McLing

McLing will take a break for the summer and be back in the next academic year. Have good summers all!

Two papers from prosodylab have been accepted at Interspeech: Wagner, Michael, Iturralde Zurita, Alvaro, and Zhang, Sijjia (in press). Parsing speech for grouping and prominence, and the typology of rhythm. Proceedings of Insterspeech in Brno, Czechia. [paper] You can try out a version of the experiment yourself at the new prosodylab field station. Abstract: Humans […]

Current and former McGillians were well represented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, held virtually June 4–7. Presentations included: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (BA 2006): Representing and resolving feature conflicts Heather Goad & Natália Brambatti Guzzo: Regularly inflected forms can be prosodically ambiguous in English Heather Newell (PhD 2006): The Morphophonology of Tamil Pronouns: A solution […]

Ruth Martinez (BA 2013), Heather Goad & Michael Dow’s paper “L1 phonological effects on L2 (non-)naïve perception: A cross-language investigation of the oral-nasal vowel contrast in Brazilian Portuguese” has been accepted for publication in Second Language Research. Abstract:  Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners’ ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are […]

McLing is pleased to announce this year’s Linguistics Student Award winners. More information about the awards, as well as previous award winners, can be found on the webpage. Congratulations all! Graduate award: Lara Riente Memorial Prize in Linguistics: Justin Royer  Undergraduate awards: Cremona Memorial Prize in Linguistics: Aliza Ellner  Award for Excellence in Research: Sijia […]

Carol-Rose Little presented a paper titled “An external possession puzzle in Ch’ol Mayan” at the 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency of Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25), hosted virtually by Sogang University last weekend. Carol-Rose also presented a poster, together with  Jessica Coon, Scott AnderBois (Brown) and Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM) titled “Super-free relatives […]

The 28th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 28) took place virtually last week, hosted by McGill University and National University of Singapore. The McGill-based portion of the organizing team included (in alphabetical order) Tallis Clark, Jessica Coon, Jacob Duserre, Mathieu Paillé, Connie Ting, and Sijia Zhang, led by Lisa Travis. Presentations by current […]

McLing is very pleased to report that Liz Smeets (PhD ’19)  has accepted a tenure-track position in the Dept of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics at York University in Toronto, starting this July. Congratulations Liz!

Michael Wagner‘s paper ‘Two-dimensional parsing of the acoustic stream explains the iambic-trochaic law’ has been accepted for publication at Psychological Review. A preprint is available at https://osf.io/rwbyh/files/  Abstract: In a sequence of otherwise equal sounds, listeners tend to hear a series of trochees (groups of two sounds with an initial beat) when every other sound […]

Postdoc Natália Brambatti Guzzo and Guilherme D. Garcia (PhD ’17) just had an article accepted for publication at Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. The title of the paper is ‘Gradience in prosodic representation: Vowel reduction and neoclassical elements in Brazilian Portuguese’. The preprint is available for download on Open Science Framework: 10.31219/osf.io/548gv.

Natália Brambatti Guzzo and Avery Franken (BA ’21) presented a talk at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, hosted virtually by the University of Chicago on May 6-8. The title of the presentation was ‘Examining contact effects in a written corpus: Subjects in Brazilian Veneto’.

Alan Bale (PhD ’06), Bernhard Schwarz, and David Shanks (incoming MA student) recemtly learned that their paper “Monotonicity revisited: mass nouns and comparisons of purity” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Semantics. A prepublished version of the paper is available at: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005928. Congratulations all! Abstract: Comparatives with “more” plus mass noun, like “John has more […]

Michael David Hamilton (PhD 2015) has been awarded tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor of Linguistics (effective Fall 2021) at Florida Atlantic University after 5 years there. Congratulations Mike!

For Carol Rose Little‘s Winter 2021 LING 215 “Languages of the World” course, each student picked a language to work with throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, they created final projects on an aspect of their language. You can take a look at some previews of their final projects here:  

Mathieu Paillé and Justin Royer both presented their work at the “Colloque 50 ans de linguistique à l’UQAM: regards croisés sur les enjeux de la linguistique”, held at Université du Québec à Montréal April 22-24. The titles of their talks were: Mathieu Paillé – “Généraliser le critère thêta : une alternative à base d’exhaustivité” Justin Royer […]

McGill linguists presented the following talks at the 51st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL). The conference was hosted virtually between April 29 and May 1 by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Natália Brambatti Guzzo and Avery Franken (BA ’21): Structure preservation and contact effects: Subjects in Brazilian Veneto Guilherme D. Garcia (PhD ’17) and Natália Brambatti Guzzo: Target […]

Postdoc Natália Brambatti Guzzo’s article “Revisiting the Acquisition of Onset Complexity: Affrication in Québec French” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Child Language. The preprint is available on Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/m7xys. Congrats Natália!

A paper by Justin Royer has been accepted for publication at the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. The paper is entitled “Decomposing definiteness: Evidence from Chuj”. The paper is based on Justin’s first PhD evaluation paper, supervised by Jessica Coon and Aron Hirsch. A pre-published version is available here: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005828. Congrats Justin! Abstract: This paper explores […]

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, […]