NWAV40 (2011)

NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) celebrated its 40^th birthday this year in its birthplace, Georgetown University in Washington, DC.  Many of us made the trek down to present and to partake of the plentiful sessions, workshops and panels. Presenting were LeAnn Brown on trans and cis speakers, LeAnn Brown and Sali Tagliamonte on the role of narratives in linguistic change, Jack Chambers on homogeneity in Canadian English, and Matt Hunt Gardner on social accounts of the Canadian Shift, as part of the New Perspectives of Vowel Shifting panel. Sali and three of her undergraduate students, Jingwei Chen, Julia Chin and Ruth Maddeaux, presented a poster on experiential learning through sociolinguistics. Along for the ride were Bridget Jankowski, Jim Smith, Derek Denis, and UofT alumni Laura Baxter, Jacqueline Peters, Maddie Shellgren and Holly Young.  Uof T alumni presenting were Alex D’Arcy and Rebecca Roeder.

As well as taking in all that linguistic content, some of us managed to see some of the Washington sights including the Smithsonian and the fatal staircase from The Exorcist. 

Photo by Bridget Jankowski

Undergraduate Research

Linguistics students Victoria Peter and Lianna Wang (ROP299 with Diane Massam) and Tiffany Chung and Josephine Tong (ROP299 with Naomi Nagy) and Jingwei Chen, Julia Chin and Ruth Maddeaux (ROP399 with Sali Tagliamonte) presented their research work at the Undergraduate Research Fair in the Great Hall, Hart House on Thursday March 8th, 2012.

The posters were entitled "The Grammar of Nothing: Null Arguments in Niuean", "Classifiers in Toronto Heritage Cantonese" and "Sociolinguistics as Experiential Learning: Curriculum Development in the Teaching and Learning Interface".

Pictured are Vicki and Lianna with Diane, Julia and Ruth with Naomi, and Tiffany and Josephine, also with Naomi.

Tiffany and Josephine also presented their research at TULCon and, with Naomi, are about to present it at the Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics at Ohio State University.
The ROP 399 project was presented at NWAV 2012 at Georgetown University.

Photo credits: Diane Massam

Lounging

Students learn and teach in the Department Lounge.

Nadia and Beth talk phonology while Ailis sorts papers. (Photo credits: Matt Gardner)

Smiling sociolinguists: Samantha, Shannon and Erin study their data.

TULCon 2012

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS) at the University of Toronto will be hosting its annual Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCon) March 2-4, 2012!

While only undergraduate students are eligible to present, everyone is welcome to attend! If you are planning on attending any portion of the conference, we would appreciate your registration:
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~slugs/?s=register

Also, we receive TULCon participants from a variety of locations; therefore, we're looking for generous individuals with free couch space/guest rooms/beds/futons/etc. who are willing to let one or more participants stay with them on the night of the 2nd or the 3rd (or both nights)! If you're interested in hosting a TULCon participant, please email us at tulcon2012 at gmail dot com with the subject header "HOUSING" or fill out this form: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~slugs/?s=hosting

Finally, please email us (slugs at chass dot utoronto dot ca) with any questions or comments.
We hope to see you at TULCon!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/University-of-Torontos-SLUGS/275253139164711

Good News from Recent Graduates!

Jaehee Bak (PhD 2011) was selected as a Post-doctoral Fellow at SungKyunKwan University in Seoul. (This is where he received his BA.) He will be affiliated with the Academy of East Asian Studies at SungKyunKwan University from the 1st of March, for one year, and his focus will be on researching and publishing.

Kyumin Kim (PhD 2011) received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-doctoral Fellowship for 2012-14. She will be affiliated with the University of Calgary, Dept. of Linguistics, and her research project is entitled "Syntax, semantics, and morphology of non-agent subjects".

Congratulations to both Jaehee and Kyumin!

New baby Atom

Nattaya Piriyawiboon (PhD 2010) and her husband, Tom Toyou, welcomed their first newborn on Jan 26 at 5.09 pm!
Welcome, Baby Atom!

Season's greetings from India

Alexei Kochetov is sending his season's greetings from Mysore, India, where he is currently a visiting scholar at the All-India Institute ofSpeech and Hearing (AIISH). He recently went on a trip to Nilgiri Hills, Tamilnadu, a remote mountainous area which is home to several indigenous tribes speaking distinct Dravidian languages. These pictures are from a village of the Toda, whose language is known for a typologically unique series of consonant place contrasts (as studied by Peter Ladefoged some 20 years ago). More pictures are available at Alexei's website.

50th anniversary of Linguistics at MIT

Cristina, Yoonjung and Diane went to MIT50 (Dec 9-11 2011), the 50th anniversary of Linguistics at MIT.

2011 Convocation

November 11th saw a wonderful SGS convocation, with a record number of linguistics MA and PhD graduates. Not everyone could attend but here are some photos of those who did: Elise, Holly, James, Maddie, Marisa, and Radu (MA), and Jaehee, Maria, and Marina (PhD), with faculty members Elizabeth, Alana, Ana Teresa, and Diane. Here are some of the great photos of the happy graduates.

Brittani's Bermudian research gets attention back home

[photo credit: bermuda‑vacations.jpg]

Britanni Fubler wants anyone interested in how Islanders speak to attend ‘How You Hanlin’ Me? A Presentation on the Lexical, Phonological and Phonetic Properties of the Bermudian Dialect’ at Bermuda College’s North Hall Lecture Theatre on November 3 at 6.30pm.

The University of Toronto graduate is advertising the session with a flyer which asks: “Have you or your friends ever thought that the Bermudian dialect was uneducated? Sounded ignorant? Was inappropriate in public settings?

“Or are you of the persuasion that it is beautiful and unique and should be a celebrated part of our culture?” [excerpt from the linked article in The Royal Gazette Online, Oct. 25, 2011]

[Chart from Brittani Fubler's U of T manuscript, "Acoustic analysis of Bermudian English", Mar. 16, 2011]

And you can see more news and pix at Sticking to our roots | Bermuda Island Life.

Keren officially awarded the Killam prize

Toronto Babel In the Star!

Our very own Beth MacLeod has been organising Toronto Babel, a language exchange night at the Rivoli on Queen St., for almost two years now.  Today, the Toronto Star ran a story about it: http://www.thestar.com/living/article/1067470--now-you-re-really-speaking-my-language. 
See pix from our previous post.

Research up North

Sali was in the Toronto Star describing some outcomes of her latest research project. Thanks to Chandan for sending this in.

Clearing the mind

Last weekend, I managed to work out my plan of attack for a SSHRC grant while hiking in a beautiful park with an unlikely name: Mono Cliffs. It boasts over 400 kinds of plants and, while I didn't stop to count them, all, I believe it. Plus, great scenery. Here's me going into a tunnel of trees. I came out the other side with a 1-page summary ready to go. Then I watched reflections in this lake and more and more became clear.
It's the best place I've hiked near Toronto, and if you want to try it, I posted a map.

What did you do on the weekend?

Visiting scholar: Maria Parascandolo

We have a visitor from Italy for Fall 2011. She writes:
"I'm Maria Parascandolo, a PhD student from Italy.
I graduated in 2009 in Modern Literature at University of Naples "Federico II". My thesis concerned Computational Linguistics, specifically I compared three syntactic annotation tagsets developed for the Italian language (TUT: Turin University Treebank, AN.ANA.S.: Annotazione e analisi sintattica and TreSSI: Treebank sintattico-semantica dell'italiano) and then I chose a solution to combine them into a unique approach.
Now I'm taking my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Salerno and my supervisor is prof. Miriam Voghera. My research project concerns linguistic attrition in the Italian community of Toronto. During my time in Canada I am both going to take advantage of the data in the HLVC corpus and to collect more samples aimed at studying this specific phenomenon. I am particularly interested in the loss of verbal morphology and I plan to structure my interviews in such a way that different verbal tenses can be elicited. From my experience at University of Toronto I hope to gain more insight into language attrition and also to gain experience with work "in the field" by means of interviews."

Maria has been exploring the area and learning about local inhabitants:

Methods in Dialectology Conference

Many U of T linguists (Ailis, Cathleen, Joanna, Jack, Keren, Naomi, Sali & Sandrine) and alumni (Laura Baxter, Alex D'Arcy, Carrie Dyck, David Heap, Nicole Rosen, Jacqueline Peters, Jeff Tennant) presented at Methods XIV the first week of August, 2011. We dined well (Budapest in London), caught up on our reading at The Pinery, and, yes, even presented some research findings.









Thanks to Anita Szakay and Evan Hazenberg for the photos.

Bill Samarin sighting

Jack C. ran into Bill Samarin at noon on the Clarke Institute walkway. He is healthy and well at 86, walking unencumbered with a stick that he says is mainly ornamental. He was returning from dim sum lunch on Dundas St. He spends some time in his office finishing an article, already accepted, on the origins of Sango (20k words) that will correct some of the claims that are out there. Last year he traveled to Bangui in Central Africa as part of a forensic mission to help with linguistic claims of the Bangis in the aftermath of a conflict. At the end of the year he will attend the Creole and Pidgin sessions at the LSA meetings in Portland, Ore.

Bill was on our faculty from 1967 until he retired in (I think [says Jack]) 1991. He is a world expert on African languages, especially Niger-Congo, and he is nonpareil on Gbeya and pidgin Sango.

CLA Presentation Prizes!

This year's winners of the Canadian Linguistic Association's annual student competition were announced yesterday, and Beth Macleod of our department won the paper presentation award for her talk "Perceptual salience and cross-dialectal phonetic convergence in Spanish." Additionally, Joanne Markle LaMontagne, a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who has taken several linguistics courses, won the poster award for her poster "Acquisition of the Spanish Present Perfect by Spanish-English Bilinguals."

(You can see their abstracts here.)

Niuean syntax and coconuts

On May 26, Professor Diane Massam gave an entertaining and informative lecture, 'Small Island, Big Language: The Story of Niue,' as part of the Flaut lecture series. She described some of her research on Niuean, an Oceanic language spoken in Niue, an isolated rocky island in the South Pacific. Niue Island is both the world's smallest independent self-governed nation and the world¹s largest upraised coral atoll. She also told us about its geography, history, and culture. Niuean challenges universal claims such as All languages have nouns and verbs and All sentences have a subject and a predicate. She also showed us some beautiful photos, which I hope she'll post a sampling of here.

Alana also promises a video of an anonymous linguist illustrating proper cocounut-opening technique. As a bystander quipped, "Linguists don't just crack the code of languages. They know how to crack coconuts, too." All part of linguistic fieldwork!

Linguists in Japan and BC

Naomi recently returned from an excellent 2 week linguistic adventure, making her first trips to Japan, Victoria, and Vancouver. All wonderful places. In Japan, she participated in the First International Symposium of Tokyo Academic Forum on Immigrant Languages, along with James Walker from York U, and practiced her best Japanese sentence: "Sumi-masen, watasi-wa sakana-o sifood-o tabe-masen." She really liked the "spirit" pun in this signpost on the way to the Meiji shrine: ""The Meiji period was an enlightened period during which a policy of 'Japanese spirit and Western Knowledge' was adopted..."

On her way home, she stopped off in Victoria for a week, where, conveniently enough, the 5th Change and Variation in Canada (CVC V) linguistics conference was going on. Marisa Brook (MA) gave an excellent talk: " Looks like there’s something interesting going on here."