Linguistics Garden Party 2018

Sali and Naomi recently hosted a mid-summer garden party to celebrate the department's successes over the past year, with special attention on Keren's contributions to the department as she steps down as department chair.

Lunch hosted by Keren

Keren Rice, our outgoing department chair, recently held a lunch in the lounge to thank everyone who's helped make the department work during her term. Of course, she very much deserves our thanks too!

New volume: Recursion across Domains

A new edited volume, Recursion across Domains, has been released with many contributions from the UofT linguistics community:

Guillaume Thomas (faculty): Embedded Imperatives in Mbyá

Fábio Bonfim Duarte (visiting scholar): Clausal Recursion, Predicate Raising, and Head-Finality in Tenetehára

Suzi Lima (faculty) and Pikuruk Kayabi: Recursion of Possessives and Locative Phrases in Kawaiwete

Ana T. Pérez-Leroux (faculty), Anny Castilla-Earls, Susana Béjar (faculty), Diane Massam (emerita), and Tyler Peterson (former visiting faculty, now at Arizona): Strong Continuity and Children’s Development of DP Recursion

Na-Young wins Excellent Student Paper Award at AATK 2018

Congratulations to Na-Young Ryu (PhD), the winner of the Excellent Student Paper Award for her paper "Effects of L1 transfer and L2 experience on the perception of Korean vowels" at the 23rd Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK), held at the University of Toronto, June 21–23, 2018.

Majed wins Best Student Poster Award at CLA 2018

Majed Al-Solami (PhD) has received the Best Student Poster Award for his poster "Vowel elision, stress, and dialect contact in Bedouin dialects" at the 2018 meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association in Regina. Well done, Majed!

Congratulations, Phil!

Phil Howson has defended his doctoral thesis "A phonetic examination of rhotics: gestural representation accounts for phonological behaviour". The committee was comprised of Alexei Kochetov (supervisor), Philip J. Monahan, Peter Jurgec, Nathan Sanders, Anabela Rato (Spanish & Portuguese Dept.), and Khalil Iskarous (USC, Dept. Linguistics).

In related news, Phil has accepted a post-doctoral research position at the University of Oregon, working with supervisor Melissa Redford.

Congratulations to Phil on these two pieces of good news!

Report from LabPhon 16

The 16th Conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology was recently held (June 19-22, 2018) at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. A list of the presentations from our department is below. Scroll down for lots of pictures from the conference and city! (The pictures are clickable for higher resolution.)

Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Suyeon Yun (Ehwa Womans University): Acquisition of Second Dialect Features by North Koreans in Seoul

Rachel Soo (MA), Philip Monahan (faculty): Lexical-phonological representations of tone in Cantonese heritage and native speakers

Jessamyn Schertz (faculty), Kara Hawthorne (Mississippi): Sentential Context Effects on Phonetic Categorization in Talkers with Non-Native and Regional Accents

Yoonjung Kang (faculty), Suyeon Yun (Ehwa Womans University): Dialectal variation and sound change in Korean nasals

Patrick Murphy (PhD), Philip Monahan (faculty): Partial Contrast, Dialect Exposure, and the Perception of Canadian Raising

Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Katherine Sung (BA): Flapping and Linguopalatal Contact Differences in Canadian English /t/ and /d/

Núria Gavaldà (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Juli Cebrian (PhD 2002, now at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Angelica Carlet (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya), Celia Gorba (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Evaluating the effects of L2 vowel perceptual training: Retention of learning and generalization to production

Juli Cebrian (PhD 2002, now at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Joan Carles Mora (Universitat de Barcelona): Measuring cross-linguistic perceptual similarity by means of online tasks

Jessamyn and Kara by their poster

Yoonjung presenting her poster

Patrick presenting his poster

Rachel presenting her poster

Alexei presenting his poster

UofT team! (LtoR) Yoonjung, Juli, Patrick, Alexei, Jessamyn, Rachel

Conference dinner

Nossa Senhora do Monte belvedere

Campo Grande, near the university

Belem Tower

Linguistics Pride 2018

The department was recently decorated for Pride:

Keren Rice recognized at Academic Leaders Reception

Keren Rice was recognized by the Faculty of Arts and Science at the Academic Leaders Reception on June 13, for her work as Chair of Linguistics, 2012-2018. In her speech she highlighted all the changes the department has seen in the past six years. Congratulations on a very successful term, Keren, and thanks for all your hard work for the department! (And the Exit sign in the background seems kind of appropriate for a “stepping down” event!)

Nathan Sanders profiled by UofT Arts & Science News on conlangs

Nathan Sanders (faculty) has been profiled by UofT Arts & Science News on constructed languages (conlangs) and his role as a mentor for a Grade 8 student's project to create his own language. Check out the article here!

Canadian Linguistics Association 2018 meeting

The 2018 meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association was recently held at the University of Regina. The list of UofT representatives is long, but pictures follow!

Alana Johns (emerita): Suliatsalunik: Lots of work to do (plenary talk)

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) & Mansour Shabani (University of Guilan): Resumption in Gilaki possessor split

Jean-François Juneau (PhD): On the mi-/mo- preverbs in ditransitive Georgian verbs

Daniel Currie Hall (PhD 2007, now at St. Mary’s) & Avery Ozburn (MA 2014, now at UBC): The representation of phonological contrast in Uyghur vowel harmony

Suzi Lima (faculty) & Adriana Leitão Martins (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro): Aspectual information impacts the countability of deverbal nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Angelika Kiss (PhD): Attributing illocutionary acts in Spanish by the tag question ¿no?

Karoline Antonsen (undergraduate) & Romina Farhang (undergraduate): The effect of PP type on recursive modifications in monolingual English children

Kazuya Bamba (PhD): Person constraint and sentence-final particles in Japanese

Suzi Lima (faculty), Alice Jesus (Lisboa), Rui Marques (Lisboa) & Ana Lúcia Santos (Lisboa): Constraints on the use of subjunctive in Brazilian Portuguese: A production study

Majed Al-Solami (PhD): Vowel elision, stress and dialect contact in Bedouin dialects

Michelle Troberg (UTM), Meena Ahmad (UTM undergraduate) & Maya Krol (UTM undergraduate): Change and loss of P-elements: A case study of fors and hors in the history of French

Susana Béjar (faculty) & Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty): When intensional subjects control agreement

Julie Goncharov (PhD 2015, now at Hebrew University of Jerusalem) & Monica Irimia (PhD 2011, now at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): The imperfect puzzle

Bettina Spreng (PhD 2012, now at Saskatchewan): Finiteness, tense, and feature inheritance in Inuktitut

Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (former post-doc, now at Queen’s): Pronominal tense and anaphora: Evidence from sequence of tense

Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at MIT): Fishing for CARP in Kinyarwanda

Laura Kastronic (UofT French), Stephen Levey (Ottawa) & Mélissa Chiasson-Léger (Ottawa): Sisters under the skin?: Discourse-pragmatic variation and change in three varieties of French

Jila Ghomeshi (PhD 1996, now at Manitoba) & Tasheney Francis Holness (Manitoba): Additive and associative plural marking in Jamiekan

Susana Béjar (faculty), Diane Massam (emerita), Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty) & Yves Roberge (UofT French): Syntactic recursion: Theory and acquisition

Will Oxford (PhD 2014, now at Manitoba): What’s the inverse of an inverse? Transitive constructions in Algonquian and Austronesian

Richard Compton (PhD 2012, now at UQAM): Inuit φ-markers as the exponence of agree: Evidence from granularity, default forms

Leslie Saxon (MA 1979, now at Victoria): Ne, discourse particle in T li˛cho˛: Speaker commitments, common ground, and calls on the addressee

The conference venue, First Nations University of Canada, under stormy skies.

Romina Farhang and Karoline Antonsen, Undergraduate students, with their poster, along with Yves Roberge and Diane Massam, who are also on the research team led by Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux.

Alana Johns (centre), recipient of the CLA/ACL 2018 National Achievement Award, along with her past students, Richard Compton (Ph.D. 2012, currently at UQAM, and Bettina Spreng, Ph.D. 2012, currently at University of Saskatchewan).

Jila Ghomeshi (Ph.D. 1996, currently at University of Manitoba), Elizabeth Ritter (Post-doc 1991, currently at University of Calgary), Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario), and faculty members, Diane Massam and Elizabeth Cowper, at the President’s Reception.

Kaz Bamba, Ph.D. student, with his poster.

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change 2018

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change, an international biennial meeting of variationist sociolinguists who are working on discourse and pragmatic variables, recently took place at the University of Helsinki in Finland. UofT had a strong presence with three presentations:

Derek Denis (faculty) and Timothy Gadanidis (MA), "Before the rise of um"

Timothy Gadanidis, "Um, about that, uh, variable: uh and um in teen instant messaging"

Sali Tagliamonte (faculty) and Katharina Pabst (PhD), "Cool system, lovely patterns, awesome results: A cross-variety comparison of adjectives of positive evaluation"

 Tim presenting his Master's forum paper research

 Katharina presenting on behalf of her and Sali

Katharina and Derek enjoying post-conference sunshine and drinks near Kauppatori (Helsinki's Market Square)

Derek enjoying the Helsinki craft beer scene with Newcastle University graduate students Kaleigh Woolford (a former undergraduate student of Derek's at University of Victoria) and Joaquín Bueno-Amaro. (Photo taken around 10:30pm, no flash!)

2017-18 Dresher Prize and Cowper Prize winners

The 2017-18 Elizabeth Cowper Syntax Prize for outstanding work in a graduate syntax seminar has been awarded to Andrew Peters for his paper "Mandarin de in the nominal and verbal domains".

The 2017-18 Dresher Phonology Prize for outstanding work in a graduate phonology seminar has been awarded to Fiona Wilson for her paper "Hiatus resolution cross-linguistically:  A harmonic serialism approach".

Congratulations to both of you!

The Canadian origins of HAL 9000

This year is the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring the iconic HAL 9000, a computer (specifically an artificial general intelligence) that Gerry Flahive describes as "perhaps the most memorable non-animal character in the history of cinema" in his article on HAL's speech and origins.

If no geographic features stood out to you in HAL's speech, that was the intention. After considering actor Martin Balsam, who has a mild Bronx accent, Kubrick decided on Canadian actor Douglas Rain. Jack Chambers explains in Flahive's article: "you have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place". Raised diphthongs notwithstanding, Canadian English is a good candidate for this, at least in a North American context. Jack:

“Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal' –the vowels are in the right place, the consonants are in the right place, it covers a large piece of ground. That’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as newscasters, as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from. It’s entirely wrong to describe Rain’s voice as ‘mid-Atlantic’–the Canadian accent has almost no trace of Britishness.”

Catching up with old friends

Saradindu Guha dropped into the department on Tuesday. Saradindu was our administrative assistant from 1990 until 1999, when he retired at 65. Now 85, he was downtown sorting out his visa for a trip to China and Japan. A remarkable man with a remarkable memory, he greeted everyone by name, inquired about spouses and partners by their names, and talked about numerous old colleagues and students. (He asked about the progress of an “affair” between two grad students. No progress— he disappeared, and she married someone else and has a university-age son.) Saradindu has a Ph.D in chemistry, and he continues his 40-year sideline of translating scientific articles from Russian into English.  Mary Hsu took this photo of Saradindu with Keren and Jack.

LVC field trip: Oral histories in Parry Sound, Ontario

The first Language Variation and Change CRC-sponsored field trip team have been doing oral histories in Parry Sound, Ontario for the past week. We have talked to 45 people and documented their stories. We are finding many interesting linguistic features in the data! In rare moments like the one portrayed in this picture, they get a chance to wind down in the local scene.

(LtoR): Kinza Mahoon, Lisa Schlegl, Tim Gadanidis, Fiona Wilson, Andrei Munteanu, Jean-François Juneau.

41st Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW)

U of T was well represented at GLOW in Budapest in April:

Left to right: Monica Irimia, Ph.D. 2014, now at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia; Elizabeth Cowper, Professor Emeritus; Avery Ozburn, M.A. 2014, now at UBC; Naomi Francis, MA 2014, now at MIT; Julianne Doner, Ph.D. student. Also participating but not pictured: Daniel Currie Hall, Ph.D. 2007, now at Saint Mary's University

11th annual Science Rendezvous

On Saturday, May 12, 2018, the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto will be taking part in the 11th annual Science Rendezvous.

Science Rendezvous is an educational outreach event that boasts dozens of exciting exhibits and many fun activities for attendees of all ages. The University of Toronto St George campus will be open to the public throughout the day.

At the Linguistics booth, there will be hands-on activities including ultrasound, spectrogram, a mini-sociolinguistic experiment, an Inuktitut morphology puzzle, immersive videos, button making, and much more! We have an enthusiastic team of linguistics students and volunteers who have worked hard to make all this happen.

You can check out the Linguistic Department’s website for the event at https://www.futurelinguist.com
The University of Toronto Science Rendezvous page with the information about exhibits on campus is here: http://www.sciencerendezvousuoft.ca
The Canada-wide site is at http://www.sciencerendezvous.ca

The event runs from 11 to 4, and will take place on and around St George Street between Harbord and College. The Linguistics Booth will be at the Bahen Center for Information Technology Atrium BA1140.

Hope to see you there!

MOTH2018

The 6th annual Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton workshop on syntax (MOTH 6) was recently held at McGill. Presenters from UofT:

Virgilio Partida Peñalva (PhD): Multiple PP-remnants in Spanish Pseudostripping: The interaction between NP- and TP-ellipsis

Kinza Mahoon (PhD): Structure of ezafe in Urdu – a compounding approach

Fiona Wilson (PhD): The amn’t gap in Scottish English

Jean-François Juneau (PhD): On the Old and Modern Georgian Suffixaufnahme in Possessive Noun Phrases

Andrew Peters (PhD): Form and Function: Mandarin de in the Nominal and Verbal Domains

Sahar Taghipour (PhD): On Definite Marking in Laki

Nadia Nacif (UofT French): Restrictive and non-restrictive adjectives in Romance languages: Portuguese and Spanish evidence

(LtoR) Back: Virgilio Partida Peñalva, Jean-François Juneau, Koorosh Ariyaee, Sahar Taghipour, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour. Front: Fiona Wilson, Kinza Mahoon, Andrew Peters, Nadia Nacif.

48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48)

The 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48) was recently held at York University. Some of the presentations associated with UofT:

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty): A Child’s View of Romance Modification

Gavin Antonio Bembridge (York University) & Andrew Peters (PhD): Who, or where are ‘you’ to me? Formality as distance in Romance and beyond

Suzi Lima (UofT faculty/UFRJ) & Cristiane Oliveira (UFRJ): Value and quantity in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese

Sophia Bello (UofT French): Does null mean something to you? Children’s missing objects and what it all means

Jacob Aziz (Western), Vanina Machado (UofT Spanish&Portuguese), Yasaman Rafat (Western), Rajiv Rao (University of Wisconsin, Madison) & Ryan Stevenson (Western): Investigating the sources of nuclear intonation in Argentinian-Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish: Evidence of parental and English influences,

Juliane Doner (PhD) & Çağrı Bilgin (MA 2017): Same Extended Projection Principle, Different Null Subject Language

Hilary Walton (UofT French): The influence of the presence of orthography on the production of a novel vowel contrast by Anglophone learners of French