McLing

SLUM along with Carol-Rose’s “Languages of the World” course are screening Tote/Abuelo (or “Grandfather”) on March 11th at 8pm, followed by a talk and Q&A with the documentary’s director, María Sojob. The documentary is in Tsotsil and Spanish, with subtitles in English and will be shown over zoom.

Synopsis: In a last attempt to get closer to her only grandfather, María seeks to understand how love is lived in her Tsotsil culture, trying to unite her two worlds.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=412EOJKAbdA

Registration link: Registration link for Tote/Abuelo March 11th, 8pm: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlcuCgqTMtH9OGDI2-bLoOV2iRDKpHZuAD 

SLUM, together with Carol-Rose Little’s LING 215 (Languages of the World) class will be showing their first movie, Menashe in Yiddish with subtitles in English. Zoë Belk and Eli Benedict will provide a commentary and Q&A after the movie. The showing begins at 8pm EST on Thursday, February 11th and will be streamed over Zoom.

Link to register for Menashe: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcsc-yurzIrHddEEz-Pqc8vfxQMSFGZR8aZ
Synopsis of Menashe: A year after his wife’s death, a widower faces pressure from his Hasidic community to give up his son for adoption unless he finds a new partner.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83UoZcdX__Y

The SLUM, together with Carol-Rose Little’s LING 215 (Languages of the World) class, are hosting three upcoming virtual movie nights, featuring movies in Yiddish, Tsotsil, and Haida. See poster below for details! Registration links in the poster are not clickable in this blog post, but are:

• Menashe – https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcsc-yurzIrHddEEz-Pqc8vfxQMSFGZR8aZ
• Tote/Abuelo – https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlcuCgqTMtH9OGDI2-bLoOV2iRDKpHZuAD
• Edge of the Knife – https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkd-yrrj8vEt3zOtJHpzynRB658l37Pn4S

A number of us represented linguists at Marche Mondiale Climate Alarm/La Planete s’invite au Parlement last Saturday in Montreal. A report of the day can be found here.

Some pictures of the event were taken. Thanks Vanna and Michael!

In this photo (left to right) is Jason Borga, Emily KL, Tim O’Donnell, Jacob Hoover, and Mathieu Paillé.

In this pic, Michael’s kids have also something to say!

This year’s departmental picnic took place at Parc La Fontaine on September 16th at 12pm. McGill’s linguists enjoyed the warm September weather and had good conversation over delicious food.

All McGill linguists, plus family and friends, are invited to our annual Beginning-of-Year picnic, to be held this year Sunday September 6th at noon at Parc Laurier in the Plateau. The picnic will be potluck style: please bring some some kind of dish and perhaps something to drink.  Hope to see you all there!

McLing is pleased to announce that Jonathan Bobaljik will be visiting Montreal next week, sponsored by the Concordia LSA and McSIRG.

What: Mini workshop: “Dependent Case and Case-dependent Agreement” (presenting in part joint work with Mark Baker)

Coordinates: Thursday January 29th, 5:30–7pm in Linguistics 117; to be followed by a dinner reception in the Linguistics Lounge

In this tutorial/workshop, we’ll work through some of the evidence for treating case on an NPs as primarily reflecting syntactic configuration (transitivity / whether there is another NP in the same domain, Marantz 1991, Baker to appear) rather than by a relationship to a designated functional head (as in Chomsky 1981 et seq). Time and audience interest permitting, we will look at some of the following:

•  critical examination of arguments that ergative case is ‘inherent’ (tied to a theta-role assigning head)

• arguments that case and agreement are not ‘two sides of the same coin’ but are distinct grammatical operations

• arguments that agreement depends (imperfectly) on case (Bobaljik 2008, Baker 2008), with attention to putative counter-examples

• different distribution of ‘active’ patterns in case vs. agreement (and the implications of this for the questions above)

  Please RSVP to Jessica if you are interested in attending.

Information for the colloquium at Concordia is as follows:

Sasha Simonenko successfully defended her dissertation on Friday 4. A party was held at Bernhard and Junko’s place to celebrate the event and, as usual, McLing reporters were in attendance to bring you some pictures.

Congratulations, Sasha!

Following Thomas Ede Zimmermann’s colloquium talk last Friday, there was a party at Junko and Bernhard’s place. In the interest of our readership, McLing reporters rushed to the scene and came back with some pictures proving that, once more, good food, good company and interesting conversations go together.

Last Thursday, our current graduate students organized a party for the admitted students as part of our Open House. Many thanks to those who helped organize the evening. We hope to see some familiar faces in the coming school year!

(Photos courtesy of Yuliya Manyakina)

Smiling and Eating

Socializing

More socializing!

The food, or what remained of it. 🙂

After Alan Yu’s colloquium on Friday, students, faculty, and alums made the trek to Petite Patrie for Indian food and homemade dessert, courtesy of Dan, Maayan, and Morgan.  A good time was had by all. Some pictures, from Dan :

Linguists and a moose

Linguists and maps

Alan Yu and Morgan eyeing Indian food

Thursday, Nov. 14, 5:30-7:00
688 Sherbrooke, Room 495

SLUM’s second Language Exchange event will be happening this Thursday. This time we will be joined by the Russian Undergraduate Students’ Society, who will be talking a bit about the Russian language, Old Church Slavonic, the Cyrillic alphabet, and more. All are welcome and Russian-themed snacks will be provided.

As we previously announced, Rajesh Bhatt visited the department to give a talk at the Syntax/Semantics Reading Group and a presentation in LING 417.  McLing reporters attended both events and brought with them some pictures to share with you.

Rajesh Bhatt talking about relatives in LING 417

Rajesh Bhatt talking to students about computational linguistics.

Rajesh Bhatt having dinner at an undisclosed location

What: Apple picking excursion!

When: Saturday September 28th

Where: Parc National du Mont-Saint-Bruno

330 Rang des Vingt Cinq Est
Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, QC
J3V 4P6
450-653-7544

This year’s apple picking excursion will take place on Saturday, September 28th at Parc National du Mont-Saint-Bruno; the cost per adult is $6.00, children from 6 to 17 years are $2.75, and children under 6 years are free. This park offers apple picking, picnic tables (if anyone is interested), as well as a hiking trail. Last year, we had to cancel due to weather, but this year the forecast looks sunny!

Everyone attending will meet in the parking lot behind the Linguistics Building at 10:00 am on Saturday the 28th.

Andria has posted a sign-up sheet in the photocopy room (109). If you are interested in attending ,please sign-up by Friday, September 20th at noon. If you are planning on taking your car and have space for others ,please indicate this on the sign-up sheet.

Hope to see you all there!

Let’s celebrate the beginning of the academic year with an informal picnic!

When: Saturday, September 7th, 12 pm

Where: Parc La Fontaine http://goo.gl/maps/oHqmf (Well-served by public transportation: e.g., Buses #11, #24, #29, #97, #144; Metro Sherbrooke or Metro Mont-Royal)

What: Bring your own food and drink (as well as plates, cups, utensils, etc); sharing is encouraged! Balls, boules/bocce, frisbees, badminton rackets, jumping ropes, or any other games are welcome.

We’ll try to find picnic tables in the area just east of Avenue Calixa Lavalee (which runs north-south in the middle of the park), and south of the volleyball courts and the grey city building; it’s more or less in the center of the park (and the same place as last year).

All are welcome! You can find photos from previous years here.

The dinner party after Kai von Fintel’s colloquium last Friday was a a lot of fun. Special thanks to Oriana, Sasha and Sepideh for making this party a possibility. Here are some pictures taken by Bernhard.