New Professor and Postdoctoral Fellows

We are happy to introduce a few new faces in our department! Joining us from UBC (via Leiden), U of C, and MIT (via Northeastern University) are Tyler Peterson, Nicholas Welch, and Bronwyn Bjorkman. 

Assistant professor Tyler Peterson

Tyler completed his PhD in 2010 at UBC. His thesis, entitled "Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Gitksan at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface", was supervised by Lisa Matthewson and was an in-depth formal study of the semantics and pragmatics of modality and evidentiality in Gitksan (a Tsimshianic language of British Columbia).
In addition to Gitksan, Tyler has worked on Amazonian languages. For the past few years, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Tyler will be an assistant professor with us for one year, and he will be teaching English Words, Morphological Patterns in Language, Advanced Morphology, Introduction to Semantics, Semantic Theory, and Advanced Semantics II, which will be a seminar on the semantics and pragmatics of evidentials and modals. Tyler will be our departmental semanticist while Michela Ippolito is away on sabbatical.

Postdoctoral fellows Nicholas Welch and Bronwyn Bjorkman

Nicholas Welch joins our department as a postdoctoral fellow. His dissertation, entitled “The Bearable Lightness of Being: The Encoding of Coincidence in Two-Copula Languages”, was completed in 2012 at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Elizabeth Ritter. He is interested in Athabaskan languages, syntax, historical linguistics, and phonetics.
This year, Nicholas will be working with Keren Rice on the syntactic structure of individual-level predicates in Athabaskan languages such as Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì (Dogrib).

Bronwyn Bjorkman joins our department as a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow. She completed her PhD at MIT in September 2011 and taught at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) for a year before joining us. Her thesis was supervised by Sabine Iatridou, and was entitled “BE-ing Default: The Morphosyntax of Auxiliaries”. The thesis was an investigation of the syntactic mechanisms underlying auxiliary verb constructions; she argued that these arise from the interaction of more general principles of verbal inflection and morphosyntactic realization.
This year Bronwyn will be working with Elizabeth Cowper, extending this work to the domain of motion verb auxiliaries (e.g. the going to future). She is also working on projects involving the morphological marking of counterfactual/subjunctive conditionals, and the properties of asymmetric coordination structures.

Welcome Tyler, Nicholas, and Bronwyn!

Summer Wrap-Up!

Ailis Cournane in Rouen, France
(Photo credit: Ailis Cournane)

We had quite an eventful summer! In addition to our five thesis defenses, three of our students completed their thesis proposals (Will Oxford, LeAnn Brown, and Michelle St-Amour), several members of our department participated in summer conferences and workshops (in addition to the CLA and the workshops we hosted), and one PhD student (Derek Denis) taught for the first time.

In May, Ailis Cournane went to France to present "Experimenting with Innovation in the Domain of Modality" at the International Conference on Grammaticalization Theory and Data, hosted by the University of Rouen.

U of T linguists at CVC VI
(Photo credit: Derek Denis)

In June, at Change and Variation in Canada VI (hosted by UQAM), Natalia Lapinskaya (undergraduate) and Naomi Nagy presented "“Cross-generational change in Heritage Russian phonology”, Derek Denis presented “Reaching a little further back: Building a corpus of earlier Ontario English from oral histories”, and incoming PhD student Matthew Pankhurst presented “Rhotic lenition as a marker of a dominant character type in Henan Mandarin Chinese”. This conference was also attended by Shannon Mooney (MA), and PhD students Marisa Brook, Matt Hunt Gardner, and Élodie Thomas.


Also in June, Julia Su presented "Inner modal in Mandarin excessive constructions" at the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 24) in San Francisco.

In August, incoming MA student Clarissa Forbes presented "Gitxsan adjectives: Evidence from nominal modification" at the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL 47) in Cranbrook, BC, and Radu Craioveanu and Christopher Spahr attended Nordic Prosody XI at the University of Tartu in Estonia, where Christopher presented "Rethinking the morphophonology of Estonian quantity".

An LGCU Welcome Workshop is in the works for October to provide all of the incoming students (as well as current students) the opportunity to share and learn about each other's areas of research.

(Photo credit: Eugenia Suh)

One of our PhD students, Derek Denis, taught for the first time this summer. The course, with
roughly 35 third year students, was LIN 351, Sociolinguistic Patterns in Language. Derek taught students how to measure and interpret the correlations between linguistic variation and social categories. Topics included social class, gender, ethnicity, and age and linguistic change, perception and attitudes toward variation, the language of the internet, and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation.
He shared that he really enjoyed teaching and the best part was having the opportunity to go back and re-read (and in some cases read for the first time) the classics of sociolinguistics, such as "Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City". Through the course he learned how to synthesize the material in the most effective way for teaching it to students who were brand new to the field and is happy that he is now equipped with a foundational set of lecture notes and materials which he can use in the future.

We hope that Derek has inspired many new sociolinguists and variationists!

Molson Prize Reception for Keren

Yesterday we celebrated the official presentation to Keren Rice of the prestigious 2012 Molson Prize in the humanities and social sciences. The $50,000 prize recognizes Keren's lifetime of outstanding work on Aboriginal languages and communities, and her continuing contribution to cultural and intellectual life in Canada and beyond.

In a reception at the Faculty Club, members of our department gathered with members of the Aboriginal Studies Program, as well as family and friends of Keren's. There were speeches from Dean of Arts & Science Meric Gertler , as well as Robert Baker (Vice-Dean Research) and representatives from SSHRC and the Canada Council who had traveled from Ottawa for the occasion.

Congratulations, Keren!

Jack and Elan comparing notes on retirement

The award: Up close and personal

Celebrating as a department

Congratulations, Dr. Su!

This week Julia Su successfully defended her thesis entitled "The Syntax of Functional Projections in the vP Periphery ". Her super committee of syntacticians consisted of Diane Massam (supervisor), Elizabeth Cowper, Susana Béjar, Alana Johns, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, and Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT). Julia's defense marks the end of our summer defenses, but we look forward to many more in the coming year!

Congratulations to Julia and to all of our recent PhD graduates, and a thank you to all of our professors who have been patiently reading one thesis after the other during this very busy summer!

Julia Su with her supervisor, Diane Massam

A toast to the new doctor
(L to R: Diane Massam, Elizabeth Cowper, Julia Su, Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT), Jack Chambers, Alexei Kochetov)

Congratulations, Dr. Arsenault and Dr. MacLeod!

We've had a busy summer of thesis defenses! Following the two syntax/morphosyntax thesis defenses earlier this summer, we've had two phonology/phonetics thesis defenses.

At the end of July, Paul Arsenault successfully defended his thesis entitled "Retroflex Consonant Harmony in South Asia". His thesis was supervised by Keren Rice, and the other members of his committee were Elan Dresher, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Peter Avery (York University) and Gunnar Hansson (UBC). Paul has been working as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Tyndale University College in Toronto (http://www.tyndale.ca/person/paul-arsenault) and will continue his appointment there in September. Paul will be teaching courses on Introduction to Linguistics, Morphology, Introduction to Phonological Analysis, and Advanced Phonology.

Last week, Beth MacLeod also successfully defended her thesis entitled "The Effect of Perceptual Salience on Phonetic Accommodation in Cross-Dialectal Conversation in Spanish". This was momentous for both Beth and her supervisor, Yoonjung Kang, because Beth's thesis is the first PhD thesis that Yoonjung has supervised. The other members of Beth's committee were Laura Colantoni, Alexei Kochetov, Jack Chambers, Keren Rice, and José Ignacio Hualde (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Beth is starting a 2-year appointment at Carleton University in September, where she will be teaching courses on Phonetics, Phonology, Spanish, the Structure of Spanish, Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, and Topics in Spanish Linguistics. Beth will also be joining OttawaBabel
(http://www.ottawababel.com/), one of the offshoots of TorontoBabel (see http://utlinguistics.blogspot.ca/2011/10/toronto-babel-in-star.html).

Congratulations to both Paul and Beth!

Interview with Jack Chambers

Jack Chambers was just interviewed today for a news segment about new words that have been added to the Merriam Webster dictionary. If you have cable TV, tune in to Global News 5:30-6:30pm today!

More Good News for Keren!

(Photo credit: Henry Feather,
courtesy of U of T)

In addition to winning the Molson Prize earlier this year, Keren Rice has also been elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada!

This prestigious award recognizes her distinguished contribution to Aboriginal studies and linguistics.

Congratulations, Keren!

Summer Workshops

We successfully hosted two workshops in the past couple of weeks. The first workshop was the CRC-sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop, which included talks on topics in Korean, Cape Breton English, Cuban Spanish, Dholuo, Mandarin Chinese, and other languages. The workshop also featured a special session on "Directions in Teaching Undergraduate Phonology", which prompted interesting discussions.

The second workshop was the Lexicon-Syntax Interface Workshop, which included talks on topics in Amharic, Russian, Modern Hebrew, Malagasy, German, and other languages. The keynote speaker of the workshop was Tova Rapoport of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, who gave a talk entitled "Focussing Manner and Result".

A big thank-you to the organizing committees of these workshops for all their hard work!

The delicious lunch provided for the participants of the Lexicon-Syntax Interface Workshop.
[Equally delicious was the enormous Indian feast provided for the participants of the Phonetics/Phonology Workshop (no picture available).]
(Photo credit: Eugenia Suh)

Trip to Ulukhaktok

In mid-June, Alana Johns and Richard Compton visited the Inuit community of Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories, to assist in the creation of a second edition of a dictionary for the Kangiryuarmiut dialect. They worked with Emily Kudlak, the Ulukhaktok Language Officer, to begin the process of editing the entries and discuss the organization of the dictionary.

(Photo credits: Richard Compton)

Congratulations, Marshall!

Many readers who did their undergraduate degrees at U of T will have been taught by Marshall Chasin. He has taught Acoustic Phonetics (LIN323H) many times now - this fall will be the 21st time! We honoured him in fall 2011 at the 20 year mark, and are glad that he wants to continue. Marshall sends other news of what is going on in his life. He is getting married in June 2013. Also, he will receive the 2012 Governor General's Silver Jubilee Award for his volunteer work with the National Youth Orchestra. Congratulations on all of this, Marshall!

Congratulations, Dr. Oda!

Last week Kenji Oda successfully defended his thesis entitled "Issues in the Left Periphery of Modern Irish". His co-supervisor Elizabeth Cowper hosted an Irish-themed party in his honour, which brought together Irish friends, Japanese friends, and numerous linguists.

 

Kenji's formal wear

                                          Elizabeth Cowper and Alex Motut                       Eugenia Suh and Joanna Chociej

Above left: Kenji's newest prized possession - a gift from the graduate students.
   Above right: Kenji with his committee (L to R: Daphna Heller, Michela Ippolito, Jim McCloskey (UCSC), Elizabeth Cowper, Kenji Oda, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, and Alana Johns (missing: Diane Massam))

 Maith thú, a Khenji! 

  Photo credits: Radu Craioveanu, Kenji Oda, and Eugenia Suh

2012 Spring Convocation

June 2012 Convocation saw four new Linguistics PhDs, from left to right: Elham Rohany-Rahbar, Anne St-Amand, Monica Irimia, and Bettina Spreng. With them are professors Elizabeth Cowper, Elan Dresher, Alana Johns, Keren Rice, and Diane Massam. It was a wonderful afternoon!

(Photo credit: Diane Massam)

Appreciation for Diane and Elaine

Profs and partners celebrated and expressed appreciation to Elaine for being such a great Undergraduate Co-ordinator and Diane for being such a great Interim Chair, as they both approach the end of their terms in office.

Diane and Elaine and their gifts

The rest of us look on appreciatively.

Blues brothers: Elan, Ron and Craig

Just appeared!

Syntax and Semantics

Cristina Cuervo and Yves Roberge (Eds.)

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 and  acquire their interpretation. The papers included in this volume explore current issues  and re-assess generally accepted premises on the relationship between lexical meaning  and the morphosyntax of sentences by confronting two competing approaches to this issue. 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, to a large extent, the syntax itself
establishes possible verbal meanings on the basis of the legitimate relations that can exist between syntactic heads, complements, and specifiers. Amharic, Catalan, Chamorro, Chukchee, English, Georgian, Inuit, Korean, Malagasy, Slovenian and Spanish, are among the languages used to provide empirical evidence and illustrate the argumentation.

Contributors: Victor Acedo-Matellan, Grant Armstrong, Mark Baker, David Basilico, Maria Cristina Cuervo, E. Matthew Husband, Kyumin Kim, Terje Lohndal, Tatjana Marvin, Jaume Mateu, Mercedes Pujalte, Yves Roberge, Andres Saab, Lisa Travis

Emerald Group Publishing, Syntax and Semantics #38, Series Editor: Jeff Runner

Congratulations and Welcome, Michelle!

Photo credit: Philip Cox

Michelle Yuan (B.A. Linguistics, 2012) received the Registrars' Graduation Award in the Humanities, presented by Principal Yves Roberge at New College on June 13th 2012.

Michelle is beginning her MA in Linguistics in our department in September.
Congratulations, Michelle!

Congratulations, Dr. Compton!

Richard Compton successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "The Syntax and Semantics of Modification in Inuktitut: Adjectives and Adverbs in a Polysynthetic Language". We celebrated with Richard at a party hosted by his supervisor, Alana Johns.

Pre-defense...excitement?

Enjoying linguistics- and non-linguistics-related conversations

With (part of) the committee (L to R: Cristina Cuervo, Diane Massam, Richard Compton, Michaela Ippolito, Elizabeth Cowper, Rose-Marie Déchaine (UBC), and Alana Johns)

Photo credits: Eugenia Suh

Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities

This year's meeting of the CLA was held at Wilfrid Laurier University at the end of May as part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Over 20 current students, alumni, and members of our faculty presented talks (program: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cla-acl/prog2012.html) and the Canadian Language Museum's exhibit Canadian English, Eh? was also featured at the conference.
   Two of our PhD students presented talks at FUSAC's biennial conference (program: http://www.ric.edu/fusac/2012ConferenceProgram.pdf), which also took place as part of the congress.

Publication: The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki

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Doug Smith (M.A. 1970, (Retired Instructor, Communications Department, University of the Fraser Valley) recently wrote to us with some memories and some news. In 1974 he was hired by the Micmac Association of Cultural Studies to help develop Mi'kmaw language studies and materials. Here is what he tell us about this experience.

In March, 2012 The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki  by Dr. Trudy Sable, Director of the Office of Aboriginal and Northern Research at the Gorsebrook ResearchInstitute, Saint Mary’s University  and Dr. Bernie Francis, distinguished Mi’kmaw linguist from Nova Scotia, was published by Cape Breton University Press.  Because of my involvement with Bernie in the linguistic analysis of Mi’kmaw and our joint development of an orthography in the ‘70s, my wife and I were invited to attend the book launches held at Membertou Reserve and Saint Mary’s University recently.  The Smith/Francis orthography has now been officially adopted by the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia and is the one used in the above publication.  (In the ‘80s Bernie designated our writing system Francis/Smith to distinguish it from others but quickly tired of hearing “Who’s Francis Smith?”)

In 1974 Bernie and I were hired by the Micmac Association of Cultural Studies (MACS) whose board of directors was made up of all the chiefs of Nova Scotia.  Our primary mandate was to come up with an optimal writing system for contemporary Mi’kmaq, especially the young, to facilitate everyday reading and writing and the development of teaching materials for reserves and schools.  One consideration that weighed in heavily was that historically French had been the first European contact language, but in more recent times, English had become the primary ambient language. 

To start with we wanted to reassure everyone that we didn’t intend to replace the Fr. Pacifique writing system in which some Catholic texts had been translated and over the years taken on a scriptural value; on the other hand Fr. Pacifique’s orthography was not something modern Mi’kmaq would find easy to use, partly because of its “French look”, e.g., accent marks, and partly because it didn’t indicate vowel length and other significant phonemic distinctions. Fr. Pacifique had also produced a grammar, Leçons grammaticales théoriques et pratiques de la language micmaque (1938-39) on which linguist James Fidelholtz had based his doctoral thesis, Micmac morphophonemics (1968).  In 1990, a decade after I had left MACS, Bernie Francis and John Hewson (Memorial University) translated into English and retranscribed Fr. Pacifique’s Leçons… using the Smith/Francis orthography under the title The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique. 

A simultaneous dimension of our work involved the Mi’kmaq of Big Cove Reserve in New Brunswick and of Restigouche Reserve in eastern Quebec who were also keen to develop a modern practical orthography.  Because French is still commonly in use in these two provinces, they favored retaining much of Fr. Pacifique’s orthography.  Bernie and I drew the line there; still, there was an exhilarating though fleeting moment when all of us, I believe, sensed the beauty of a pan-Mi’kmaw writing system.  Alas, that wasn’t to happen until later.  Nevertheless, I still relish those animated heady days when Bernie and I, along with Emmanuel (Manny) Metallic, Albert (Don) DeBlois, Gilles Delisle Mildred Milliea, Gordon Francis, James Fidelholtz, and many other interested Mi’kmaq, explored the linguistic, orthographic, and political ramifications of what we were doing. Meanwhile, whenever Bernie and I weren’t involved in the larger issues, we were doing solid linguistic analysis and trying to resolve the many thorny issues on how to best represent the language given the allophonic idiosyncrasies, morphophonemics, dialects, registers, and the limitations of the typewriter.

After I left MACS ca. 1980, Bernie waged a one-man campaign to promote the orthography.  He travelled widely throughout Mi’kma’ki holding workshops, teaching the language, translating documents, composing documents anew, answering people’s questions, allaying anxieties and in every way proselytizing through example.  Thanks to his steadfast fearlessness and tireless efforts for over 30 years, Bernie Francis has succeeded in gaining acceptance of the current Smith/Francis orthography among the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. And finally, thanks to Bernie’s teaching credit courses for teachers at Big Cove for McGill University and St. Thomas University, Big Cove has now adopted the Smith/Francis orthography; moreover, the Restigouche orthography has come to differ from ours in only a minor way.

Debert, N. S. Archeological Site.  Photo courtesy of Helena Bastedo

Submitted by Doug Smith April 19, 2012

Keren's work on Slavey/Dene recognized by a Molson Prize

Please see details at:
http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/main/newsitems/keren-rice-molson

Read the complete news release from the Canada Council for the Arts: http://canadacouncil.ca/news/releases/2012/rk129828846563770398.htm

The announcement here (U of T news) has a lovely photo!
 

Congratulations Keren!

Congratulations, Joanna and John!

Congratulations to Joanna Chociej (PhD 3) and John Latta, who were married at St. Casimir's Church on May 12, 2012! The ceremony was attended by a number of U of T linguists, present and past, and an informal reception was held at the Duke of York pub.

Photo credit: Eugenia Suh

L to R: Andy Lin, Jacqueline Peters, Alex Motut, Eugenia Suh, Joanna Chociej, Radu Craioveanu, Tomohiro Yokoyama, Christopher Spahr, and Derek Denis

Photo credit: Tomohiro Yokoyama

The happy newlyweds, finding a moment to rest after the festivities.