TULCon 2011

TULCon 2011 (the Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference) is an event organized by the UofT SLUGS (Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students). It took place Friday, March 4, 2011 to Sunday, March 6, 2011.

SLUGS looks for housing volunteers for TULCon 2011: since a number of attendees will be coming from out of town, anyone who has extra sleeping space (couch space, guest rooms, extra beds, etc.) that is willing to host one or more out-of-town attendee on the nights of March 4th or 5th (preferably both) should get in touch with the TULCon planners either by e-mail (tulcon2011 -at- gmail -dot- com) or by filling out the TULCon hosting form.

You do not have to live close to campus, but you should be TTC-accessible.

For more information on TULCon, visit the SLUGS official site.

All other inquiries should be directed at tulcon2011 -at- gmail -dot- com.

UofT Linguistics on Facebook

If you have a Facebook account, be sure to follow our departmental fan page and get blog updates on your news feed right when they happen!

NWAV 39

NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) 39 was held in San Antonio, Texas from November 4th to the 6th this year. UofT was well represented with presentations by the following (listed in alphabetical order of first author):

LeAnn Brown

Gender and Sociophonetics: What Performative Readings Suggest

Derek Denis

The trajectory of General Extenders from a transatlantic perspective: Innovation and innovators

Matt Hunt Gardner

The In-Crowd and the “Oat-casts”: Diphthongs and Identity in a Cape Breton High School

Naomi Nagy, Nina Aghdasi, Derek Denis, Alex Motut, Dylan Uscher

Pro-drop in Heritage Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Contact-Induced Change

Sali Tagliamonte & Bridget Jankowski

The Genitive in Today’s World or the Genitive in the World of Today

Cathleen Waters & Sali Tagliamonte

Innovators Across Innovations: Exploring Co-Variables in Linguistic Change

Manami's new job

Manami Hirayama sends the happy news that she will take up a position in Kyoto as tenured associate professor at Ritsumeikan University. She is wrapping up her appointment at the National Language Institute in Tokyo with some perception experiments. She says that Kyoto is a beautiful city, the cultural centre of Kansai region with the Imperial Palace and great theatres, two-and-a-half hours south of Tokyo on the fast train. Manami moves in April.

I need me an audience!

Don't miss this interesting talk on Thursday evening!


Friends of Linguistics At the University of Toronto [flaut]
and
The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS)
present a lecture by

AILIS COURNANE
PHD Student, University of Toronto

I need me an audience!

Southern United States English (SUSE) has an interesting reflexive
construction which behaves quite unlike Standard English reflexive
constructions. In Standard English one can say the sentences in (1) but not
those in (2). All the sentences are grammatical in SUSE.

1) a. I wrote myself a letter
b. I bought myself a car (*for my son)
2) a. I wrote me a letter to the president
b. I bought me a car (for my son)

The bolded pronoun in (2) is called a Personal Dative (PD). In this talk
Ms. Cournane will discuss the development of the Personal Dative from
reflexive constructions in Old English. She will also show how the SUSE
reflexive constructions are similar to double object constructions found in
a wide variety of languages. Multimedia clips from football players, folk
songs, politicians, and popular culture will be used to illustrate this
interesting, and widespread, linguistic phenomenon.

PRESENTATION, INFORMAL DISCUSSION AND RECEPTION

Thursday JANUARY 27, 2011
7 ­ 9 p.m.

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
SIDNEY SMITH HALL
4th floor
LINGUISTICS LOUNGE

OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY AND FRIENDS
Hope to see you there!

Jack Chambers, in his jazz hat, on the radio

Jack was on CBC's Sunday Edition this morning to talk about word jazz, the child of bebop jazz and beat poetry, according to cbc.ca, on the occasion of word jazz artist Ken Nordine's 90th b-day.

Read the broadcast at: http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2011/01/23/anat-hoffman---emily-dickinson---word-jazz/

Toronto Babel

A year ago, Beth Macleod started TorontoBabel, "an international language exchange group that brings together native and non-native speakers of many different languages from various countries around the world."

Here's a link to a clip from an interview with Beth on Metro Morning. Metro Morning also provided the quote above and the photo.

Our New Cactus Collection!

Hello all,

As the Chair of the Cactus Caucus, a prestigious sub-committee of the Plant and Beautification Committee, I would like to provide an important report:

The cactus collection that was housed in the lounge in September was my personal collection. After I removed it, there was quite an uproar -- with many feelings and expressions of sadness and discontent. As such, the Cactus Caucus has put together a new, *permanent* collection in the lounge for our enjoyment.

So next time you have a moment, please stop by the lounge and take a look at our new prickly friends!

Many thanks to Elaine Gold and the LGCU for funding this project.

-Michelle St-Amour
Cactus Caucus, Chair

Holiday Party

United in one small department lounge (and the hallway) on December 3rd were faculty, Ph.D. students, visiting students, MA students (including all of the new ones),undergrads, alumni (Dylan, we see you!), staff, and family-members.

Christmas and Hanukkah songs were provided by the ever-reliable F-ZERO, now joined by MA student Christopher Spahr on bass guitar.

Refreshments included an inordinate number of varieties of cheese; and thanks to MA student Maddie Shellgren, we were all treated to the sight (and taste) of a twelve-inch-tall gummy-bear.

Linguistics-Psychology Welcome Party

On Thursday the 11th members of the psychology and linguistics departments got together to "meet the people at the other end of the hall" in the Linguistics Lounge. Opening remarks were made and the departmental band, F-ZERO, provided entertainment.

LGCU Welcome Workshop

The LGCU hosted its second annual Welcome Workshop, an informal conference that enables participating new students in particular to introduce themselves and share a bit of their research in a 15-minute talk.

Half of the new MA students opted to take part, along with Ph.D. students Ross Krekoski, Will Oxford, and LeAnn Brown. The presentations were interspersed with coffee, cheese, and pastries; and then followed by leftovers and an impressively lengthy period of standing around in the room and talking.

Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change

This is a photo taken Oct. 21, 2010 after a private screening of the new movie "Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change" at U of T before its official premiere Sat. Oct. 23. The movie screening was sponsored by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation as part of a new series of events on the topic of northern security .

The photo shows the ABS 231 Inuktitut class which is being taught by Alana Johns and Saila Michael standing with the famous Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk (who co-directed this movie with Ian Mauro) in the middle. At least two of these students are undergraduate linguistics students: Michelle Yuan and Paul King.

Diane's visit to New Zealand

I am now in New Zealand as a visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, teaching syntax, meeting students, and taking part in field methods (Kiribati is the language and it has fascinating directional constructions and mysterious verbal suffixes). Plus meeting members of the Niuean community and doing a little field work on Vagahau Niue (Niuean). It has been an interesting time, with 348 earthquakes since I got here on Sept 14th (out of a total of 1448) until today, Oct 4th, 8 pm. It has been great to see a second Spring this year! I went to Wellington to give a talk too, where I saw Naomi and Jack's pictures in the Sociolinguistics Hall of Fame. Here is a picture of me with Ofania Ikiua, consultant extraordinaire for Vagahau Niue, and my co-author for two papers on Niuean. She is a senior analyst with the NZ Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. During my time here, I have found out interesting things about Niuean cognate object constructions, focus, causatives and a little bit about pro-drop.

The End of Argument Structure? Workshop

This weekend the University of Toronto is hosting "The End of Argument Structure?" Workshop. Invited speakers included Mark Baker, Heidi Harley, Lisa Travis and Grant Armstrong. The abstract booklet is available here. The workshop description is below. The workshop has been organized by María Cristina Cuervo and Yves Roberge.

This  workshop,  to  be  held  on  1‐2  October,  2010,  will  be  an  opportunity to  explore  current  issues  and  re‐assess  generally  accepted  premises  on  the relationship  between  lexical  meaning  and  the  morphosyntax  of  sentences.  A central  question  in  the  study  of  language  concerns  the  mechanisms  by  which the  participants  in  an  event  described  by  a  sentence  come  to  occupy  their positions  in  the  structure  and  acquire  their  interpretation.  A  long‐standing approach  is  based  on  the  assumption  that  it  is  the  lexical meaning  of  a  verb  that  determines,  albeit  indirectly,  the  basic  properties of  sentence  structure  at  the  level  of  verbal  meaning,  including asymmetric relations, thematic roles, case, and agreement.  An alternative approach claims  that  the  syntax  itself  greatly  restricts  possible  verbal meanings on the basis  of the legitimate relations that can exist between syntactic heads, complements, and specifiers.  

 If  we  think  that  all  systematic  aspects  of  verbal  meanings  (licensing  of external  argument,  number  and  type  of  ‘obligatory’  and  extra  arguments, agentivity,  causativity,  aksionsart,  etc.)  are  dependent  on  configurational properties,  what  is  left  for  lexical  entries?  Do  generalizations  such  as the
UTAH  and  other  prominence  hierarchies  need  to  be  stated  explicitly,  or are they  derived  from  more  general  principles  of  syntactic  operations  (and structures)  and  semantic  compositionality?  What  is  left  unexplained  by syntax‐driven approaches? 

In  order  to  promote  an  open  exchange  of  ideas,  we  have  in  mind  a  real workshop  format  rather  than  a  regular  conference  around  themes  that  will be  determined  in  consultation  with  the  invited  participants,  based  on  their contributions.  A  small  number  of  papers  will  be  selected  from  open submissions.  
 
Invited participants:  
Mark Baker (Rutgers University)
Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)  
Lisa Travis (McGill University)

Invited student participant:  
Grant Armstrong (Georgetown University)

Earthquake in NZ

Diane Massam is in New Zealand now. She sent this image of how things are after the recent earthquake. Our thoughts are with all our friends in NZ, with hopes for speedy recovery.

Summer fun w/ Faetar & Cellese

Sometimes friends wonder how we academic-types keep busy all summer, with all that "time off." This would be a great place to post what you did this summer. Especially if you have good photos to add.

I spent several days hanging out in Brantford (home of Wayne Gretsky!) and other parts of the Greater GTA. Turns out there are lots of speakers of Cellese, the Francoprovençal dialect "from across the valley" to Faetar, where I did fieldwork in the early '90s. These speakers came from Celle, in southern Italy, in the 1950's, mostly, and have been living in Ontario, and continuing to speak Faetar and Cellese ever since. So far, I've talked to over 30 people. Given that there are only about 600 left in Faeto and Celle, this is a pretty good sample! I went to their summer picnic (140+ people, a variety of sausages, and a great bocce tournament) and will be meeting the Rochester contingent at their Polenta Dinner (Migliazzate) next month.

Side benefits, besides getting to practice my Faetar and drink "real" Italian coffee, include tasting the fruits (and veges (?)) of their gardens, prosciutto from Faeto, and their homemade wine, as well as meeting race car drivers, artists, and shoemakers. And I keep busy during the non-interviewing days transcribing some of the highlights of these interviews. Sadly, I have no photos to post, but you can see some great pix of Faeto, taken by one of my favorite speakers, here.

Language and Cultural Expo

New PhD student Matt Gardner brings this to our attention:

Omni TV is sponsoring a Language and Cultural Expo Oct. 2-3, 2010 at Exhibition Place. Looks like a variety of events, and maybe a great place to recruit speakers for various research projects...

If you go, come back and blog about it!

CLA student poster winner

Our PhD student Liisa Duncan has been announced as the winner of the student poster competition at this year's CLA annual conference. Liisa's poster was titled "Consonant gradation in Finnish dialects". Congrats, Liisa!

CLA 2010

This year's CLA Conference was held at Concordia University in Montreal from May 29-31, and our department had a very strong presence!

The following members of the department gave talks:

Rashid Al-Balushi

The licensing of structural case in Standard Arabic

Ailis Cournane

A cline of subject clitic doubling: Grammaticalization in small steps

Elizabeth Cowper

Where auxiliary verbs come from

Yoonjung Kang and Seung-Joon Park

Variation of consonant-final nouns in heritage Korean in Toronto

Loredana Andreea Kosa

Sibilant harmony: Investigating the connection between typology and learnability

Diane Massam

On the status of inversion in an inverse language

Alexandra Motut

A puzzle for the syntax and semantics of depictives

Kenji Oda

Dependent verbal morphology in Modern Irish: A distributed morphology approach

Will Oxford

Same, other, and different: A first look at the microsyntax of identity adjectives

Yves Roberge and Nelleke Strik

L'omission Wh: théorie et acquisition

Michelle St-Amour

On being definitely unique in Inuktitut

Nelleke Strik

French wh-questions in child L2 acquisition

And the following members of the department presented posters:

Elizabeth Cowper and Daniel Hall

Structures for possession in Upper Sorbian and Czech

Liisa Duncan

Consonant gradation in Finnish dialects

Julie Goncharov

'Definite' adjectives in Slavic

Maria Kyriakaki

What Greek DETs do: The restrictive DP

Annick Morin

Diachrony and synchrony of /l/ gemination in Québec French

Ana Pérez-Leroux and Yadira Alvarez

How to BE in Spanish: The acquisition of copula and existential constructions by Spanish speaking children

Last but not least, Naomi Nagy was a panelist in a round-table discussion entitled "Corpora: Heritage and Preservation."

Congrats to all who participated!

(If anyone has inadvertently been omitted from this lengthy list, please contact the blog committee at utlinguistics@gmail.com to let us know.)

41st Annual Conference on African Linguistics

The University of Toronto and York University recently co-hosted the 41st Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL2010), on May 6-8th. Plenary speakers were Prof. Sammy Beban Chumbow (Université Yaoundé I, Cameroon), Prof. Salikoko Mufwene (University of Chicago), and Prof. Sharon Rose (University of California at San Diego). These talks touched upon a number of key issues related to African language description, analysis, history, status, and preservation, tying well with the theme of the conference “African Languages in Contact”.

There were over 80 talks presented from researchers at institutions throughout the world including North America, Europe, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Sudan, and others. Five parallel sessions were needed at times at the conference to accommodate the great number of participants!

Talks were presented covering numerous aspects of formal linguistic theory and language studies, including sessions centered around Phonology, Tonology, Phonetics, Syntax, Semantics, Acquisition, Language Variation, Language Policy, Language Contact, and others.

University of Toronto linguistics graduate students Isaac Gould, Safieh Moghaddam, and Nicholas Rolle each presented a paper at the conference in distinct syntax sessions. Isaac presented on the absentive marker and Safieh presented on focus constructions, both in Lamnso’ [Bantoid: Cameroon], while Nicholas presented on morphosyntactic aspects of personal pronouns in Esan [Edoid: Nigeria]. All three of these talks come from continued work on these languages stemming from past Field Methods courses taught by University Professor Keren Rice.

The conference ended with a bang, held at the hall of the Eritrean Canadian Association of Toronto. There, the participants feasted on a great variety of foods from East and West Africa, sipped on Ethiopian beer, all to the tunes of a great Zimbabwean band Asaansi (sp?), whose name in Shona means “Waves”. The night was capped by lots of dancing, both by the band and by the participants. You can see more of the festivities here:

Our linguistics students Derek Denis, Nicholas Rolle, and Isaac Gould


Co-organizer Peter Avery


Wonderful African food


The great Zimbabwean band


Plenary Speaker Sharon Rose


Plenary Speaker Sammy Beban Chumbow


Co-organizer Bruce Connell


Women in traditional Nigerian garments


Profs. James Essegbey and Salikoko Mufwene


The conference was organized by Peter Avery, Parth Bhatt, Bruce Connell, Juvenal Ndayiragije, Emmanuel Nikiema, Keren Rice, and Nicholas Rolle, with the help of volunteers too numerous to mention here in full.