McLing

The first talk in our 2020-2021 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Laura Dilley (Michigan State University) this Friday, September 18 at 3:30 pm. If you are planning to attend talks, we would like you to register in advance with the following link (you only need to register once for the 2020-2021 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series): https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrdumvrD8iH9IjXu6ziqP0IjxFkciJxwj9. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about […]

As last week’s meeting was cancelled to make it easier for people to participate in the scholar strike, this week’s MCQLL meeting (1:30pm on Wednesday, September 16th) will be lightning talks by returning MCQLL lab members (that would have normally taken place last week). This will serve as an introduction to the type of work […]

Bing’er will lead discussion during this week’s P* Reading Group—the paper will be announced and distributed to the reading group mailing list prior to the meeting. P* Reading Group takes place on Fridays from 12-1pm on Zoom. The Meeting ID is: 956 5471 8344, or click this link to join: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/95654718344. All are welcome to attend!

At this week’s MCQLL meeting (1:30pm on Wednesday, September 9th), there will be a series of lightning talks by returning MCQLL lab members. This will serve as an introduction to the type of work done at MCQLL, as well as provide a space to ask questions about our research and the lab in general. Please […]

The P* Reading Group will be meeting virtually on Friday, September 11th, from 12-1 pm. The meeting will take place on Zoom (see Zoom info below). All are welcome to attend! This week’s meeting will focus on planning when group members will present, so please come with your preferred dates for presenting.

Congratulations to Henrison Hsieh, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Beyond nominative: A broader view of A’-dependencies in Tagalog” last week. Photos of the Zoom defense and post-defense virtual celebration are below.

A new paper by Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron (PhD ’17), Meghan Clayards, and Michael Wagner was published in the journal Laboratory Phonology: Kilbourn-Ceron, O., Clayards, M., and Wagner, M. (2020). Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through speech planning effects: A case study on coronal stop realizations. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 11(1). Abstract: Predictability has been shown […]

Our graduate student Henrison Hsieh is defending his PhD thesis online at 10 am this Friday, September 4, 2020. His thesis title is: “Beyond Nominative: A Broader View of A’-dependencies in Tagalog”. Relevant links and more details will be sent to the department mailing list as soon as they become available. See you there!

This year, the annual beginning-of-year Linguistics pizza+introductions gathering was replaced with… a Zoom meeting and break-out sessions. Students, faculty, postdocs, and staff paused for a screenshot:

Vera Yunxiao Xia (BA ’18), Lydia White and Natália Brambatti Guzzo’s article “Intervention in relative clauses: Effects of relativized minimality on L2 representation and processing” was accepted for publication in Second Language Research.

Congratulations to Heather Goad (PI), Fred Genesee, Gigi Luk, Stefano Rezzonico, Phaedra Royle, Karsten Steinhauer, Elin Thordardottir and Lydia White who received a new FRQSC Team Grant entitled Plasticité cognitive et acquisition du langage : l’effet de l’environnement linguistique / Cognitive plasticity and language acquisition: The effects of linguistic environment.

McLing is happy to welcome a new cohort of graduate students to the Department of Linguistics! Xuanda Chen is interested in phonetics, speech science and modelling speech flow using mathematical and computational tools. He completed M.A. at Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In his spare time, Xuanda enjoys anime, fiction, and music. Alex […]

McGill linguists attended and presented at the 2020 Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop, hosted virtually by the University of Toronto, August 17-18, 2020. Madelaine O’Reilly-Brown presented “Restructuring and clause structure in Hindi-Urdu”, Connie Ting  presented “Capturing ‘exempt’ anaphors with local binding”, and Beini Wang presented “Split intransitivity in Mandarin Chinese”. Martina Martinović was this year’s invited speaker.

Congratulations to Meghan Clayards who received a new SSHRC Insight grant “What makes us flexible? The role of cognitive control and sensory representations in spoken word recognition”. Collaborators are Morgan Sonderegger, Ross Otto (Psychology), Shari Baum (SCSD) and Rachel Theodore (University of Connecticut). Summary: One of the most important things we do every day is understand […]

Binger Jiang and co-authors Meghan Clayards and Morgan Sonderegger published a paper in Laboratory Phonology, titled: “Individual and dialect differences in perceiving multiple cues: A tonal register contrast in two Chinese Wu dialects.” https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.266

Heather Goad and Lisa Travis’s paper ”Phonological evidence for morpho-syntactic structure in Athapaskan” was accepted for publication in The Linguistic Review.

Two new papers by McGill Linguistics coauthors were published in the proceedings of this years Speech Prosody Conference, held May 25 to August 31, 2020. Videos from the talks can still be found on the conference website. Gibson, Emma, Francisco Torreira, and Michael Wagner. (2020). The high-fall contour in North American English: A case study in imperatives. In […]

McGill Linguistics was well represented at the recent Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30), held online from August 17–20, and hosted by Cornell University. Our own Bernhard Schwarz was a keynote speaker, presenting joint work with Aron Hirsch (McGill postdoc 2017-19) and Michaela Socolof (“Severing uniqueness from answerhood”), and a number of former and current McGill affiliates were featured in the program: […]

Michael Wagner (PI) and Duane Watson (Vanderbilt University, collaborator) were awarded a new SSHRC Insight Grant. The project is titled ‘The incremental mind: Prosody as a window into the gradual formation of a sentence while speaking” –– congratulations! Summary: This project proposes to use sentence prosody, i.e., the precise way a sentences are pronounced in real time, as […]

LabPhon 17 was virtually held in Vancouver, July 6-8. There were several presentations by current and recent McGillians: Heather Goad (invited speaker) – Marginal phonological structure: Prosodic constituency that you cannot ‘hear’ in Québec French Jane Stuart-Smith, Morgan Sonderegger, Jeff Mielke, James Tanner, Vanna Willerton – The SPADE Consortium (talk) Desperately seeking English sibilants: Discovering […]