McLing

MCQLL meets on Wednesdays at 1:00 in room 117. This week, Alessandro Sordoni will be discussing Natural Language Inference datasets such as MNLI, or paraphrase corpora such as QQP. NLU models trained on those datasets become usually brittle when they are tested on examples that are still grammatically correct but slightly out-of-distribution (see HANS and […]

Siva Reddy is joining as a joint faculty in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Computer Science. He is a Facebook CIFAR AI Chair at MILA (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute). Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Siva’s research aims to enable […]

Martina Martinović spent 6 weeks in November and December doing fieldwork on Wolof in Senegal. She was collecting data for her ongoing projects on the structure of copular clauses and progressive constructions, and on tense and aspect with Ryan Bochnak. She also started a new project, looking at how clitic climbing in control clauses can […]

Please save the data for the upcoming colloquium talks this semester: Andrés Salanova (University Ottawa) – February 28th Laura Dilley (Michigan State University) – March 13th Yael Sharvit (UCLA) – April 3rd Colloquiua take place Friday afternoons at 3:30––more details will be announced before each talk. Please contact organizers Francisco, Masashi, and Yeong with any […]

The 2019 Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of Latin America Archiving Award was presented to Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez and Jessica Coon for their Chol language archive at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. They received the award in New Orleans at the SSILA meeting, which meets concurrently with the LSA. […]

Congratulations to McGill BA student, Marielle Côté-Gendreau, who was recently awarded the American Name Society Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes “outstanding scholarship of a names researcher in the early stages of his/her academic or professional career”. She received the award for her submitted article “Tracking Napoleon, his name and his myth in 19th century French Canada: Sociodemographic […]

This semester, P* reading group will meet on Tuesdays from 1:00-2:00 pm, location TBD. There will be no meeting on Tuesday, January 14; further announcements will be made once a meeting location is secured.

In a study published in the journal Science, Tim O’Donnell together with an international team of researchers led by Sam Mehr at Harvard,  examined the universality of diversity of human song across societies. Amongst other results, the paper showed that all of the cultures studied used song in four similar behavioral contexts: dance, love, healing, […]

The 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, hosted by the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, took place December 18-20. It featured a number of presentations by current and former affiliates of our Department, including: Alan Bale (PhD 2006), Bernhard Schwarz & David Shanks (U2): Monotonicity restored: more never means purer (poster) Aron Hirsch (postdoc 2017–19) & Michael Wagner: Only reconstruction and backwards association (talk) […]

McGill linguists spent this past weekend in New Orleans for the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. Presentations by current McGillians included the following: Jeffrey Lamontagne & Francisco Torreira – Production planning mediates phonological variation Carol-Rose Little (Cornell University), Mary Moroney (Cornell University), Justin Royer (McGill University) – Classifying classifiers: Two kinds of […]

McLing would like to wish everyone a good winter break. We’ll return in 2020 with more McGill Linguistics news. As always, please send your news, events, talks, publications, and linguistics-related travel to us at mcling.linguistics@mcgill.ca

Last Tuesday, Francesco Gentile successfully defended his PhD thesis “Modal Adjectives and the Grammar of Non-local Modification”. Congratulations Francesco!

Please join us for the PhD Oral Defense of Francesco Gentile, Monday, December 9th, 2019 at 2:30 pm in the Ferrier Bldg. Rm. 456. The dissertation is titled: “Modal Adjectives and the Grammar of Non-local Modification”. The defence will be followed by a reception in the Linguistics lounge (room 212).

Congratulations to Jessica Coon, who was recently named Director of the Mellon-funded Indigenous Studies and Community Engagement Initiative! Read the full story here.

Please join us for the PhD Oral Defense of Francesco Gentile, Monday, December 9th, 2019 at 2:30 pm in the Ferrier Bldg. Rm. 456. The dissertation is titled: “Modal Adjectives and the Grammar of Non-local Modification”. The defence will be followed by a reception in the Linguistics lounge (room 212).

The next talk in the Linguistics colloquium series will be by Jason Brenier (Georgian Partners) on Friday, December 6th at 3:30 pm in ARTS W-20. Title and abstract to come!

Please join us this afternoon for the last of the three talks in connection with the LING/DISE search in Indigenous Languages. Speaker: Ryan DeCaire (UofT) Coordinates: December 2nd, 3:00–4:30 in Arts 260 (to be followed by a reception) Title: Tertiary Education for Indigenous Language Revitalization Abstract: Indigenous communities, some now for decades, have been working tirelessly to maintain […]

Heather Goad gave two colloquia at the University of Vienna this past week: “An unexpected source of footing in Québec French” (in collaboration with Gui Garcia (PhD 2017) and Natália Guzzo (post-doc until 2019)) and “How many types of s are there?”

Congratulations to newly-minted Dr. Liz Smeets, who recently defended her dissertation “Conditions on L1 transfer in L2 discourse-syntax mappings: The case of Clitic Left Dislocation in Italian and Romanian”, supervised by Lydia White and Lisa Travis. Below Liz is pictured with supervisor Lydia White, ceremoniously moving her photo (with help from baby Otis) from “current […]

This week at MCQLL, Gemma Huang will present her ongoing project on comparing phonotactic probability models. Overview: Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that studies the restrictions on permissible combinations of phonemes. The adoption of words is governed by systematic intuitions on the likelihood of different combinations of sounds in a language. For example, between […]