McGill Linguistics hosted Understanding obviation: A cross-linguistic perspective October 4–6th, organized by Anne Bertrand and Jessica Coon. Slides and handouts from the talks will be posted on the website.

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Irene Smith will present “Perception of vowel contrasts in the presence of an allophonic merger” We will be meeting this Wednesday, October 9, at noon. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82524506850. Abstract: The PIN-PEN merger is a feature of […]

There will not be a meeting of the Syntax-Semantics/MULL group this week, and regular meetings will resume after the fall break.

Gui Garcia (PhD 2017) and Heather Goad’s paper Weight effects and the parametrization of the foot: English versus Portuguese was just published in Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 15(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.6420

Our next meeting will be on September 30 at 10 AM in room 002. Simon LiVolsi will be presenting the following on laryngeals in Kanien’kéha: Abstract: The Northern Iroquoian language Kanien’kéha has two laryngeals: /h/ and /ʔ/. While previous analyses have syllabified these segments into the onset or coda, I argue that the laryngeals may be […]

Sinn und Bedeutung 29 took place at the Consorzio Universitario Mediteraneo Orientale in Noto, Italy last week. Presentations and posters by current McGill affiliates include: Matthieu Paillé (PhD ’22), Brian Buccola (PhD ’15), Bernhard Schwarz, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Willie Myers, Jonny Palucci, Esmail Moghiseh (PhD ’24), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Post-doc ’14-’15), Aron Hirsch (Post-doc ’17-’19)

Katya Morgunova and Terrance Gatchalian (McGill) will be presenting a talk “Intentive aspect, Purposives, and their Results in Kanien’kéha.” The meeting will take place on Monday, September 30 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Their abstract is below: While existing work on Northern Iroquoian universally acknowledges the distinction between state and event verbs, some works also […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Laurestine Bradford will present ” Quantitative Analyses of Aspectual Phenomena”We will be meeting this Wednesday, October 2, at noon. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82524506850. Abstract: The study of verbal aspect concerns the shapes of events in time (aspectual […]

Sinn und Bedeutung 29 took place at the Consorzio Universitario Mediteraneo Orientale in Noto, Italy last week. Presentations and posters by current McGill affiliates include: ·         Jonny Palucci – “Pseudo-scoping out of relative clauses: a dependent definite approach” ·         Willie Myers – “Argumentless presuppositions in Kanien’kéha” ·         Aron Hirsch and Bernhard Schwarz – “Constraining alternatives” ·         Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Bernhard Schwarz – “Decoupling amounts from their instantiations” ·         Luis Alonso-Ovalle and […]

Andrei Munteanu presented the results of a project conducted by last year’s LING 630 class at the 8th International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics: Structure, Use, and Meaning (SUM) on September 20th, in Transilvania University of Brașov (Romania).  Munteanu, Andrei; Kim, Andrea; LeBrun, Benjamin; LiVolsi, Simon & Jackson Mundie. “Partial voicing neutralization in unstressed stop-nasal […]

Our next meeting will be on September 23 at 10 AM in room 002. Meghan will be presenting the following paper (attached). Myers, E. B., Olson, H. E., & Scapetis-Tycer, J. (2024). Individual Differences in Accent Imitation. Open Mind, 8, 1084-1106. Abstract: All talkers show some flexibility in their speech, and the ability to imitate an unfamiliar accent […]

George Bennett (McGill) will present a talk “Case and agreement in Scandinavian pancake sentences”.  The meeting will take place on Monday, September 23 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. George’s abstract is below: Pancake sentences are copula constructions in which the predicative adjective (e.g., yummy) bears default phi-features and the subject (e.g., pancakes) is interpreted as denoting a contextually […]

Lydia White, Heather Goad, Gui Garcia, Natália Guzzo, Liz Smeets and Jiajia Su presented a paper at GALA 16, NOVA University of Lisbon, Sept. 12-14 2024, on Pronoun interpretation in English: Is prosody enough?

Irene Smith and James Tanner (PhD 2020) presented at Interspeech 2024, September 1-5, in Kos, Greece. The titles of the talks are below. Irene Smith, Morgan Sonderegger, and The SPADE Consortium. Modelled Multivariate Overlap: A method for measuring vowel merger.James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, Tyler Kendall, JeffMielke, Robin Dodsworth, Erik Thomas. Exploring the anatomy of articulation […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Gaurav Kamath will present “When Words Change Meaning, Age (Almost) Doesn’t Matter”We will be meeting this Wednesday, September 18, at noon. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department Abstract: A central question in the study of how language changes over lifetimes is whether […]

McGill will host Understanding Obviation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, October 4–6 at McGill’s Thomson House. The full program is now available here. All are welcome to attend, but requested to register by September 22nd. Obviation is perhaps most commonly discussed in connection with languages of the Algonquian family in which (i) multiple 3rd person nominals in […]

This week, Laurestine Bradford (McGill) will be presenting a MULL-themed talk “What are the eventuality classes of Tlingit?”.  The meeting will take place on Monday, September 16 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Laurestine’s abstract is below: In terms of eventuality class (or lexical aspect, or aktionsart), Tlingit verbs broadly fall into four groups: achievement, activity, state, […]

This coming week, we are starting off the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! Our first talk will be given by Dr. Georgia Zellou (UC Davis) on Friday, September 13th at 3:30PM. Details on the location will be announced shortly. The details of the talk are given below.  Title: Linguistic and social […]

This week, Richard Compton (UQAM) will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled “Collaborating on a Kangiryuarmiutun dictionary & Research Ethics and REB Approval for Linguistic Fieldwork” at 3pm in room 002 of the Linguistics department. The abstract is below: In the first half hour I’ll present an overview of a collaboration with Inuvialuit community linguist Emily Kudlak to create […]

Last week, Brandon Chaperon presented work-in-progress titled “Irrealis mood enclosed negation in Igala” at the SNAG 2024 workshop, held September 5-6 by the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle at University Paris Cité.