U of T Linguistics MA, 2013-14: stellar success!

This year’s graduating MA students have truly distinguished themselves: all 11 of them are on track to complete their MA Forum papers on time. For an cohort of this size, this is a remarkable achievement – and one that is unprecedented in the department.

Back: Naomi Francis, Danielle Moed, Michael Schwan, Patrick Murphy, Kazuya Bamba, and Richard Gananathan.
Front: Emilia Melara, Emilie LeBlanc, Ruth Maddeaux, Maida Percival, and Avery Ozburn.

The MA program has a well-deserved reputation for being intense. However, on top of completing the degree, over the course of this year members of the MA class have presented papers or posters at NELS, CLA, WICCFL, WISSLR, MO(L)T(H), Agreement by Correspondence, the CRC Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop, the Welcome Workshop, and our departmental research-group meetings. They have done compelling research across a wide variety of subfields –syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, language change and variation, psycholinguistics, and more – and established lively friendships with each other and much of the rest of the department.

Eight of the outgoing MA students are continuing to Ph.D. programs immediately. Ruth Maddeaux, Emilia Melara, and Patrick Murphy will be continuing on to the department’s own Ph.D. program; Emilie LeBlanc is going to York; Naomi Francis is heading to MIT; Avery Ozburn and Michael Schwan are off to UBC; and Richard Gananathan is going a little further afield – all the way to the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

All our best to the members of this powerhouse MA cohort!

Ron Smyth, Movie Star - Coming to TIFF!

David Thorpe's documentary Do I Sound Gay?, about the phonetics and acoustics of voices across sexual orientations (as well as stereotypes and homophobia), is complete and has been accepted into the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, with post-production financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign, includes our faculty member Ron Smyth and his research on gay voices and dialects; also featured are George Takei, David Sedaris, Margaret Cho, Dan Savage, and more. The TIFF presentation is on Sunday, September 7th at Ryerson, with a live introduction by Thorpe and Savage. Tickets go on sale starting one week in advance.

Aaron Dinkin in the Star

Faculty sociolinguist Aaron Dinkin was one of several people interviewed for a Star article in July about the variable pronunciation of the word 'lieutenant' in North America.

GLAC 20

Ph.D. students Ailís Cournane and Becky Tollan were at the 20th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, held at Purdue University on May 2 and 3. They presented a collaborative paper, "Climbing trees: Syntax-semantics alignment in re-analysis of West Germanic modal verbs".

Dog Days III Syntax Workshop

The third Dog Days syntax workshop took place August 7. In this picture, three Dog Days guests: Martha McGinnis (MA 1993), Betsy Ritter (Postdoc 1988) and Tova Rapoport (left to right).

International Society for the Linguistics of English 3

ISLE 3 is taking place in Zürich, Switzerland, from the 24th to the 27th of August.

Sali A. Tagliamonte is presenting two papers: "Using the architecture of variable systems to predict language change", and, with colleague Suzanne Evans Wagner (Michigan State University), "Incrementation in adolescence: Tapping the force that drives linguistic change".

Former visiting student Claire Childs will be presenting "Not or no? Variation in sentential negation across varieties of Northern British English".

Good news from Kyumin Kim (Ph.D. 2011)

Congratulations to alumna Kyumin Kim (Ph.D. 2011), who has accepted a one-year position as Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, beginning July 1, 2014. In addition, Kyumin has been awarded a Korean Studies Grant from the Academy of Korean Studies. The project title is 'Animacy and verb in Korean'.

(Post courtesy of Diane Massam.)

"Translating the Land" exhibit at Robarts Library

Robarts Library is hosting an exhibit on three First Nations languages that has been extended until the end of October.

Methods in Dialectology 15

Methods in Dialectology 15 will be taking place in Groningen, Netherlands, from August 11th to 15th. Lots of U of T faculty members and alumni are going to be involved!

Naomi Nagy (faculty) is giving one of the plenary talks:
"Heritage languages as new dialects."

There will also be presentations by:

J. K. Chambers (faculty):
"Global demise of a venerable change in progress."

Aaron Dinkin (faculty) and colleague Robin Dodsworth (North Carolina State University):
"Gradience, allophony, and the Southern shift trigger."

Sali Tagliamonte (faculty) along with Suzanne Evans Wagner (Michigan State University):
"What makes a panel study work? Researcher and participant in real time."

French professor Anne-José Villeneuve is co-presenting two papers. One is with colleague Philip Comeau (University of Ottawa): "The future in a Continental French dialect: Polarity versus temporal distance." The other is with Nanna Haug Hilton (University of Groningen): "Structural convergence in minority languages in Europe."

Alumnus Wladyslaw Cichocki (Ph.D. 1986, now at the University of New Brunswick) is presenting "Vocalic duration variability in regional varieties of New Brunswick Acadian French" with Yves Perreault and Sid-Ahmed Selouani (Université de Moncton).

Alumni Sheila Embleton (Ph.D. 1981, now at York University) and Eric Wheeler (Ph.D. 1980, now also at York University) are presenting a joint paper with colleage Dorin Uritescu: "A comparison of three digital systems for dialect geography."

Eric Wheeler is also co-presenting "Creating the Chinese online dialect atlas" with Robert Sanders of the University of Auckland.

French Linguistics alumnus David Heap (now at UWO) is presenting "Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula: Archival materials and web facsimiles to online cartography."

HLVC project in Italy

A sector of the HLVC project is spending July in Italy, conducting fieldwork. We wanted to share our little blog:

http://hlvccalabria.wordpress.com

Participants: Paolo Frasca', Alessia Plastina and Francesco Muoio (all students in the Italian Dept. at U of T) and Naomi Nagy.
(Post courtesy of Naomi Nagy)

Congrats, Daphna!

Congratulations to Daphna Heller on being awarded tenure, with a promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. Well done, Daphna!

(Post courtesy of Keren Rice.)

Premier Kathleen Wynne remembers her time in Linguistics at U of T

In an interview with U of T news, published July 7, Premier Wynne reflects back on her time in the Linguistic Department as an MA student and the impact it had on her work in government. With special mentions for Professors Jack Chambers and Ivan Kalmar (Anthropology).

http://news.utoronto.ca/which-u-t-alumni-have-seat-ontario-cabinet-table

Undergraduate linguistics students partner with Language Activists in M'Chigeeng.

A new website, Baadwewedamojig, has recently been launched promoting the transliteration of historic Ojibwe texts into current orthography. This website results from a collaboration between the 2012 undergraduate language revitalization class (LIN 458 - taught by Professor Alana Johns), a sub-group of those linguistics students (Robin McLeod, Paulina Lyskawa, and Annita Chow), and a graduate student from Computing Science (Patricia Thaine) who provided their transliteration and computing expertise to a project headed by Alan Corbiere of M'Chigeeng First Nation. Mr. Corbiere with the team from M'Chigeeng has created a site where learners and fluent speakers can read and listen to Ojibwe stories in various formats, according to their level and choice.

Directorships

Congratulations to Alana Johns and Ana-Teresa Pérez Leroux who have taken up directorships as of July 1. Alana will be Director of the Aboriginal Studies Program for 2014-2015; a position that she first took up last year. Ana-Teresa is the new director of the Cognitive Science Program.

Congratulations, Richard!

Congratulations to Richard Compton (Phd 2012), who has accepted a tenure-stream position at the Université du Québec à Montréal. As of July 1st, he will be an assistant professor (in French: professeur régulier) in the Department of Linguistics (Département de linguistique).

In further good news, Richard has also been awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant. The project title is "Nominal and verbal incorporation in Inuit".

Great news, Richard!

Keren gives convocation address for University College

Keren Rice gave the convocation address for University College this week! Convocation ceremonies can be streamed on the U of T website. You can hear her part at 14:42-27:50.

http://streaminginc.com/uoft/2014_spring_convocation/2014-uoft-spring-conv-18.html

(Hat tip to Leslie Saxon (UVic))

Seminar on Speech Production and fieldwork on Sorbian in Germany

Alexei Kochetov (faculty) and Phil Howson (Ph.D.) attended the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production was held in Cologne, Germany in May 5-8.

Alexei gave a talk, "Vowel coarticulatory effects on Kannada retroflex stops" (co-authored with N. Sreedevi, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing). Phil presented a poster, "An EMA examination of Czech alveolar and post-alveolar fricatives", co-authored with Alexei.

After the conference, Phil visited the Max-Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Leipzig to collect phonetic data on Sorbian, an endangered Slavic language indigenous to the easternmost state of Saxony, Germany. He also visited the towns of Bautzen, Schleife, and Cottbus, the centres of the areas where the main dialects of Sorbian are still spoken. Phil's trip was funded by the University of Toronto Germany-Europe Fund.

CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop

The CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop is taking place today, June 19, in Woodsworth College (WW) 120. The program features an invited talk by Sharon Rose (UCSD) at 4:15, "Transparency and centralization in Moro vowel harmony: phonetics and phonology", and also the B. Elan Dresher Phonology Prize Talk by Avery Ozburn, "Statistical laryngeal harmony in Oromo".

Here is the full list of presentations:

Yoonjung Kang (UofT Linguistics, UT Scarborough) & Andrea Hòa Pham (U Florida)
French loanwords in Vietnamese: the role of input language phonotactics and contrast

Peter Avery (York U)
Consonant-tone interactions

Graziela Pigatto Bohn (U São Paulo)
The acquisition of pre-tonic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

Erin Hall (UofT Linguistics)
Style and substance in the Canadian Shift: New evidence from Toronto

Maida Percival (UofT Linguistics)
Counter-bleeding opacity in Hul’q’umi’num’ vowel harmony

Kazuya Bamba (UofT Linguistics)
An OT analysis of Dagbani ATR harmony

Radu Craioveanu & Ross Godfrey (UofT Linguistics)
A nonagreement analysis of long-distance vowel-consonant assimilation in Harari

Avery Ozburn (UofT Linguistics)
Statistical laryngeal harmony in Oromo

Ranjan Sen (U Sheffield)
Pre-Classical prevarication in Latin feet: Stratal synchronic structure and discretionary
diachronic development

Holman Tse (U Pittsburgh)
Retroflexion in Somali Kizigua: Language relatedness as a facilitating factor in a
typologically rare sound change?

Daphna Heller (UofT Linguistics)
Morphological activation during spoken word recognition: beyond sound and meaning?

Ross Godfrey (UofT Linguistics)
Morphologically conditioned durational effects in English: Phonetic implementation or
lexical access?

Gillian de Boer (UofT Speech Language Pathology)
Application of linear discriminant analysis to the Long Term Averaged Spectra of
simulated resonance disorders: A pilot study

Holman Tse (U Pittsburgh) & Naomi Nagy (UofT Linguistics)
Exploring automated formant analysis for variationist study of Heritage Cantonese

Anneke Slis (UofT Speech Language Pathology)
The effect of articulatory constraints on gestural intrusion and reduction errors

Sharon Rose (UCSD)
Transparency and centralization in Moro vowel harmony: phonetics and phonology

PhD Convocation, June 2014

Newly minted PhDs Abdel-Khalig Ali and Will Oxford, at convocation 

with Elizabeth Cowper and Elan Dresher (June 9, 2014)

Congratulations, Avery!

Two years ago, our department established an annual B. Elan Dresher Phonology Prize for the best paper in the advanced phonology classes.

The recipient of this award for 2013-14 is MA student Avery Ozburn. She will be presenting her work at the CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop on Thursday June 19, 11:50 am. Her paper is entitled 'Statistical laryngeal harmony in Oromo'. All are welcome to attend the talk (in Woodsworth 120).

Congratulations to Avery!

(Post courtesy of Keren Rice.)