At this week’s MCQLL meeting,  Irene Smith will be presenting “Quantifying vowel category distinctness using Bayesian modeling”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday, February 20 at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract:  Phonetic and sociolinguistic studies of vowel merger require a measure of […]

We are going to have another colloquium talk this semester, on February 23 (stay tuned for the room number). It will be given by our very own Andrei Munteanu. The title and abstract are below: Probabilistic Evaluation of Comparative Reconstructions. In this talk, I present Wordlist Distortion Theory, a framework for the probabilistic evaluation of comparative reconstructions in historical […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Thursday, February 22nd at 1pm 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: ‘Two Optional Past Tenses in Kanien’kéha’. The abstract is below: This talk focuses on […]

McGill Linguistics will host a workshop workshop Understanding Obviation: A cross-linguistic perspective October 4–6 2024. See the webpage for details, invited speakers, and the call for papers (abstracts due April 15th). Contact organizers Anne Bertrand and Jessica Coon with any questions.

The P* reading group will be meeting again this Monday, 19 February at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Connie will be presenting original research on intrinsic F0 effects. Here’s an abstract: I will present some production and perception data from monolingual English participants. Production task: participants were asked to read words in […]

The P* reading group will be meeting again this Monday, 12 February at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Massimo will be leading a discussion on Christine Shadle’s 2023 paper Alternatives to moments for characterizing fricatives: Reconsidering Forrest et al. (1988). The PDF is attached, and also available on the Google Drive. Here’s the […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Thursday, February 15th at 1pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Katya will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Bipartite negation in Kanien’kéha’. The abstract is below: In Kanien’kéha, negation is bipartite: it […]

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO, https://nacloweb.org/) is an annual opportunity for high school and CEGEP students in the US and Canada to take a day off from school and try solving some toy linguistics problems at a university host site. McGill Linguistics was proud to host 14 high school and CEGEP students from Montreal […]

The P* reading group will be meeting againthis Monday, 5 February at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Irene will be leading discussion on Abigail Cohn’s 1993 paper Nasalization in English: phonology or phonetics. The PDF is attached, and also available on the Google Drive. Here’s the abstract: In English, a number of rules affect […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group will be meeting on Thursday, February 8th at 1pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Mathieu Paillé (in person) and Nina Haslinger (remotely) will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Contrastive reduplication, degree predication, and the case of numeral imprecision ‘. The abstract is […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting,  Massimo Lipari will be presenting “The cross-linguistic acoustic space of fricatives”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday February 6 at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract:  The acoustic study of fricatives presents three major challenges. First, which acoustic dimensions […]

McGill was well represented at the last NELS conference. Presenters included Jonathan Palucci (current grad student, third from the left in the picture), Mitcho Erlewine (former postdoc, not in the picture), Carol Rose Little (alumna, first from the right in the picture), Justin Royer (alumn, not in the picture), and Luis Alonso-Ovalle (second from the […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Thursday, February 1st at 1pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Jessica will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Long distance extraction and clause type in Ch’ol ‘, which is joint work with Juan Jesús […]

A new article by Carol-Rose Little (McGill BA ’12), Scott AnderBois (Brown University) and Jessica Coon was just published online at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Title: Type-shifting in headless relative clauses Abstract: Research on the (in)definiteness of bare nouns has developed various proposals regarding which type-shifters exist in human language and which principles are […]

Please join McLing in belatedly welcoming Martin Renard, who is visiting McGill during the Winter 2024 semester as a graduate research trainee. Hi everyone! My name is Martin Renard, I am a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Toronto. I work on Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), a Northern Iroquoian language spoken just outside of Montréal. I […]

The P* reading group will be meeting againthis Monday, 22 January at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Xuanda will be presenting original research in a talk titled Laryngeal Specification on Fricatives: Evidence from Perceptual Bias. Here is an abstract: Compared with conventional phonological models that use a single [±voice] feature to represent all […]

The Syntax-Semantics reading group will be meeting on Thursday, January 25th at 1:30pm (instead of 1pm) in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person. This week, Ryan Windhearn (Concordia) will be giving a talk entitled: “Evidence from Innovation: Reconstructing Indo-European Clause Structure”. The abstract is below: Traditionally […]

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Andrei Munteanu will be presenting “Evaluating comparative reconstructions probabilistically”. Abstract below. We will be meeting this Tuesday January 23rd at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom. Abstract:  In this talk, I present Wordlist Distortion Theory, a framework for the probabilistic evaluation of comparative reconstructions […]

The next talk of the McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series is next week. The talk will be given by Dr. Heather Newell (Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)) on Friday, January 19th at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680, room 1041 (10th floor). Heather is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Heather before the talk next Friday, please email […]

Thanks to all who responded to the poll. This semester, the P* Reading group will meet Mondays 15:30-16:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). Our first meeting will be this coming Monday, 15 January, where we’ll determine the presentation schedule. As always, all docs will be available in the Google Drive, including the schedule (which is also […]