Phil Howson in Journal of the International Phonetic Association

Congratulations to Phil Howson (Ph.D.) for his new paper on Upper Sorbian in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association! Link, abstract:

Sorbian is a West Slavic language spoken in eastern Germany, in Saxony and Brandenburg near the borders of Poland and the Czech Republic, and is recognized as an endangered language by UNESCO (Moseley 2012). It is commonly referred to as Sorbian in English, but has historically been referred to as both Wendish and Lusatian. The Sorbian speech area used to expand from its northernmost point approximately 50 km south-east of Berlin to its southernmost point approximately 8 km from the borders of the Czech Republic (Stone 1993). This area is also referred to as Lusatia (Figure 1). However, the Sorbian-speaking area continues to shrink every year and is currently much smaller than Stone (1993) describes. Upper Sorbian is currently only used in daily communication in and immediately around Budyšin (personal communication, Lechosław Jocz).

Welcome to our new visiting scholar Laura Rupp (from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Our department welcomes Laura Rupp, who will be with us as a visiting scholar and working with Sali Tagliamonte. She's coming to us from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She has a page on her university's site here.

Laura Rupp is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She did her Ph.D. thesis on grammatical theory at the University of Essex (UK) and soon developed an interest in grammatical properties of English varieties. Her current research is on grammatical constraints on variation. One the hand, she explores how insights from grammatical theory may help advance our understanding of grammatical conditioning of variation. On the other hand, she explores the window that grammatical properties of English varieties offer on the nature of grammatical rules. In the past few years, she has developed fruitful collaboration with researchers in the field of Language Variation and Change. This collaboration had led to a joint paper with Sali Tagliamonte on the historical development and current function of so-called complex demonstratives (e.g. this here park) in York English that will be published in English Language and Linguistics in 2017. During my visit to UoT from Jan 21-March 3, we will conduct further research and write a paper on two other vernacular demonstratives in York English: the zero article (e.g. Ø park) and the reduced demonstrative (e.g. t’ park). In other joint research with David Britain (University of Bern, Switzerland), she has been inquiring into the nature of the ‘Northern Subject Rule’ in varieties of English and the implications for linguistic theorizing on subject-verb agreement. According to the Northern Subject Rule, morphology on the verb is regulated by subject type (NP versus pronoun; e.g. The children gets away with it vs They get_ away with it), rather than the person/number properties of the subject.

Ryan DeCaire on Kanien’kéha (Mohawk)

UofT Arts & Science News has a feature on Ryan DeCaire, assistant professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and Department of Linguistics, on Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), including the benefits of learning and teaching it. Check it out here.

Michael Iannozzi on CTV on Canadian English

Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014), who is now a graduate student at Western (but is still involved with the Canadian Language Museum), was recently on CTV News to talk about Canadian English (the Canadian Shift, etc.). Check it out here; it's 6 minutes long.

LSA et al. 2017

The Linguistic Society of America recently held their 91st annual meeting in Austin, Texas between January 5th and 8th (2017), alongside the smaller sister societies: the American Dialect Society, American Name Society, North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

See the schedule here. Pictures below (courtesy of Keren Rice, Sali Tagliamonte, and Diane Massam)! Presentations, etc. from U of T:

Sali Tagliamonte (faculty) was inducted as one of the 2017 LSA Fellows.

Keren Rice (faculty) was a speaker for the panel "One Hundred Years of IJAL: Balancing Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Field", sponsored by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).

Marisa Brook (Ph.D. 2016, now at Michigan State University), Bridget Jankowski (Ph.D. 2013), Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.), Sali Tagliamonte (faculty): Post-adolescent change in the individual: early adulthood against the backdrop of the community

Keren Rice (faculty): Data collections: What is the intellectual value?

Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at MIT): On apparent ergative agreement in Inuktitut

Sali Tagliamonte (faculty), Emily Blamire (Ph.D.): Using Internet language to decipher the actuation of linguistic change

Alexandra Motut (Ph.D.): Non-obligatory control is (at least partly) structural

Michela Ippolito (faculty), Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.), Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D.): The semantics of object marking in Kinyarwanda

Cedric Ludlow (undergraduate), Lisa Schlegl (undergraduate), Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): “Just down the drag there”: direction-giving in English dialects

Bridget Jankowski (Ph.D. 2013), Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty): Supper, dinner or tea?: sociolinguistic variation in the meals of the day

Holman Tse (University of Pittsburgh, former visiting student at UofT): Heritage language maintenance and phonological maintenance in Toronto Cantonese monophthongs: but they still have an accent!

Diane Massam (faculty): Instrumental double object constructions

Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Victoria): I couldn’t take the TTC but mans made it over anyway: pronominal ‘mans’ in Toronto English

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University): All in Cayuga

Bridget Jankowski and Derek Denis.

Derek Denis giving his talk.

Emily Blamire presenting her poster to a group of onlookers.

Sali Tagliamonte, the new LSA Fellow!

Lex Konnelly, Marisa Brook, and Bridget Jankowski (Ph.D. 2013).

Diane Massam and Michael Barrie.

Texas State Capitol.

Exploring Austin.

Exploring Austin.

Workshop on Slovenian Phonology

Workshop on Slovenian Phonology

Monday, January 16, 2017 at O.I.S.E. (252 Bloor St W), Room OI 11200.

The Workshop will feature talks by undergraduate students from the University of Toronto as well as researchers from Slovenia. The workshop is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Science Germany/Europe fund.

Please, register at https://goo.gl/AqX3w7 before Sunday, January 15, noon.

The program is attached: Workshop program

A visit from Santa for Eastern Orthodox Christmas

Santa visited the department for Eastern Orthodox Christmas on January 7th!

LVC Holiday Party 2016

LVC celebrated the end of a productive semester and wishes everyone a wonderful holiday (and now a Happy New Year).


Melanie (visiting PhD student), Jack (emeritus prof) and Darcie (post-doc) enjoy the chocolate fondue course


Aaron (asst. prof), Lex and Emily (PhD students) contemplate the cheese fondue course

Congratulations, Dr. Krekoski!

On December 7th, Ross Krekoski successfully defended his thesis entitled "Contrast and Complexity in Chinese Tonal Systems". His committee was comprised of Elan Dresher (advisor), Yoonjung Kang, Keren Rice, Michael Barrie, Peter Jurgec, and Jie Zhang (external). Congratulations, Ross!

Keren Rice featured in U of T News, Nick Welch featured in The Varsity

Two recent articles featuring department members!

First, U of T News has a story on Aboriginal languages where they interview Keren Rice (faculty) on her research, the state of Aboriginal languages in Canada, and the prospects for language revitalization: "Truth and reconciliation live here: At U of T, Indigenous languages speak for themselves"

Second, The Varsity has an article on the new movie Arrival that's about a linguist who tries to figure out an alien language. They interview Nick Welch (faculty), who explains some positives and negatives about the movie's portrayal of linguistics: "Linguistic armament: Deciphering the science of Arrival". This follows a recent piece where U of T News talked to Nick as well as Shayna Gardiner (Ph.D.) about the movie.

U of T linguists interviewed about Arrival!

In all the buzz about the new sci-fi film Arrival, U of T News interviewed Nicholas Welch (faculty) and Shayna Gardiner (PhD) about the linguistics in the movie! You can read their thoughts here.

NWAV45 at Simon Fraser University, November 3–6

NWAV45 had some great UofT representation this year! Earlier this month, a number of UofT sociolinguists flew to Vancouver to attend the conference. NWAV this year was co-organized by Alexandra D’Arcy (UofT alum, Ph.D. 2005) of UVic and Panayiotis Pappas of Simon Fraser University. Here are some photos from the trip:

The UofT crew from left to right: Jack Chambers, Marisa Brook, Ruth Maddeaux, Paulina Lyskawa, Darcie Blainey, Brianne Süss, Lex Konnelly, Naomi Nagy, Sali Tagliamonte, Sam Lo, Erin Hall, and Melanie Röthlisberger.

Gillian Sankoff listens attentively as Sali opens her talk wtih Suzanne Evans-Wagner.

Shayna intrigues the crowd.

A pod of UofT researchers in the wild!

Melanie shows off the ICE cube.

Presentations by UofT folks included:

Sali Tagliamonte (faculty) and Suzanne Evans-Wagner: “Vernacular stability: Comparative evidence from two lifespan studies.” 

Darcie Blainey (post-doc): “Staying true to your roots: Language stability through late adulthood amidst language shift.” 

Marisa Brook (Ph.D. 2016, now an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University): “A two-tiered change in Canadian English: The emergence of a streamlined evidential system.

Jack Chambers (faculty): “Cracking the code: Wedgies and lexical respectability.” and “Cognitive styles and language variation.”

Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now a post-doc at the University of Victoria): “Pathways to homogeneity in Canadian English.”

Aaron Dinkin (faculty): “It’s no problem to be polite: Change in apparent time in responses to thanks.”

Erin Hall (Ph.D.): “Static and dynamic analyses of Canadian Raising in Toronto and Vancouver.”

Shayna Gardiner (Ph.D.): “The Dhutmose Letters: Lifespan change in Ancient Egypt?”

Shayna Gardiner (Ph.D.) & Naomi Nagy (faculty): “Stable variation and the role of continuous factor groups: A meta-analysis.” 

Sam Lo (undergraduate) and Naomi Nagy (faculty): “Variable use of Heritage Cantonese classifiers.”

Paulina Lyskawa (MA 2015): “Converging vs. competing phonology: Does coe-switching play a predictable role?”

Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now Ph.D. a thet University of British Columbia): “A vague phonological contrast: /eɪg/ as a distinguishing element of BC English.”

Naomi Nagy (faculty): “Cross-cultural approaches: Comparing heritage languages in Toronto.”

Melanie Röthlisberger (visiting researcher from Universiteit Leuven): “Is indiginization in probabilistic constraints a sign of different grammars? Insights from syntactic variation in New Englishes.” 

Brianne Süss, M.A. 2016: “Style-shifting over the lifespan: Evidence from a Canadian icon.”

Interview with recent hire Jessamyn Schertz

Our blog is doing a series of interviews with recent hires to the department, and first up is Jessamyn Schertz, who's been hired as an Assistant Professor at UTM / St. George. Most recently she was working in a postdoc position at UTSC with Yoonjung Kang, and we're very happy to have her continue on in her new position. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 2014, and her website is here.

We've also created a new post label called "interview" for this and other interviews in the future.

How would you introduce your research to someone who isn't familiar with linguistics?

I study the fine-grained details of how we pronounce and perceive the various sounds of speech. The “same” sounds can vary across languages (for example, French and English both have “p” sounds, but they are pronounced slightly differently) and even individuals with the same language background will have slightly different definitions of the same sound. The way we produce and perceive sounds is shaped by many factors, including our language background, social characteristics that we ascribe to ourselves and other talkers, the specific communicative situation, and general cognitive processes that may differ across individuals. In my work, I try to tease apart how these different factors interact with one another in 1) by recording speakers and doing acoustic analysis of their speech, and 2) by developing experiments to “map” listeners’ perception of sounds. 

How would you introduce your research to a fellow linguist?

It really depends on the linguist. As an introduction, probably pretty much the same way as above, actually!

What kinds of data collection (e.g. elicitation, experiments, oral texts, conversations) do you use in your research?

My work is mostly experimental, although I am interested in doing more corpus work as well.

Is there any research topic, area, or method you haven't explored very much but that you'd like to work with at some point?

I have recently been thinking more about the influence on social factors on speech perception. I’m hoping to take advantage of the rich social and linguistic diversity in Toronto to explore how linguistic and social factors shape perception and production. 

What courses do you most enjoy teaching?

I don’t have a favorite, but I do enjoy different aspects of teaching different levels. General introductory courses are always fun because students have no idea what to expect: most have never heard of linguistics, and their assumptions about what it is tend not to match up with the actual course content. On the other hand, the intellectual stimulation of working with advanced undergraduate and graduate students is both exciting and motivating for my own thinking.

What kind of graduate student research projects would you like to be involved in, either as a supervisor, second reader, etc.? (areas and methods)

Along with my primary areas of speech perception and production, I am looking forward to being involved in student projects that stretch my interests: students with primary interests in other subfields who are interested in doing experimental work, as well as projects looking at the relationship between linguistic systems in bilinguals and second-language learners.

What's your favourite thing about Toronto as a city?

I love Toronto! I will try to limit myself to two favorite things. First, I love walking around in all of the different neighborhoods and the opportunity to get groceries from all over the world. Second, there is a fantastic community of amateur musicians in Toronto - the best I have ever found. 

Since your main appointment is at UTM, what involvement are you going to have with the St. George department?

Right now, I’m helping to lead the Junior Forum, a professional development course for new graduate students. It’s fun to be involved at the beginning stages of people’s careers. I’ll be teaching grad courses about once a year, and looking forward to serving on thesis/GP/dissertation committees. I’ll also be continuing my involvement with the Phonetics/Phonology and Psycholinguistics groups, as well as research collaborations with my colleagues across the three campuses.

FLAUT lecture by Marshall Chasin (November 16th, 2016)

Friends of Linguistics At the University of Toronto (FLAUT) recently held a talk by Marshall Chasin titled "Clatter, Music and Hearing Loss". Here's a picture from the event.

Left to right: Yves Roberge, Marshall Chasin, Colin Swift (representative of the New College alumni association), Guillaume Thomas, and Jack Chambers. (Picture courtesy of Jennifer McCallum.)

Ph.D. convocation (November 2016)

Here are some pictures from the recent Ph.D. convocation that included graduates from our department.

Left to right: Mercedeh Mohaghegh, Yu-Leng Lin, Keren Rice (faculty), Safieh Moghaddam, Diane Massam (faculty), and Marisa Brook. (Picture from Diane Massam.)

There was a reception in the department that included wug cookies! (Picture from Keren Rice.)

Mo-MOT 1 at Carleton, November 18th to 20th

Mo-MOT 1, the First Annual Morphology in Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Workshop, is being held later this month at Carleton University in Ottawa. The program is available here. Presenters from UofT include:

Ilia Nicoll (Ph.D.) “The Provacative Feature Deletion Model:  Morphological consequences of a syntactic model of agreement alternations”

Ross Godfrey (Ph.D.) “Process morphology and nonconcatenative allomorphy”

Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) & Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) “The feature geometry of non-binary gender: Implications of singular definite specific they.”

Michael Barrie (Ph.D. 2006, now at Sogang University) “Two issues in the morphology of Iroquoian verbal prefixes”

Bronwyn Bjorkman (postdoc 2012-2015, now at Queen's University) “The inherent puzzle of modal subjects”

Alana Johns (faculty) is also the invited speaker on Saturday.

Rear, L-R: Mike Barrie (PhD 2006, now at Sogang U, Seoul), Elizabeth Cowper, Kumiko Murasugi (former undergrad, now at Carleton U), Andrew Peters (York U, currently taking courses at U of T), Lex Konnelly (MA 2016, current PhD student), Alana Johns

Front, L-R: Ross Godfrey (PhD), Bronwyn Bjorkman (former SSHRC & Banting postdoc, now at Queen's), Gavin Bembridge (York PhD)

Pumpkin carving night 2016

The Linguistics Graduate Course Union (LGCU) recently held a pumpkin carving night, its first one since 2010. Below is the result. Thanks to Keren Rice for the photo!

U of T linguists at USC!

U of T linguists presented their research last weekend at the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology, held October 21-23, 2016 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Yoonjung Kang & Jessamyn Schertz: The role of perceived L2 category in cross-language perception and implications for loanword adaptation

Michael Becker (Stony Brook University) & Peter Jurgec: Inconspicuous unfaithfulness in Slovenian

Throwback: old department branding

Courtesy of Jack Chambers, we have an old department letterhead (from around 1981) that shows an attempt at branding for our department. It was created by an (at the time) new office of the university that was charged with branding the various departments of the university.

Naomi Nagy guest lecture at NYU

Naomi kicked off the 2016-2017 NYU Linguistics Colloquium series with a guest lecture , "Cross-cultural sociolinguistic surprises in Toronto Talk," sharing some recent findings from the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project. The perk of talking about Heritage Languages? Being wined and dined by local linguists at Japanese, Chinese, Italian (and another)—2 of these because she works on 2 Italian varieties!—and Ukrainian venues, all in a 2-day stretch. Oh, and mustn’t forget the Mah Ze Dahr Bakery, with Pakistani roots. Its Urdu names means "the taste essence of food, its flavor and magic that make it delicious."

Bonus: catching up with new NYU prof Dr. Ailis Cournane, a recent grad of our department.

NYU may be the only linguistics department with its own doorman!