Congratulations to Wei and Meghan! Zhang, W., & Clayards, M. (2023). Contribution of acoustic cues to prominence ratings for four Mandarin vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154(5), 3364-3373. Abstract The acoustic cues for prosodic prominence have been explored extensively, but one open question is to what extent they differ by context. […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, December 6th at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Will will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Diagnosing Prepositions: Decomposing Path in White Hmong’. This talk investigates the syntactic category of so-called […]

Current and former McGillians attended the Boston University Conference on Language Development (Nov 2-5) and had a McGill reunion dinner:  Current McGillians gave the following talks:

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 29th at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Jonny will present ongoing work addressing whether relative clauses are scope islands for universal quantifiers. Abstract: A scope island is a syntactic context […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Massimo Lipari will be presenting “Timecourse of rhoticity in Quebec French vowels”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday, November 28th at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract: Quebec French is undergoing a rarely observed kind of sound change whereby the front […]

McLing is happy to announce that three McGill linguists and alumni were honoured with annual awards from the Linguistics Society of America. You can read more about these and other awards on the LSA website: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/2024-awards. Congratulations all!

McLing is happy to report that three MA students walked in the Fall 2023 graduation ceremony, held last week at Place des Arts. Claire Halpert and David Shanks each received their MAs in Linguistics, and Taryne Pachano received an MA in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Congratulations all!

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Jacob Hoover will be presenting: “When unpredictable doesn’t mean difficult”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday November 21st at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract:  When humans process linguistic input, we do so faster and with less […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 22nd at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Anne Bertrand and Rose Underhill (UBC) will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Situation obviation in Ktunaxa’. Obviation is a system that is usually defined as […]

Professor James Crippen hosted a traditional Tlingit potlatch (Tlingit ḵu.éexʼ [qʰù.ˈʔíːxʼ] lit. ‘invitation of people’) on October 21st in his home town of Wrangell, Alaska (Tlingit Ḵaachx̱an.áakʼw [ˌqʰàːtʃ.χàn.ˈʔáːkʼʷ]). The event ran for 14 hours from 10am to midnight and hosted over 80 guests of several Tlingit clans in the Wolf/Eagle moiety, particularly including leaders of the Naanyaa.aayí, Sʼiknax̱.ádi, and Kayaashkiditaan clans as well […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Irene Smith will be presenting “Variation in nasal coarticulation”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday November 14th at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract: This talk presents the early stages of a project investigating variation in prenasal coarticulation and […]

On November 11-12 McGill hosted the second edition of “Malagasy in Montreal,” a workshop for research on Malagasy and other Austronesian languages. McGillians Lisa Travis, Zlata Odribets, Luané Lennox, Austin Kraft, and Ileana Paul (PhD 2000) presented their projects.

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 15th at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Terrance will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Kanien’kéha optional tense?’. Kanien’kéha is a morphologically tenseless language, where clauses may appear without overt markers […]

McLing would like to belatedly welcome Eva Portelance back to the Linguistics department! Eva is a postdoctoral researcher working with Tim O’Donnell and Siva Reddy through December 2024. I study how both humans and machines learn to understand language and reason with it.  I did my PhD in California where I lived for 6 years, […]

Next Friday, we are having the last talk of the McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series of this semester! The talk will be given by Dr. Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota) on Friday, November 10th at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680, room 1041 (10th floor). The details of the talk are given below.  Title: What does it seem that hyperraising blocks? Abstract: In this talk, I […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 8th at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Sabrina will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Argument-adjunct asymmetry of Mandarin Chinse wh-in-situ island sensitivity’. In contrast to their English counterparts, wh-elements in Mandarin […]

The P* reading group will be meeting again this Thursday (9 November) at 10 in room 117 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Irene, Alex and Xuanda will be giving short presentations on ideas for their thesis proposals, followed by a discussion session. Any relevant documents will be available on the Google Drive. The […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Amanda Doucette will be presenting “Phonotactic Complexity, Morphological Irregularity, Frequency, and Word Length: Towards Quantifying a Causal Relationship”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday, November 7th at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract: It has been claimed that morphologically […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Gaurav Kamath will be presenting “Testing the Apparent Time Construct in Embedding Space”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday October 31st at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract: Linguists are often interested in studying how language changes over generations. […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 1st at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, George will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Closest Conjunct Agreement in the DP’. Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA) refers to the phenomenon whereby a verb […]