Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, Nov 11, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Josh will present his work. Presenter: Josh Lee 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.

Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, November 4, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Presenter: Morgan Sonderegger Title: A survey of the corpus phonetics pipeline Abstract: Morgan will give the first lecture of his LSA 2025 course, described here — covering speech corpora and available tools for doing corpus phonetics, in current practice, at a high level. The full schedule […]

Professor Kriszta Eszter Szendrői (University of Vienna) will give a guest presentation in the Syntax-Semantics meeting on November 4, at 3:00-4:20pm. A reception will follow at 4:30pm in Thomson House. The 3:00pm meeting will be held in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ Kriszta will be presenting on “The typology […]

The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Dr. Márton Sóskuthy (The University of British Columbia) next Friday, November 7th at 3:30pm at Leacock 232. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Sound change and lexical shifts in the emergence of Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation in English Abstract: Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation is a famous […]

On Wednesday Oct 29th Michael Wagner gave a colloquium talk at the University of Ottawa, titled Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection. Abstract: Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and are taken to play a crucial role […]

Morgan Sonderegger presented a tutorial, “PolyglotDB: a library for representing and analyzing speech data” at the University of Zurich, as well as a talk, “Cross-linguistic patterns of intrinsic F0 and sibilant dynamics”, at the University of Zurich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Oct. 15 and 16).

Belated congratulations to Irene Smith, who successfully defended her dissertation, “Gradience in English pre-nasal allophony,” on September 12!

Congratulations to Amanda Doucette, who successfully defended their dissertation, “Compensation and causation in the lexicon,” on October 24!

Our next presentation will be this Tuesday, October 28, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Massimo will present his work. Title: Patterns of variation in sibilant acoustic dynamics Abstract: According to conventional wisdom, sibilant fricatives require relatively long articulatory–and thus, acoustic–steady states due to their complexity. Recent studies have called this into question, however, finding gradual, continuous change in the […]

The Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) is meeting Thursday, October 30 at 4PM in DS-1950* on the UQAM campus, followed by a social happy 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.

McGillians presented at the 56th meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society, NELS 56, held this past weekend at NYU. Presentations by current McGill affiliates included:

The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Simon Charlow (Yale University) on Friday, October 24th at 3:30pm at Leacock 232. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Effect-oriented interpreters for natural language Abstract: Computer programs are often factored into ‘pure’ components — simple, total functions from inputs to outputs — and components that […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, October 21, 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 Varya Tiutiunnikova (McGill) will be presenting “Bare NPs are choice functions in Uralic languages.” Here is the abstract: Chierchia (1998) and Dayal (2004) proposed a unified approach to […]

Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, October 21, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom. Tony will present a paper (attached below). Paper: Natvig, D. (2021). Modeling heritage language phonetics and phonology: Toward an integrated multilingual sound system. Languages, 6(4), 209.

Two new articles by McGill linguists have been published in Language and Linguistics Compass! Correlates of Object Raising in Mayan, by Justin Royer (PhD ’22) and Jessica Coon (https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70013) Abstract: Mayan languages show variation in the morphosyntactic distribution of absolutive objects. A now commonly-adopted analysis ties this variation to differences in object movement and agreement. In so-called ‘high-absolutive’ languages, […]

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 […]