What did McGill linguists do this summer? Here is part 1 of our summer news round-up. It’s not too late to send McLing your summer news for inclusion in next week’s digest.
- McGill Linguistics undergraduate Georges Awaad made news this summer when he was deemed the “Most Multilingual Student” by the language-learning app Babbel. While we know that being multilingual isn’t necessary for linguistic research, speaking 19 languages can’t hurt–congrats Georges!
- Nico Baier is leaving McGill and beginning a new postdoctoral fellowship working with Henry Davis and teaching syntax at UBC. Nico spent two years at McGill as a course lecturer and postdoc working with Jessica Coon on a SSHRC-funded project on agreement. Best of luck Nico!
- Linguistics undergraduate student Emily Baylor worked with Tim O’Donnell throughout the summer on a project entitled “Generalization in the German Plural.”
- Jessica Coon spent a week in Wrocław, Poland, teaching at this year’s Eastern Generative Grammar (EGG 2019) school. Earlier in the summer she presented collaborative work with Stefan Keine (USC) at the Workshop on Approaches to Wh-Intervention at the National University of Singapore.
- Emily Goodwin, together with Tim O’Donnell and Koustuv Sinha presented a poster entitled “Systematicity in Natural Language Inference” at the Cogsci 2019 conference in Montreal.
- Jacob Hoover and Michaela Socolof attended the Cogsci 2019 conference in Montreal. Jacob also attended the 31st European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information in Rīga, Latvia for two weeks in August.
- As the recipient of an Arts Research Internship Award (ARIA), linguistics undergraduate student Gemma Huang worked with Tim O’Donnell throughout the summer on a project entitled “Testing Models of Phonotactics.”
- McGill Linguistics alumna Gretchen McCulloch‘s (MA ’13) popular linguistics book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language was published earlier this summer to glowing reviews, and was in the top 10 New York Time bestsellers list for nonfiction. Congrats Gretchen!
- Tim O’Donnell presented a paper together with Shijie Wu and Ryan Cotterell at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics entitled “Morphological Irregularity Correlates with Frequency.”
- As the recipient of an Arts Research Internship Award (ARIA), linguistics undergraduate student David Shanks worked with Bernhard Schwarz and Alan Bale (Concordia) throughout the summer on a project entitled “Many and the origins of proportionality.”
- Vanna Willerton visited the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh to work with Dr. Kenny Smith.
- The Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Laboratory (MCQLL) hosted a five day workshop on grammar induction and syntax embeddings with visitors Leon Bergen (UCSD), Eva Portelance (Stanford), Daniel Harasim (EPFL), Alessandro Sordoni (MSR Montreal).