McLing

Several current and former McGillians presented at New Sounds at Concordia this past weekend: Walcir Cardoso, Guilherme Garcia, Heather Goad, Dan Goodhue, Hyekyung Hwang, Takako Kawasaki, Moti Lieberman, John Matthews, Jeffrey Steele, and Lydia White were involved in the presentations below:

Last week, members of the Mi’gmaq Research Project traveled to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia to attend the L’nui’sultinej Conference. The name of the conference translates to “Let’s speak Mi’gmaq” and is a conference for Mi’gmaq language speakers, educators, and learners from all around Eastern Canada. Recent McGill graduates Carol Little and Elise McClay are shown below presenting with Listuguj Community Member and recent high school graduate, Mary Beth Wysote. The title of the group’s talk was “Student Perspectives on Mi’gmaq Language Learning through Multi-Modal Teaching: A Community-Linguistics Partnership.”

On May 23-25, the McGill Syntactic Interfaces Research Group (McSIRG) will hold an international workshop exploring the semantics/pragmatics interface. The workshop is entitled Exploring the Interfaces 2: Implicatures, Alternatives, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (ETI 2) and will take place at The Thomson House, located on the McGill University campus.

ETI 2 is the second of three international workshops exploring the interfaces that McSIRG is organizing. McSIRG and the workshops are funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Quebec’s Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (FQRSC).

INVITED PARTICIPANTS

The following researchers will participate in ETI 2:

* Alan Bale (Concordia University)
* Emmanuel Chemla (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris)
* Luka Crnič (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
* Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen)
* Brendan Gillon (McGill University)
* Uli Sauerland (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)
* Bernhard Schwarz (McGill University)
* Raj Singh (Carleton University)
* Michael Wagner (McGill University)

PROGRAM AND ADDITIONAL INFO

More information about ETI 2, including the program, abstracts, and background reading, can be found at the ETI 2 website.

REGISTRATION

There is no fee for attending ETI 2, but we do ask that you register if you plan to attend. The registration page can be found here.

TWO EXTRA TALKS

In addition, there will be two extra talks taking place before and after the workshop. On May 22 at 2pm, Emmanuel Chemla will present his work on processing free choice. On May 27 at 10am, Bart Geurts will present his work on framing and embedded implicatures. Both talks will take place in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Building, 1085 Dr-Penfield. All are invited.

As we mentioned before, on May 22 at 2pm, Emmanuel Chemla will present his work on processing free choice, and on May 27 at 10am, Bart Geurts will present his work on framing and embedded implicatures. Both talks will take place in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Building, 1085 Dr-Penfield. All are invited.

Maayan has just returned from the 20th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, held at the University of Arlington Texas from May 17–19. He presented a talked, titled ”Individual and Event Existentials in Tagalog.”

Professor Diane Massam (University of Toronto) and Maayan, after a lunch of tacos.

Yosef Grodzinsky is giving a talk on Wednesday May 15at the Linguistics Department, University College London. The title of his talk is “The neural processing of positive and negative quantifiers”. You can read the abstract below:

Quantification is central to natural language in all its aspects. We have new clues about the mental operations involved, obtained through the use of multiple experimental methods (RT, fMRI, and error patterns in aphasia). In this talk, I will present new results and a dilemma: experimenting with quantifier Polarity contrasts, we found pronounced differences, but also important similarities, in the real-time processing of positive (upward entailing) and negative (downward entailing) proportion and degree quantifiers (more/less-than-half; many/few). I will also report preliminary results from neuroimaging and from patient work, suggesting that the same Polarity contrast activates parts of Broca’s region in fMRI, and leads to comprehension difficulties in aphasic patients, who have trouble with negative, but not positive quantifiers of the above types.

The resulting picture is rich and highly structured. It might help us refine our view of the role of the main language regions in the brain. This picture leads, moreover, to a theoretical dilemma: some of these results are naturally accounted for by an analysis based on Barwise & Cooper’s insight on the way generalized quantifiers are verified; and yet, other findings are better accommodated in a movement-based analysis of negative quantifiers, akin to the one commonly given to negative indefinites.

I will dwell on this dilemma, consider possible ways to resolve it, and discuss the potential significance of these new results and their interpretation to the relevant intellectual domains.

(based on work with Isabelle Deschamps, Galit Agmon, Yonatan Loewenstein, Lew Shapiro, Katrin Amunts, Stefan Heim, and others.)

McLingers were represented at the SALT 23, held at UCSC. Robert Henderson and Luis Alonso-Ovalle were part of a poster session. You can check Robert’s abstract (“Quantizing Scalar Change”) here and Luis’ (“Modal Determiners and Alternatives: Quantity and Ignorance Effects”) here.

We gratefully acknowledge the GPD (Admissions) for having complimented one of the presenters on his tan.

Michael Wagner’s research and funding have been highlighted in a “Researcher Spotlight” post on the Arts Research blog, here.

McGill will host a workshop on computational methods and fieldwork Monday and Tuesday, May 27th and 28th. Plenary speaker Alexis Palmer will give a talk and a hands-on workshop. The Computational Field Workshop will also feature talks by Montreal-based iLanguage Lab. A preliminary schedule can be found here. Registration is free, but please email Jessica Coon if you plan to attend so we can get a head-count for space and catering.

The Computational Field Workshop is co-sponsored by the Mi’gmaq Project and Ergativity Lab.

Michael Wagner is just back from the University of Southern California where we gave a colloquium talk titled “A Generalization of Hurford’s Constraint.” He will travel to Frankfurt next week where we will give a similar talk at the Generative Grammatik des Südens conference at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. You can (perhaps) read his abstract, in German, here.

As we recently reported, a number of current and former McGill linguists presented at GASLA 12 (Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition) at the University of Florida in April. Here they are!

Back row: Moti Lieberman, Jeff Klassen, Larissa Nossalik (2009) Middle row: Joyce Bruhn de Garavito (1999), Theres Grueter (2006), Elena Valenzuela (2005), Silvina Montrul (1997), Lydia White, Öner Özçelik (2012), Guiherme Garcia Front row: Roumyana Slabakova (1997), Luisa Meroni (postdoc, 2006-2007)

Lisa Travis returned last week from three weeks of fieldwork and teaching in Madagascar. Lisa reports on 21 days, three cities (Diego, Mahajanga, Antananarivo), 44 hours of flying and 30 hours of overland bus travel. The research team consisted of two Canadian linguists (Lisa Travis and Ileana Paul), four Malagasy linguists (one from Diego, three from Tana), and ten students (four from the Diego group, and six from Tana group).  There were 7 days of classes, 4 days of methodology workshops, 2 days of direct elicitation.  Lots of great dialect data!

Alex Drummond (Faculty lecturer) gave a talk titled ‘The Case for Extraposition as Movement’ at UMass, Amherst on April 23, 2013. The talk took place as part of Brian Dillon and Kyle Johnson’s graduate course, Seminar on Adult Sentence Processing.

Kristina D’Orsi will be interning at a social media marketing company.

Allison Filler will be interning at Rock the Vote.

SLUM president Roseanne Lau will be interning at Elle Canada.

Ex-president Maddie Revill will be working at a robotics company in California.

Marla Vicente will be completing an MA in Speech Pathology at McGill.

On May 3rd to May 5th, a number of McGill post-docs, faculty and alumni will present at the 23rd Semantics And Linguistic Theory (SALT 23). Luis Alonso-Ovalle will present a joint poster with Paula Menendez-Benito titled “Modal determiners and alternatives: Quantity and ignorance effects”. Robert Henderson will present a poster “Quantizing scalar change”. Gwendolyn Gillingham (BA ’07) will present a talk called “Focusing on unlikely accented nominals: Context, alternatives and implied expectations”. And Edwin Howard (BA ’09) will present a talk titled “Superlative degree clauses: evidence from NPI licensing”. Congratulations all!

A second linguistics major, current U2 BA Honors student Misha Schwartz, has received an Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Award (ARIA).  Misha will work with Morgan Sonderegger this summer on accent dynamics on reality television.  More information about ARIA awards is available here. Congratulations, Misha!

On April 26th to April 28th, a number of McGill students and faculty presented at the 12th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA 12). Mordecai Lieberman presented a talk titled “The impact of transferred prosodic structures on L2 morphological comprehension”. Guilherme Garcia presented a poster “Stress patterns in English and Brazilian Portuguese: Proposing an accuracy ranking based on weight and syllabic structure”. Jeffrey Klassen presented a poster called “Acquisition of English focus prosody: Evidence from native speakers of Spanish”. And Lydia White presented a talk as part of a special workshop on applying generative SLA to the language classroom. The talk was called “Implications of generative second language research for language teaching: overview and assessment”. Congratulations all!