As the academic year wraps up, Jeanne and Morgan are stepping down as co-editors of McLing — thank you for your service! We’re happy to share that Sama’a will be joining as student co-editor in the fall, alongside Jessica, who will be returning as faculty editor. McLing will be on summer break starting this week. […]

Recent PhD graduate Irene Smith has accepted a one-year teaching position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Linguistics. Congratulations, Irene!

Jessica Coon’s paper “Invisible inanimates and the syntax of pronominal prefixes in Northern Iroquoian” was just accepted for publication in Language. A pre-print PDF is available here. Congratulations, Jessica!

McGillians attended the 18th Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop on May 22nd at l’Université de Montréal. Talks included:

McGill linguists of past and present attended the special joint meeting of SULA (Semantics of Underdocumented Languages of the Americas) and Triple-A (Semantics of Languages of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania), held at the University of British Columbia. The conference included plenary talks by two McGill alums, Terrance Gatchalian (“Split tenselessness: tense, aspect, and counterfactuality in Kanien’kéha”) and Justin Royer (“Wh-predicates, […]

Laurestine Bradford presented a talk about Tlingit progressive aspect at the conference on Neglected Aspects of Motion Event Descriptions (NAMED) at the Université du Québec Trois-Rivières on May 21st. Her talk was titled “Motion Verbs Without Fact of Motion”.

Jeanne Brown gave an invited talk at the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), held May 11–15 in Philadelphia. Her talk was titled, “Rethinking ‘young women’s creak’: Piecing together production, perception, and social evidence.” The talk received media coverage in the ASA 190th press release, Ars Technica and New Scientist! Abstract: Since […]

McGill linguistics was well represented at the 44th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 44), which took place May 6–8 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Presentations by current affiliates included: The full program is available here: https://wccfl44.github.io/WCCFL44/program.html

Current and former McGillians were well represented at the 18th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition conference which took place at the University of Cambridge, April 16-18 2026. Vera Yunxiao Xia (BA 2018) & Lydia White presented a paper on Relativized Minimality and Featural Mismatches in L2: Is There an Age Advantage? Yanran Mou (BA 2024) & Heather […]

Xuanda Chen’s (PhD 2025) paper, co-authored with Heather Goad, David Shanks (MA 2023) & Donghyun Kim (PhD 2015), “The role of L1 feature specification in naive L2 vowel perception: Evidence from feature fission and fusion” has been accepted for publication in Second Language Research. Congratulations!

Jessica Coon has been awarded a prestigious James McGill Professorship. Congratulations to Jessica for this well-deserved recognition of her exceptional work and outstanding achievements!

Luis Alonso-Ovalle presented (virtually) `”Hidden Structure in the Composition of Degree DPs”, (joint work with Bernhard Schwarz) at the UConn Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series on April 24, 2026.

McGillians presented their work at the Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton Syntax Workshop (MOTH), hosted by McMaster University in Hamilton on April 11th 2026! Talks included:

Members of the Kanien’kéha language research partnership between McGill and the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center (KORLCC) presented a talk titled “Iakwarihwí:saks: A community–university Kanien’kéha Research Partnership” at the Symposium on American Indian Languages (SAIL), which was held at the University of Arizona, April 2–3. 

The last presentation in this term will be on Monday, April 13, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom (Please use this new zoom link). Jeanne will be practising her invited talk in the creaky voice special session at ASA 2026. Topic: Rethinking “young women’s creak”: Piecing together production, perception, and social evidence Abstract: Since the early 2010s, popular narratives alongside […]

Congratulations to Myriam Lapierre who just had two papers accepted for publication! The first has been accepted to Journal of Phonetics (with Alessio Tosolini) and the second has been accepted to Laboratory Phonology. Lapierre, M., De Falco, E., Tosolini, A., & Steffman, J. (accepted). Disentangling prominence strengthening: Evidence for independent stress and length effects in […]

Since next Monday is Easter Monday, our meeting will be temporally moved to Wednesday, April 8, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.  Naomi Sacks will be presenting her study Vowel Hiatus Resolution in Mora-Timed Languages: Determining the Syllabicity of Adjacent Vowels in Japanese. Abstract: Vowel hiatus, or adjacent, heterosyllabic vowels, are a crosslinguistically dispreferred phenomenon. Vowel hiatus may be resolved in […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 9th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Brandon Chaperon will be presenting “Generic argument-structure head in the Wolof causative-benefactive syncretism.” Here is the abstract: This work provides an account for the crosslinguistically […]

The Montréal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) will meet on Thursday, April 9th at 4PM in room 406 of Thomson House. There will be three talks followed by a social hour. Talks include: This event is open to all linguists across Montréal. Please email emma.custer@mail.mcgill.ca if you’d like to be added to the mailing list.

Several McGillians, past and present, attended MOThQ Phonology and Phonetics Workshop in Quebec City on March 27-28. The program can be found here: https://mothq2026.netlify.app/program.html