McGill was well-represented at the 2015 LSA Institute. Grads Hye-Young Bang, Guilherme Garcia, Dan Goodhue, Bing’er Jiang, Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron, Dejan Milacic and alums Elise McClay and Erin Olson (BA ’12) were participants; alums Gretchen McCulloch (MA ’13) and Yuliya Manyakina (MA ’15) ran satellite events; Morgan Sonderegger co-taught a course on modeling sound change. Here are most of them:
McGill was also well-represented at ICPhS 2015 in Glasgow, described in a separate post.
Hye-Young Bang gave talks at the International Conference on Korean Linguistics and at ICPhS, in addition to attending the LSA Institute.
Colin Brown spent a good portion of his summer in the Pacific Northwest doing research on the Gitksan language. He reunited with two consultants as well as UBC’s Gitksan lab in Vancouver, BC, before traveling to Gitksan territory for two weeks, where he worked with ten consultants in 4 villages, hiked to a glacial waterfall, and attended a (8 hour!!) stone raising feast. Upon his return to Vancouver he attended the 50th annual International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL) at UBC.
Jessica Coon spent two weeks in Chiapas with Lauren Clemens (SUNY Albany, recent McGill Post-doc), Ryan Bennett (Yale), and Cora Lesure (McGill BA). They ran two experiments in two different Ch’ol-speaking towns. One was a perceptual study, and the other was a production experiment designed to test focus-marking strategies, set up with help from Michael Wagner and with new pictures created by McGill undergraduate Blare Coughlin. The pictures are available for public use, with credit to Blare, and can be downloaded here.
McGill BA student Nadia Famularo, recent graduate Madeleine Mees, and Tibetan consultant Tashi Wangyal, traveled to UC Santa Barbara last week to present collaborative work at ICSTLL: The International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. The work grew out of the 2014 Field Methods class on Tibetan. The title of their talk (with Jessica Coon, who could not attend) was “Ergative marking in Dharamsala Tibetan”.
Guilherme Garcia finished writing a book chapter on Quebec French and English stress with Natália Brambatti Guzzo and collected data in Brazil, in addition to attending the LSA Institute.
At the beginning of May, Brendan Gillon returned from a half year sabbatical, which he spent at National Chengchi University, in Taipei, Taiwan. During his four months there, he gave seven talks on topics in linguistics and in philosophy, two of which he managed to give in his very rusty Chinese. Later, while in Paris as a member of the jury for a CNRS Habilitation he gave a talk, entitled “Quel contenu sémantique ont les classificateurs en chinois (mandarin)?” at a workshop at the Sorbonne organized by Francis Corblin.
Heather Goad finished her term as Associate Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the end of August. Together with Misha Schwartz (BA 2014), she submitted one journal article and one conference proceedings paper on the kinds of evidence available to learners when acquiring a subset grammar in phonology. She also finished two book chapters and one conference proceedings paper on the grammar and acquisition of sC clusters. Together with James Tanner (MA 2015) and Kate Shaw (BA in progress), she worked on extending the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis to the processing of inflectional morphology.
Henrison Hsieh attended the 13th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (13-ICAL) in Taipei, Taiwan this past July, as well as some of the talks held by the Linguistics Department at the University of the Philippines Diliman for their Linguistics Month activities. In addition to learning more about a lot of the current work in Austronesian linguistics, Henrison met many of the Austronesianists active in and around the Austronesian-speaking region. He is excited for opportunities to collaborate with them in the future.
Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron‘s proceedings paper from WCCFL 32, “Almost: scope and covert exhaustification” is now available online at http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/32/index.html. Oriana also attended the LSA (see above) and ICPhS (other post).
Donghyun Kim gave talks at the 2015 Linguistic Society of Korea and the 2015 Korean Society of Speech Sciences meetings, entitled “Developmental trajectories in the acquisition of novel vowel contrasts” and “The acquisition of new vowel contrasts by Korean learners of English: A longitudinal study” (both with Meghan Clayards and Heather Goad).
Mellon postdoctoral fellow Hadas Kotek presented in Generative Syntax in the Twenty-first Century: The Road Ahead in Athens, Greece, and participated in the SIAS Summer Institute: In the Armchair, in the Field, and in the Lab, which took place in Berlin. Hadas also had a number of publications: her paper on the syntax/semantics of most appeared in Natural Language Semantics (joint work with Martin Hackl and Yasutada Sudo). Her paper describing turktools, a set of free, open-source tools appeared online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (joint work with recent McGill post-doc Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine), and her paper on relative pronoun pied-piping and the syntax of restrictive vs. non-restrictive relative clauses will appear in the Proceedings of CLS 51 (PDF; joint work with Michael Y. Erlewine).
Jeff Lamontagne also gave a talk at CLA, entitled “A variationist analysis of vowel fronting in Laurentian French”.
Junko Shimoyama presented a poster at the CLA annual meeting at the Univ. of Ottawa, on her ongoing project with Alex Drummond (UMass Amherst), Bernhard Schwarz and Michael Wagner, titled “A no-source puzzle for clausal ellipsis in right dislocation, sluicing and fragments”.