Johanne Paradis, from the University of Alberta, will be giving a talk entitled “Resilience and Vulnerability in the Arabic-English Bilingual Development of Syrian Refugee Children and Youth” on Thursday, March 27, 2025 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM. In EDUC 120, Learning Commons Education Building | 3700 McTavish For all bilingual children, individual variation in their bilingual development […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, March 24 at 3 pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw. Emma Custer (McGill) will be discussing “Causee-less causatives in Wolof.” Here is Emma’s abstract: In this talk, I investigate argument structure in Wolof causative constructions, focusing on the relationship […]

Our next meeting will be Tuesday March 25th at 10am in room 117. Ray will be presenting his thesis research titled “Moving from Compensatory Lengthening to Partial Assimilation in Chilean Spanish.” This is in part in preparation for his talk at CLA, so there will be a discussion afterwards about the research. Here is the abstract: […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Laurestine Bradford will present a talk titled “Do aspectual classes show up in corpus distribution patterns?”. We will be meeting this Wednesday, March 19, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104. Verbs fall into distinct aspectual classes, […]

Jessica Coon’s paper, “Embedding, extraction, and clausal pied-piping in Ch’ol”, with collaborator Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM) was just published in Glossa, available here: https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/17171/. Congrats! Abstract: This paper examines clausal embedding and long-distance wh-dependencies in Ch’ol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. We demonstrate that when it comes to finite embedded clauses, two options […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, March 17 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw. The meeting will feature two presenters, who are both talking about relative clauses. Clara Tran (McGill) will be discussing “Relative Clause Attachment by L1 Vietnamese-L2 English Bilinguals: Effects of Prosody.” Austin […]

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, March 18th at 10am in room 117. Heather will be presenting the paper “High Vowel Deletion in Quebec French.” There will also be a Zoom link open for this meeting at the following link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84127437214?pwd=3U6LIdUJyJi6TnacFR1OwPRetKNAAN.1 Meeting ID: 841 2743 7214 Passcode: 674595

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, March 11th at 10am in room 117. Natalia will be presenting the paper Kramer and Zec 2020 “Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis.” The abstract is the following: Weinvestigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Massimo Lipari will present “/ɹ/ in 3 English dialects: Tongue shapes and formant dynamics.” We will be meeting this Wednesday, March 12, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104. Abstract: English approximant /ɹ/ is famously subject to […]

Willie Myers’s paper “The form and force of Kirundi exclamatives” was just published online in Linguistic Variation (and will be in an upcoming print version). It can be accessed at https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lv.24010.mye. More details can be found below: Title: The form and force of Kirundi exclamatives Abstract: This paper examines the syntax and semantics of two types of […]

Next week, we’ll have an invited talk by Canaan Breiss (University of Southern California) on Monday, March 10 at 3PM at 2001 McGill College in room 461. The details of the talk are given below. Title: How to make the most of what you have: building phonological theory from sparse data Abstract: One recent trend […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Irene Smith will present “Perception of PIN-PEN merger in Southern and non-Southern American-English listeners.” We will be meeting this Wednesday, February 26, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on Zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104. Abstract: Merged production of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before […]

This week, we’ll have an invited talk by Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley) on Friday, February 28 at 3PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Explaining phonological exceptions: The case of Atchan morpheme-specific nasal harmony Abstract: When phonological phenomena appear to constitute exceptions to typological universals, they prompt a number […]

Our next meeting will be Tuesday Feb 25th at 10am in room 117. Massimo will be presenting the paper Inkelas and Shih (2017) “Looking into segments.” The abstract is the following: This paper outlines Q theory, in which the traditional segment (consonant, vowel) is decomposed into a string of three ordered subsegments, or q, representing […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, February 24 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw. Ina Zeng (McGill University) will be discussing “Morphological Realization of Presuppositionality in Igala.” Here is Ina’s abstract: In this talk I discuss the morphological realization of presuppositionality in Igala (Niger-Congo) […]

The 22nd Old-World Conference in Phonology (OCP22) was held from at the University of Amsterdam, on February 5-7, 2025. Current McGill PhD student Cheman Sangma gave a presentation titled “What’s the word? Phonology is still structured,” and current McGill MA student Simon LiVolsi presented a poster called “Kanien’kéha laryngeals.”

This week, we’ll have an invited talk by Gloria Melessmoen (UBC) on Friday, February 21 at 3PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Non-concatenative morphemes require phonologically defined strata Abstract: What is the division of labour between different components of the grammar? Specifically, what does the phonological grammar “know” […]

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, February 18th at 10am in room 117. Jeanne will be presenting the paper Gradient and Visual Speaker Normalization in the Perception of Fricatives by Strand and Johnson (1996). The abstract is the following: The role of visual information in speaker normalization of fricatives is examined by comparing listeners’ responses […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, February 17 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw. George Bennett (McGill University) will be discussing “Argument Structure in Mainland Scandinavian pancake sentences.” Here is George’s abstract: Prototypical ‘pancake sentences’ are copula sentences involving a subject (e.g., ‘pancakes’) and […]

This upcoming meeting of P* Group on February 11 will be cancelled. Our next meeting will be on February 18. Stay tuned for presentation details.