The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its final meeting of 2025 on Tuesday, December 2, 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 David Avellan-Hultman (McGill) will be presenting “Revisiting finite ha-omission in Swedish.” Here is the abstract: In this talk, I revisit the observation that the Swedish perfect […]

Congratulations to Siva Reddy who received a CS-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher award! CS-Can is Canada’s national organization for advancing computer science research and education. This Early Career award recognizes CS faculty members at Canadian universities who, within 10 years of receiving their PhD, have made significant contributions in their academic careers, particularly to research. […]

Our last P* meeting for this semester will be on Tuesday, Nov 25, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom.  Irene, Jeanne, Massimo, and Alex (maybe) will practice presenting for their ASA presentations! All relevant documents (presentation schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) are available on this Google Drive.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, November 25, 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 Dawn Lau (McGill) will be presenting “Surprisals, The Brain, and How Thematic Roles Are Processed.” Here is the abstract: Cross-linguistically, experimental data from neurolinguistics has initially shown blindness […]

Our next MCQLL meeting will take place Nov 24th at 2pm in room 002. Alessio’s talk is titled Prominence strengthening in Todos Santos Mam.

This week’s MCQLL talk will take place Nov 17th at 2pm in room 002. Massimo will present his work, titled: Apparent vocal tract length vs /s/ acoustics in a large multilingual corpus.

Our next presentation will be on Tuesday, Nov 18, from 1-2 pm in room 002 and on Zoom.  Jeanne will present her thesis ideas in sociophonetics. All relevant documents (presentation schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) are available on this Google Drive.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, November 18, 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 Anna Carolina Almeida, Raimundo (Ray) Cox-Casals, and Michael Wagner will be presenting “Cumulative agreement in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.”

The Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) is meeting Thursday, November 20 at 4PM in Pavillon Lionel-Groulx (3150 Jean Brillant St) room C-9019 of the Université de Montréal (great chance to use the new REM line!). We will have three presentations, followed by a social hour.  Talks include: IMPORTANT : For a chance to play a Kanien’kéha language learning […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, November 11, 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 […]

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.