McLing

Students from the Winter 2022 Linguistic Field Methods class will be traveling to Toronto later this week to present their work on Kirundi at the first Toronto–Montreal Bantu Colloquium, Ba-TOM 1, hosted at the University of Toronto Scarborough May 27th and 28th. Presenters include Chase Boles, Brandon Chaperon, Terrance Gatchalian, Claire Henderson, Katya Morgunova, Willie Myers, and David Shanks.

McGill linguists of past and present gave talks at New Sounds 2022 10th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, which took place April 20th–22nd at the University of Barcelona. Talks included: Heather Goad: The role of similarity in feature redeployment. Guilherme D Garcia (PhD 2017) & Chao Zhou: L1 Mandarin prosody helps acquiring […]

Avleen Mokha (BAhon 2020) and Heather Goad presented a talk titled “A structured approach to obstruent+approximant+vowel strings in Hindi” at the virtual (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages 12 earlier this month at the University of Utah.

Yuzhou Yan (Honours Linguistics/Major Computer Science) presented on part of his honours thesis work at the 16th annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC16, hybrid format), April 22-24, 2022. The title of his presentation was “Complementizer Selection by Japanese Verbs”.

Junko Shimoyama gave a colloquium talk last Thursday at Cornell University virtually, on “Embedded negative polar questions in Japanese: explaining the puzzling distribution of embedded non-canonical negation”. This is based on joint work with Daniel Goodhue (PhD 2018) at the University of Maryland.

McGill linguists of past and present gathered at UQAM last Friday and Saturday for the 10th annual edition of the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop. Justin Royer gave an invited talk titled “Binding and anti-cataphora in Mayan”. Other talks by McGill grad students included: Terrance Gatchalian – Building Ktunaxa causatives Will Johnston – Directed motion in […]

Congratulations to PhD student Clint Parker, who has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship for the 2022–2023 academic year, which he will use to carry out fieldwork on the Shughni language in Tajikistan.  Clint will be hosted by a local academic institution and work directly with Shughni-speaking academics and other community members.  This fieldwork will […]

Martina Martinović and Michael Wagner will be presenting at the upcoming West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 40), hosted virtually by Stanford University May 13–15. Martina will be presenting a talk titled “[-Person] and [+Person] resumption in Igala”, and Michael will be presenting in the special session on Prosody, Focus, and Ellipsis with a […]

 James Crippen will be giving an invited talk at UQAM (in English) on Wednesday April 13, 2022 from 12:45 to 1:45 pm in DS-3470 (https://carte.uqam.ca/pavillon-ds). Area linguists are welcome! Title: Space and time in Tlingit: Aspect, motion, and conjugation class Abstract : Tlingit verb inflection for aspect is conditioned by four conjugation classes that are identified by three prefixes (n-, g̱-, g-) and their absence […]

Will Johnston gave a talk titled “Event Structure and Serial Verb Constructions in Hmong” on Friday, April 1 at a (virtual) meeting of the University of Minnesota Hmong Linguistics Research/Reading Group.

Several members of the Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Laboratory (MCQLL) have had papers accepted at major conferences. Benjamin LeBrun, Alessandro Sordoni and Timothy J. O’Donnell’s paper titled Evaluating Distributional Distortion in Neural Language Modeling has been accepted for to appear at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). The paper investigates whether neural language models […]

Please join us Friday, April 8th at 3:30pm for our next talk of the 2021-2022 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series. If you are planning to attend talks and have not yet registered, you can do so here (you only need to register once for the 2021-2022 year). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the […]

The 10th Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop will take place this year April 22nd and 23rd at UQÀM. The line-up includes presentations by Terrance Gatchalian, Will Johnston, Bernardas Jurevicius, and Willie Myers, as well as an invited talk by Justin Royer. The full program is available here, and registration is here.

MULL-lab will be meeting this Wednesday, April 6th at 4pm. David will be presenting: The Southern Tutchone NP. The abstract is attached below: Abstract: Southern Tutchone is a critically endangered Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in the southern Yukon. This talk focuses on two processes in the nominal domain: possession and nominalization. I will first outline the possessive system before focusing […]

At this week’s p group meeting, Apr 6 12pm, Connie will lead discussion on phonology puzzles in Kirundi. It will be our last meeting this semester, hope to see you all there!

At this week’s MCQLL meeting on Tuesday, April 5 at 3:00-4:00, Michaela Socolof will give a talk titled ‘Characterizing morphological systems using partial information decomposition.’ If you’d like to attend, please register for the Zoom meeting here if you haven’t already. Abstract Morphological systems across languages vary when it comes to the relation between form and meaning. In some languages, a […]

Luis Alonso-Ovalle has just come back from a week at the Laboratoire de Linguistique of the University of Nantes, France, where he gave a six-hour mini course on intensional semantics and a colloquium talk (‘Singular Bare Interrogatives: a Case for Higher Order Quantification, a Weak Singular and Strong Plural’, joint work with our own Vincent […]

Jessica Coon gave a colloquium talk titled “Constraining Agree” at Harvard last Friday, presenting collaborative work with Stefan Keine (UCLA). The abstract is below: This talk illustrates how a constrained probe mechanism for Agree combined with the feature gluttony system laid out in Coon & Keine 2021 can account for a wide range of complex […]

Connie Ting and Wei Zhang each presented at the 2022 edition of MOT, the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonetics/Phonology Workshop, held at the University of Ottawa March 25th and 26th. Connie Ting – “Investigating universality of consonant intrinsic F0 effects” Wei Zhang – “Cue primacy effects in Mandarin tone imitation” The full program is available here.

MULL-lab will be meeting this Wednesday, March 30th at 4pm. Brandon will be presenting: Igala’s Dual Negation. Abstract is attached below: Abstract: This talk presents a puzzle pertaining to two different surface forms for negation in Igala (Niger-Congo). Negation can either surface as a (super) high tone on the subject or as a pre-verbal particle. I will first go over […]