The 56th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) was held at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from May 15-17, 2025. Presentations by McGill-affiliated students included:

PhD student Austin Kraft was the invited student speaker at this year’s 32nd Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association annual meeting (AFLA 32), which took place June 2–4 at the Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. The title of Austin’s talk was “Pseudoclefts in Land Dayak Questions”, and the full program is available here.

McLing is happy to congratulate McGill alum Gui Garcia (PhD ’17) on receiving the Canadian Linguistics Association’s Early Career Researcher Award! This award is presented to “an individual early in their career who has made outstanding and original contributions to the field of linguistics.” Congratulations Gui!

The Department of Linguistics hosted the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, which was held June 2-6. The conference attracted about 250 people, most of them from universities, but also a good number of members of Indigenous communities involved in language documentation and revitalization attended. About 10% travelled from abroad (mostly the US, but including […]

As part of ongoing collaborations with students and teachers in the immersion program at the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center (KORLCC), McGill and KORLCC affiliates organized the second Iakwarihwí:saks mini workshop, showcasing projects that have come from collaborative research with first-language speakers this year. This work has been supported by Jessica Coon’s SSHRC […]

Current McGill affiliates were well represented among the talk and poster presenters at this year’s Canadian Linguistic Association conference, held June 2–6 at McGill. Talks by current McGill linguists included: Posters included: This year’s CLA also included three mini courses, including one led by Austin Kraft and Wishe Mitchell Mittelstaedt titled “Data management, data storage, […]

The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce this year’s award recipients. Learn more about the awards here and here. Congratulations all! Faculty of Arts AwardsCremona Memorial Prize in Linguistics: Emma Custer & Sophia FlaimLara Riente Memorial Prize: Terrance Gatchalian Departmental AwardsU2 Academic Achievement Award: Kira Tess PavlidisAward for Academic Leadership: Max BlackburnAward for Department Citizenship: Ina ZengAward for Excellence in Research: Natalia Feu

Zlata Odribets and Laurestine Bradford have been awarded a Jacobs Research Fund grant for Tlingit fieldwork this summer! The grant will fund a two-week trip to Teslin, Yukon this August. The students will work together in intensive sessions with local elders. Zlata will investigate indefiniteness, while Laurestine will focus on lexical aspectual distinctions. Laurestine has […]

PhD students Katya Morgunova and Willie Myers received a Jacobs Research Fund grant to study Kanien’kéha (Mohawk; Iroquoian) for their respective dissertations. The grant covers elicitation with first-language speakers in Kahnawà:ke, Québec in collaboration with the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center. Katya will be looking at finiteness in embedded clauses while Willie will […]

McGill is hosting the 2025 CLA conference, which will take place June 3-6th. In addition to a full program of talks and posters, this year the conference is hosting events including a special session on transcription challenges for Indigenous languages, a panel on AI tools for under-resourced languages and a full day of intensive crash courses on various tools for […]

Jessica gave a talk at TED AI in San Francisco in the fall, “Lessons from linguistics for the future of AI”, which was featured last week in McGill’s Arts Newsletter. The full talk is available here.

The 17th Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal Semantics Conference took place on May 10 at the University of Ottawa. McGill was well represented by PhD students Laurestine Bradford (Cumulative Closure vs. Iterativity in Tinglit) and Austin Kraft (Accounting for Javanese Numerals’ Dual Roles), MA student Sama’a Salama (Decomposing the Definite Article) and alumni Zahur Ashrafuzzaman (Toward a Formalization of […]

Hot from the press: Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Esmail Moghiseh (2025) Existential Free Choice Items: The Case of Farsi Yek -i DPs, Semantics and Pragmatics, 18 (4).

McLing is very happy to welcome Myriam Lapierre as an incoming faculty member in the McGill Linguistics Department. Myriam will be officially joining us in January 2026. Myriam’s research combines phonological theory, original fieldwork, articulatory and perceptual phonetics and in-depth typological surveys. Her theoretical work centers on formal models of representational phonology and, in particular, […]

PhD student Austin Kraft’s abstract, “Pseudoclefts in Land Dayak questions,” has been selected as the best abstract by a student or junior scholar of the upcoming 32nd conference of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA). Austin will deliver the talk as a plenary speaker at AFLA in Jakarta, Indonesia, this summer.

The Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL-Lab) is meeting Thursday, May 8 at 4PM in Rm 404 of Thomson House on the McGill Downtown campus. We will have three presentations on fieldwork puzzles, followed by a social hour. Talks include: The event is open to all linguists across Montreal! If you’d like to join the mailing list, please email willie.myers@mail.mcgill.ca.

McGill linguists presented work at the 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43), held last weekend at the University of Washington. Presentations by current McGill affiliates included: McGill linguists of past and present gathered for a picture:

A new paper by Morgan Sonderegger and Márton Sóskuthy (UBC) titled “Advancements of Phonetics in the 21st century: Quantitative data analysis” has just been accepted to the Journal of Phonetics. A preprint is available here. Abstract: Phonetic research in the 21st century has relied heavily on quantitative analysis. This article reviews the evolution of common […]

Congratulations to Ada Tur, Gaurav Kamath and Siva Reddy! Their paper, ‘Language models largely exhibit human-like constituent ordering preferences’, was selected to win a Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics SAC award at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025). The paper appears here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05670.

Wei Zhang (PhD, 2024) has received an Assistant Professor position at the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University.  Congratulations, Wei!