McLing

Next meeting: Friday 22 March 2019, 1h30-3 PM, room 117, 1085 Dr Penfield Topic: Structure Presenter: Claudia Perez-Herrera Reading: Bermudez-Otero, R. (2016) We do not need structuralist morphemes, but we do need constituent structure. In Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds), 2016, Morphological metatheory (Linguistics Today 229), 387–430. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002774

McGILL UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE  Speaker: Frank Mollica Date & Time: Wednesday, March 20, 2019 9:30am   Place: WILSON 105 Title: The Human Learning Machine: Computational Models of Lexical Acquisition Abstract: Language allows us to face novel concepts and situations by building structured mental representations of the world. The primary goal of my research program is to […]

At next week’s meeting, Emi will present on sections of chapters 3 (“The Tipping Point”) and 4 (“Signal and Noise”) of Charles Yang’s book The Price of Linguistic Productivity; How children learn to break the rules of language. The presentation will focus on the Tolerance Principle, Yang’s account of linguistic productivity. Specifically, she will highlight the […]

This Thursday and Friday McGill  will host a Workshop on Amazigh languages, featuring invited talks by Karim Achab (University of Ottawa), Hamid Ouali (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Khokha Fahloune (UQAM), as well as short presentations on Kabyle by the students in this semester’s Field Methods course. Thursday, the talks will be held in Leacock 738 […]

Speaker:  Susi Wurmbrand (Universität Wien) Date & Time: March 22, 2019 Place:  Education Bldg. rm. 334 Title: Proper and improper A-dependencies Abstract: This talk provides an overview of case and agreement dependencies that are established across clause-boundaries, such as raising to subject or object and cross-clausal agreement. We will see that cross-clausal A-dependencies (CCADs) in several languages […]

The 12th annual Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop (TOM 12) will be co-hosted by the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics at Concordia University and the Department of Linguistics at McGill University on Saturday, March 30, 2019. For details and registration, see https://tom12mtl.wixsite.com/tom12. All are welcome. Those planning to attend are requested to register. Registration is free.

The linguistics Department at McGill and the CRBLM jointly invite you to a talk by Prof. Mara Breen (Psychology, Holyoke College). There’s be a social dinner in the evening, please let me know in case you’re interested in attending! Title: Hierarchical linguistic metric structure in speaking, listening, and reading Friday, March 15, 3:30-5:00pm Location: McGill […]

McGill UNIVERSITY – DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE  Speaker: Rachel Rudinger, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University Date & Time: Monday, March 11, 2019 9:30am   Place: ARTS W-20 Title: Natural Language Understanding for Events and Participants in Text Abstract: Consider the difference between the two sentences “Pat didn’t remember to water the plants” and […]

P* Reading Group (Wednesday, 1:30 pm) We’ll be having P* Group on Wednesday, March 13th at 1:30 pm in room 831 of SCSD (2001 McGill College, 8th floor), during which Jeff will lead a discussion of  Breen’s (2018) “Effects of metric hierarchy and rhyme predictability on word duration in The Cat in the Hat”. The paper is […]

McGill UNIVERSITY – DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE  Speaker: Kyle Mahowald Date & Time: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 9:30am   Place: WILSON 105 Title: Cognitive and communicative pressures in natural language Abstract: There is enormous linguistic diversity within and across language families. But all languages must be efficient for their speakers’ needs and cognitively tractable […]

This week, Benjamin Oldham will be presenting his ongoing work on applicatives in Chichewa. The presentation is titled: Object marking in Chichewa: A diagnostic for the syntax of applicatives. A short abstract is below. This presentation uses object marking in Chichewa as a diagnostic for the syntactic structure of applicatives, which are double object constructions. […]

The fieldwork lab will meet this Thursday from 4:30–6:00pm in room 117. Richard Compton (UQAM) will lead discussion ethics and university REB, and will be discussing a reading by Monica Macaulay’s (2004) article, ‘Training Students for the Realities of Fieldwork.’ If you need access to a copy of the article, or if you would like to […]

McGill linguistics will host a Workshop on Amazigh languages on March 21st and March 22nd. The workshop will have invited talks by Karim Achab (University of Ottawa), Hamid Ouali (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Khokha Fahloune (UQAM), as well as short presentations on Kabyle by the students in this semester’s Field Methods course. All are welcome! If you do […]

P* Reading Group (Wednesday, 1:30 pm) We’ll be having P* Group on Wednesday, February 27th at 1:30 pm in room 831 of SCSD (2001 McGill College, 8th floor), during which Meghan will lead a discussion of  Yu’s (2019) “On the nature of the perception-production link: Individual variability in English sibilant-vowel coarticulation”. The paper is available at bit.ly/PGroup_2019a. All […]

At next week’s MCQLL meeting, Graham will give a presentation on the following paper: The Emergence of an Abstract Grammatical Category in Children’s Early Speech (Meylan et. al. 2017) Abstract: How do children begin to use language to say things they have never heard before? The origins of linguistic productivity have been a subject of heated debate: […]

This week in Syntax Reading Group, Michaela Socolof will be presenting some ongoing work on Georgian correlatives. There is no reading for this week. We will meet at our usual time and location: 12-1pm in Linguistics room 117. All are welcome!

This week, Michael Wagner will give a talk titled “Interactions between focus and choice of intonational tune”. As usual, we will meet on Friday at 3pm in Room 117. All are welcome to attend!

This week a new article was published online in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience with co-authors Donghyun Kim (recent PhD graduate) and Meghan Clayards. Donghyun Kim & Meghan Clayards (2019). Individual differences in the link between perception and production and the mechanisms of phonetic imitation, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1582787 Here is the hyperlink https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Fde842EPv6tjjsAcRCjR/full?target=10.1080/23273798.2019.1582787

P* Reading Group (Wednesday, 2 pm) We’ll be having P* Group on Wednesday, February 6th at 1:30 pm in room 831 of SCSD (2001 McGill College, 8th floor), during which James will lead a discussion of  Williams and Escudero’s (2014) “A cross-dialectal comparison of vowels in Northern and Southern British English”. The paper is available at bit.ly/PGroup_2019a. All […]

At next week’s MCQLL meeting, Seara Chen will be presenting on computational model for phonotactics. She will present a survey of two of the major types of computational models for phonotactics, which are based on a collection of papers. In addition, she will also give a short explanation of the current experiment they are working in the lab that […]