McLing

December 2nd at 1pm, Tommy will give a presentation on “Silent Heads and Pwd-Edges in Quebec French”.    Abstract: In the first part of my talk, I present novel phonetic evidence from my corpus (Montreal metro annoucements) to support the theory of silent heads in French. With this theory, I will examine C-clusters at the edges of […]

The Word Structure Research Group/Groupe de recherche sur le mot (https://wordstructure.org/) will have a Zoom meeting Friday, December 3rd, 1:30-2:30. Richard Compton (UQAM) will give a talk: Les pronoms en inuktitut. Contact Lisa Travis (lisa.travis@mcgill.ca) if you are interested in attending.

MULL-Lab will be meeting Tuesday, November 30 at 4:30pm. Julien Carrier (UQAM) will give a talk titled Topicality and referentiality in Inuktitut. An abstract for the talk is below. If you would like to attend but haven’t registered for MULL-Lab, you can do so here. Abstract: In this talk, I argue that Inuktitut is a […]

There will be no syntax-semantics reading group meeting this week.

Please join us Friday, November 26th 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 […]

There will be no syntax-semantics reading group meeting this week. We will resume the following week.

At this week’s P group meeting, Nov 25 1pm, Rachel Soo, a PhD student in University of British Columbia, will give a presentation on “Recognition and representation of Cantonese sound change variants in a bilingual lexicon”. Abstract: Systematic phonetic variation within and across languages and dialects exposes listeners to different pronunciation variants. While previous research […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting on Tuesday, November 23 at 4:00 PM, Vikash Mansinghka will give a talk titled “Scaling towards human-like AI via probabilistic programming.” An abstract and speaker bio follows. This week we’ll be meeting an hour later, at 4:00, rather than 3:00. This time change only applies to this meeting. If you haven’t […]

Martina Martinović will give a colloquium talk this Wednesday 11/24 from 12:45-1:45 at UQAM. The talk will be in the De-Sève building, room DS-3470. Note that proof of vaccination is required to attend. Title: Reversibility in specificational copular sentences and pseudoclefts: Evidence from Wolof Abstract: Specificational sentences have long been attracting the attention of researchers, due to […]

Linguistics PhD student Mathieu Paillé gave an invited talk online at Humboldt University of Berlin on November 9th, entitled “Derivational morphemes exhaustify roots: a hypothesis on the relationship between language and concepts.” Abstract: Non-scalar content vocabulary taken from a particular conceptual domain is usually interpreted as mutually exclusive, as seen in examples like #This comedy is […]

MULL-Lab will be meeting Tuesday, November 16 at 4:30pm. Clint Parker will give a talk titled Toward an analysis of Shughni causative constructions. A description for the talk is below. If you would like to attend but haven’t registered for MULL-Lab, you can do so here. Description: Shughni (Iranian; Tajikistan & Afghanistan) has at least […]

The Word Structure Research Group/Groupe de recherche sur le mot (https://wordstructure.org/) will be meeting Friday, November 19th, 1:30-2:30 at UQAM DS3470 (https://carte.uqam.ca/pavillon-ds). Lisa Travis (McGill) will give a talk on Prefixes as E-merged Adjuncts. Full vaccination is required to attend. Contact Lisa if you are interested in attending through Zoom or have any other questions.

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Friday, November 19th at 2:30pm. Tessa Scott will be presenting her work “Object licensing in San Juan Atitán Mam”. Abstract: In Mam, and a subset of other Mayan languages, ergative subjects are restricted from undergoing A-bar extraction. A camp of analyses attribute the inability of extracting […]

At this week’s P group meeting, Nov 18 at 1pm, Alex will present the paper “English /r/-/l/ category assimilation by Japanese adults: Individual differences and the link to identification accuracy” (Kota Hattori and Paul Iverson). Abstract: Native speakers of Japanese often have difficulty identifying English /r/ and /l/, and it has been thought that second-language […]

Justin Royer and Jessica Coon presented collaborative work at the 6th meeting of Form and Analysis in Maya Linguistics (FAMLi VI), which took place in a hybrid format at CIMSUR-UNAM in Chiapas, Mexico November 12th and 13th. The title of their talk was: “Extracción del objeto y el parámetro absolutivo bajo/alto”.

Heather Goad and Lisa Travis’s paper ‘Phonological evidence for morpho-syntactic structure in Athapaskan’ has just been published in a special issue of The Linguistic Review on Phonological solutions to morphological problems. The link to the paper is here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tlr-2021-2070/html

McGill linguists presented their work at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing  (EMNLP 2021) November 7–11. Jacob Louis Hoover presented a poster (virtually) for a paper titled Linguistic Dependencies and Statistical Dependence. Siva Reddy was an author on Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures, which won the Best Long Paper award. Congrats Siva and team!

McGill was well represented at the 46th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (Nov 4-7). The following poster presentations were given by current and former McGillians: Unlearning L1 options and incomplete acquisition: The case of CLLD in Italian and Romanian. Liz Smeets (PhD 2020) Can indirect positive evidence be used in the domain of inflectional morphology? Native English-speaking learners’ […]

At this week’s P group meeting, Nov 11 1pm, Irene will lead a discussion on the paper “Uniformity in phonetic realization: Evidence from sibilant place of articulation in American English” (Eleanor Chodroff and Colin Wilson). Abstract: Phonetic realization is highly variable and highly structured within and across talkers. We examine three constraints that could structure […]

MULL-Lab will be meeting Tuesday, November 9 at 4:30pm. Terrance Gatchalian will give a talk titled Some Notes on Ktunaxa causatives. A description for the talk is below. If you would like to attend but haven’t registered for MULL-Lab, you can do so here. Description: I will be presenting some preliminary data and generalizations on […]