McLing

McGill linguists presented at this year’s Canadian Linguistics Association (CLA) annual meeting, held virtually June 1st–4th. Presenters included: Terrance Gatchalian – The composition of Ktunaxa causatives: argument- and event-structure restrictions Sijia Zhang & Michael Wagner – Speech segmentation and tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese Full information can be found at the conference page: https://cla-acl.ca/programmes/congres-de-2022-meeting.html

The first “Linguistic elicitation for language revitalization”, co-taught by Meghan Clayards and Jessica Coon in the condensed May summer term, together with course advisors James Crippen, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Tahohtháratye Brant (UofT), and Ryan DeCaire (UofT), held final presentations at the Thomson Island Cultural Camp in Akwesasne last Thursday. The course was developed in partnership with […]

McLing is pleased to announce the incoming McGill graduate cohort! The following PhD, MA, and QY students will be joining McGill in Fall 2022. Welcome new students! – Cheman Baira A Sangma – Jeanne Brown – Benjamin LeBrun – Luané Lennox – Olivia Oppong – Nicole Isaac-Pictou

Congratulations to Mathieu Paillé, who will start a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Calgary in fall 2022. He will work with Elizabeth Ritter, Dimitrios Skordos, and Martina Wiltschko on a project called “How to do things with nominals.

PhD student Mathieu Paillé gave a talk entitled “Inclusion of parts, or exclusion of predicates: Comparing two exhaustivity accounts of homogeneity” at the Workshop on Part-Whole Structures in Natural Language, at Masaryk University in Brno (held online). The handout is here. Abstract: Discussion of homogeneity effects usually focuses on examples involving pluralities, but the effect is often taken […]

PhD student Laurestine Bradford will present her Master’s project work as a flash talk at the 44th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Cogsci 2022), taking place on July 27th-30th in hybrid format. Her work is entitled “Communicative Need Modulates Lexical Precision Across Semantic Domains: A Domain-Level Account of Efficient Communication.

Lydia White, Heather Goad, Gui Garcia, (PhD ’17) Natália Guzzo, (Post-doc ’18–’19) Liz Smeets (PhD ’19) and Jiajia Su (PhD ’19) presented a paper at Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA 16) in Trondheim, Norway, May 12-14, entitled Determining prosodic effects in L2 grammars: effectiveness of different methodologies. There were a number of McGillians present. In the photo: Philippe Prévost […]

Students from the Winter 2022 Linguistic Field Methods class traveled to Toronto later this week to present their work on Kirundi at the first Toronto–Montreal Bantu Colloquium, Ba-TOM 1, hosted at the University of Toronto Scarborough May 27th and 28th. Presenters included Chase Boles, Brandon Chaperon, Terrance Gatchalian, Claire Henderson, Katya Morgunova, Willie Myers, and David Shanks. They were joined […]

McGill linguists of past and present gave talks at New Sounds 2022 10th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, which took place April 20th–22nd at the University of Barcelona. Talks included: Heather Goad: The role of similarity in feature redeployment. Guilherme D Garcia (PhD 2017) & Chao Zhou: L1 Mandarin prosody helps acquiring […]

Avleen Mokha (BAhon 2020) and Heather Goad presented a talk titled “A structured approach to obstruent+approximant+vowel strings in Hindi” at the virtual (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages 12 earlier this month at the University of Utah.

Yuzhou Yan (Honours Linguistics/Major Computer Science) presented on part of his honours thesis work at the 16th annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC16, hybrid format), April 22-24, 2022. The title of his presentation was “Complementizer Selection by Japanese Verbs”.

Junko Shimoyama gave a colloquium talk last Thursday at Cornell University virtually, on “Embedded negative polar questions in Japanese: explaining the puzzling distribution of embedded non-canonical negation”. This is based on joint work with Daniel Goodhue (PhD 2018) at the University of Maryland.

McGill linguists of past and present gathered at UQAM last Friday and Saturday for the 10th annual edition of the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop. Justin Royer gave an invited talk titled “Binding and anti-cataphora in Mayan”. Other talks by McGill grad students included: Terrance Gatchalian – Building Ktunaxa causatives Will Johnston – Directed motion in […]

Congratulations to PhD student Clint Parker, who has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship for the 2022–2023 academic year, which he will use to carry out fieldwork on the Shughni language in Tajikistan.  Clint will be hosted by a local academic institution and work directly with Shughni-speaking academics and other community members.  This fieldwork will […]

Martina Martinović and Michael Wagner will be presenting at the upcoming West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 40), hosted virtually by Stanford University May 13–15. Martina will be presenting a talk titled “[-Person] and [+Person] resumption in Igala”, and Michael will be presenting in the special session on Prosody, Focus, and Ellipsis with a […]

 James Crippen will be giving an invited talk at UQAM (in English) on Wednesday April 13, 2022 from 12:45 to 1:45 pm in DS-3470 (https://carte.uqam.ca/pavillon-ds). Area linguists are welcome! Title: Space and time in Tlingit: Aspect, motion, and conjugation class Abstract : Tlingit verb inflection for aspect is conditioned by four conjugation classes that are identified by three prefixes (n-, g̱-, g-) and their absence […]

Will Johnston gave a talk titled “Event Structure and Serial Verb Constructions in Hmong” on Friday, April 1 at a (virtual) meeting of the University of Minnesota Hmong Linguistics Research/Reading Group.

Several members of the Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Laboratory (MCQLL) have had papers accepted at major conferences. Benjamin LeBrun, Alessandro Sordoni and Timothy J. O’Donnell’s paper titled Evaluating Distributional Distortion in Neural Language Modeling has been accepted for to appear at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). The paper investigates whether neural language models […]

Please join us Friday, April 8th at 3:30pm for our next talk of the 2021-2022 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series. If you are planning to attend talks and have not yet registered, you can do so here (you only need to register once for the 2021-2022 year). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the […]

The 10th Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop will take place this year April 22nd and 23rd at UQÀM. The line-up includes presentations by Terrance Gatchalian, Will Johnston, Bernardas Jurevicius, and Willie Myers, as well as an invited talk by Justin Royer. The full program is available here, and registration is here.