Congratulations to Siva Reddy who has won a prestigious 2026 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship for early-career researchers! You can read all about it here.

The next P* group presentation will be on Monday, Feb 23, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom. Natalia will be presenting her Honours Thesis (attached), Impoverished Nuclei in Lushootseed: A CVC Analysis.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, February 19th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Bernhard Schwarz (McGill) will be presenting “Hidden structure in the composition of degree DPs”. Here is the abstract:

GLAM kicked off the new term with a winter outing that brought together new arrivals and returning members of the Department for an afternoon of skating and pizza in downtown Montreal on January 31st. Everyone laced up their skates and enjoyed the crisp January air at Esplanade Tranquille. Check out the photos below! After skating, […]

The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Dr. Kate Mooney (University of Maryland, College Park) next Friday, February 20th at 3:30pm at Leacock 232. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Explaining asymmetries between (morpho-)phonological and phonetic operations Abstract: Phonological patterns often bear morphological restrictions. In both SPE-style rules and Optimality Theory, these partially productive alternations are often […]

Next presentation will be on Monday, Feb 16, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom. Heather will be presenting a paper (below) on Epenthetic Inheritance by our upcoming colloquium speaker, Kate Mooney. All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be available on this Google Drive.

Xuanda Chen has been awarded a postdoctoral position in the lab of Prof Haizhou Li in the School of Artificial Intelligence at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen. Congratulations Xuanda!

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, February 12th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Jessica Coon and Michael Wagner (McGill) will be presenting “Reconsidering animacy hierarchy effects in Mayan:Experimental evidence from Ch’ol” (joint work with Stefan Keine (UCLA) and Juan Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM)) Here […]

We’re delighted to announce that Tal Linzen will be giving a colloquium this Thurs (Feb 12th) at 11:45 over zoom: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/86483387308?pwd=2NXkhS1itsS4uYvJIS3tAy3pd9ZE0d.1 All linguistics faculty and graduate students are welcome to attend. Cognitive science for, and using, large language models For decades, the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science have aimed to create systems that learn […]

Next presentation will be on Monday, Feb 9, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.  Myriam and Alessio will be presenting their work. Title: Disentangling prominence strengthening: Evidence for independent stress and length effects in Panãra vowel acoustics Abstract: This study examines how two dimensions of phonological prominence—phonemic length and lexical stress—affect the acoustic formant space of vowels in Panãra, a […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, February 5th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Laurestine Bradford (McGill) will be presenting “Tlingit Spatial Roots” Here is the abstract:

The article “Natural language and external conventions: re-examining per”, co-authored by Alan Bale and Bernhard Schwarz, has just appeared online at Linguistics and Philosophy: https://rdcu.be/e1ian. The abstract is below. Abstract We argue that per-phrases like two grams per liter exhibit a dual interpretive pattern. When such phrases saturate predicates of quantities in simplex dimensions, like weight or distance, they are […]

Next presentation will be on Monday, Feb 2,12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.  Tony will be presenting Bybee, J., & Easterday, S. (2022). Primal consonants and the evolution of consonant inventories. Language Dynamics and Change, 13(1), 1-33. (Attached) All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be available on this Google Drive.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, January 29, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Austin Kraft (McGill) will be presenting “Countability in Javanese: ‘language’ and other nouns” Here is the abstract:

Next presentation will be on Monday, Jan 26, 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.  Massimo will be presenting Iskarous, K., & Vietti, A. (2025). Phonetic information in the vowel spectrum: the meaning of mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. Journal of Phonetics, 112, 101434. All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be available on this Google Drive.

The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Justin Royer (Université de Montréal) on Friday January 30th at 3:30pm at Leacock 232. The details of the talk are given below. Title: Wh-questions and predication in Chuj (Presenting joint work with Cristina Buenrostro and Rodrigo Ranero) Abstract: This paper examines the syntax of quantificational expressions and […]

Our first presentation will be on Monday, Jan 19,12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom.  Meghan will be presenting this paper (attached):  Jang, J., Lee, J., Lee, J., Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2025). Unveiling Denasalization as an Ongoing Sound Change: The Role of Prosody and Gender in Seoul Korean. Language and Speech, 00238309251390431. All relevant documents (schedules, abstracts, papers and slides/handouts) will be […]

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, January 22, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Alessio Tosolini (McGill) will be presenting “Analyzing the Linguistic Priors of Language Models with Synthetic Languages” Here is the abstract:

This term P* Group will meet on Monday 12-1pm in room 117 and on Zoom. Our first meeting will be next Monday, Jan 12, during which we will determine week-by-week presentation schedule for this term.

The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its first meeting of 2026 on Thursday, January 15, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566 Mathieu Paillé (ZAS) and David Blunier (Université de Poitiers) will be presenting “Evidence for emergent negation in alternatives” Here is the abstract: