Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, October 7, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Josh will present his work. Topic: High vowel devoicing in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech All relevant documents (presentation schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) are available on this Google Drive.

The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Yoad Winter (Utrecht University) on Friday, October 10th at 3:30pm at Leacock 15. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Reciprocal Alternations: Operators vs. Lexical Preferences Abstract: One approach to verbs like ‘meet’, ‘hug’ and ‘fight’ derives their intransitive, “reciprocal”, meaning from the transitive entry, using a […]

Jessica Coon spent the first few weeks of the semester in Chiapas, Mexico working with Ch’ol speakers and local collaborators on a project on animacy-driven hierarchy effects, as part of a larger collaboration with Stefan Keine (UCLA), Juan Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM), and Michael Wagner. Jessica and Juan (with long-distance support from Michael) ran participants in a small […]

Michael Wagner presented two talks, “Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection” on October 2 at the Universität Wien and “The Iambic-Trochaic Law Revisited” on October 1 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies at Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Abstracts are below. Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection: Prosodic focus is […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, October 7, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ Hannah Katinsky (McGill) will be presenting “Right dislocation in Korean.” Here is the abstract: In many canonical head-final languages, the presence of postverbal elements is found to be […]

Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, September 30, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Kuilin (me) will present a paper (attached). Presenter: Kuilin Li Paper: Beddor, P. S., Coetzee, A. W., Styler, W., McGowan, K. B., & Boland, J. E. (2018). The time course of individuals’ perception of coarticulatory information is linked to their production: Implications for sound change. Language, 94(4), […]

The first talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Dr. John Esling (University of Victoria) next Friday, October 3rd at 3:30pm at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below. Title: What Polynesian, Iroquoian, Semitic/Cushitic, Nilotic, West African (ATR), Tibeto-Burman and Germanic languages share in laryngeal articulation Abstract: Many phonetic and […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 30, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ George Bennett (McGill) will be presenting “Argument structure of emission verbs in Scandinavian.” Here is the abstract: In this talk, I present some early-stage data and thoughts on […]

The program of Sinn und Bedeutug 30, held at Goethe University, Frankfurt, features several McGillians, listed below for your information: Despite much pressure and great demand, graphical reporters missed Simonenko. In their favour, however, it should be mentioned that they showed proof of courage once again and risked their lives and equipment on a slippery […]

Vera Yunxiao Xia (BA 2018) and Lydia White presented a paper at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference (GALA 17), at the Université de Tours, Tours, France, September 11-13th 2025, on Number mismatches in the processing of object relative clauses: Does featural Relativized Minimality operate in L2?

The Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) is meeting Thursday, September 25 at 4PM in Rm 404 of Thomson House on the McGill Downtown campus. We will have three presentations on fieldwork puzzles, followed by a social hour. Talks include: The event is open to all linguists across Montreal! If you’d like to join the mailing list, please email willie.myers@mail.mcgill.ca.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 23, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ Nicolas Poisson (McGill) will be presenting “A kind of puzzle with the definite determiner.” Here is the abstract: This talk will present a puzzle in how romance languages […]

Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, September 16, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Simon will present his work on “Feet in Kanien’kéha“.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 16, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ Sama’a Salama (McGill) will be presenting “Severing maximality from the definite article.” Here is the abstract: In this paper I argue for the decomposition of the widely adopted […]

The first P* Group presentation will take place on Tuesday, September 9, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Alessio Tosolini will be presenting his work, “Comparing Phonological Feature Sets for Low-Resource ASR”. The abstract is attached below.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 9, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ Austin Kraft (McGill) will be presenting “Two lives for numerals: Evidence from Javanese.” Here is the abstract: A prominent treatment of numerals is that they lead multiple semantic […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group is holding its first meeting of Fall 2025 on Tuesday, September 2, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department (1085 Av Docteur-Penfield). Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ In the meeting, there will be informal group introductions, and the group will create a presentation schedule for the semester. All interested […]

This summer, several McGill students and professors organized workshops in collaboration with Kanien’kehá:ka organizations Ionkwahronka’onhátie and the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center (KORLCC). On June 12th, 19th, and 26th, Simon LiVolsi, Akwiratékha’ Martin, and Heather Goad led Praat workshops in Kahnawà:ke in collaboration with teachers and adult immersion program students at KORLCC.  On July 8th, Anne Bertrand, Sophia Flaim, and Jessica Coon led an ELAN and Audacity […]

Alessio Tosolini presented a poster at the Special Interest Group on Typology at the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna titled “Analyzing the Linguistic Priors of Language Models with Synthetic Languages“. Congrats, Alessio!

Laurestine Bradford presented a poster titled “Aspectual classes as lexically-conditioned predictors of aspectual choice” at the SCiL (Society for Computation in Linguistics) 2025 meeting on July 18th-20th. The meeting was hosted by Wellesley College but held in Eugene, Oregon, co-located with the LSA Summer Institute.