Hiatus

March 17

Hello everyone,

Check out all new albums, here, here, here and here!!!

This issue took a while to come out, but it's now here!! With lots of pictures and many interesting news, it is a great issue! Don't forget to send us your pictures, your whereabouts and information about your new research. We want to know everything.

In order to see all posts for this month, make sure you click on 'March 2008' in 'Archives' on the left.

Jeff and Eric (current Hiatus editors)

Bonjour tout le monde,

Ce numéro a mis un moment pour sortir, mais le voici enfin!! Avec plein de photos et des nouvelles intéressantes, il s'agit d'un excellent numéro! N'oubliez pas de nous envoyer vos photos, vos nouvelles de conférences et des informations sur votre recherche. Nous voulons tout savoir.

Afin de visualiser tous les billets de ce mois-ci, assurez-vous de cliquer sur 'March 2008' dans 'Archives' à gauche de cette page. 

Jeff et Éric (vos éditeurs actuels)

Stephanie is a doctor

Stephanie Chen is a doctor. She successfully defended her thesis. Eric Mathieu was the supervisor, Audrey Li (University of Southern California) was the external examiner and Marc Brunelle, Paul HIrshbuhler and Juana Munoz-Liceras were the internal examiners.

The title of the thesis was: 'Chinese relativization: Ordering at the syntax-phonology interface.

We had great Chinese food in the evening. Check out the photo album here.

Upcoming conferences

The second Change and Variation in Canada (CVC II) conference will be held at the University of Ottawa on June 21-22, 2008. This student-led event will bring together researchers working within a variationist framework on Canadian language varieties or at Canadian institutions.  Conference website.

ADLINGA Personal Website Workshop

Every graduate student should have a personal website, so ADLINGA presented a student website workshop on Friday, March 7, from 11:30 to 2:30, in the SMD 0020 computer lab. It was taught by PhD student Neil Wick.  Neil has had his own personal web page for nearly 13 years and has personally written over 500 web pages.  He is currently the maintainer of the websites for the department’s Sociolinguistics Laboratory and for our journal, Cahiers linguistiques d’Ottawa/Ottawa Papers in Linguistics. He also has a 3-year diploma in graphic design from Durham College.

At this workshop, participantsl learned:

• How to design your site without spending any money on software.

• How to get your pages onto the University of Ottawa web server space.

• What to put on your web pages, what not to put on your web pages.

• The basic principles of how web pages are structured and why it is important to know this.

• How to add personal style to your page while making sure it works on a wide variety of computers.

• How to put IPA characters and foreign characters on your web page.

• The basics of preparing your graphics for the Internet.

The focus of the workshop was on highly practical matters.  By the end of the workshop, participants were able to have their own personal website up and running.  While the presentation and workshop were geared to graduate students, other interested parties were welcome to attend.  More information about another workshop of this type will be sent by email shortly.

Where are they now?

Martin Elsig, former visiting scholar in the department, was awarded The Haspa Foundation prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Humanities for the 2006-2007 academic year. Martin did his Ph.D work at the University of Hamburg, and spent 18 months at the University of Ottawa learning variationist methods and carrying out his doctoral research on Sociolinguistics Lab corpora. His dissertation, Diachronic aspects of syntactic variation in the interrogative system of Quebec French, was co-supervised by Professors Jürgen Meisel (U. Hamburg) and Shana Poplack.

Talks

A few of us made made presentations at the annual Atelier de Phonologie Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonology Workshop at McGill (March 14-16). Sophia Stevenson presented "[VOICE] Lessons" about voicing in Korean. Scott Mackie presented "Voiceless Stops in Love: Can Segments be Mutually Attracted?", and Jeff Mielke and Joe Roy presented "Phonetic Similarity in Ultrasound: Comparing Deterministic, Statistical and Information-theoretic Approaches".

Ana Arregui will be going to SALT at UMass on March to present a poster "Chisholm's Paradox: detaching obligations from deontic conditionals" (March 21-21), and will also be going to WCCFL at UCLA (May 16-18) to present a paper "A note on domain restriction".

Fereshteh Modaressi will be presenting "The effect of rhyme on semantic relatedness and lexical access" at the Annual Meeting of Cognitive Neuro science Society in San Francisco in April.

Shana Poplack recently gave some invited talks, and has some more scheduled:

Stability and change over four and a half centuries of real time. University of Copenhagen. (October)

Four and a half centuries of variation, stability and change: The evolution of (Canadian) French. University of Calgary. (November)

Variationist tools for the study of language change. Workshop on "Building Integrative Models of Linguistic Change", Santa Fe Institute. (February)

Diffusion without contact: Is the media a vehicle for linguistic change? Presentation for the Arts One program, Faculty of Social Sciences and the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. Carleton University. (February)

Le contact des langues provoque-t-il le changement linguistique? When does language contact lead to language change? The Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute. University of Ottawa. (February)

The role of prescription in the progression of language change. Fourth International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. University of Albany. (April)

Éric Mathieu and Bethany Lochbihler (now at McGill) will be presenting 'Wh agreement on Ojibwe: consequences for feature inheritance and the status of tense' at WSCLA (Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas), edition 13, at Kingston (Queen's University) on March 28-30.

Marie-Hélène Côté will present at the GLOW Workshop on Phonology and Gradient Facts a talk entitled 'Is Syllabification categorial or gradient? on March 25.

Éric Mathieu was an invited speaker at the Université de Genève at the beginning of March. He talked about Frenc WH in situ and prosody.

There are many students presenting at TOM (see feature below).

   

A band

There is some kind of department band.  Little is known about this.

Colloquia

We have had a lot of recent colloquia, such as:

Lisa Travis (McGill University), October 18

Jeff Mielke (University of Ottawa), November 15
"Different features do different things because they come from different places"

Jürgen Meisel (University of Calgary/University of Hamburg), December 3

Barbara Schulz (University of South Carolina), January 15
"Investigating the interaction of language processing and linguistic universals in (second) language acquisition"

Andrea Dallas (University of Florida), January 23
"L2 Use of Subcategorization Frame during Filler-gap Resolution"

Laura Sabourin (University of Ottawa), January 25
"Sentence Processing in First and Second Language Acquisition: What canERPs Tell us?"

Holger Hopp (University of Groningen), January 28
"Ultimate Attainment in L2 Inflectional Morphology: Grammatical Knowledge and Processing Performance"

Michal Starke (University of Tromsø), February 15
"What we've learnt from 30 years of Principle & Parameters (syntax does not project from the lexicon)"

LaTeX tutorial

Hélène Tourigny, Jeff Mielke, Joe Roy, and Keren Tonciulescu put on a LaTeX tutorial on January 29.  Materials from the first workshop are on the web here. The second LaTeX tutorial was on Monday March 10 at 1pm in Simard 226.

Semantics groups

A new reading group has been created this semester: The Semantics Reading Group. Participants meet every two weeks (more or less) to discuss readings in semantics. It is an informal meeting, and everybody is welcome. We are working to make semantics fun! The contact person is Keren
Tonciulescu.

The TOM Workshop

The first meeting of the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal workshop in semantics will take place on March 29-30, at the University of Toronto. It will be an informal meeting, giving members of UofT, Uottawa and McGill a chance to present ongoing research in an informal environment. The program will be announced soon. The contact person at UOttawa is Ana Arregui.