Undergraduate Award Recipients 2023-2024

 Please join us in congratulating our Undergraduate Linguistics Award recipients! 

The Jack Chambers Award is awarded to Robin Huo.

The Henry Rogers Memorial Award is awarded to Lucy Meanwell (MA student).

The McNab Scholarship in Linguistics is awarded to Zayd Jose Diz.

The Elaine Gold Award for Undergraduate Achievement in Linguistics is awarded to Benjamin Kobina Eku Sangmuah. 

The Massam/Roberge Scholarship in Linguistics is awarded to Charlie Morocz. 

Please join us in congratulating our winners, Robin, Lucy, Zayd, Benjamin, and Charlie! Well done everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

Yanfei Lu, winner of the
Dresher Prize.

We are so proud of both the students, congratulations!

Tri-Agency Confirms Increased Funding for CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC Awards!

Earlier in June, Tri-Agency confirmed that, effective September 1st, 2024, the Government of Canada will be increasing award values for students and postgraduate researchers, including new and current award holders.

Advocating for "fairness for every generation," and a commitment to researchers of the future, this increase in budget is funded by Canada’s federal granting agencies, including CIHR, (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) NSERC, (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).

The value of master's scholarships will be increased to $27,000/year, while those for doctoral students will jump to $40,000/year. Current and new postdoctoral fellowships will increase to $70,000.

Students holding an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship are also included in this increase, totaling $40,000/year. 

Programs not affected by this increase include Vanier and Banting, worth $50,000 and $70,000 respectively.

More goals expected to be met by this budget increase can be found on the Budget Canada website.

To apply for any of these incredibly exciting awards, see the list below:

CIHR Health Research Training Award Programs

NSERC Students and Fellows

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

At the Linguistics Department blog, we strongly encourage any and all interested and qualifying parties to apply for these awards, especially after these recent increases, and we look forward to writing many posts documenting your success.

Elaine Gold Receives the Governor General's Meritorious Service Award

Director Elaine Gold at Glendon Hall

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

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

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

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

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

Director Gold giving her presentation in Taipei, September 2023.

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

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

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

Congrats Karina!

Congrats to Karina Cheung! 

She presented her research at TULCON and then at Vic's Research Day. For the second, she won the Student Choice Research Award (Voted on by UofT Community) for her paper, "The effects of Heavy-NP Shift on Tagalog Word Order Preferences,"  based on work supervised by Dr. Ivan Bondoc.

Congratulations to Lex Konnelly!

The SGS Awards Committee has selected Lex Konnelly (PhD 2023) as the sole winner of the University of Toronto’s 2024 John Leyerle-CIFAR Prize for Interdisciplinary Research. This award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research and significant contributions to both the academic community and to Canadian society. Note that the award is open to candidates from all SGS programs, not just Social Sciences and Humanities. Many thanks to Lex for putting Linguistics in the spotlight among all these disciplines!

 

Lex’s dissertation (committee members: Prof. Atiqa Hachimi, Prof. Susan Ehrlich and Prof. Derek Denis) explores the linguistic strategies employed by non-binary patients to negotiate medical expectations while expressing their gender identities authentically, highlighting the interplay between language, identity, and healthcare access. Lex’s work not only puts in conversation the fields of linguistics, (trans)gender studies,  and studies of health communication, but also identifies barriers to accessing competent, truly affirming healthcare [quoted from the dissertation].

 

Please join me in congratulating Lex for their distinguished work!

Thanks to Guillaume for the text.

2024 IGNITE grant recipients

 Congratulations to Samuel Akinbo and Suzi Lima! 

They got a 2024 IGNITE grant which supports "interdisciplinary research led by Black faculty, librarians, post-doctoral scholars, clinical scientists and medical research fellows/residents at the University of Toronto." These funds will help support their "project to document the preparation of traditional foods and investigate the grammar of counting and measuring in Gã and Yoruba, two closely related languages spoken in Ghana and Nigeria, respectively. Collaborating with universities in Ghana and Nigeria, one of the project’s key goals is to preserve and revitalize stigmatized traditional foods."

See great photos and more about other winners here:
https://brn.utoronto.ca/announcing-the-2024-brn-ignite-grant-recipients/

Laura Griffin wins NWAV Prize

 Laura Griffin joins of UofT linguists* being recongized by the

LILLIAN B. STUEBER STUDENT NWAV PRESENTATION PRIZE

"This is a prize for the best student presentation that treats variation in languages that have been missing from or are less frequently represented at NWAV."  (NWAV51 website)

Laura won this for her HLVC talk, 

"They’re j/u/st about the same!: Vowel Shift in Heritage and Homeland Seoul Korean."

Laura describes her reaction, Naomi looks on proudly.

Holman Tse, a member of the Stueber Prize Committee, joins in for a photo.

 

Along with talks by Yoonjung Kang and her colleagues, Laura helped bring the number of talks about Korean up to 3 at this NWAV, contributing to the diversity of languages at this NWAV [see purple Korean slice in graph].

*Previous UofT winners and runners-up:

Justin Leung, NWAV49

Chris LeGerme, NWAV49

Robert Prazeres, NWAV48

Dresher and Cowper Grad Student Prizes!! 🎉

We are proud to share the winners of the 2021-2022 Dresher and Cowper Prizes! 🎉

Martin Renard (PhD Student) is the recipient of the Dresher Prize for his phonology paper entitled "Stem and Initial Segment Faithfulness of Kanien'kéha"!  

Akil Ismael (MA Student) is the recipient of the Cowper Prize for his paper entitled "Ergativity in Shilluk"!

Congratulations to both Renard and Ismael! The Department is incredibly proud of your work and is excited to see what the future holds! 

Note: The prizes are named for two emeriti profs in our Department: Elizabeth Cowper and Elan Dresher.

CoLang Award Recipient!

Congratulations Martin Renard (PhD Student)! He is one of this year's recipients of the LSA's prestigious fellowship to participate in CoLang! The Linguistic Society of America sponsors The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (aka CoLang), a summer training institute where linguists gain hands-on experiences in the best practices for language documentation, descriptive linguistics and language revitalization.  

Martin is a 1st year PhD student and is interested in Indigenous language revitalization and collaborative linguistic research.  He has mostly worked on the endangered Northern Iroquoian Language Kanien'kéha (also known as Mohawk). 

Congratulations Renard!! We are excited to hear about your experience and are eager to see you put your new skills to work!