Speaker: Tokiko Okuma
When: Friday, May 11th at 2pm
Where: Linguistics 002
Title: “L2 Acquisition of Japanese noun accents by L1 English learners”
Abstract:
The experiment reported in this paper explores the influence of L1 prosodic structures on the L2 acquisition of Japanese simple and compound nouns by L1 English learners. Japanese unaccented simple nouns have a structure without a foot. Japanese compounds form one PWd as a whole with one foot. These structures differ from those of their English counterparts; in English, every PWd must have a foot and English compounds have two PWds with two positions of prominence. As a result, L2ers are expected to have a problem with these structures if they transfer L1 prosodic structures into the interlanguage grammar. In the experiment, 9 L2ers were compared with native Japanese speakers in producing simple and compound nouns. The results for pitch and intensity show that the L2ers produced L1 feet in unaccented simple nouns. By contrast, they successfully formed one PWd for the whole compound. These results suggest that modification of existing prosodic constituents (PWds) is acquirable at early stages of development, whereas elimination of existing prosodic constituents (feet) is more problematic.
Monday, May 14, 2012, 3:00-4:30 pm
Erica Yoon and Junko Shimoyama: Investigation of the scope of negation and quantifiers in Korean, practice talk for WAFL 8.
Background reading: Han, Chung-hye, Jeffrey Lidz, and Julien Musolino. 2007. Verb-raising and grammar competition in Korean: Evidence from negation and quantifier scope. Linguistic Inquiry 38:1-47.
Sara Mackenzie (Memorial University), and Erin Olson, Meghan Clayards & Michael Wagner (McGill) presented a poster a poster on the production and perception of the allophones of /l/ in English at the 7th North American Phonology Conference at Concordia this week: “The Role of Allophonic Variation in Speech Segmentation”. They will also present this project as a poster at Labphon in Stuttgart later this summer.
Recent MA student Akiko Shimada and Heather Goad will present ‘The special status of Blackfoot /s/’ at the 20th Manchester Phonology Meeting in May.
Jessica Coon and Lisa Travis are both invited speakers at the ergativity-themed first Cambridge Comparative Syntax Conference (CamCoS 1) in Cambridge, UK May 18–19th. Jessica’s talk is titled “Taking ergativity’ out of split ergativity: A structural account of aspect and person splits”. Lisa will present “When a language becomes or ceases to be ergative”.
Erica Yoon (Cognitive Science honours) and Junko Shimoyama are presenting a joint paper titled ‘Investigation of the scope of negation and quantifiers in Korean’ at the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart (WAFL 8, May 18-20, 2012).
http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/konferenz/wafl8/
This week will be the last syntax-phonology reading group before the SIRG workshop, which beings this Sunday, May 6th. Again we will have a longer session with a break, and discuss the following papers:
- Sasha Simonenko and Maire Noonan will present Øystein Vangsnes‘ “Syncretism and functional expansion in Germanic wh-expressions” and parts of “The polyfunctionality of which in Övdalian” (contact Maire for the paper)
- Mike Hamilton will present Richard Compton and Christine Pittman‘s (2010) “Word-formation by phase in Inuit” Lingua 120.
- Aron Hirsch will present Jonathan Bobaljik‘s (in press) “Universals in comparative morphology: Suppletion, superlatives and the structure of words” [PDF from his website]. Aron will present material found throughout chapters 1–5, but suggests reading the summary at the beginning of chapter 5 if you don’t have time to get through all of it.
When: Thursday 5/3, 10:00–1:00
Where: Linguistics 117
Graduate student Chen Qu has just received an FQRSC fellowship for a two-year postdoctoral position at UQAM. She will be working together with Prof. Rushen Shi in the psychology department’s Language Research Lab on a project titled “The acquisition of Mandarin tonal system by English and French speakers.” Congratulations Chen!
Two McGill undergraduates, Thea Knowles and Carol Little, will head to the Hunter Undergraduate Linguistics and Language Study (HULLS 2) conference in New York this coming weekend. They will present their collaborative work: “Didja know: A comparative study of affrication across word boundaries in Canadian and American English.” Carol will also present work from her joint honours thesis “American Regional Lexical Survey: Age and gender in lexical change in the South”
We are pleased to announce that the linguistics department has received 3 ARIA internships to support undergraduate research projects over the summer: “The purpose of the Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Award (ARIA) is to support undergraduate students who undertake research during the summer under the direct supervision of a faculty member.” You can learn more about the program on the ARIA webpage.
Erica Yoon (Cognitive Science honours) will work with Junko Shimoyama, on a research topic that examines, both experimentally and theoretically, the nature of scopal interactions between negation and quantificational DPs in Korean. Part of the internship will take place in Seoul, Korea, where Erica will run an experiment with adult native speakers of Korean.
Kalyna Franko (Linguistics & Psychology major) will work in the neurolinguistics lab on a project that examines the behavioral and neural reflections of the processing of different quantifier types. Together with Galit Agmon, Isabelle Deschamps and Yosef Grodzinsky, Kalyna will be working on the design, implementation and analysis of a Reaction Time experiment, as well as a functional MR imaging study, of positive and negative degree and proportion quantifiers such as many, few, more-than-half and less-than-half.
Madeleine Revill (Linguistics honours) will experimentally examine the acquisition of Spanish plural by native speakers of English, under the supervision of Heather Goad. The topic will be examined from the perspective of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis which states that difficulties that learners have with the production of functional morphology stem from constraints on prosody that are transferred from the native language grammar.
Congratulations all!
McLing has just learned that Walter Pedersen has been awarded one of only three Teaching Assistant Awards made within the Faculty of Arts for the 2011–2012 academic year. From the Faculty:
The Faculty of Arts Graduate Student Teaching Awards is designed to recognize outstanding teaching in the Faculty by graduate students,
and will be awarded at the April Faculty meeting. All full-time Arts graduate students in good standing who are Teaching Assistants or Course
Lecturers are eligible for this award, and any student or member of the academic staff may submit a nomination. Three awards of $500 each will be made.
The awards will be presented Tuesday, April 24th at 3:00pm in Leacock 232, all are invited to attend. Congratulations Walter!
This week Walter is presenting on his on-going work on ‘again’ ambiguities. All are welcome! Students who work in the areas of syntax and semantics are particularly encouraged to attend.
When: Monday, April 23, 2012, 3:00-4:30 pm
What: Walter Pedersen: Again and measures-of-change: A unified account of again-ambiguities.
Background reading: Pedersen, Walter A. (2010) Two sources of again-ambiguities: Evidence from degree-achievement predicates [PDF], in Maria Aloni et al. (eds.), Logic, Language and Meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium revised selected papers, vol. 6042 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 355-363, Springer.
This week we will have another extended Syntax-Phonology group in order to prepare for the upcoming SIRG workshop:
- Jessica Coon and Gretchen McCulloch will present work by Neil Myler (NYU) and Andrés Salanova (U. Ottawa)
- Heather Newell will continue discussion from last week on Željko Bošković (2007) “On the Locality and Motivation of Move and Agree: An Even More Minimal Theory” (LI 38.4:589 – 644)
Where: Linguistics 117
When: Thursday April 26, 10am–1pm (with a break)
Luis Alonso-Ovalle has been awarded one FQRSC (Établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs) grant. The title of his project is “Variations entre langues dans la sémantique des groupes nominaux indéfinis : l’expression de l’ignorance et de l’indifférence.” Congratulations!
As McLing goes to press today, Jozina Vander Klok will be at McMaster University giving a talk as an invited speaker on semantic fieldwork methodology. Her talk will be based on her experience working on Javanese, and is titled “The task of the semantic fieldworker: Building controlled contexts to target specific interpretations”.
Who: David Nicolas
What: The logic of mass expressions.
When: April 16, 2010, 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Where: Room 117
The upcoming meetings of the Syntax-Phonology research group will focus on work related to the upcoming upcoming Exploring the Interfaces: Word Structure workshop, to take place at McGill May 6–8. This week we will begin with a rescheduled presentation from last week, and continue with work by Tom Leu. Please note the earlier start time.
Heather Newell will present: (i) Tobias Scheer‘s Chunk definition in phonology: prosodic constituency vs. phase structure [PDF from his website], and (ii) Zeljko Boskovic (2007) On the Locality and Motivation of Move and Agree: An Even More Minimal Theory (LI 38.4:589 – 644)
Tom Leu will present his own work: “The indefinite article – Indefinite? – Article?” (on Lingbuzz)
When: Thursday April 19th, 9:30–11:30
Where: Linguistics 117
SLUM is offering free review sessions for all linguistics classes! Some review sessions are led by students who have previously taken the class, and others are informal reviews for you to get together with other students in the class to go over course material. All review sessions will take place in the linguistics building (1085 Dr. Penfield). Below is the schedule for the April 2012 exam season:
LING 455: Monday April 16, 2:30-4:30, ling lounge (informal review)
LING 330: Wednesday April 18, 2:30-4:30, ling lounge
LING 350: Thursday April 19, 2:30-4:30, ling lounge (informal review)
LING 200: Friday April 20, 2-4pm, rm. 117
LING 371: Tuesday April 24, 2:30-4:30, ling lounge (informal review)
LING 201: Tuesday April 24, 2:30-4:30, rm. 117
LING 320: Thursday April 26, 2:30-4:30, ling lounge
McGill will be well-represented at the upcoming Modality@Ottawa workshop later this week. Presentations include work by McGill faculty and graduate students:
- Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Junko Shimoyama will present collaborative work “Modality in the nominal domain: exploring Japanese wh-ka indeterminates”
- Luis will also present a talk with Paula Menendez-Benito (Göttingen University): “Indifference and modality: the case of Spanish uno cualquier”
- David-Etienne Bouchard will present a poster “Opinion verbs are not opaque”
- Jozina Vander Klok will present a poster titled “Towards a semantic typology of modality: evidence from Paciran Javanese”
You can see the full conference program here.
Jessica Coon returned last week from giving a colloquium talk at her undergraduate alma mater Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her talk, which was based on collaborative work with Omer Preminger, was titled “Taking ‘ergativity’ out of ‘split ergativity’: A structural account of aspect and person splits.”
Many of our finishing and recently-finished linguistics undergraduates have exciting plans for the coming year. This post presents just a few, please continue to let McLing know of your plans!
- Recent graduate Aron Hirsch will begin MIT’s PhD program in linguistics this fall
- Hannah Pinksy will head to UVM to begin a program in Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Recent graduate Alexandra Piwowarek will begin an MA program in Saarbrücken this fall
- Maude Poirier-Caron will spend a year off in England and then plans to head to graduate school in the future
Congratulations and good luck to all!
Brian Buccola has received a full scholarship to attend this year’s NASSLLI (North American Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information), a week-long summer program for graduate students in linguistics, logic, philosophy, computer science, and related fields, which will take place at UT Austin. Congratulations, Brian!
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