the next talk in our McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Maria Gouskova, this Friday, November 6, 2026, at 3:30 p.m. in Arts Building, room 150. The details of the talk are given below.  — Infixing Reduplication: Connecting Shape and Position It is a matter of some disagreement whether phonological theory should aim to […]

The McGill Open House 2026 took place on October 24, in the Arts & Leacock buildings. We were very lucky to have a strong team of some of the current undergraduate students in Linguistics, helping prospective students and their family members, answering many questions from them.  A big thank you from the UPD (Junko) to: […]

William Johnston’s (PhD 2024) “Paths across worlds: the presupposition of ‘back’ in intensional contexts”, based on one of his McGill PhD Eval papers, has just been accepted for publication in “Journal of Semantics.” Congratulations Will!

McGill News recently featured a piece on Charles Boberg‘s work on Canadian English, including his recent collaborative publication in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics with recent McGill graduates Claire Henderson (MA 2023) and Jackson Mundie (MA 2024). Their article is titled “A New Survey of Canadian English: Fifty Years of Language Change” and reports on […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, October26th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.  Klaus von Heusinger (Universität zu Köln) will be presenting “Island constraints for conceptual anaphora.” Here is the abstract: Conceptual anaphors, as in (1), from Morton Ann Gernsbacher (1991: 82; after Sidner, 1984), […]

The McGill Reporter featured an article on Mary Tekahawáhkwen McDonald, known to many as Wá:ri, who graduated Monday with McGill’s first PhD in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Her dissertation is titled “Kanien’kéha Through the Eyes of a First-Language Speaker”, and was supervised by Jessica Coon, Heather Goad, and Noelani Arista (History). The Ad Hoc program in […]

McGill linguists presented their work at this year’s meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 57), which was held at the CUNY Graduate Center October 16–18. Talks and posters by current and past McGillians included: You can see the full program here.

Several current and former McGillians were involved in talks and poster presentations at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2026, held October 9-11 at the University of Maryland. Heather Goad gave a plenary talk titled “Syllabification is more abstract than it appears: Initial codas and final onsets”. Other presentations by McGill affiliates included:

Jonny Palucci and Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s paper “Have causatives always project possibilities from facts” was just accepted for publication in Semantics of Natural Languages.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, October 19th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.  Hannah Katinsky (McGill) will be presenting “‘What’ is a verb? Question formation in Kanien’kéha”. Here is the abstract: Languages like English have two ways of forming wh-questions: simple […]

On September 18th, the Graduate Linguistic Association of McGill (GLAM) hosted a beginning-of-year picnic in Parc Jeanne-Mance. Good food and company abounded. Thanks to Ilya for documenting the event with some photos:

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, September28th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.  Yosef Grodzinsky (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ELSC) will be presenting “How Deeply Human is Language? Chomsky, the Brain and the AI Fantasy.” Here is the abstract: The appearance of Deep […]

The first talk in our McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Lefteris Paparounas (UQAM), next Friday, October 2nd, at 3:30pm in Arts Building, room 150. The details of the talk are given below.  Building verbal reflexives in Turkish and beyond Many languages derive reflexive interpretations from ostensibly intransitive verbal forms (e.g. English ‘John bathed’; compare ‘John bathed himself’). […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, September21st, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.  Emma Custer (McGill) will be presenting “Long-distance allomorphy in Pulaar is locally conditioned.” Here is the abstract: A question actively debated within the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993) […]

The first Montréal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) meeting of the semester will be held on Friday, September 25th, from 4–5PM in Room 404 of Thomson House (3650 Rue McTavish) on the McGill campus. After the meeting, we’ll have a social hour at Brass Door Pub (2171 Rue Crescent). If you plan to join us […]

Alessio Tosolini conducted fieldwork this summer on Ese Ejja in Portachuelo Alto, Bolivia.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, September14th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.  Austin Kraft (McGill) will be presenting “Partitives in Javanese.” Here is the abstract: I present a new account for why partitives in Javanese (Austronesian) yield a different interpretation than partitive counterparts in languages like English. Constructions such as the English three of Mary’s […]

McGill’s P* Group will have its first meeting on Monday, September 14th, at 12PM in Room 117. They will be creating this semester’s schedule so come prepared with presentation ideas!

Martina Martinović accompanied by Emma Custer (M2), Kento Tanaka (PhD2), and Sama’a Salama (PhD3) spent 6 weeks in the Saint-Louis region of Senegal conducting fieldwork on Wolof and Pulaar.

Professor James Crippen, PhD students Laurestine Bradford and David Avellan-Hultman, and UBC PhD student Aaní Perkins traveled to Teslin, YT for three weeks in August to do fieldwork on Tlingit (Lingít [ɬìn’kít]). They had elicitation sessions almost every day, covering subordinate clauses, question and focus particles, and progressive aspect with elders Anaalahaash Sam Johnston, Shuwuteen Margaret […]