Research Groups: Friday, January 8

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Syntax Group
Paper discussion led by Keffyalew Gebregziabher: Kalin, Laura, and Coppe van Urk (2015). Aspect splits without ergativity: Agreement asymmetries in Neo-Aramaic. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 33, 659–702.

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Fieldwork Group
Group discussion of linguistic fieldwork in Canada and different models of fieldwork used in the country. Focus on a paper by alumna Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins (MA 1984, now at the University of Victoria): (2009). Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working within Canadian indigenous communities. Language Documentation and Conservation, 3(1), 15-50.

LSA, etc. 2016

The 90th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America will be taking place in Washington, D.C. from January 7th to 10th. Alongside it, the smaller 'sister societies' will also be convening. Our department will be represented at the meetings of LSA and three other societies:

Linguistic Society of America

Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D.), Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Victoria), Marisa Brook (Ph.D.), and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "From the bottom to the top of the S-curve: Be like and the Constant Rate Effect."

Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D.) and Rebecca V. Roeder (postdoc 2007-09, now at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte): "A phonological model of the Canadian Shift."

Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D.): "Evidence as the presupposition of wh-exclamatives."

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) and Marisa Brook (Ph.D.) are presenting a poster: "Adaptive change in sociolinguistic typology: The case of relative who."

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "Phi-syntax in Northern Iroquoian."

Kenji Oda (Ph.D. 2012, now at Syracuse University): "Without specifier: The modern Irish copula revisited."

Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at MIT): "Subordinate clause types and the left periphery in Gikuyu."

Michelle is also presenting a joint talk with colleagues Ruth Brillman (MIT) and Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard University): "Inuktitut mood-agreement interactions as contextual allomorphy."

LSA Symposiums

Naomi Nagy (faculty): "Studying more and less endangered heritage varieties."

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): "A sociolinguistic perspective on linguistic documentation."

Keren Rice (faculty): "Documentary linguistics and community relations."

Naomi Nagy (faculty) and Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland): "Moving forward with multilingual transcription."

Nicole Rosen (Ph.D. 2007, now at the University of Manitoba): "Multilingual language revitalization: The case of the Red River Métis."

Nicole Rosen  (Ph.D. 2007, now at the University of Manitoba) with colleagues Jesse Stewart (University of Saskatchewan) and Olivia Sammons (University of Alberta): "Diachronic effects of language contact in the synchronic Michif vowel system."

Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins (MA 1984, now at the University of Victoria) along with members of the UVic Community-University Research Alliance: "Meaningful consultation and intangible results in CBLR."

Andrew Carnie (BA 1991, now at the University of Arizona) with University of Arizona colleagues Joshua Meyers, Nicholas Kloehn, Muriel Fisher, Michael Hammond, Natasha Warner, Diana Archangeli, and Adam Ussishkin: "The field is not the lab, and the lab is not the field: experimental and community-based linguistics with Gaelic speakers on Skye."

William J. Idsardi (BA 1988, now at the University of Maryland): "Neurophysiological measures of speaker and dialect identification."

American Dialect Society

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty) and Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.): "Stability, obsolescence and innovation: North American dialects in the 21st century."

Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D.), Rebecca V. Roeder (postdoc 2007-09, now at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte) and colleague Becky Childs (Coastal Carolina University): "Social moderation of a structural sound change? The Canadian Shift in four communities."

Cathleen Waters (Ph.D. 2011, now at the University of Leicester): "Stability amidst the change: Degree modification in a historical context."

Nicole Rosen (Ph.D. 2007, now at the University of Manitoba), Alexandra D'Arcy (Ph.D. 2005, now at the University of Victoria), and colleague Jillian Ankutowicz (University of Lethbridge): "Think-een about (ING)."

Sali also has a poster in conjunction with her students from the LSA Summer Institute 2015: "An awesome talk: Variation and change in adjectives of positive evaluation."

Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics

Emilia Melara (Ph.D.): "Arbitrary null subjects in Mauritian Creole."

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): "The syntax and prosody of Onondaga interrogatives."

Carrie Gillon (MA 1999, now at Arizona State University), with colleague Peter Jacobs (University of Victoria): "The semantics and pragmatics of Skwxwú7mesh evidentials."

Patricia A. Shaw (Ph.D. 1976, now at the University of British Columbia): "Laryngeal architecture in Kwak’wala."

Congratulations, Ailís!

Ailís Cournane (Ph.D. 2015) will shortly be departing for the University of Mannheim in Germany, where she will be taking up a six-month position as a junior professor in language acquisition.

Congratulations, Ailís, and best of luck on your European adventure!

Congratulations, Heather!

We get to say a very literal adieu to postdoc Heather Burnett as she departs for Paris, where she is taking up a position as a researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, positioned at the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle at the Université de Paris 7-Denis Diderot.

Congratulations, Heather, and all our best wishes!

Sali on Planet ArtSci

Faculty member Sali A. Tagliamonte was recently interviewed for Planet ArtSci, the official podcast of the U of T's Faculty of Arts and Science. The interview touches on Sali's Ontario Dialects Project, Canadian English and French, and sociolinguistics and descriptivism more generally. The podcast can be heard here; there is also a transcript available.

Alana Johns in Arts & Science News and the Bulletin

Faculty member Alana Johns has been interviewed for the news page of the U of T Faculty of Arts & Science about the Dictionary of Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut Postbase Suffixes.

Note that the Dictionary itself, completed this past summer, can be purchased via Amazon.ca.

Update: The article has also appeared in U of T News more generally. Thanks to Jack Chambers for noticing this!

Congratulations, Chris!

Christopher Spahr successfully defended his thesis, "Contrastive representations in non-segmental phonology", on Thursday, December 17, 2015. On the committee were Elan Dresher (supervisor), Keren Rice, Peter Jurgec, Yoonjung Kang, Daniel Currie Hall, and external examiner Draga Zec (Cornell University). Congratulations, Dr. Spahr!

Research Groups: Friday, December 11

9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Phonetics/Phonology Group
Paper discussion led by Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.): Morley, Rebecca (2015). Deletion or epenthesis? On the falsifiability of linguistic universals. Lingua, 154, 1-26.

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Language Variation and Change Group
Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Victoria) presenting a workshop on plotting in R using the ggplot package.

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Semantics Group
Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D.): "Evidence as the presupposition of wh-exclamatives in English."

This paper makes a novel proposal regarding wh-exclamatives in English. In the literature, the main contention is whether exclamatives presuppose their propositional content. This paper argues that what is actually presupposed by wh-exclamatives is not their propositional content but rather that the speaker has first-hand evidence for the proposition. For example, the presupposed content of "What a good book John wrote!" is not that John wrote a very good book but that the speaker has read John's book. This analysis explains different behaviors of wh-exclamatives including their inability to be embedded under certain phrases such as "I don't know".

Joint talk: Guillaume Thomas and Kang Lee

Semanticist Guillaume Thomas is one of two U of T faculty members invited to a conversational joint talk, "True Lies", being hosted by the Cognitive Science program and University College. The topic is truth and lying; the other faculty member invited is Kang Lee of OISE, whose research focuses on how children learn about lying, learn to lie themselves, and learn to spot lying in others. The discussion will take place at 4:00 PM on Tuesday, December 8, in UC140.

Congratulations, Safi!

At an evening ceremony at our Mississauga campus yesterday evening, Ph.D. student Safieh Moghaddam was presented with two awards for teaching at UTM:

Course Instructor Award – Linguistics (academic year 2013-14)
Course Instructor Award – Linguistics (academic year 2014-15)

The awards committee recognised Safi "for extraordinary and outstanding performance as a course instructor".

Congratulations, Safi! Well-deserved.

Research Groups: Friday, December 4

9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Psycholinguistics Group
Jessica S. Arsenault and Bradley Buchsbaum (U of T Psychology/Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest): "Distributed neural representations of phonological features during speech perception." Presentation based on article of the same title: Journal of Neuroscience, 35(2), 634-642.

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Syntax Group
Diane Massam (faculty): "The syntax of agreement variation in English existential constructions."

In this paper I look at variation in the copular verb form in existential sentences in English  ("There is/are three men in the room."). I consider exactly what must be going on in the syntax for the 'is/are' variation to arise. This is a complex undertaking because there are many different approaches to the mechanics of agreement and (at least) six different syntactic treatments of existential constructions in the literature. I review these analyses with the variation in mind. Most syntacticians studying variation within Minimalism posit Vocabulary Insertion analyses within Distributional Morphology but I will argue for a structural ambiguity account for this variation.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Fieldwork Group
Peter Avery (York University), talking about his fieldwork experiences among speakers of tone languages and some lessons to be taken away from these.

Ruth Maddeaux in Ireland

Second-year PhD student Ruth Maddeaux spent the month of August in Ireland, where she conducted an experiment as part of her research for her first Generals Paper. She first spent a week in Dublin attending Sociolinguistics Summer School 6 at Trinity College Dublin. Then, traveled on to the rural village of Carna, in County Galway, where she spent the next two weeks. Carna is part of a Gaeltacht – a predominantly Irish-speaking region, and the perfect place to find native Irish speakers to participate in a phonological experiment! Though monolingual Irish speakers are virtually non-existent these days, Ruth was happy to find that Irish is proudly spoken in this region, by old and young alike. Renting a room from a local Irish language teacher provided a helpful introduction to the community. Her travels also included day trips into Cill Chiaráin, An Cheathrú Rua, and Casla – all similar villages in the Connacht area Gaeltacht – as well as the larger Galway City. Ruth highly recommends this landscape as the backdrop to writing a Generals Paper!

The one day it was warm enough to go without a jacket. Locals

recommended that Ruth wash her face in the Irish Sea as a cold remedy!

Sali A. Tagliamonte on CBC's 'Fresh Air' tomorrow

An interview between host Mary Ito and one of our faculty members will be airing on CBC Radio One's 'Fresh Air' tomorrow morning starting at 6 AM. Ito has released the following preview via the 'Fresh Air' Facebook page:

Join me tomorrow on FA for a fascinating discussion on how we speak in this province! Linguist Sali Tagliamonte will talk about Ontario dialects and how language, culture, history and geography all intersect to create differences in the way we speak English.

TBB199 poster session

There will be a poster session for Elaine Gold's TBB199 class (Languages of Canada: Identity and Culture) in the department lounge on Thursday, December 3 from 10 AM to 12 PM. Stop by and check out what the students have been researching in terms of language maintenance and revitalization!

Congratulations, Iryna!

We're delighted to be able to congratulate fifth-year Ph.D. student Iryna Osadcha and her husband Pavlo Penenko on the arrival of their daughter, Alice Penenko, born on the evening of November 21, 2015 at 7 lbs, 8 oz. Everyone is doing well.

Welcome, Alice, and all our best wishes to the new parents (and their own families)!

Research Groups: Friday, November 27

9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Phonetics/Phonology Group
Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.) on a new phonetic/phonological analysis of recordings from North Saami.

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Language Variation and Change Group
Matt Hunt Gardner (Ph.D.) leading a software workshop on an introduction to R as used in variationist sociolinguistics.

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Semantics Group
Naomi Francis (MA 2014, now at MIT): "Positive polarity item modals and scope in negative inversion constructions."

Negative inversion (e.g. "Never have I seen such a majestic giraffe!") involves the preposing of a negative expression and obligatory subject-auxiliary inversion. Collins and Postal (2014) claim that the preposed negative element takes scope over everything else in the clause. I show that, while the negative expression does take scope over quantificational DPs, deontic modals "should" and "must", which have been argued to be positive polarity items (Iatridou and Zeijlstra 2013), are able to outscope it. I argue that a full account of modal scope in these constructions will have to involve a contrast in scope-taking abilities between deontic and epistemic modals, one that is independently needed to explain the behaviour of these modals in other environments.

Photos from the Symposium on Graduate Research in Canadian English

Ph.D. student Matt Hunt Gardner is teaching an undergraduate class on Canadian English at Queen's University this semester. On Wednesday the 18th, several other Ph.D. students -  Marisa Brook, Erin Hall, and Ruth Maddeaux - followed Matt to his class and all four presented their own research in the form of a symposium on graduate research on Canadian English.

Thanks to Anastasia Riehl at Queen's for the photos!

Matt introduces the event.

 Marisa talks about restrictive relative clause behaviour inside and outside the city.

Erin describes Canadian Raising in Toronto and Vancouver dialects.

Ruth discusses experimental evidence for divergent perceptions of different uses of like.

Group shot of our travelling band of sociolinguistics students!

Jack Chambers in the Chronicle Herald

Faculty member Jack Chambers was quoted in the Halifax Chronicle Herald this week, providing his opinion on the matter of whether a recording linked to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris might be Canadian.

18ième Atelier bilingue en linguistique théorique / 18th Bilingual Workshop in Theoretical Linguistics

The 18th Atelier bilingue en linguistique théorique / 18th Bilingual Workshop in Theoretical Linguistics is taking place today at the University of Western Ontario. Two of our postdocs and one alumnus are presenting:

Darcie Blainey (postdoc):
"Nasal versus nasalized vowels: The case of Louisiana French."

Heather Burnett (postdoc) and Julie Auger (Indiana University):
"Mie versus point in Picard: Semantics, pragmatics, and power."

Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario):
"I SWORE they talked differently."

Report from NWAV44

Our department co-hosted NWAV44 with York University from October 22-25. This was a massive undertaking that had seen ongoing effort over several years from seven faculty members on the committee (including our own Aaron Dinkin, Naomi Nagy, and Sali A. Tagliamonte, as well as former U of T French faculty member Anne-José Villeneuve, now at the University of Alberta), plus more than forty student volunteers.

The city of Toronto did its part and helped welcome sociolinguists from all over the world to Hart House with some gorgeous fall weather.

  
                                (Photo by Sali A. Tagliamonte.)                                                                                   (Photo by Marisa Brook.)

On the Thursday, faculty member Sali A. Tagliamonte hosted a workshop on cross-disciplinarity: four faculty members from very different backgrounds were chosen to analyze the same phenomenon (was/were variation in the city of York, England) and then discuss their findings together. One of the four was faculty member Diane Massam, who gave her account of the variation from a syntactic/Minimalist perspective. Later in the afternoon, once the committee had welcomed the attendees, Ph.D. student Ruth Maddeaux introduced the first 'Crossroads' workshop speaker, David Adger (Queen Mary University of London).

In the morning, plenary speaker Jack Chambers (faculty) took attendees through a history of sociolinguistics as studied in Canada over the years.

(Photo by Sali A. Tagliamonte.)       

Current department members and alumni who presented on the Friday included Emilie LeBlanc (MA 2014, now at York University), Katherine Rehner (faculty), Darcie Blainey (postdoc), and Julien Carrier (Ph.D.). The day's plenary was given by faculty member Elizabeth Johnson from the Mississauga campus, whose research is centered on language acquisition.

Hart House also welcomed a number of Great Hall Birds.

(Photo by Radu Craioveanu.)

The evening poster session included contributions from Heather Burnett (postdoc), Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland), Emilia Melara (Ph.D.), Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.), Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario), and Shannon Mooney (MA 2012, now at Georgetown University).

Saturday's events included talks that involved Claire Childs (former visiting student, now back at Newcastle University), Alexandra D'Arcy (Ph.D. 2005, now at the University of Victoria), Aaron Dinkin (faculty) and Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.). The day concluded with a lively party in the Great Hall.

(Photo by Radu Craioveanu.)

Talks on Sunday included those by Maddie Shellgren (MA 2011, now at Michigan State University), Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Victoria), Bridget Jankowski (Ph.D. 2013), Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty), Marisa Brook (Ph.D.), and Emily Blamire (Ph.D.).

The conference concluded with an address/summary by William Labov, introduced by one of his former graduate students, Aaron Dinkin (faculty). Labov, along with all of the other plenary speakers, received a special hand-knitted toque with an NWAV44 patch on it as a thank-you for his contribution to the conference.

(Photo by Marisa Brook.)

The conference will be staying on this side of the border for next year: NWAV45 is being held in downtown Vancouver, co-hosted by the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University.