LING Lecture: Jeff Lamontagne - Unstable stability across the community: Variability as a cause for language change

March 3, 2022

We are pleased to announce that the next talk of the Winter 2022 semester will be by Jeff Lamontagne from Indiana University, which will take place on Thursday, March 3rd at 5:30pm (abstract & Zoom link below). 

Please show up a bit early if possible, as there will be a waiting room to admit audience members to the talk. In addition, there will be an informal reception on Zoom immediately following the talk, so please plan to stay a bit longer if you can.  

Unstable stability across the community: Variability as a cause for language change

High vowels in Laurentian (ie. Canadian/Quebec) French have received considerable attention for a confounding set of laxing and tensing processes. In final syllables, high-vowel tenseness is fully predictable: high vowels are tense in open syllables and in most lengthening contexts, but lax otherwise. In non-final syllables, however, multiple processes have been proposed to account for the various contexts in which high lax vowels surface -- from optional harmonies of several types to obligatory retensing.

In this talk, I present corpus data of non-final laxing, probing individual speakers' patterns. I show that within-community variation has been underestimated in the literature; new patterns not proposed in the literature emerge, while those in the literature are consistently attested for a subset of speakers. The types of patterns emerging suggest that high-vowel laxing is being analysed by learners in different ways, such that some speakers attribute laxing to segmental phonology, others to prosody, and some speakers appear to be associating laxing with individual words. I conclude with evidence from how mid vowels coarticulate with upcoming high vowels to argue that Laurentian French speakers faced with optional and opaque pronunciations are increasingly resorting to phonemicising high lax vowels.

Zoom Link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/91658101439?pwd=TW9xSmRuajQvRXlLSktCRXA0QUd3Zz09

Passcode: lingtalk  

--

AL Lecture Series: Mary Jane Curry - Graduate students and academic publishing: Dilemmas and experiences 

February 18, 2022

Zoom Link

Abstract: Graduate students across disciplines are feeling, along with scholars, increased pressures for academic publishing, but they as well as their supervisors are receiving varying and sometimes contradictory messages about when to publish and how to do it. In this talk I will lay out some of the dilemmas facing graduate students about publishing during their degree programs, drawing on my own and others’ research as well as my experiences with supporting doctoral students in publishing book reviews, book chapters, articles, and a book, An A-W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Interwoven in the discussion will be suggestions to aid students interested in entering the academic publishing ‘field’ and learning ‘the rules of the game’ (Bourdieu, 1991). 

Mary Jane Curry, Associate Professor of Education, University of Rochester

Mary Jane is an Associate Professor in the Warner Graduate School of Education and

Human Development, University of Rochester. She has co-authored four books and coedited three books on various aspects of academic literacy, writing by users of English as

an additional language, and writing for publication, including A Scholar’s Guide to

Getting Published in English (Multilingual Matters, 2013) and Academic Writing in a

Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English (Routledge, 2010),

both with Theresa Lillis.

--

LING Lecture: Nandi Sims - The effects of contact and ideologies on linguistic variation in a pre-adolescent community

January 27, 2022

We are pleased to announce that the next talk in the Linguistics Lecture series will be by Nandi Sims (Florida International University) which will take place on Thursday, January 27 at 5:30pm.  (Zoom link below). 

Please show up a bit early if possible, as there will be a waiting room to admit audience members to the talk. In addition, there will be an informal reception on Zoom immediately following the talk, so please plan to stay a bit longer if you can.  

*A complete abstract will follow shortly*

Zoom Link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/99965539592?pwd=NDNoOENSbkZnV2ZxUG5MaUNUTFloQT09

Passcode: lingtalk  

--

LING Lecture: Kyumin Kim - The syntax of lexical aspect in Korean: with a focus on different types of NP objects

November 18, 2021

We are pleased to announce that the next talk in the Linguistics Lecture series will be by Kyumin Kim (Chungbuk National University) which will take place on Thursday, November 18 at 7pm.  (abstract & Zoom link below). 

Please show up a bit early if possible, as there will be a waiting room to admit audience members to the talk. In addition, there will be an informal reception on Zoom immediately following the talk, so please plan to stay a bit longer if you can.  

The syntax of lexical aspect in Korean: with a focus on different types of NP objects

This talk investigates the syntax of lexical aspect, i.e., the internal temporal properties of the event described. In particular, this talk aims to characterize the syntax of lexical aspect in Korean with a focus on different types of object NPs specific to the language. Korean is an article-less as well as a classifier language similar to Chinese or Slavic languages. Thus, an available range of nominal objects in Korean are not the same in English type languages, as illustrated in (1) and (2). In (1), unlike English, a bare singular noun such as sakwa ‘apple’ can appear as an object of the accomplishment verb mek-‘eat’. In (2), the classifier key is obligatory to quantify the object noun sakwa ‘apple’, which is also different from English. 

(1)  MinHo-ka       sakwa-lul        mek-ess-ta.

MinHo-NOM apple-ACC      eat-PAST-DEC

‘Minho ate an apple/the apple(s).’

(2)  MinHo-ka       sakaw sey       key-lul             mek-ess-ta.

MinHo-ka       apple   three    CL-ACC         eat-PAST-DEC

‘MinHo ate three apples.’

It is well-known in the literature that the properties of an event are determined not by a verb alone, but by the verb and its internal argument (e.g., Verkuyl 1972, Dowty 1979, van Voorst 1988, Tenny 1994, Borer 2005). Regarding the Korean data such as in (1), an important question is how the language specific properties relevant to internal arguments – article-less and obligatory classifiers – play a role in characterizing the syntax of lexical aspect in a Korean type language differently from an English type language where an article is present but a classifier is lacking. 

In this talk, as a first step to address this question, I detail how different types of nominal objects in Korean interact with the verbs to give rise to telic interpretation of the event VP, which has not been paid much attention in Korean literature. I present the result from online judgement tasks on meaning participated by13 native speakers of Korean. The following types of objects specific to Korean were tested with accomplishment verbs such as ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘write’, and ‘draw’: a bare singular noun, a bare plural noun, a numeral classifier noun, a noun preceded by the demontrastive ku ‘the’, and a proper noun. Building on evidence from the behaviors of the VPs that have these nominal objects, I propose that in Korean the presence of quantity of a nominal in the event VP is crucial to elicit a telic interpretation of the event VP, regardless of whether or not the quantity of the object is specified. For example, unlike English, a bare plural object in Korean such as sakwa-tul ‘apple-s’ show a strong telic interpretation with the verb such as mek- ‘eat’ similar to a numeral classifier noun object such as sakwa sey key ‘three apples’ shown in (2). Even an object without quantity specified such as sakwa meych key ‘apple several CL’ also shows a strong telic reading. I further propose that a category of quantity such as plural or a numeral classifier appears as a modifier phrase on NPs in Korean rather than being a projecting head such as Num (or Q), which accounts for the fact that the time adverbial phrases such as ‘in/for X time’ do not grammatically distinguish telic or atelic readings in Korean. The modifier view also captures the ambiguous interpretation in telicity shown by some objects like a bare singular or plural noun.

In the final part of the talk, I will discuss what the current consequence suggests for the syntax of lexical aspect in a Korean type language differently from an English type language. For example, the proposed account suggests that number may not be a grammatical category in Korean. Assuming the parallel between nominal and verbal domains, e.g., quantity-telicity or Num-Asp (e.g., Bach 1986, Travis 1992, Verkuyl 1993, Borer 1994), it is questionable whether Asp is projected in Korean and how the lack of article or the presence of a classifier is relevant to this puzzle. I will briefly discuss these issues by comparing other article-less languages such as Slavic or article-less and classifier languages such as Mandarin with Korean. 

Zoom Link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/92801153409?pwd=ZnlKNmVZcjQvTU9VaG13VjRERDUrZz09

Passcode: lingtalk  

--

Annual Meetings on Phonology (AMP2021)

September 23, 2021

York University, along with the University of Toronto, will be hosting the 9th Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) conference from Oct. 1-3, 2021 (online). Along with a full program of oral presentations and poster sessions on topics in theoretical, experimental, and computational phonology, the following invited speakers will be giving presentations related to two themes, pedagogy in phonology and data quality in phonology:

Pedagogy in Phonology: 

• Christina Bjorndahl – Carnegie Mellon University 

• Anya Hogoboom – William and Mary University 

• Robert Kennedy – University of California, Santa Barbara 

Data Quality: 

• Julie Hochgesang – Gallaudet University 

• Adam McCollum – Rutgers University 

• Morgan Sonderegger – McGill University 

The Annual Meetings on Phonology (AMP) conference began in 2013 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has quickly grown into a major phonology conference, held at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014) and New York University (2017). Further information and links for registration can be found at https://www.amp2021toronto.com/

Registration is free but is required to gain access to the conference sessions. Participants are asked to register by Sept 28 if possible.

--

LAL Graduate Student Literacies Workshop: Sustainable Academic Writing Strategies

September 22, 2021

Before you get too deep into the semester's assignment load, take a moment to upgrade your Academic Writing skills with the first LAL Graduate Student Literacies Workshop on October 8th at 3:30pm!

LING Lecture: Ross Godfrey - Morphemes without Morphs

September 17, 2021

Welcome and welcome back! The semester is off to a very busy and exciting start including an exciting first LING Lecture on Thursday, September 30th at 6pm. We're starting the semester with Ross Godfrey speaking on Morphemes without morphs (abstract & Zoom link below). 

Please show up a bit early if possible, as there will be a waiting room to admit audience members to the talk. In addition, there will be an informal reception on Zoom immediately following the talk, so please plan to stay a bit longer if you can.  

Morphemes without Morphs

Abstract: Following Hockett (1954), linguists often distinguish between item-and-arrangement (IA) and item-and-process (IP) theories of morphology. In IA theories, complex words are derived through the concatenation of morphemes, whose specific shapes are called morphs. In IP theories, complex words are derived by subjecting bases to morphological processes, and affixation can simply be thought of as one process among many. While hybrid theories have been proposed in the past, I am unaware of any previous proposals for a hybrid theory that accepts the concatenation of morphemes, but denies the existence of morphs. In this talk, I outline the general contours of such a theory (developed more fully in Godfrey 2020), as well as its motivation. Why do we need morphological structure? Why should we reject morphs? And how is it possible to have one without the other?

References

Godfrey, Ross. 2020. Morphemes without morphs: A theory of syntactic arrangements and phonological processes. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.

Hockett, C. F. 1954. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10:210–234.  

Zoom Link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/92289207821?pwd=a1RzQ2RsL0F0a1huenlDbi9Nekw1Zz09 

Passcode: lingtalk  

--

Working on Term Papers? Five Ways to Approaching your Term Papers More Strategically

February 27, 2021 - A guest article by Hiba Ibrahim

Let me guess! You probably woke up the Monday after reading week, thinking: “reading week is over and it wasn’t as productive as I hoped”. Courses resumed, long readings are back, AND you are preoccupied with outlining and drafting your final projects and papers. 

In this blog, I would like to share some of the strategies I used in Winter 2020 to plan for and write my term papers. This is not to say that they will work for everyone the same way they did for me, but I have always found that reflecting on others’ ideas is worthwhile when improving my writing skills.

1. Don’t Throw your Fall Projects Away!   

You probably spent a lot of time reading and note-taking for presentations and term papers in the Fall semester, so why not build on those, if possible? One of my term papers in the Winter term, for instance, was originally a subtopic I presented for another class in the Fall. By reconstructing the theoretical framework. I also wrote a literature review of a topic I explored extensively in one course as my final paper for another. In other words, use your resources wisely! Presentations and papers are two different products, and there is always room to reflect on how you could reconstruct arguments and expand your topics with innovation, as long as you are not self-plagiarizing. 

2. Produce Something You Can Use Afterwards 

As graduate students, working on assignments is a great way to explore our interests and extend our professional development opportunities. We tend to write about course areas we are passionate about or have expertise in, motivating us to progress. However, this might not be the case for all the courses we are enrolled in. In that case, you might want to consider a project that you can build on later for publication or professional purposes. Some reflection questions might be: What is a topic that this course addresses and that has an influence on your professional practice? What is a timely issue that this course addresses and that is controversially discussed in your research area or workplace? Some courses, for instance, offer the option to develop curriculum or professional development materials. You might want to consider this track, if it is more motivating and more relevant to your course and/or professional goals. 

3. Think Aloud with your Classmates 

And I don’t mean texting someone with your paper idea or asking them about theirs, but rather seeking to have meaningful conversations about your progress, your struggles, and the options you are considering. I know that during these unusual times our physical interaction is limited and we barely have time to get things done, but I don’t exaggerate when I say that these conversations can elicit deep learning as much as the writing process itself. Engaging with our colleagues via phone calls, Zoom calls, or virtual study groups are some possible ways to connect and share work and feedback with one another. This peer-peer time provides us with different perspectives and useful resources and most importantly, it builds a sense of community through the emotional and mental support we give one another. 

4. Multitask

When it comes to course work, multi-tasking can be different. I personally have always found it challenging to work on two or three different writing projects simultaneously. However, I have found that it gets better with time. For that, setting realistic “to-do lists” can help you stay focused and productive. Realistic is the key word! 

5. Adjust Expectations Along the Way 

When we start writing, we usually start with a certain scope and angle in mind. However, the more you progress in reading, the more reflective you become. This feeling that "my initial plan is shifting" can be frustrating or stressful sometimes, especially if you are a perfectionist. But I believe by now most of us have realized that this is part of the process: our thinking processes change and evolve as we engage critically with resources. Openness to making strategic changes in your paper focus is important, as long as you keep your timeline and project scope in mind. 

Term papers can be overwhelming, especially during this difficult time we are all going through. The writing process, however, will also allow you to explore your abilities in ways you have never imagined. 

Hang in there and enjoy the process as much as you can! You’ve got this!

--

AL Lecture Series: Deconstructing discourses of diversity & Digital Peer Review in an Academic Writing-focused Course

Hee-Jin Song and Olga Makina (York University) will be presenting at the next AL Lecture next Friday, February 26th at 10:00am ET on Zoom. Abstracts follow.

https://yorku.zoom.us/my/jnc20?pwd=SkM4Z014THc3ME9tZDBXSkhUOWxhdz09

Deconstructing discourses of diversity:   Envisioning possibilities from impossibilities in multicultural education in South Korea
Hee-Jin Song, Assistant Professor, York University 

Drawing upon Ruíz’s (1984) framework for language policy and planning and Cummins’ (1986, 2001) empowerment framework for minority education, this study investigates how diversity is conceptualised in South Korea through a case study of multicultural education. Specifically, it examines how newcomer adolescents’ linguistic and cultural identities are perceived by teachers and peers in two high schools. The findings reveal that diversity is dominantly viewed as an impediment to academic success for newcomer youth and is only appreciated once students are fully assimilated into Korean society. The concept of diversity as a resource and right and the notion of multicultural and multilingual identities in the Korean educational context are absent, or hidden, at best. Although there are examples where newcomer learners see diversity as empowerment and resources for their identity construction and positionality, this orientation has not been acknowledged in educational practices. The study calls for conceptualizing diversity as empowerment and resources as ethical lenses to move away from ethnocentric and deficit orientation.

Digital Peer Review in an Academic Writing-focused Course
Olga Makinina, Assistant Professor, York University 

This presentation illustrates how digital tools, such as Google Docs, eClass/Moodle Workshop and Forum, and screencast videos, can facilitate peer review in remote/blended ESL writing-focused courses. An overview of the current literature on technology-enhanced peer feedback will be followed by a summary of the initial results of an action research study in progress. In this study, 25 participants received peer feedback-focused instruction and engaged into peer review activities throughout one academic term. The activities employed peer feedback in different formats and under different conditions (e.g., free and controlled; anonymous, one-on-one, and group-based). The instruction was preceded by a questionnaire that identified the participants' prior knowledge and experience with digital peer review, and a second questionnaire administered at the end of the course examined whether and how the participants' preferences, attitudes towards and perceptions of digital peer feedback have changed as a result of focused instruction and practice activities.

--

LING Lecture: Prosodic focus marking: Production, perception and typological variation

Anja Arnhold (University of Alberta) will be joining us on Zoom next Thursday, January, 28th at 5:30pm to talk about Prosodic focus marking (see abstract below). Please arrive a few minutes early to ensure that you are let into the Zoom room in time for the talk to begin.

https://yorku.zoom.us/j/99477003607?pwd=amNjYXdCRnFPUG5PUDFEMTdXR2ZJZz09

Passcode: 467541

Abstract: Prosody – the melody and rhythm of speech – can convey a lot of different kinds of information, for example distinguishing questions from statements or telling us where the speaker comes from.

In this talk, I will concentrate on prosodic focus marking – the way prosody highlights new or important information. I will consider various angles: How does prosodic focus marking differ between languages? How does prosody interact with other linguistic means of marking focus, such as cleft sentences like It was the lawyer who sent the letter? How does prosodic focus marking help us interpret spoken language – does it allow adults and children to find the referent of a pronoun faster? Can prosody help listeners predict what will be said next?

I will present some of my past, ongoing and future research addressing these questions with different methodologies – scripted production studies, corpus analysis and perception experiments with and without eye-tracking.

--

LING Lecture: Phonological representation of voiceless nasals in Drenjongke (Bhutia)

Seunghun J. Lee (ICU and U of Venda) will be joining us on Zoom next Thursday, November 26th at 4:30pm to talk about their work on Drenjongke phonetics and phonology (see abstract below). Please arrive a few minutes early to ensure that you are let into the Zoom room in time for the talk to begin.

https://yorku.zoom.us/j/97571435193?pwd=WHc4SS9meExlQmp0VVlOQUxJbTFQUT09

Meeting ID: 975 7143 5193
Passcode: 074964

Abstract: Drenjongke (Bhutia) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Sikkim, India, whose phonological and phonetic properties are understudied. Previous impressionistic descriptions of the Drenjongke phonological inventory report that the language has eight nasal phonemes that contrast in terms of voicing /m, n, ɲ, ŋ/ and /m̥, n̥, ŋ̥, ɲ̥/ (e.g., /mà/ ‘mother’ and /má/ ‘wound’ vs. /m̥a/ ‘down’, Yliniemi 2019, George van Driem p.c.). This study presents findings from the acoustics of voiceless nasals and explores how voiceless nasals can be phonologically represented.

The data obtained from our recordings suggests that there is no unique phonetic realization of the voiceless nasal but at least four different patterns: (1) a voiceless nasal, (2) a nasal without voicelessness (i.e. [n, m, ɲ, ŋ]), (3) aspiration but no nasality in the consonant (i.e. [h]). In the case of (3), nasality is absent in the consonant target but still realized, although differently: preceding or following vowels are nasalized. Lastly, a variant of (3), and the most common pattern we observed, is (4) a metathesis in the consonant portion. Instead of what was expected for voiceless nasals based on previous phonemic descriptions, that is voicelessness followed by voicing (e.g., [n̥n], Yliniemi 2019), we observed a voiced nasal first followed by aspiration. The metathesis resulted in a resyllabification so that the voiced nasal portion becomes the coda of the preceding word, and the target stimulus onset is an [h]. Figure 1 illustrates the realization of (1) and Figure 2 the realization of (4).

Figure 1 (above) and 2 (below): Two realizations of the voiceless nasal

What all these four patterns seem to have in common is that speakers still maintain the use of nasality, even if it does not match the expected consonant but appears in a coda or a vowel. Phonologically there is a target, but phonetically the target is not uniformed. Although the realization of the voiceless nasal shows variability, nasality is maintained. This result is similar to what can be observed for the vowel length contrast in Drenjongke: phonemic length has various phonetic realizations (Lee et al. 2019, Guillemot et al. 2019).

Guillemot Céleste, Lee, Seunghun J., Kawahara, Shigeto, Monou, Tomoko. (2019) Prosody comes first? Phonetic realization of long vowels in Drenjongke. NINJAL ICPP 2019.

Lee, Seunghun J., Guillemot, Céleste, Lai, Audrey H., Asai, Honoka, Sato, Kotone (2019). A preliminary study of the vowel length contrast in Drenjongke. Proceedings of the 33rd Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan.

--

Five Tips to Surviving the Applied Linguistics MA

September 15, 2020  -  A guest article by Marijke de Looze

Way back in September 2019, I sat where you are sitting now. Well, not literally where you are sitting – the York classroom chairs were probably less comfortable. I remember looking around the room and wondering, “What have I gotten myself into?”.

I’m still not sure I have that answer, but I can at least share some thoughts from my own experience. So I offer you my 5 practical tips to surviving the Applied Linguistics MA.

Tip 1: Figure out what kind of reader you are. Fast.

With a full course load, you will probably read six to twelve articles a week – roughly a couple hundred pages. The relentlessness of the reading can be daunting, but it is manageable.

The key is to work out what kind of reader you are. Can you do next week’s readings well in advance, or will you forget everything? Do you highlight text or write summary notes? Some readings are totally accessible, but others will seem impenetrable – identify those quickly, and give them more time. You may get busy and read some articles less… fully…. But do the reading - you will get more out of class discussions and the program as a whole.

Prepare for your final papers by applying a bit meta-analysis as you read – take note of well-crafted lit reviews or theoretical frameworks to refer back to as examples. Signpost articles that might be useful to revisit, to avoid the panicked deadline-driven hunt for that one article that said that one thing that one time...

Oh, and do NOT read that super-dense article in your comfy chair – you will never get through it.

Tip 2: Manage your screen time.

As the first fully online cohort, this is an added layer you will contend with.

With asynchronous participation, the danger is either that you spend endless hours in the forums, or forget about them completely. I have found it helpful to timetable asynchronous work as diligently as the synchronous classes. Schedule multiple points in the week to check into each class Moodle, but set a time limit for yourself – fifteen minutes, half an hour, whatever’s logical.

For synchronous classes, it may take some time to figure out your online personality. I was surprised to discover that I was quiet for the first few Zoom classes. (Anyone who knows me for more than five seconds would find that terribly funny.) Eventually, I found I could use facial expressions and reactions to communicate my energy without disturbing the flow of the discussion. 

Do not underestimate the usefulness of taking breaks. Can’t make heads or tails of that paragraph? Go for a walk. Eyes burning from too much screen time? Go say hi to your partner or best friend or kids (they probably miss you). It may take a little while, but you’ll find your online style – just be patient with yourself.

Find ways to combat isolation. You won’t have the advantage of those spontaneous conversations between classes or in the lounge, but you can still build a community of practice, share ideas and support each other. Create WhatsApp groups for different classes or with presentation groups, or with someone you really click with. Attend GLASA events and department talks. And check in with each other.

Tip 3: Find your niche (but not too much).

Impostor syndrome is real. Guaranteed, at some point, your classmate will provide an off-the-cuff remark that amazes you with its eloquence, theoretical density and perspective. It certainly happened to me. Multiple times. But here’s the thing: unbeknownst to you, some contribution you make that you consider mundane is likely inspiring a similar awe in your classmates. Figure out what your experience has given you – what distinctive lens can you bring to coursework and discussions? This can also help with selecting final paper topics – look for intersections between your experience and the course content.

That said, don’t get too stuck in your niche – take every opportunity to tap into the thoughts and perspectives of colleagues with different experiences and diverse insights. Ask questions, and express uncertainty. Challenge your own viewpoints through extensive reading, research into new areas, and critical discussions with professors and peers. Make the most of this unique community you are in.

Tip 4: Listen to Rose. She is always right.

Rose has an inimitable way of making you feel like your struggle is both exceptional and totally normal. On the rare occasion she can’t answer you herself, she will direct you to someone who can. And when she says, “you know, people usually come to me at the end of the term and say….”, listen carefully. She is undoubtably telling your future.

She probably even knew I would include her in my list.

Tip 5: Remember that this experience is, ultimately, for you.

It really doesn’t matter what has motivated you to start this program, or where you hope to be afterward. This year is for you. The reading that you do is for you. The papers you write are for you. The presentations you prepare are for you. You may not need this reassurance now. But when you find yourself at the computer at 2am in mid-November, terrified that your paper is worth 40% of your mark and you just don’t know if your professor will like this specific word you have chosen... well, it can be help to take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are here to learn and develop and grow, and that the most important person to satisfy with your work is you.

If you struggle to remember that, nominate a friend to remind you on occasion. Or message me; I’ll tell ya.

This year is going to challenge each of you in different ways – at times, you may find it frustrating, overwhelming or exhausting. But you will also, hopefully, find new avenues of interest, a scholarly community that welcomes your membership, and parts of yourself that you never knew existed.

I envy you. I really do. If I could sit again where you are sitting now, I would in a heartbeat. And not just because you get to do this from the comfort of your living room.

--

LING Lecture: Ileana Paul

September 14, 2020

The first LING Lecture of the 2020-2021 academic year is coming up (on Zoom) and we're looking forward to seeing you there!

From the organizers:

Ileana Paul (Western University) will be giving the first talk of the year on Thursday, September 24 from 5-6pm. The talk will take place on Zoom (meeting information is below). 

Please show up a bit early if possible, as we will be enabling a waiting room to admit audience members to the talk. In addition, we are planning an informal reception on Zoom immediately following the talk, so please plan to stay a bit longer if you can.

The title and abstract follows below.

All are welcome, and we hope that you can join us!

———————

Malagasy pronouns: inside and out

Ileana Paul (Western), joint work with Lisa Travis (McGill)

Cross-linguistically, pronouns show different syntactic and morphological properties. These differences have been analyzed in at least two ways in the literature. First, as the stripping away of outer syntactic structure, as proposed by Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) and by Déchaine and Wiltschko (2002). According to this approach, the internal syntactic structure correlates directly with the external distribution as well as the semantics. The second approach, proposed by Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona (1999), posits different kinds of deficiency (phonological, morphological, syntactic). Each kind of deficiency is independent from the other, which leads to variation in interpretation and distribution. New data from Malagasy pronouns, however, show that neither approach is adequate. We propose that Malagasy pronouns contain a demonstrative layer and that a head movement analysis of pronouns can account for the various forms of morphological deficiency in the pronominal paradigm.

———————

Zoom Meeting Information

Topic: York University Linguistics Lecture Series: Ileana Paul

Time: Sep 24, 2020 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://yorku.zoom.us/j/99676577407?pwd=TGxRSmlNR2pwQ01IQVYyN3FzcHZhQT09

Meeting ID: 996 7657 7407

Passcode: 948642

One tap mobile

+16475580588,,99676577407#,,,,,,0#,,948642# Canada

+17789072071,,99676577407#,,,,,,0#,,948642# Canada

Dial by your location

        +1 647 558 0588 Canada

        +1 778 907 2071 Canada

        +1 438 809 7799 Canada

        +1 587 328 1099 Canada

        +1 647 374 4685 Canada

Meeting ID: 996 7657 7407

Passcode: 948642

Find your local number: https://yorku.zoom.us/u/adJe6LgZq2

Join by SIP

99676577407@zoomcrc.com

Join by H.323

162.255.37.11 (US West)

162.255.36.11 (US East)

115.114.131.7 (India Mumbai)

115.114.115.7 (India Hyderabad)

213.19.144.110 (Amsterdam Netherlands)

213.244.140.110 (Germany)

103.122.166.55 (Australia)

64.211.144.160 (Brazil)

69.174.57.160 (Canada)

207.226.132.110 (Japan)

Meeting ID: 996 7657 7407

Passcode: 948642

--

COVID-19 Updates

March 26, 2020

In line with university-wide closures, GLASA has postponed all upcoming events indefinitely. We encourage you to watch this space for updates on the symposium as soon as we are able to confidently set a new date. We also encourage LAL graduate students to visit http://yugsa.ca/services/funding/ for emergency funding opportunities.

We will keep all GLASA members apprised of any updates as they become available. 

Keep well and please observe careful hand hygiene and physical distancing!* 

Best Wishes,

GLASA Exec

*Stay home if you can, stay 6ft away from others if you must go out, and avoid contact with folks who are managing high-risk health conditions. In short, assume you've already got it but are just asymptomatic and do everything you can to make sure you don't pass it on.

--

Upcoming Lectures: LAL Panel & LING Talk

February 20, 2020

Next Thursday, February 27th YorkU's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics is hosting two exciting linguistics events. At 9:30am, five panelists come together in Ross S540 to discuss Teaching Academic Writing in English as a Second/Additional Language. [POSTPONED: new date TBA]

Later that day, at 5:30pm in the AV Room (Ross S562), the LING Lecture series will feature Suzi Lima from University of Toronto discussing countability and individuation with reference to Brazilian indigenous languages.

--

LING Lecture: Beth MacLeod

February 6, 2020

Join us in Ross S562 (AV Room) at 5:30pm next Thursday, February 13th for Beth MacLeod's LING Lecture: Phonetic Convergence: What do Speakers Change and What can Listeners Hear?

Abstract: During an interaction, people often take on the behaviours of the person they are talking to, even if only in small ways. If she touches her face, you’re more likely to touch your face. If he crosses his legs, you’re more likely to cross your legs. If they smile, you’re probably going to smile too (e.g. Chartrand & Bargh 1999). This tendency to imitate applies in how we talk as well, including how we pronounce sounds. When we subconsciously imitate the pronunciation of the person we are talking to, this is called phonetic convergence. Speakers converge towards the person they are talking to along a whole host of acoustic-phonetic aspects of speech (e.g. Babel 2012; MacLeod 2014;Nielsen 2011) and listeners can perceive these changes (e.g. Pardo 2006; Walker & Campbell-Kibler 2015). In this talk, I will discuss the different strands of ongoing research on phonetic convergence, including work that has explored which aspects of the acoustic signal speakers adjust when they converge and whether listeners can perceive convergence.

Reception to follow.

--

DLLL Winter Term LING Lecture Schedule Announced

January 24, 2020

York University's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics has announced the schedule for this term's LING Lecture Series. LING lectures are held at 5:30pm on York University's Keele Campus in Ross S562 (AV Room). Stay tuned for further details of this term's exciting speakers!

York DLLL LING Lecture Series: Winter 2020

Jan 30: Youri Zabbal (York): syntax/semantics

Feb 13: Beth MacLeod (Carleton): phonetics/phonology, sociophonetics, Spanish, L2

Feb 27: Suzi Lima (U of T): language documentation (Indigenous languages of Brazil), semantics, psycholinguistics

March 12: Monica Irimia: syntax

March 26: Liz Smeets (recent McGill PhD): syntax/semantics, bilingualism, L2

--

Getting started 2019-2020

September 1, 2019

Welcome to new and returning members for the 2019-2020 year!

Our new executive committee has been established, with plans for transitional positions to prepare for Kris and Kendall stepping down next year and an events committee to organize activities. We are working to establish a calendar of events for 2019-2020.

We are holding our first executive meeting online on Sept. 6th. All future executive meetings will be online. All members are invited to attend these meetings, whether or not they are on the executive committee, to stay up to date on GLASA operations and to provide their opinions and feedback to the executive. 

Meeting minutes will be provided afterwards and all essential issues will be put to a vote via an online form so that all members can participate regardless of their ability to attend meetings.

--

Tech fund for data analysis software

Throughout the 2018-2019 academic year, GLASA has brought our data analysis software initiative to LAL executive meetings. We have proposed a number of ways the department might support this initiative, and we have presented information from a survey conducted among GLASA members about students' needs and interests in this area. Many thanks to all who took time to fill out the survey!

The LAL executive is very interested in supporting our initiative. They have recently agreed to provide an annual budget of $300 to GLASA to distribute to students entering the data analysis phase of their research to help defray software costs!

In the meantime, GLASA  allocated a portion of its 2018-2019 budget to partially fund LAL students who wished to attend short courses from the Institute for Social Research at York during its 2019 Spring Seminar Series (see below). GLASA is looking into continuing this allocation in the 2019-2020 year for students who are unable to attend in Spring 2019 or who would prefer to take other ISR courses that were not on offer at this time.

--

ISR Short Course