McLing

This week’s MCQLL meeting on Thursday, Jan 21, 1:30-2:30pm will feature a talk from Koustuv Sinha. Koustuv is a third year PhD candidate at McGill University / Mila / Facebook AI Research, and is supervised by Joelle Pineau and Will Hamilton. His primary research interest lies in understanding systematic reasoning and generalization in discrete modalities, encompassing […]

On January 26th, undergraduate recipients of Arts Research Internship Awards (ARIA) will present the results of their summer linguistics research projects. Four linguistics students will be presenting their work, listed below. More information and details for how to attend can be found on the ARIA website: https://www.mcgill.ca/arts-internships/events-0/annual-undergraduate-research-event “The Status of Mid-Level Nuclear Accents in English” – Sijia […]

The Fieldwork Lab will resume meetings this semester, with their first meeting at 4pm on Thursday January 14th. Please contact Carol-Rose Little if you would like to be added to the Fieldwork Lab slack channel for more information on meetings.

McLing is happy to welcome Hermann Keupdjio [kə́pʒʲò], who is joining McGill Linguistics this January as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. James Crippen. Hermann recently graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Ph.D in Linguistics. His research program spotlights the following research areas: (i) theoretical syntax (the mechanics of Move […]

McGill postdocs Natália Brambatti Guzzo and Carol-Rose Little each presented their work at this year’s annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, which took place virtually January 7–10. The Acquisition of Complexity: Affrication versus Branching Onsets in Québec French – Natália Brambatti Guzzo Base-generating V1 – Carol-Rose Little Carol-Rose also presented “Clusivity marking across Mayan languages” […]

A paper by Justin Royer, Pedro Mateo Pedro (U. Toronto), Elizabeth Carolan (BA ’14), Jessica Coon, and Magdalena Torres has been accepted for publication in Tlalocan, a journal that specializes on the documentation of texts and narratives from Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica. The paper is entitled “Atz’am k’ik’ atz’am: The story of Xuwan and a grammatical sketch […]

If you plan on attending syntax-semantics meetings this winter, please fill the following poll by Friday Jan 15th: http://whenisgood.net/xcmtdzz All are welcome!

The article ‘Phonological variation and prosodic representation: Clitics in Portuguese-Veneto contact’ by Natália Brambatti Guzzo and Guilherme D. Garcia (PhD ’17) has been published in the Journal of Language Contact. Guzzo, Natália Brambatti and Guilherme Duarte Garcia. 2020. Phonological variation and prosodic representation: Clitics in Portuguese-Veneto contact. Journal of Language Contact 13(2): 389–427. Abstract In […]

Registration has just opened for two new Linguistics courses to be taught by incoming professor James Crippen this winter: an introductory undergraduate course LING 211 (Introduction to Indigenous Languages) and a mixed gradute/undergraduate course, LING 411/511 (Structure/Analysis of an Indigenous Language).

A paper by Jessica Coon, Nico Baier (McGill postdoc ’18–’19), and Ted Levin has been accepted for publication in the journal Language. The paper is titled “Mayan Agent Focus and the Ergative Extraction Constraint: Facts and Fictions Revisited”, and is available on LingBuzz. Abstract: Many languages of the Mayan family restrict the extraction of transitive (ergative) subjects for […]

James McGill Professor Emeritus Lydia White appears on a recently published list of the top 2% of academics in the world, as determined by citation indicators (Ioannidis, J., Boyack, K. and Baas, J. 2020. Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators. PloS Biol 18(10).) There were almost 160,000 names in the top 2%, so presumably […]

In this week’s syntax/semantics group meeting on Thursday December 10th at 1:30, Connie Ting will present her current Eval 1 work on Malagasy. All are welcome! In Malagasy, genitive DPs are bound to a preceding head via a morphological process called N-bonding (Keenan 1995). This process is reported to occur in constructions involving agents of […]

McGill Linguistics will jointly host the 28th Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association meeting (AFLA 28) with National University of Singapore May 25th–28th 2021 (to be held virtually). The list of invited speakers and more information about the call for papers can be found on the AFLA website here: https://lingconf.com/afla28/. The Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) promotes the study […]

Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menéndez-Benito’s handbook article on free choice items, to appear in the The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, went online in November at the publisher’s website: Alonso-Ovalle, Luis and Paula Menéndez-Benito  (2021). Free Choice Items and Modal Indefinites. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, […]

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Thursday, December 3th, at 1:30pm.Will Johnston will present work titled: “Nonspecific promises: restitutive ‘again’ and intensional transfer-of-possession verbs.” Abstract: So-called transfer-of-possession (ToP) verbs, such as ‘give’ and ‘send’, have been argued to take small-clause complements. This proposal is supported by the availability of multiple readings for the adverb […]

This week, Terrance Gatchalian will be leading discussion in P* Group, which will take place on Friday from 12-1pm on Zoom. All are welcome! To get information on how to join the meeting, please register here.

This Thursday (Dec 3) at 4pm during the Fieldwork Lab meeting, Aaron Broadwell (University of Florida) will be presenting “Making historical texts in indigenous languages accessible to communities: A Zapotec case study”. Please email Carol-Rose Little if you would like to attend and do not have access. Abstract: Caseidyneën Saën is a set of open educational […]

Bernhard’s handbook article on adjectival modification, to appear in the The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, went online in September at the publisher’s website: Schwarz, Bernhard (2021). Nonlocal Adjectival Modification “The wrong number”. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118788516.sem114]

Martina Martinović presented her work on control and restructuring in an invited talk at the University of Chicago on November 20th. The title and abstract are below: Control and restructuring in Wolof This research explores the phenomenon of control in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which has the following properties. First, Partial Control is not possible […]

Jessica Coon and Justin Royer contributed a chapter to a recently-published Oxford University Press volume, Nominalization: 50 Years on from Chomsky’s Remarks, celebrating the 50-year anniversary of Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization”. The title of their chapter is “Nominalization and Selection in Two Mayan Languages”.