McLing

This will be McLing’s last issue for the 2018/2019 academic year. We’ll back in the fall, have a good break!

We are pleased to announce the winners of our graduate and undergraduate student awards. Graduate award winner: Jurij Bozic (Lara Riente Memorial Prize) Undergraduate award winners: Beini Wang (Cremona Memorial Prize) Michael Goodale (Excellence in Research) Megan Deegan (Academic Leadership) Hayley Ostrega (Department Citizenship) Aliza Elner (U2 Academic Achievement). Congratulations to all!

Paulina Elias (BA ’18) will begin the masters program in Speech Language Pathology at Western University. Masashi Harada will present a poster at GLOW in Asia Xll in Seoul, South Korea. The poster about his first Eval paper will be titled “Contextual effects on case in Japanese copular constructions”. For this research trip, Masashi will […]

Please join us in welcoming our incoming class of first-year graduate students for Fall 2020: Alexander Cucinelli (PhD, Memorial University Newfoundland) Shao-ren Lyu (PhD, National Chiao Tung University) Connie Ting (PhD, University of Toronto) Wei Zhang (PhD Beijing University of Language and Culture) Emily Goodwin (MA, McGill University) Jonathan Palucci (PhD, McGill University) Beini Wang […]

Paulina Elias (BA ’18) will begin the masters program in Speech Language Pathology at Western University. Congrats Paulina! Francesco Gentile and Bernhard Schwarz will be presenting their new joint work on how many questions at the Workshop Exhaustivity in Questions and Answers – Experimental and theoretical approaches in Tübingen in June. The title of their talk […]

Congratulations to second-year PhD student Mathieu Paillé, who was recently awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for his doctoral studies. He was featured, together with other fellowship recipients, in last week’s McGill Reporter. The full list of McGill Vanier scholars is here. Congrats Mathieu!  

The Parameters Workshop in Honour of Lisa Travis took place Friday and Saturday last week at Thomson House, and included a number of current and former McGill affiliates, especially students, colleagues, and collaborators of Lisa Travis. The workshop included two full days of talks and posters on the topic of parameters. Special thanks to grad […]

McGill linguists traveled to California last week for the 29th meeting of SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory), held May 17th–19th at UCLA. Talks and posters by McGill affiliates included: Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Esmail Moghiseh – Neutralizing Free Choice Items via Domain Restriction: Farsi -i Indefinites Aron Hirsch and Bernhard Schwarz – Singular “which”, mention-some, and […]

Jessica Coon travels to the UK later this week to give the annual Babel Lecture at the University of Huddersfield on May 24th. She appeared in Babel Magazine’s Meet the Professionals in connection with her work on the movie Arrival.

James Tanner has received a FRQNT Internship Award and will spend the Fall 2019 semester at the University of Glasgow. Under the supervision of Jane Stuart-Smith, James will continue his investigation into phonetic variability across English dialects. Congrats James!

This Friday and Saturday McGill will be posting a Parameters Workshop in Honour of Lisa Travis, who is retiring at the end of this year. Full information is available on the workshop website, here: https://lingconf.com/parameters/

GLOW 42 was hosted at the University of Oslo between 7-11 May. McGill linguists gave presentations at the conference, and McGill alumnus Jozina Vander Klok (PhD, 2013) was one of its organizers. The full program can be viewed on GLOW’s website here. McGill’s linguists gathered for a quick photo:

Vanna Willerton received a Graduate Mobility Award which she will use to make a short visit in August to the University of Edinburgh to complete a computational morphology research project in collaboration with Professor Kenny Smith and the Centre for Language Evolution. Vanna also recently learned that she received CGSM graduate funding. Congratulations Vanna!

Justin Royer is currently doing fieldwork in Yuxquen, a Chuj community located in Guatemala. While in Guatemala, Justin will be working on several projects, including a new project on the interface between syntax and prosody in Chuj, the focus of his second Eval paper. For this research trip, Justin is funded by a McGill Graduate […]

The 2019 Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop took place this past weekend at Carleton University in Ottawa. Lisa Travis gave an invited talk, and Mathieu Paillé presented a talk title “Unergatives in Malay inside-verbals.”

Luis Alonso-Ovalle gave a colloquium talk at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Maryland on Friday April 26. He presented joint work with Aron Hirsch. The title of their talk was “Keep ‘only’ strong!”

Syntax Group will meet this Thursday. Mathieu Paillé will be giving a practice talk for the upcoming MOTH workshop entitled “Revisiting VSO in Malay”. Description:  Malay/Indonesian has a construction where the verb surfaces to the left of the subject, and the morpheme -nya appears on the verb. Sommerlot (2018), writing about Indonesian, analyses these as fronting the […]

Who: Stefan Keine (USC) and Ethan Poole (UCLA) When: Thursday April 25th, 3:00–4:30 Where: Linguistics room 117 Not all reconstruction effects are syntactic With the advent of the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995), reconstruction effects have typically been analyzed in terms of interpreting the lower copy of a movement chain (e.g. Fox 1999). In […]

This week, Bernhard Schwarz will present his joint work with Alexandra Simonenko and David Oshima. Title: Factive islands from necessary blocking Abstract: Szabolcsi and Zwarts (1993) discovered a type of factive island effect where question-forming wh-movement from the complement of a factive predicate can be rendered unacceptable by the complement’s content. On Oshima’s (2007) account, […]

Lisa Travis is retiring at the end of this year and we are throwing a party––in the form of a conference on parameters––to celebrate her career and her many years of contributions to the McGill Linguistics Department. The schedule for the Parameters Workshop in Honour of Lisa Travis is now available here: https://lingconf.com/parameters/schedule/ We have a great line-up […]