The Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia is pleased to invite abstracts for submission to the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 38) to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 6-8, 2020.
Important Dates:
- Abstract Submission deadline: October 26, 2019, 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time
- Notification of acceptance: Mid-December, 2019
Make sure to view the two papers by Dr. Athanasopoulou: ”Confusability of Mandarin Tone 3 and Tone 4: effects of focus and syllable position” & “How perceptible is the difference between Tone 3 and Tone 4 in Mandarin Chinese?”. Both papers have been published in ICPhS conference proceedings Well done!
Dr. Darin Flynn was a guest on a podcast Talk About Talk hosted by Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. The topic was the language of Profanity: Talking Taboo, so make sure to listen to this great interview here.
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Angeliki Athanasopoulou as Assistant Professor in Linguistics! She specializes in phonology and phonetics, and is especially interested in prosodic phenomena, including the manifestation of stress and focus across languages, and their acquisition. Dr. Athanasopoulou joins us after obtaining a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Delaware (’16) and working as a Senior Research Assistant in Psychology at UCSD (’16) and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychology and Linguistics at the UofC (’17–’19).
Elias Abdollahnejad
Our PhD student’s, Elias Abdollahnejad’s paper – “Persian ditransitives: Movement for specificity?” was selected for Honourable Mention, i.e. runner-up for the Best Student Paper Award at last month’s Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association in Vancouver. Congrats, Elias!
On November 15 and 16, the Linguistics Division of the SLLLC will be hosting YYC Pronouns 2019, the latest in a series of Canadian workshops on nominal structures. The workshop gathers researchers from across Canada investigating a range of topics from the morphosyntax of pronouns to the semantics of determining pronominal reference. Keynote speakers at the workshop will be Isabelle Charnavel (Harvard) and Martina Wiltschko (UBC). Additionally, on November 14th, there will be a panel discussion on the use of singular “they” and non-binary pronouns for the general public, with keynote speaker Kirby Conrod (U. of Washington).
CLA Photo Gallery
16 talks/posters by 10 grad students, 6 professors, and 3 researchers at this year’s Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Visit CLA’s website and make sure to read the program and search for any familiar names. Check out the photo gallery below!
MingYu Qiu
An MA student, Mingyu Qiu, presenting the results of her work on F0 ranges in L1 and L2 of Japanese and English speakers.
Elias Abdollahnejad
Elias, our PhD candidate, presented psycholinguistic evidence in favour of syntactic movement in his talk titled “Persian ditransitives: Movement for specificity?”
Dr. Dennis Storoshenko
Dr. Dennis Storoshenko talked about singular ‘th-‘ pronouns being used in contexts where definiteness is uncertain in his presentation titled “Plurality and Binding within the English ‘th…sel{f/ves}’ Paradigm”
Lindsay Hracs
Lindsay Hracs, a PhD candidate, talked about the integration of information that is required for understanding learning problems at the interface in her poster presentation “Revisiting the Interface Hypothesis: A theoretical discussion of its claims and predictions for Second Language Acquisition”.
Lyndon Rey
Lyndon Rey, an MA student, presented his extended Q-theory by proposing that phonological contours can be represented subsegmentally as continuous functions.
Merion Hodgson
Merion Hodgon, an MA student, gave talks on two posters – “Voice Onset Time on Plains Cree” and “Final Aspiration in Blackfoot and Plains Cree”
Mohammad Alsamaani
“Laryngeal contrast in Swahili: The role of perception,” by Mohammad Alsamaani & Dr. Steve Winters at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association 2019.
Benjamin Peng Han
PhD candidate Benjamin Han presenting work titled “Testing contexts’ effects on the Mandarin reflexive anaphor ziji’s interpretation”
Fantastic Four
Four posters at the first poster session. From left to right: Adam Daniel; Mohammad Alsamaani; Dr. Amanda Pounder, Dr. Eyup Bacanli, & Dr. Darin Flynn (not pictured); and Merion Hodgson.
The School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary invites you to the 2019 NorthWest Conference on Phonetics & Phonology. The conference will take place at the University of Calgary, September 21-22, 2019. The deadline for abstracts submission is June 16, 2019.
For more details check out the official website of the conference.
The 94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America will take place January 2-5, 2020, in New Orleans. Abstract submission deadline is June 24. For more information visit LSA2020.
2019 Faculty of Arts Award for Dr. Rittter
Congratulations to Professor Elizabeth Ritter on receiving the 2019 Faculty of Arts Award for Established Research Excellence!
Four new students will begin writing their Honours thesis the next academic year:
- Mr. Jesse Weir will be working with Prof. Storoshenko on expletive pronoun dropping in English, e.g. “Seems obvious”
- Ms. Raina Schnider will be working with Prof. Skordos on children’s inferences – reasoning with disjunction in particular
- Mr. Kody Tufts will be working with Prof. Pounder on inflectional processes in Tsuut’ina, a local Dene language
- Ms. Quinn Goddard will be working with Prof. Flynn on the prosody of Plains Cree, in a joint project with Dr. Angeliki Athanasopoulou and Ms. Merion Hodgson. Her thesis will focus on the prosody of Blackfoot, a different Algonquian language.
The 35th Northwest Linguistic Conference
AbuAmsha Duaa and Lyndon Rey will be presenting their work at Northwest Linguistic Conference, at the University of Victoria, on 26-27 April. Check out the conference program here!
2nd North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics
Dr. Storoshenko will be presenting work on Clausemate NPI Licensing in Persian, co-authored with Mahyar Nakhaei, at the 2nd North American Conference on Iranian Linguistics this week. Check the program and look for live-streaming options.
Verbatim Annual Colloquium Photo Gallery
Quinn Goddard on Plains Cree Prosody Project (Athanasopoulou & Flynn), starting a presentation with Sunday’s historic NHL broadcast in nêhiyawêwin/ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ
Dr. Elizabeth Ritter, Dr. Heather Bliss, and a Siksika elder, Ikino’motstaan Noreen Breaker, presented their database of the recorded Siksika oral stories as a part of documentation of the Blackfoot language at the ICLDC 2019 (Feb 28-March 3). View their presentation A’tsotsspommootsiiyo’p Niitsitapi’powahsin: “We help each other together with the Blackfoot language” here.
On 2-4 January, Calgary linguistics had five presenters at the Linguistics Society of America Conference 2019. Four graduate students and a faculty member, Dr. Dennis Storoshenko presented at the conference. Check below!
Mahyar Nakhaei
Our MA student, Mahyar Nakhaei presenting his research on “The Interplay of Memory and Sentence Structure on the Resolution of Persian” via Skype.
Dr. Dennis Storoshenko
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Elias Abdollahnejad
Dr. Storoshenko and Elias Abdollahnejad presented two posters: Testing Mixed Influences on Reference Resolution in Persian & On Object Position in Persian Ditransitives: Movement or Base Generation?
Lindsay Hracs
Lindsay Hracs (PhD candidate) presented her paper on the use of Generalizaed Estimating Equations to model the relationship between child and caregiver speech in the case of ‘only’.
Christina Ilse
Christina Ilse (MA) presented her paper on sociolinguistic factors in ‘benne/sijn’ variation in Early Modern Dutch at the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics meeting.
Graduate Alberta Award
Lindsay Hracs, our PhD candidate, has received Alberta Graduate Citizenship Award in recognition of her excellence in leadership and dedication to help local communities. The selection of the prestigious award is based on strict criteria that each recipient needs to meet. Each candidate needs to have a strong record of service and community engagement demonstrated through active involvement in non-profit organizations. Lindsay says she is extremely happy to have received the Award, emphasizing that this award will most certainly inspire her to continue to be an active community member. Congrats Lindsay!
The editors of the Calgary (Working) Papers in Linguistics are pleased to report that the 30th Volume is now available to read and download. The editors of this volume are Elias Abdollahnejad, Duaa Abu Amsha, Kelly Burkinshaw, Adam D. Daniel, and Brett C. Nelson. The following authors published their papers in this volume: Elias Abdollahnejad, Adam D.Daniel, Harriet K. Haggerty. CWLP is an online journal which includes contributions by faculty and students at the University of Calgary and elsewhere.
Dr. Nicolas Welch
Dr. Nicolas Welch, an alumnus of the department of Linguistics, has received a prestigious Tier 2 CRC in Change, Adaptation and Revitalization of Aboriginal Languages at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Click on the image to view an article about Dr. Welch's achievement.
Great Supervisor Award(s)
Dr. Susanne Carroll and Dr. Darin Flynn received Faculty of Graduate Studies "Great Supervisor Awards" at this year's ceremony, held on November 22, 2018.