McLing

The next syntax-semantics reading group meeting group will take place Monday (11/11) at 14:30 in room 002. Richard Compton will be giving a presentation entitled: On pronouns in Inuktut. The schedule for the syntax-semantics reading group can be found at the following link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KmuPoC7LolwS6Z79qZs6BFbgCnYOED8An3l3IA-pOuk/edit?usp=sharing

Next week, Heather will lead a discussion of Aldrete et al.’s (2019) “Tone slips in Cantonese: Evidence for early phonological encoding”, on Monday (Nov. 11) 2:45-3:45pm in room 117 of the Linguistics Department.

On Wed November 13 Andrés Buxó-Lugo (University of Maryland) will present on his research in the prosodylab-meeting (10.30am-11.30am) in Room 117 in Linguistics (1085 Dr. Penfield Avenue).  The world is not enough to explain lengthening of phonological competitors Speakers tend to lengthen words when a phonologically overlapping word has recently been produced. Although there are multiple accounts […]

The first talk in our 2019-2020 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by John Alderete (Simon Fraser University) on Friday, November 15th at 3:30 pm in BIRKS 111. The title of the talk is “Speech errors and phonological patterns: Integrating insights from psycholinguistic and linguistic theory”. All are welcome to attend. Abstract:  In large collections of speech errors, phonological […]

Heather Goad & Lydia White have just published an epistemological paper ‘Prosodic effects on L2 grammars’ in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. The paper, along with 15 commentaries, can be found here: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lab.19043.goa

Please join us next week for the first of three talks in connection with the LING/DISE search in Indigenous Languages. Speaker: Dr. Kari Chew (University of Victoria) Coordinates: November 19th, 3:00–4:30 in EDUC 624 (to be followed by a reception) Title: Weaving Words: Situating linguistics, education, and language reclamation within a culturally-significant metaphor Abstract:  Drawing on a five-year […]

Francisco will lead a discussion of Beirne and Croot’s (2018) “The prosodic domain of phonological encoding: Evidence from speech errors”, on Monday (Nov. 4) 2:45-3:45pm in room 117 of the Linguistics Department.

The next syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Monday (04/11) at 14:30 in room 002. Ingy Hamza will be giving a presentation entitled: Verb morphosyntax structure in Standard Arabic (Perfective and Imperfective).

This week at MCQLL, Yikang Shen and Zhouhan Lin will present on previous and ongoing work. Title: Ordered Neurons and syntactically supervised structural neural language models. Abstract: In this talk, we will first present the ONLSTM model, which is a language model that learns syntactic distances through an extra master input gate and a master […]

On Thursday 31st October, James Tanner gave an invited talk at the University of Glasgow, presenting joint work with Morgan Sonderegger and Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow) entitled ‘Structured speaker variability in Japanese stops: relationships within and across cues to stop voicing’.

A new paper has  just been published in the Journal of Phonetics: Wagner, Michael & Michael McAuliffe (2019): The effect of focus prominence on phrasing. Journal of Phonetics 77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.100930 Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of intonational tune), the syntactic constituent […]

Our next syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Monday (28/10) at 14:30 in room 002. Michaela Socolof will be leading a discussion about Steven Foley’s recent poster at NELS 50: The Principle Minimal Compliance and derivational competition in South Caucasian agreement

This week, Meghan will lead a discussion of Seyfarth et. al’s (2019) Evidence against interactive effects on articulation in Javanese verb paradigms, with Seyfarth et al. (2018) as optional background reading. Both readings are available at bit.ly/PReadingGroup. P* Group takes place at 2:45 pm on Monday in room 117 of the Linguistics Building. All are […]

Our next syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Monday at 14:30 in room 002. Michaela will be leading a discussion about Steven Foley’s recent poster at NELS. The link to his abstract can be found here: https://nels50.mit.edu/program

This week at MCQLL, Dima Bahdanau presents recent work. Title: CLOSURE: Assessing Systematic Generalization of CLEVR Models Abstract: The CLEVR dataset of natural-looking questions about 3D-rendered scenes has recently received much attention from the research community. A number of models have been proposed for this task, many of which achieved very high accuracies of around […]

McGill linguists of past and present were in Cambridge this past weekend for the 50th meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS 50), held at MIT. Talks by current McGill affiliates included Justin Royer‘s talk Apparent syntax-prosody mismatches as right extraposition: Evidence from Mayan and Michaela Socolof, Bernhard Schwarz and Aron Hirsch‘s talk, Which-questions, uniqueness, and answerhood: evidence from disjunction. Stefan […]

Michael Wagner gave a colloquium talk at Northwestern University last week, presenting collaborative work with McGill PhD alum Dan Goodhue (University of Maryland). The title and abstract are below. Toward a Bestiary of the Intonational Tunes of English What is the inventory of tunes of North American English? What do particular tunes contribute to the pragmatic […]

A new paper by Stefan Keine, Michael Wagner, and Jessica Coon has just appeared in the newest issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. The paper is titled “Hierarchy Effects in Copula Constructions” and can be accessed online here. This paper develops a generalization about agreement in German copula constructions described in Coon et al. (2017), and proposes […]

The next syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Monday (21/10) at 14:30 in room 002. There will be two practice talks for NELS: 1) Michaela and Bernhard will present joint work with Aron Hirsch entitled “Which-questions, uniqueness, and answerhood: Evidence from disjunction”. 2) Justin will present “An apparent syntax-prosody mismatch as right extraposition: Evidence […]

At the meeting of MCQLL this week, Kushal Arora will present his recent work with Aishik Chakraborty. Title: Learning Lexical Subspaces in a Distributional Vector Space Abstract: In this paper, we propose LexSub, a novel approach towards unifying lexical and distributional semantics. We inject knowledge about lexical-semantic relations into distributional word embeddings by defining subspaces […]