts can be found here, and a link to more photos of the event can be found here on Google Photos.

Patrick Sonnenberg, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, presents his poster The intersection of gender identity and political affiliation in the perception of the presidency

Keara Boyce, University of Ottawa Centre for Child Language Research, presents Production benefits recall of novel words with frequent, but not infrequent phonotactic probabilities

Mia Sara Misic, Vivian Che & Fernanda Lara Peralta, University of Toronto, present Nasal harmony in Mostec Slovenian

Aaron Mueller, University of Kentucky, presents A lemma-based approach for English-Uyghur statistical machine translation

Alex Motut, University of Toronto, delivers the closing keynote talk

A captive audience

Workshop on Slovenian Phonology

Workshop on Slovenian Phonology

Monday, January 16, 2017 at O.I.S.E. (252 Bloor St W), Room OI 11200.

The Workshop will feature talks by undergraduate students from the University of Toronto as well as researchers from Slovenia. The workshop is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Science Germany/Europe fund.

Please, register at https://goo.gl/AqX3w7 before Sunday, January 15, noon.

The program is attached: Workshop program

U of T linguists at USC!

U of T linguists presented their research last weekend at the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology, held October 21-23, 2016 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Yoonjung Kang & Jessamyn Schertz: The role of perceived L2 category in cross-language perception and implications for loanword adaptation

Michael Becker (Stony Brook University) & Peter Jurgec: Inconspicuous unfaithfulness in Slovenian

Fieldwork and exchange in Slovenia

In the last weeks of June, three undergraduate students in our department and Peter Jurgec (faculty) visited Slovenia to present ongoing research on Slovenian and to do fieldwork on two dialects of Slovenian, sponsored by a grant from the Germany/Europe Fund to Peter Jurgec.

The participants organized the Ljubljana-Toronto Workshop, featuring presentations by U of T students Zhiyao (Vivian) Che (Velar Palatalization in Slovenian), Fernanda Lara Peralta (Interaction of vowel deletion and final devoicing in Šmartno Slovenian), Mia Sara Misic (Nasal harmony in Mostec Slovenian), and Peter Jurgec (Stress shift in Slovenian).

The students had a chance to experience fieldwork firsthand. In Mostec, we examined nasal harmony using a dual-chamber nasalance mask, instrumentally confirming thus far the first case of nasal harmony in a Slavic language. In Šmartno, we looked at nominal paradigms, filling the gaps in the existing data, using elicitation.

Here is what the students said about the trip:

"I feel homesick for Slovenia and not even Toronto. It was really a lot of fun learning how to operate the nasometer on participants and handle the data. I had a wonderful time […] doing such cool fieldwork."

"I loved being able to practically apply so much of what I had learned on campus to our fieldwork in Slovenia. The participants were wonderful people to work with and I really enjoyed analyzing their data and finding exactly what we were looking for (especially the nasal harmony!). I also greatly appreciated having the chance to give a presentation at the University of Ljubljana and valued the presentations they gave on Slovenian stress and dialectology."

Researchers from Ljubljana will be visiting our department in February 2017.

Slovenian and Toronto students in picturesque Ljubljana.

A student and a Slovenian linguist, Professor Karmen Kenda Jež, with

a speaker of Mostec, a dialect of Slovenian with nasal harmony.

The Toronto team (Zhiyao Che, Fernanda Lara Peralta, Mia Sara Misic, and Professor Jurgec)

in front of the village of Šmartno [ˈʃmaɾtno], as seen above the sign.

Elicitation in Šmartno.