McLing

McGill linguists presented at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39), hosted virtually by the University of Arizona April 8–11. Presentations involving McGill linguists included: Dan Brodkin and Justin Royer – “Ergative Anaphors and High Absolutive Syntax” Abstract Carol-Rose Little, Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez, Jessica Coon, Nicolás Arcos López and […]

Please join us Friday April 23rd at 3:30pm for the final colloquium of the Winter 2021 semester. Speaker: Duane Watson (Vanderbilt University) Register here. Title: “Speaking for thinking: Understanding the link between cognition and speech” Abstract: One of the central debates in the language sciences is understanding whether linguistic representations can be divided into those that represent competence, […]

This Monday at 12:30pm, Alex (Z.) will present on her project titled “Acoustic characteristics of vowel reduction in advanced Spanish-English bilinguals”. All are welcome! To join the meeting, please use the information in the confirmation email that you received following registration. If you haven’t registered, please do so here.

This week, Will Johnston will present a talk titled: “Verb serialization as event-building: Evidence from Hmong”. (This is a 20-minute practice talk for MOTH; abstract follows.) Fieldwork Lab meets on Thursdays, though due to the unusual class schedule, Fieldwork Lab will exceptionally begin at 4:15 this week. Abstract:  I examine two common and highly productive types of […]

Our next talk in our 2020-2021 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) on Friday, April 16th, at 3:30pm. The title and abstract are included below. If you have not yet registered for the colloquium series, please do so here (you only need to register once for the 2021-2021 year). […]

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Friday, April 16th at 2:30pm. Mathieu Paillé will present a 20-minute talk entitled “Généraliser l’unicité thématique: une alternative à base d’exhaustivité.” The talk will be in French but following discussion can be in either French or English. The talk is meant for an audience of both […]

The Move & Agree Reading Group is meeting this Friday, April 16 and Neda Todorovic will be discussing Barany & van der Wal 2021 paper entitled “We-dont-agree (only) upward”. Please contact Hermann Keupdjio for Zoom information.

McLing is very pleased to report that Bernhard Schwarz has been promoted to Full Professor. Congratulations Bernhard!

Michael gave a colloquium talk at UPenn on March 25, titled “Two dimensional parsing and the iambic-trochaic law”. Abstract: The ‘Iambic-Trochaic-Law’ of rhythmic perception holds that alternating long and short sounds are perceived as sequences of binary groups with final prominence; alternating soft and loud sounds as sequences of binary groups with initial prominence. This talk […]

Michael will debate Arto Anttila (Stanford) in a “Targeted Collaborative Debate” on April 16 at the upcoming 44th meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW 44) conference, held virtually. Arto Anttila (Stanford University) and Michael Wagner (McGill):  “What is deaccentuation?” https://glowlinguistics.org/44/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/02/abstract-debate-deaccentuation.pdf The full program is available here: https://glowlinguistics.org/44/program/

Postdoctoral fellow Hermann Keupdjio will be giving two talks at Syntactic Asymmetries in African Languages (SAIAL 2021), organized virtually by Potsdam Linguistics, April 15–16. Hermann Keupdjio – Wh-/focus movement and the in-situ/ex-situ partition in Bamileke Medumba Hermann Keupdjio and Christelle Niguieu Toukam – Syntactic asymmetry between multi-event and causative SVCs in Bamileke The full program […]

This Thursday, during Fieldwork Lab, Hermann Keupdjio will talk to us about doing a virtual fieldtrip. Contact Carol-Rose Little if you would like to join. Doing a virtual “fieldtrip”: Collecting data from understudied languages is a vital enterprise that enriches our knowledge of the nature of human language. Accomplishing this with in person visits is […]

This week’s MCQLL meeting on Thursday, April 8 at 1:30-2:30pm, will feature a talk from Michaela Socolof, a third year PhD student in the Linguistics department at McGill. Abstract: I will be presenting an overview of issues relating to the syntax of relative clause constructions across languages. The purpose of this talk is to explore possibilities for […]

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Friday, April 9th at 2:30pm. Martina Martinović will be presenting joint work with Dr. Ryan Bochnak (UBC). Flavours of the future: The case of Wolof di The auxiliary di in Wolof (Niger-Congo) is associated with several readings: an event-in-progress/progressive reading, a habitual reading, and a future […]

Our next talk in our 2020-2021 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by James Crippen (McGill University) on Friday, April 9th at 3:30pm. The title of the talk is “Aspect and related phenomena in Tlingit: Looking down to composition”. The abstract can be found at the end of this message. If you have not yet […]

The Move & Agree Reading Group is meeting this Friday, April 09 and Terrance will be discussing Bjorkman and Zeijlstra’s 2019 paper entitled Checking Up on (ϕ-)Agree. Please contact Hermann Keupdjio for Zoom information.

McLing is happy to announce that Carol-Rose Little (current postdoc; BA ’12) has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Linguistics position at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. She will be joining their faculty this fall. Congratulations Carol-Rose!

The annual Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Conference is scheduled to take place Monday–Tuesday, April 19th and 20th, hosted virtually by McMaster University. You can find the full program and registration information here: https://moth-2021.webnode.com/, including the following talks by McGillians: Jing Ji, (McGill University): A Hybrid Analysis of Chinese Right Dislocation William Johnston, (McGill University): Verb Serialization as Event-Building: Evidence […]

Next Monday at 12:30pm, Meghan will lead a discussion on “Context-dependent phonetic enhancement of a phonation contrast in San Pablo Macuiltianguis Zapotec” (Barzilai, M. L. & Riestenberg, K. J., 2021). To join the meeting, please use information in the confirmation email that you received following registration. If you haven’t registered, please do so here.

This week’s MCQLL meeting Thursday, April 1, 1:30-2:30pm, will feature a talk from Maya Watt. Bio and talk abstract are below. If you would like to attend the talk but have not yet signed up for the MCQLL meetings this semester, please send an email to mcqllmeetings@gmail.com. Bio: Maya Watt is a U3 undergraduate student in Honours Linguistics […]