University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
Wednesday, May 26, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM: Syntax Group
The first of two sets of practice talks for the Canadian Linguistic Association meeting in June:
1. Michelle Troberg (faculty): "Towards a syntactic typology of prepositions in French."
2. Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Obviating lexicalism: A structural account of exocentricity and metaphorical extension."
As part of McMaster University's 2020-21 Cognitive Science of Language lecture series, Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) will be giving an online talk. After her MA in our department, Yining earned her Ph.D. in 2020 from New York University with a focus on morphosyntax, especially argument structure and event structure. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on cognitive aspects of L1 acquisition. Yining's talk, "Event distinctness and the cross-linguistic expression of causation," will be taking place on Tuesday, March 16, from 10:30 AM to 12 PM. See the email for a Zoom link.
Causative sentences with transparent causative marking are often assumed to encode distinct causing and caused events (e.g. Someone made the plate break), while causatives with no overt marking have non-distinct or overlapping events (e.g. Someone broke the plate). In this talk, I show that transparent causatives differ cross-linguistically in event distinctness, using several syntactic diagnostics. While transparent causatives in language such as English and Japanese encode two distinct events, transparent causatives in many languages such as Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian; Philippines) encode only one event. I also present evidence of spurious causative marking in both child and adult languages. I conclude that event distinctness does not apply equally across languages, nor in language development.
The 14th Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON 14) is taking place online on March 6 and 7, hosted by our own SLUGS. Note that if you would like to attend (and are not already involved as a presenter and/or organizer), you will need to register here.
Undergraduates of ours who are presenting talks are:
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:
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.
We are delighted to have learned that Daphna Heller (faculty) has been awarded a six-month Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities by the Jackman Humanities Institute, in support of her project 'Sources of information and linguistic meaning: From typology to cognition'. Congratulations, Daphna!
Congratulations to Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), Mihaela Pirvulescu (faculty, Department of French), and Yves Roberge (faculty, Department of French) on the publication of their co-authored book, Direct Objects and Language Acquisition, now available from Cambridge University Press!
Direct object omission is a general occurrence, observed in varying degrees across the world's languages. The expression of verbal transitivity in small children begins with the regular use of verbs without their object, even where object omissions are illicit in the ambient language. Grounded in generative grammar and learnability theory, this book presents a comprehensive view of experimental approaches to object acquisition, and is the first to examine how children rely on the lexical, structural and pragmatic components to unravel the system. The results presented lead to the hypothesis that missing objects in child language should not be seen as a deficit but as a continuous process of knowledge integration. The book argues for a new model of how this aspect of grammar is innately represented from birth.
The 51st meeting of the North East Linguistics Society is being held online, hosted by l'Université du Québec à Montréal, from November 6 through 8.
In classical theories of countability, the minimal elements in the extension of count nouns are atoms, and the material parts of these atoms are not themselves part of the extension of the nouns (cf. Link 1983, Chierchia 1998, 2010 among many others). According to these theories, grammatical atomicity (what counts as an atom for purposes of counting in language) is strongly associated with natural atomicity (what constitutes as an individual of the kind described by a noun). Against this view, Rothstein (2010) argues that natural atomicity is neither required nor necessary for grammatical counting. Rothstein (2010) argues that atoms can be contextually defined. That is, count nouns like fence, wall and bouquet denote “different sets of atoms depending on the context of interpretation”. For example, what counts as a wall-atom in a particular context (the four wall-sides of a castle that we can consider as ‘a wall’) might not count as a wall-atom in a different context (the north wall of a castle, which we can also name as ‘a wall’). Empirical facts across languages provide ample evidence that discrete individuals are not necessarily countable (see object mass nouns such as furniture in English) and that nouns that denote substances are not necessarily uncountable (cf. Mathieu 2012, Lima 2014 among many others). Such evidence suggests a dissociation between natural and semantic atomicity. Given this debate, the question we intend to address in this talk is: how much does the conceptual content of a noun and natural atomicity influence how units of individuation are specified? Are units of individuation grammaticalized in the semantics of the nouns? Or are units of individuation contextually/pragmatically specified?
My survey of existing description and documentation of reduplication across all 23 Salish languages is complemented by original fieldwork on the phonology and semantics of Comox-Sliammon, a Central Salish language traditionally spoken in the Sliammon, Klahoose, Homalco, and Comox communities. It is estimated to have approximately 47 fluent speakers (FPCC 2018). Watanabe (1994a; 1994b; 2003) presents the most thorough description of the Comox-Sliammon reduplicative inventory to date, though it has also been documented in Harris (1981), Hagége (1981), and Blake (2000). Watanabe (2003) identifies 11 types of reduplication, some of which can be reanalyzed as a combination of affixes. I will outline the reanalysis that I am pursuing in my dissertation and I will argue there are four main patterns in Comox-Sliammon (as in Salish as a whole): C1C2, C1, C2, and V1.
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.
