MA student Maayan Adar returned to Canada on August 27th from Manila, Philippines. He spent July and August there collecting data on the syntax of several Philippine languages — T’boli, Ilokano, Ibanag, and Kapampangan. He met with speakers at UP Diliman, the national university of the Philippines, where he was a visiting research fellow. The data collected will contribute to ongoing ergativity-related research projects at McGill, which you can read more about here. Maayan also co-authored an Oxford Bibliographies Online article on ergativity with Jessica Coon, which was published this summer.
Incoming Ph.D. student Henrison Hsieh also spent his summer in the Philippines working as an RA. While there he prepared elicitation material and gathered Tagalog data for the VSO prosody project headed by Michael Wagner (funded by the FQRSC Syntactic Interfaces grant). He also collected data on a particular verbal construction in Filipino English.