McLing

This week in the Fieldwork Lab meeting, Dan Brodkin (UC Santa Cruz) will present work titled “Agent Focus in South Sulawesi”. Fieldwork Lab will meet at 4 on Thursday, November 26th. Contact Carol-Rose Little (carol.little@mcgill.ca), if you would like to join the meeting.

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Thursday November 26th at 1:30pm. Danfeng Wu, a graduate student from MIT, will be presenting work titled “Syntax and prosody of either…or… sentences”.

Articles by Jessica Coon and Justin Royer appeared in the recently-published Oxford University Press volume, “Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages“, edited by Ivano Caponigro, Harold Torrence, and Roberto Zavala. The volume is the result of a series of workshops which took place in Chiapas Mexico in 2017 and 2018. The volume contains 15 chapters […]

Michael’s handbook article on prosodic focus, to appear in the upcoming Semantics Companion, has gone online on Nov 4 at the publisher’s website: Wagner, Michael (2021). Prosodic focus. TheWiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. [doi]

Michael Wagner recently presented a poster, “Encoding a semantic contrast requires phonological contrast in English but not in French” at the 61st Annual Conference of the Psychonomic Society on Nov 19 2020. Can a homophone antecedent cause deaccentuation? It turns out yes. See the full poster for more.

Jessica Coon presented collaborative work with recent postdoctoral fellow, Nico Baier, and with Ted Levin at two invited talks recently: November 11th at Leipzig University, and November 20th at UCLA. The title and abstract are below. A manuscript version is available on LingBuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004545. “Mayan Agent Focus and the Ergative Extraction Constraint” Many languages of the […]

In advance of this Friday’s colloquium, Will Johnston will be leading discussion on work by speaker Emily Elfner. The 2015 paper is titled “Recursion in prosodic phrasing: evidence from Connemara Irish” and can be downloaded at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-014-9281-5.

The next talk in our 2020-2021 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Emily Elfner (York University) on Friday, November 20th at 3:30pm. The title of the talk is “Evaluating evidence for recursive prosodic structure”. If you have not yet registered for the colloquium series, please do so here (you only need to register once for […]

This week, Alex Cucinelli will be leading discussion on “Dutch and English toddlers’ use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions” (Lammertink et al., 2015). P* Group takes place on Fridays from 12-1pm on Zoom. All are welcome! To get information on how to join the meeting, please register here.

The McGill Linguistics Department is very happy to welcome new professor James Crippen, who will be joining us in January 2021. James Crippen [ˈkɹɪ.pən] specializes in morphosyntax, information structure, and the structure of the lexicon. He works primarily on Tlingit as well as on other languages in the Na-Dene (Dene-Eyak-Tlingit) family. Particular topics he has worked […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting (1:30-2:30pm Wednesday, November 11), Bing’er Jiang, a sixth year PhD student at the McGill Linguistics Department, will present her work on the perceptual tonal space in Mandarin Chinese continuous speech. Talk abstract is below. If you would like to join the meeting and have not already registered for the MCQLL […]

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Thursday November 12th at 1:30pm. Martina Martinović will be presenting work titled “Control and restructuring in Wolof”: ABSTRACT: In this talk I discuss the phenomenon of control in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which has the following interesting properties. First, Wolof only exhibits Exhaustive Control; Partial Control is not possible in the […]

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS 51) took place virtually this past weekend, organized by the UQÀM. McGill presenters included: Justin Royer – Subject or possessor? Binding and the ‘Low/High-ABS’ parameter in Mayan Jonathan Palucci & Luis Alonso-Ovalle – Numeral any: In favor of viability Full conference information can be found here: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/linguistique/en/nels51/

At this week’s MCQLL meeting (Wednesday, November 4th, 1:30-2:30pm), Emi Baylor, masters student at McGill School of Computer Science and Mila, will be presenting on her work with morphological productivity. Bio and talk abstract are below. If you would like to attend the talk but are not already on the MCQLL listserv, please sign up […]

The next Fieldwork Lab Meeting will be on November 5th, 2020, this week exceptionally at 2:30pm. (Contact Carol-Rose Little if you would like to join.) Dorothea Hoffmann will present a talk entitled “Event- and team-based fieldwork with a non-profit in comparison to the “lone-wolf” approach: A personal account”. Abstract: This paper compares “traditional” academic fieldwork […]

This week’s Syntax-Semantics Reading Group meeting will take place Thursday, November 5 at 1:30pm. Will Johnston will present work in progress, titled “Nonspecific promises: the structure of intensional transfer-of-possession verbs.” 

James Crippen, who will begin a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Linguistics in January 2021, was featured last week in the McGill Reporter, together with six other new Indigenous faculty members. James is currently finishing up a postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Frasier University, and recently completed his doctoral dissertation at UBC. Read the full […]

Alex Göbel, who recently finished his Ph.D. at UMass, just made it across the border to start his postdoc at McGill! He will be working Michael’s prosody.lab, on a postdoc funded through a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, as well as funding from a SSHRC Insight grant. Welcome Alex!

At this week’s MCQLL meeting (Wednesday, October 8th, 1:30-2:30pm), Michaela Socolof, PhD student in the McGill Linguistics department, will be presenting on her work with idioms and compositionality. Bio and talk abstract are below. If you would like to attend the talk but are not already on the MCQLL listserv, please sign up at this link […]

This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Thursday October 29th at 1:30pm. Justin Royer and Jonathan Palucci will be presenting work that they will be presenting at the upcoming NELS conference. Justin’s talk is titled “Binding and the low/high abs parameter in Mayan” and Jonathan’s is titled “Numeral any: In favour of Viability”.