Hiatus

New Hiatus Address

Hello everyone,

From February 2013, the Linguistics Department Newsletter Hiatus will have a new home. The new address is:

http://artsites.uottawa.ca/hiatus/

Please update your bookmarks!

Hiatus for new students/ Hiatus pour nouveaux étudiants

Welcome to new students! Hiatus for new students here:

http://hiatus.typepad.com/hiatuswelcome/

Bienvenue aux nouveaux étudiants! Hiatus pour nouveaux étudiants ici:

http://hiatus.typepad.com/hiatusbienvenue/

 

February 15

Hi everyone,

Here is the new issue of Hiatus. Please send me your news for the next issue (conferences, papers coming out, interesting talks, etc.). Don't be shy.

your editor,

Ana

 

Marie-Hélène Côté, Full Professor

Marie-Hélène Côté, chair of our department, is now a Full Professor (retroactive to March 1 2012). Congratulations!

Tharanga Weerasooriya and Eric Mathieu go to FASAL

Tharanga Weerasooriya and Eric Mathieu will be presenting their paper "Wh in situ and prosody: the case of Sinhala" at the 3rd Formal Approaches to South-East Asian Languages workshop (FASAL 3). The conference will take place at USC on March 9 - 10. You can find the program here:  Download FASAL3_final_program.

"Syntax and its Limits", forthcoming in OUP (Rob Truswell editor)

Rob Truswell, together with Raffaella Folli and Christina Sevdali (University of Ulster), is editor of a book forthcoming in OUP: "Syntax and its Limits" (the book should be out by the end of the year). It is a collection of papers that aim to clarify the division of labor between syntax and neighbouring components (morphology, semantics, information structure and the lexicon). Here is the table of contents:

1 Syntax and its limits Raffaella Folli, Christina Sevdali, and Robert Truswell
2  Harmonic derivationalism Winfried Lechner
3  Reconstruction, control, and movement Robert Truswell
4  Linearizing empty edges Terje Lohndal and Bridget Samuels
5  Evidence for the use of verb telicity in sentence comprehension Erin O’Bryan, Raffaella Folli, Heidi Harley, and Thomas G. Bever
6 Focus intervention in declaratives Aviad Eilam
7  Root phenomena as interface phenomena: Evidence from non-sententials Cecile De Cat
8  ‘Contrast’ and its relation to wa in Japanese and nun in Korean Reiko Vermeulen
9  Adjuncts within words and complex heads Glyne Piggott and Lisa deMena Travis
10  Still puzzled by adjectival passives? Berit Gehrke
11  The role of syntax in stress assignment in Serbo-Croatian Boban Arsenijevic and Marko Simonovic
12  Allosemy, idioms, and their domains: Evidence from adjectival participles Elena Anagnostopoulou and Yota Samioti
13  The ‘No Agent Idioms’ hypothesis Heidi Harley and Megan Stone
14 On the syntax and semantics of the Japanese comparative Hazel Pearson
15  Bare number Theodora Alexopoulou, Raffaella Folli, and George Tsoulas
16  Obligatory resumption in Greek free and restrictive relatives Evangelia Daskalaki and Marios Mavrogiorgos
17  Ethical datives: A puzzle for syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces Dimitris Michelioudakis and Eleni Kapogianni
18  The syntacticization of discourse Liliane Haegeman and Virginia Hill
19  A syntactic answer to a pragmatic puzzle: The case of asymmetric and Bronwyn Moore Bjorkmam

Psychoshorts call for papers

 

Psychoshorts Call for Papers

Abstracts for a one-day conference will be considered in all areas of psycholinguistics including sentence processing, L1 and L2 acquisition and processing, perception, production, as well as in neurolinguistics and clinical linguistics.

Abstracts should be anonymous and limited to a maximum of 400 words. Submissions by graduate students are particularly welcome. Talks will be limited to 15 minutes and can be in English or French. More completed work will be considered for talks. There will also be a poster session, during which researchers are encouraged and welcome to present works in progress and project proposals. Please indicate on your submission whether you would prefer to give a talk or present a poster.

The morning will begin with a methodological workshop given by Dr. Alain Desrochers of the Department of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. He will be presenting an interactive session on how to build an experiment and the various methodologies used in psycholinguistics.

The deadline for submission is February 14, 2013. Please submit your abstracts to [email protected]. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 18, 2013.

For more information and instructions on how to submit abstracts please see our website: http://artsites.uottawa.ca/psychoshorts

Important Dates:

Abstract Deadline: Feb. 14, 2013

Notification of acceptance: Feb. 18, 2013

Conference: Mar. 1, 2013

 

 **********************

Appel à contributions pour Psychoshorts

Les propositions de contributions en provenance de tous les domaines de la psycholinguistique seront prises en considération pour la journée d’étude, y compris le traitement des phrases, l’acquisition et le traitement chez les locuteurs L1 et L2, la perception, la production, la neurolinguistique et la linguistique clinique.

Les propositions doivent être anonymes et limitées à 400 mots. Les contributions d’étudiants des cycles supérieurs sont particulièrement les bienvenues. Seuls les travaux plus complets seront considérés pour les communications orales, lesquelles pourront avoir lieu en français ou en anglais et seront limitées à 15 minutes. La journée d’étude inclura aussi une séance d’affiches, au cours de laquelle les chercheurs seront encouragés à présenter leur recherche en cours et leur proposition de projet. Veuillez s'il vous plaît indiquer sur votre demande si vous préférez présenter ou participer à la séance d’affiche.

La matinée débutera avec un atelier méthodologique offert par Dr. Alain Desrochers, professeur au Département de Psychologie de l'Université d'Ottawa. Cette session interactive portera sur la façon de concevoir une expérience scientifique et sur les différentes méthodes employées en psycholinguistique.

La date limite pour nous faire parvenir vos propositions de contributions est le 14 février 2013. Veuillez s'il vous plaît nous les transmettre à l'adresse [email protected]. Les avis d’acceptation seront envoyés avant le 18 février 2013.

Pour plus d’information sur la rédaction et l’envoi des propositions, veuillez visiter notre site Web: http://artsites.uottawa.ca/psychoshorts

Dates importantes:

Date limite d’envoi des propositions : 14 février 2013

Date limite de réception des avis d’acceptation: 18 février 2013

Conférence: 1^er mars 2013

Department photo-board

We are currently assembling a photo-board with pictures of members of the Linguistics Dept. at OttawaU. If you would like to participate, please send an email with a picture file of good resolution to Ana (ana.arregui-at-uottawa.ca) by February 20. Clarify that it is for the photo-board.

David-Etienne Bouchard (post-doc in our department)

David-Etienne Bouchard is a post-doc in our department. We asked him to tell us about himself:

"I am a recent graduate from McGill University (December 2012), where I wrote my thesis called “Long-Distance Degree Quantification and the Grammar of Subjectivity” under the supervision of prof. Bernhard Schwarz. My work is primarily at the syntax-semantics interface, and sometimes squarely in semantics. My main research area is the semantics of degree operators such as the comparative and superlative morphemes, intensional degree operators like too and enough, etc., particularly when they appear in non-canonical positions as they do in Québec French. My more recent work also examines the representation of subjectivity in the grammar. There I use the behavior of opinion verbs like to find to show that judge-dependency should be modeled as an additional index on the interpretation function, rather than as covert pronominals present in the syntax."

Thomas G. Bever at Carleton University

*Thomas G. Bever*, Professor of Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Language Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona Tucson, will be at Carleton University *Mon. March 11-Thurs. March 14, 2013* as part of the Faculty of Arts and Social 
Science’s Distinguished Visitor Program. Dr. Bever is one of the world’s leading scholars on the formal, psychological and biological properties of natural language. His visit is being hosted by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies, the Institute of Cognitive Science, 
and the Department of Psychology.

Dr. Bever will be giving four lectures during his visit, and will also be available for meetings with individuals and groups. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with him please contact Kumiko Murasugi at [email protected].

The preliminary schedule and topics of his talks are as follows:

*Linguistics lecture*
Date: Mon. Mar. 11
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
Location: 100 St. Patrick’s Building
Topic: The acquisition constraint on languages, which accounts for 
canonical forms and certain alleged linguistic universals, e.g. the EPP.

*Psychology lecture*
Date: Tues. Mar. 12
Time: TBD
Location: 2017 Dunton Tower
Topic: Familial handedness and genetics of neurology of language and music.

*Cognitive Science lecture*
Date: Wed. Mar. 13
Time: 3:00-4:30 pm
Location: 238 Tory Building
Topic: The golden mean and depth perception

*Interdisciplinary lecture for a general audience*
Date: Thurs. Mar. 14
Time: 3:00-4:30 pm
Location: 180 University Centre
Topic: Linguistic universals, combining aspects of each of the three 
previous talks.

February 1 2013

Hi everyone! Here is the new Hiatus. Thanks to Rebecca McIntyre and Gita Zareikar for their contributions. The next issue will be out on February 15. Send me your news!

Your friendly editor,

Ana

Talks and presentations

Here is a list of talks and presentations for this semester:

January 28:

Jamie White, Title: TBA, 2:30 - 4, Arts 509. 

February 1:

Robin Dodsworth, Title: TBA, 11:30 - 1, Arts 509.

February 4:

Rebecca Morley, Title: TBA, 2:30 - 4, Arts 509.

February 8:

Ewan Dunbar, Title: TBA, 11:30 - 1, Arts 509.

March 22:

David-Etienne Bouchard (to be confirmed)

April 5:

Krista Byers-Heinlein, "Building two lexicons from scratch: The case of bilingual infants", 2:30, Arts 509. 

Stay tuned for further details!

 

Syntax-Semantics Reading Group Schedule

The schedule for the next few meetings of the Syntax-Semantics reading group looks like this:

February 1: Presentations by  Saleh AlQahtani and Tharanga Weerasooriya.

February 18: Presentations by Saleh AlQahtani and Nicté Fuller Medina.

March 8: Presentations by Ewelina Frackowiak and Brandon Fry.

The meetings take place at 10 am in Arts 523. Please contact Rob Truswell if you would like to present or just have more information. Everyone is welcome!

ADELSA apparel

ADELSA rocks some pretty sweet apparel.  It’s a great memento of the school year, as each year we offer something different, and always in a new colour.  It makes a great birthday gift or grad gift.  This year, we will have four options:
1) Teal t-shirt saying “Je veux etre un schwa, parce qu’il est jamais stresse”  (I wish I was a schwa, because it’s never stressed)  $20.00
2) Grey t-shirt saying “this is a wug.  Now there are two.  There are two ___” $20.00
3) Burgundy hoodies with a zipper saying linguistics in IPA in French and
English on the back $45.00
4) Underwear – pink with teal edging, saying “I’d tap that” using the IPA tap $10.00

Order forms will be available on ouwebsiteshortly:

 http://adelsauottawa.weebly.com

LaTeX tutorial January 22nd: report

Joe Roy and Rob Truswell ran a LaTeX tutorial on Monday 22nd for approximately 15 graduate students. It was a great success, and LaTeX was learned. Rob held a second tutorial on January 28th for those unable to attend the first. So, if you still do not know LaTeX, it is NOT their fault.

 

Ana Arregui, traveling semanticist

Ana Arregui gave an invited talk at the "What if?" opening conference at the University of Konstanz (title: "Some things change, some stay the same: evaluating similarity in counterfactuals") on October 27 2012 (conference details here). Ana also gave an invited talk at the Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop (title: "Indexical anchoring in conditionals") on December 8 2012 (conference details here). Ana presented joint work with Marisa Rivero and Andrés Salanova at a UBC colloquium on January 11 2013 (title: "The imperfect: from times to worlds in different languages"), details here.

Upcoming ADELSA events

1) ADELSA Ski Trip will be taking place on Friday February 8.  Tickets will be on sale in the ADELSA office during office hours (pop by even when it’s not our office hours, there’s usually someone in there) as well as in Cafe Alt on Monday Feb 4 from 10-4.  We welcome everyone – friends, roommates, everyone. Ticket prices to be announced shortly on our website and Facebook group.

2) ADELSA Wine and Cheese will be taking place on February 28.  Tickets are $5.  We have rented out the Pour House in the Byward Market.  First 50 tickets will include a glass of wine, and there will be veggie and cheese platters there.  It’s a great way to relax with your classmates and friends – you can bring people not in linguistics.

3) Taste Party is taking place Friday March 15.  Proceeds will go to Relay for Life.  It’s a cool event where you can change your perception of food using a miracle berry.  We’ll provide all sorts of fruits and candies and other cool things to taste, and you can order a drink to see how it changes.

Lastly, as we are coming to the end of the school year, if you are interested in joining the ADELSA team to make all this fun happen, details will be distributed through the faculty of Arts about elections for student associations.  We will post details on our website and on facebook as soon as the faculty gives them to us.

If you have any questions about any of these things, or would just like toget in touch with ADELSA, you can contact us at: [email protected]

http://adelsauottawa.weebly.com

Sarra Ghazel: PhD defense

Sarra Ghazel has successfully defended her PhD dissertation on January 11. 

Thesis title: Cognitive Architectures in Morphological Processing: Acquisition and Attrition

PhD in Cognitive Science at Carleton University.

Co-supervisor: Laura Sabourin

Co-supervisor: Jo-Anne Lefevre

Sarra did her BA in linguistics at the University of Ottawa before moving to Carleton to continue with her graduate work. Congratulations!

 

ADELSA scholarship

This year, ADELSA is offering two Golden Wug scholarships to students. Students who are interested in this scholarship are encouraged to check out the guidelines that will be listed on the ADELSA website as well as on Facebook.  Submissions will be due March 27.

http://adelsauottawa.weebly.com

Natural Language Processing reading group

The NLP reading group meets every two weeks (more or less) to discuss papers of interest in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Participants include profs and students from the Computer Sciences Dept. and the Linguistics Dept. Everyone is welcome! If you would like more information, please contact Stan Szpakowicz (professor at the Computer Science Dept). 

The next meeting will take place on January 31, at 10 am in SITE 5084. You can find information about the paper and upcoming meetings here: http://thecookiegroup.blogspot.ca

MOT Call for papers: reminder

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa will host the MOT (Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto) Phonology Workshop March 15-17, 2013. Abstracts on any topic in phonology (including interfaces with phonetics and morphosyntax) should be submitted electronically. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words, including examples and references. 

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: Friday, February 1, 2013. 

Send abstracts to:
Marie-Hélène Côté <[email protected]>

Please circulate this call for papers among your colleagues and students. The call is reproduced in this document (Download Call-MOT13), which you are invited to print and post.

Hope to see you in Ottawa!

Marc Brunelle, Marie-Hélène Côté, John Jensen



APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS

Le département de linguistique de l'Université d'Ottawa accueillera l'atelier de phonologie MOT (Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto) les 15, 16 et 17 mars 2013. Les résumés, portant sur n'importe quel aspect de la phonologie (incluant les interfaces avec la phonétique et la morphosyntaxe), doivent être envoyés électroniquement. Les résumés ne doivent pas dépasser 500 mots, incluant les exemples et les références.

Date limite pour la soumission des résumés: le vendredi 1 février 2013.

Faites parvenir les résumés à:
Marie-Hélène Côté <[email protected]>

Veuillez faire circuler cet appel à communications parmi vos collègues et étudiants. L'appel de soumission est reproduit ici ( Download Appel-MOT13).  Vous êtes invités à l'imprimer et à l'afficher.

Au plaisir de vous voir à Ottawa!

Marc Brunelle, Marie-Hélène Côté, John Jensen

TOM call for papers (reminder)

The sixth meeting of the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal workshop in semantics will take place at McGill on March 23rd. This is an informal meeting and a great opportunity to meet profs and students from other departments. Abstract deadline is February 1st. You will find more information about the workshop here:

https://sites.google.com/site/tom6mcgill/home

Contact person for this event = Ana Arregui.

Dr. Julie Abbou: Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies

L’Institut d’études des femmes a le plaisir d’annoncer l’arrivée de Mme Julie Abbou (Ph.D.), à titre de Chercheure invitée de la Banque de Montréal en études des femmes. La durée du séjour de Mme Abbou est de janvier au 15 mai 2013. Nous vous invitons à venir faire sa connaissance.

 

Mme Abbou est docteure en linguistique de l’Université de Provence (France). Dans le cadre de sa thèse, elle a travaillé sur le genre linguistique comme continuation des relations de pouvoir articulées par le genre social. Elle s’est intéressée à des pratiques discursives présentes dans le milieu anarchiste dont l’objet est la remise en question politique du genre, analysé en termes de relations de pouvoir. L’étude de ces perturbations linguistiques l’a conduite à explorer des questions telles que le métadiscours et la notion d’autorité dans la parole d’expertise, les différents niveaux d’ancrages linguistiques et sémantiques du genre, les liens entre anarchisme et féminisme, les micropolitiques linguistiques et plus largement la périphérie en tant que lieu du politique, ainsi que les rapports de normes et de pouvoir en langue.

 

Un séjour postdoctoral à l’Université Polytechnique de Hong Kong lui a permis de poursuivre ces pistes de recherches, tout en développant un projet sur le genre en cantonais et sur la représentation des femmes chinoises comme moteur de la construction des identités hongkongaises.

 

Son séjour à l’Institut d’étude des femmes est consacré à une réflexion sur les imbrications entre langue, genre et pouvoir dans le contexte canadien francophone et sur les pratiques de remise en question de ces trois élaborations politiques, en appuyant sa réflexion sur une lecture rhétorique d’un contexte sociolinguiste large, comprenant aussi bien les rapports affectifs aux langues en présence que les institutions de la langue, l’histoire politique, intellectuelle et éditoriale et le paysage féministe.

 

Vous pouvez rejoindre Mme Abbou :

Bureau : FSS 11043 (120, rue Université)

Courriel : [email protected]

Téléphone : 613-562-5800, poste 1274

 

*****************************************

The Institute of Women’s Studies has the pleasure of announcing the arrival of Dr. Julie Abbou as our Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar in Women’s Studies. The duration of Dr. Abbou’s mandate will be from January to May 15, 2013. We invite you to come and meet her.

 

Julie Abbou holds a PhD in linguistics from the Université de Provence (France). For her dissertation, she worked on linguistic gender as an extension of power relations articulated by social gender. She studied discursive practices in the anarchist milieu the object of which is to challenge gender politics, analyzed in terms of power relations. Her research on these linguistic disruptions led her to explore questions such as meta-discourse and the notion of authority in the speech of expertise, the different levels of linguistic and semantic embedding of gender, the links between anarchism and feminism, micro-level language planning, and, more broadly, the periphery as a site of politics, as well as the relations between norms and power in language.

 

A postdoctoral visit to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University enabled Dr. Abbou to continue with these avenues of research, as she developed a project on gender in Cantonese and on the representation of Chinese women as engines of the construction of Hong Kong identities.

 

During her stay at the Institute of Women’s Studies, Dr. Abbou will reflect on the overlaps among language, gender, and power in the Canadian Francophone context and on the practices that challenge these three political formulations, basing her analysis on a rhetorical reading of a broad socio-linguistic context, including affective relations with the languages under consideration; language institutions, political, intellectual, and publishing history; and the feminist landscape.

 

To reach Dr. Abbou:

Office: FSS 11043 (120 University St.)

Email:  [email protected]

Telephone: 613-562-5800, ext. 1274

January 15 2013

Hello everyone! Welcome to a new semester of Hiatus! We would love to have your news. Let us know what you have been up to (conferences, papers, research trips, etc.). And also send along other interesting linguistics news you would like to share.

Your editor for this semester,

Ana

Carleton Speaker Series: Tania Zamuner (Jan. 18th, 4pm)

Exploring the role of production in language development

Tania Zamuner, University of Ottawa

Jan. 18th, 2013
4 p.m.
Location: Paterson 111 

This event is sponsored by School of Linguistics and Language Studies

http://www1.carleton.ca/slals/cu-events/speaker-series-dr-tania-zamuner

 Abstract:  Exploring the role of production in language development

As children learn language, they spontaneously produce the speech of those around them. This work explores what function and impact these productions have for the development of learners' phonological and lexical representations. One central issue is whether production is a mechanism that supports language learning. A second issue is whether production impacts learners' representations. If so, this should be reflected in language processing. Learners should be faster or more accurate at perceiving words that they have produced. To examine these issues, I will discuss data from an experimental study looking at the impact of production on word learning, and discuss the issues from a psycholinguistics perspective.