Hiatus

Marie-Hélène Côté, Full Professor

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

"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

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 Kumiko_murasugi@carleton.ca.

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.

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!

 

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 : jabbou@uOttawa.ca

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:  jabbou@uOttawa.ca

Telephone: 613-562-5800, ext. 1274

Andrés goes to WSCLA

Andés Salanova will be one of the invited speakers at this year's edition of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency of the Languages of the Americas, to be held at Berkely April 5-7.

You can find information about the conference here:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~wscla/wscla-call.html

Marie-Hélène à Paris

Marie-Hélène Côté was an invited speaker at the Journé PFC, Paris 2012. You can find more information about the conference, as well as about the project "Phonologie du Français Contemporain" here:

http://www.projet-pfc.net/paris2012.html

Welcome Philip Comeau

We asked Philip to share some information about his work and research interests:

I joined the linguistics department in January as a postdoctoral fellow. Since then, I have been working under the supevision of France Martineau within the context of her MCRI project, Le français à la mesure d'un continent: un patrimoine en partage. During my MA and PhD studies at York University, I mainly focused on Acadian French (my native variety) and for this postdoctoral project, I'm studying earlier stages of Acadian French using textual data (personal letters).

Presentations by MA student, Brandon Fry

Brandon Fry (MA, expected 2013) will be giving an informal presentation at McGill on October 24th, and a presentation at the Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association at Saint Mary's University in Halifax on November 2nd entitled Particle verbs: principled explanation and PF.

 

Plenary talks and conferences: Liceras and colleagues

Juana Liceras is giving a number of plenary talks and also a number of conference presentations with colleagues at the University of Ottawa.

[1] Nelson Mendez, Raquel Llama, Raquel Fernández Fuertes, J. M. Liceras. Code-switching data and third language acquisition: insights from subject-verb mixings. 8^th. International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. University Jaume I, Castelló, Spain, September 13-15.

[2] Juana M. Liceras. Plenary talk. “Un lugar para cada cosa y cada cosa… ¿en qué lugar?: la lengua materna, el input y las técnicas de obtención de datos”. 23 Congreso Internacional de la Asociación para la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Extranjera. Universitat the Girona, Spain, September 19 – 22, 2012.

[3] Juana M. Liceras. Plenary talk. El saber ocupa, ¿qué lugar?: el acceso indirecto a las intuiciones del nativo. I Congreso Internacional Nebrija en Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de Lenguas. En camino hacie el plurilingüismo. Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain, September 28-30, 2012.

[4] Juana M. Liceras, Raquel Fernández-Fuertes, Aurora Bel, Cristina Martínez Sanz. The mental representation of gender and agreement features in child 2L1 and child L2 grammars: insights from code-switching. UIC Bilingualism Forum 2012. University of Illinois at Chicago. October 4 and 5, 2012.

[5] Juana M. Liceras, Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Lia Walsh. The 31^st. Second Language Research Forum (SLRF). Building Bridges Between Disciplines: SLA in Many Contexts. October 18-21, 2012.

[6] Juana M. Liceras, Raquel Fernández-Fuertes, Cristina Martínez Sanz. Code-mixing preferences displayed by heritage speakers and second language learners. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), University of Florida, Gainsville, October 25-28, 2012.

[7] Juana M. Liceras, Raquel Fernández Fuertes, Cristina Martínez Sanz. Heritage speakers and individual bilingualism: insights from code-switching. The Road Less Travelled: An International Conference on Heritage Languages and Language Acquisition. Victoria College, University of Toronto, October 26 and 27, 2012.

Obituary: Christian J. Adjemian

Christian  Adjemian was professor of syntax in this department from 1978 to 1988. Chris passed away from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) on August 26, 2011, at the age of 63. He was born in the south of France in 1947 of Armenian and Italian parents, and he later moved to the United States with his parents, where he obtained his doctorate at the University of Washington [Seattle] in 1978. Coming to this Linguistics Department that same year, Chris quickly gained the respect and affection of his colleagues, his grad students and his undergrads. He was an excellent teacher  and communicator of his enthusiasm for linguistic theory.

During the latter part of his time here Chris felt a calling to spread the word of God; he studied at Ottawa Theological Hall during his final years with the department. After leaving the University of Ottawa in 1988, he served a Reformed Presbyterian congregation in Perth, Ontario. In January 2000 he took up duties as Pastor of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later returned to Canada, living in Montreal.

Chris is survived by his wife Laura (née Baskerville) and by their children Tamika, Maro, Jonathan, Anna, Rachel and Stephanie.

***

My personal memory  is of a warm and happy teddy bear of a man, as robust of body as sharp of mind, a man passionate in his interests and compassionate in his dealings with others, a teacher to be envied for his easy communication with students, a friend and colleague who made the Department a richer and warmer place to be. I hear the lilting tones of his Provençal French speech echoing in the hollow he left in the Department as he went on to a calling he felt to be higher than that of a professor bound to the mere temporal delights of grammatical theory. There was much to emulate and even more to like. Chris, tu nous manques!

Ian MacKay

Thanks to Maro Adjemian for a number of biographical details and to Chris for inspiration then and now.

Ian MacKay and Chris Adjemian in the Department of Linguistics circa 1984. 

Photo credit: André Lapierre.

 

Maria Biezma - Visiting Professor at Carleton University

I teach semantics and psycholinguistics at Carleton University. In my research work, I am interested in the meaning of natural language utterances. In particular, I am interested in those constructions whose meanings do not have an obvious way of being brought about compositionally, and have often been attributed to language conventionalization. For example, I have wondered about why it is such a bad idea to propose to your partner by asking out of the blue “would you marry me or not?”, whereas “would you marry me?” is a much better idea. Or why, upon hearing “If only I were in New York”, we understand that the consequences of being in New York are somehow desired by the speaker, even though there isn’t any lexical item encoding such meaning. In order to answer these questions I usually find myself looking at the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and  intonation of constructions, and showing the need of paying attention to the formal properties of discourse.

I graduated from UMass Amherst last May and I’m now back in Ottawa. Yes, back! I did my M.A. in Linguistics at Ottawa U (2005).

Update from across the pond

We recently asked Marie-Claude Tremblay about what life is like in her new job at Newcastle University and what types of adjustments there are from being a graduate student to being on the tenure track. The good news - it's great to have a job! Some of the bigger changes are to adjust to the British university system, which is very different from the Canadian system. Did you know that any assignment or exam that counts toward the final mark needs to be double-marked by a colleague from your department as well as by someone in your field from another university in England?

In addition to getting to know the university and her colleagues, M-C has also been exploring the surrounding area. She shared some pictures us.

Another new addition! Welcome to the world baby: Part 2

Congratulations to Ekab Al-Shawashreh and his family on the birth of their son in November. His name is Sanad.

 

Sanad.

Welcome to the world!

On October 11th, Laura Sabourin and Vineet Parti welcome their little boy Nathan Mohan Parti into the world. Congratulations!

André Lapierre

André Lapierre retired on June 30, 2011, after having worked at the University of Ottawa for 45 years - before a Linguistics department was even a gleam in anyone’s eye.  While here, he served in practically every capacity possible: from Full professor of Linguistics to Chair of the department to Vice-Dean and Secretary of the Faculty of Arts to member of the Board of Governors of the University.  He shepherded Canadian Studies from the small program it was to the international institute it is now.  And the list is by no means exhaustive.

André est reconnu internationalement en tant que lexicographe, se spécialisant en toponymie, terminologie et en français canadien. Il a servi, à différentes occasions, non seulement comme président de la Société canadienne d’onomastique mais aussi de la American Name Society, et il était membre fondateur du bureau des directeurs du Conseil international des sciences onomastiques. Il est rédacteur adjoint des revues Onomastica Canadiana et Rivista italiana di onomastica, et il a largement publié dans ces revues ainsi que dans beaucoup d’autres. Il est aussi l’auteur de 4 livres. André est en grande demande en tant que consultant dans ces domaines. Il a travaillé avec les Nations Unies, le gouvernement fédéral et les Ressources naturelles Canada, entre autres, et il a même été nommé président de leur Comité consultatif de la recherche toponymique (1989-). Il a aussi travaillé de près avec des communautés des Premières nations en ce qui concerne l’attribution des noms de lieux.

For all of these and other contributions too numerous to mention, André was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008, and just last week, Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, the first geolinguist to be honored in this way.

André’s administrative responsibilities have precluded him from doing much teaching, especially during his recent mandate as Vice-Dean of the Faculty. This means that many of our current students have unfortunately never had the good fortune of having him as a teacher. He was a great one, receiving uniformly high course evaluations, which the University of Ottawa recognized by awarding him the prize for Excellence in Education in 2003.

In addition to André’s onomastic and toponymic interests, he is also a closet sociolinguist, and generously endowed the André Lapierre prize for excellence in research on sociolinguistic issues relating to French and English Canada. The very first one of these was presented to Allison Lealess on September 14 for her work on Canadian French morphology - L1 and L2.

Bref, bien que l’université et le département s’ennuyeront de toi, nous te souhaitons la meilleure des chances dans les plusieurs projets que tu as déjà planifiés pour ta retraite.  Nous gardons ta place au Labo de Sociolinguistique, ce qui veut dire qu’il faudra donc souvent venir la réchauffer.

Shana Poplack

Paul Hirschbühler

Paul Hirschbühler retired on January 1, 2011 after being a member of the Department for 33 years. He joined the Department in 1978 after obtaining his PhD in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, following studies in Romance Philology in Brussels. Paul played numerous important roles in the Department, including being Chairman for a term.

To my eyes, however, what truly defined and still defines Paul is his deep enthusiasm for syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics, which he so successfully transmitted to the numerous masters and doctoral students he supervised. Paul made important contributions to the study of relatives, told us why verbs and clitic pronouns constantly battle to be second in earlier French, etc., etc., but the Locative Alternation seemed to inspire him most profoundly.

Paul thought of opening a restaurant after a Sabbatical in Barcelona, but chose instead to entice us to consider the wonders of quantifier scope with appetizing sounding examples related to the Locative Alternation such as Luc a bardé  une caille de trois tranches de lard and Luc a saupoudré deux plats de trois épices. Paul, we know you are still pursuing your very many interests in language, food, and wine in your retirement, and we wish you well.

María Luisa Rivero

Anahí Alba de la Fuente (new part-time prof)

Anahí let us have some information about her work and research interests:

"My name is Anahí Alba de la Fuente. I was born and raised in Spain. I arrived in Canada in 2005 to work with Juana M. Liceras for my M.A. In September 2006 I started my PhD in Spanish linguistics, which I hope to finish very soon.

At the University of Valladolid, Spain, I completed two honours B.A.s (English Philology and Spanish Philology). When I was in third year, I participated in the Erasmus European exchange program, thanks to which I got to spend one year in Edinburgh, Scotland. During my exchange in Edinburgh, I decided that I wanted to focus on linguistics and language acquisition so, when I went back to Spain, I talked to one of my professors in Valladolid, Raquel Fernández Fuertes, who is also an alumni of the University of Ottawa, and she suggested working with Juana Liceras for my graduate studies. It sounded like a great idea, so I found myself in Ottawa in August of 2005 wearing a jacket and hiking boots –people had told me all about the Canadian winters but, somehow, they had forgotten to mention that it actually gets quite warm in the summer!

My doctoral research is on clitic cluster constraints, which I study from different perspectives, including theory, diachrony, language acquisition and processing.

At the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, I have taught Spanish culture and Spanish language at all levels. I am also the coordinator of the Language Acquisition Research Lab and, even though my affiliation is with the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, I have been very much in touch with the Department of Linguistics since the very beginning. I have taken most of my graduate courses in linguistics, I have participated in events and activities organized by the department and now I teach *Introduction à la syntaxe* and *Acquisition des langues secondes*.

I was recently honoured with the 2011 Part-Time Professor of the Year Award at the Faculty of Arts, which meant a lot to me because I really like teaching.

On a more personal note, I enjoy reading, watching movies, eating good food, but, most of all, I like travelling and experiencing different cultures firsthand."

 

Jimena Terraza (new part-time prof)

Jimena let us have some information about her work and research interests:

"I am a new part-time professor in the Department of LInguistics. For the last ten years I have been working on the description and documentation of an indigenous language of Argentina (my native country) called Wichi. My PhD dissertation was a grammar of this language.

In 2008, I begun work on Algonquian languages as well (mostly Innu). I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and my research is on the morphological and syntactic reflections of the 'Animacy/prominence/referential hierarchy' in the grammar of Ojibwe and other languages of the family."

Welcome Robert Truswell

Robert Truswell is new professor in linguistics. Following the Hiatus tradition, we've asked him a few questions to get to know him better.

Welcome to Ottawa!

 

When I was growing up, I wanted to be.....

I remember being asked that question all the time when I was a kid, but I never remember having an answer.  I used to say things like "fireman" or "goalkeeper" because they were socially acceptable answers, but I never meant it.  I only worked out what I wanted to be when I was 23 years old, by a slow process of elimination of pretty much every other conceivable career.

 

Before I was a linguist I was a(n)...

I worked for directory enquiries (which is an old, UK version of 411), answering 1,000 phone calls per day, each lasting an average of 22 seconds.  Before that, I worked in a factory making chocolate raisins, chocolate-coated coffee beans, etc.  My job was to hit 1,000kg of chocolate per day with a hammer, because the slabs of chocolate they'd bought in were too big for the hole in the chocolate-melting machine.

 

On a desert island, I would bring....

I'm doing really badly at this question because I'm thinking like a backpacker.  "Make sure you've got plenty of water, a stove, some dried food, sunblock".  I'd like to think I'd bring some whisky and a guitar and settle in to enjoy it, but desert islands don't work like that.  Is it cheating to bring a boat? (editors note: yes, that's cheating!)

 

Most people don't know that I.....

Got the lowest grade ever recorded in any subject in my high school.  The highest possible grade was A*, then A through C were passes, D through G were fails, and N and U were spectacular fails.  After my attempt at pottery ended up exploding in the kiln, and thereby not only destroying itself, but destroying everyone else's attempts at pottery along with it, my art teacher decided that there weren't enough letters in the alphabet to describe my ineptitude, and started inventing new ones.

 

In my free time I....

Play music, cook, eat, drink, spend time with friends and my fiancee, hike a lot, travel, play chess.  I'm pretty bad at doing nothing.

 

If I had a million dollars, I would.....

Buy a bike, and then be confused.  I'm not very materialistic.  A bit of money makes life easier, but with that sort of money I'd probably give it away and squander it on nonsense until I got back to a level I was comfortable with.

 

The professor who had the most influence on me is...

When I was a kid, I had a reputation for being a maths geek and a music geek.  The two people who had the most influence on me were my maths teacher Paul Lazenby and my piano teacher David Lang.  Paul demonstrated to me in no uncertain terms that I wasn't a mathematician, however good I was at understanding and using mathematical ideas.  David had the good grace to see that I was never going to practice the piano, and the flexibility to broaden his teaching horizons in response, to cover everything from composition and keyboard harmony through to philosophy and psychology.  Both of these people were big enough to look beyond a student who was good at "their" subject, and see what the student really needed.  Both of them made me see that spending your life doing what you do well is like the guy looking for his keys where the light is rather than where he dropped them.

 

When I die I want to be remembered as the one who...

I hope the people who remember me know me too well to pigeonhole me like that, and people who don't know me too well have better things to do than remember me.

 

How do you react when someone asks "So, you are a linguist. How many languages do you speak?"

In my very first linguistics lecture, when I was 17, Jim Hurford gave the perfect answer: "One, but I speak it very well". For some of us, that's a lie, but it gets to the point beautifully.

 

What does a linguist do?

We try to understand how language can be so simple that a 4-year-old has figured out a lot of it, but so complex that no analyst has really come close; and we try to work out what it says about us that 4-year-olds unconsciously know so much more about language than even the greatest theoretician knows consciously.

 

In a perfect world, what would you do if you were..

... A politician

I'd be disappointed in myself, and the world wouldn't be perfect.  I don't see many principled politicians gaining any real power.  So if I were a politician, chances are I'd either be unprincipled, or powerless, and that doesn't sound like fun.

 

an artist?

Well, I'd create art.  Surely it doesn't get any better than that?  I'm not a jealous person, but I'm jealous of people who that comes naturally to.

 

a student again?

Honestly, I'd probably follow my nose and end up back here again, but I'd like to think I'd know some more about areas which are currently closed to me.  Physics, economics, geology, archaeology, they're all fascinating to me, but I remain clueless about all of them.

 

List of favorites:

favorite movie(s):

It's got to be the right film at the right time.  Magnolia is so bleak and still manages to uplift me.  Pretty much everything the Coen brothers have done can make me convulse with laughter.  A Dr. Seuss film called The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T should be much better known than it is.  But how are you meant to compare these to each other, or to Yojimbo, or the Seventh Seal, or Rear Window?

 

favorite book(s):

The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov, and Ulysses by Joyce.

 

favorite food:

Just whatever's good right now.  I've arrived in Ottawa in summer.  The markets are full of good fresh veg, it's too hot to cook much, and I'm happy like that.  I'm a vegetarian with localvore tendencies, so I'm very curious to see what I'll be eating in February.  Possibly nothing.  In the UK, I always got childishly excited about wild garlic.  It's free, it tastes like someone has injected just the right amount of garlic into every single leaf of spinach, and it's one of the first non-boring foods to appear every year.  No idea what will fill the same role over here.

 

favourite hobby:                  

Hiking.  Without a doubt.  Leaving the paths behind, finding myself miles (preferably days) from anywhere, ideally on top of a mountain, and I feel tiny, but safe and refreshed.  I never think about work when I'm hiking, and hardly ever think about anything other than where I am, but when I come back I've always figured out how to deal with some problem, without having paid it any conscious attention.

 

favorite sport:

Is hiking a sport?  The only "real" sport I've ever paid attention to was baseball, when I lived in Boston in 2007-8, and the Red Sox won the World Series.  I liked it because it seemed that awkward facial hair was the most reliable predictor of a team's success.

 

Favourite place:        

Just one place?  I think Barcelona's pretty special, and the Sagrada Familia is definitely my favourite unfinished building, over 120 years into the construction.  The architecture, the lifestyle, the regional pride, the hills and the sea.  As cities go, it takes some beating.  But I'd be heartbroken if I got stuck in a city for good.  Maybe the most honest answers would be "the countryside", or "Europe".

 

What do you miss the most about X? (X = whatever you like!)

X = Edinburgh / Scotland

Edinburgh is a city defined by the way the natural world intrudes upon it.  To the east, there's Arthur's Seat, a rugged dormant volcano.  To the north, there's the sea.  To the south, the Pentland Hills.  There are six other hills or cliffs around the city.  Two green spaces, Princes St Gardens and the Meadows, were lochs until they were drained.  Edinburgh fits where it can among all that, and a lot of its unique character comes from the constraints that nature imposes on it.

 

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland, which is only a small country.  It's a 6-hour drive from Edinburgh to the north coast, and the population is around 5 million.  However, 3.5 million of those live in a small area, roughly 50 miles across, around Edinburgh and Glasgow.  Outside of this, and a couple of other population centres, Scotland is basically wilderness: even within this small area, quite a few journeys cannot be made by any means in less than a couple of days.  By Canadian standards, that's nothing, of course, but that's really the point.  Canada is so vast and so empty that it confuses me.  Scotland is empty enough for you to feel like you've reached the middle of nowhere with a bit of effort, but then you're back in civilization a couple of days later.  It's mountainous land, but rarely dangerous at any time of year.  A very human-sized wilderness.  I think I'm going to miss that.

 

What do you like most about Ottawa?

So far, the water, and the wildlife.  My fiancee found a pretty huge snapping turtle in the fast lane of Sussex Drive on my first night here.  We don't have those in Scotland.  The landscape around here is completely different to what I'm used to, and right now, that's exciting.  I don't yet know what I like here, but there's a load to explore.  What I'm really looking forward to is winter, though.  I love the cold.  My interview was in early February, and I still came back.

 

Tomorrow is the end of the world. What would you do today?

Carry on.  What's the point of doing something special that you wouldn't ever have a chance to look back on?  I'd hate to think that I wouldn't be happy when it ended, but I'm normally happy.

 

You are going to live another 500 years. How are you going to spend  this time?

Trying to find a cure for such a long life.  I would very much like to have a full, happy, and healthy life, but my three score years and ten are a scale I can handle, and I'd be lost with the other 430.

 

What is a good student to you?

The obvious part is independence: a good student might challenge you, stand up for their ideas, think for themselves, or draw connections that no-one suggested to them.  But the other part is a constructive mindset.  It's much easier to tear holes in theories than to build new ones, and a really good student is not only independent, but also has the knack of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  We're not just in the business of peddling ideas about language.  Ideally, we're also helping students to engage in constructive, critical, logical, evidence-based reasoning about any complex question.  It's an absolute joy when you see that kind of thinking in a student.

 

What is a good graduate student to you?

A good student who graduated.  The undergrad/grad dichotomy is a false one where I come from.  But that kind of reasoning takes time to develop, and grad students have just had more practice at it.

 

Were you an obedient child?

Mainly, yes.  I went off the rails when I was 10 years old, and mercifully got all my bad behaviour out of the way at an age when I was too young to do anything really stupid.

 

What is your greatest achievement in your life?

I'm 32 years old.  I'm quite proud of how I live my life but I wouldn't consider anything to be great just yet.

 

Were you a good working student?

Occasionally.  I was an undergrad at Oxford, where hard work is pretty much compulsory.  Every week, I had to write two 2,000-word essays, do a couple of translations, and read half a dozen novels or plays plus criticism (I was studying French literature) and enough linguistics texts to get my head round the next essay topic, for most of my time there.  But I never worked specifically for good grades, and I was really puzzled when everyone else hid in the library to revise for exams.  I remember it as a pretty relaxed time with a constant undercurrent of things that just had to be done.  In the end, I got a first, which is the highest class of degree, but I only just got a first, and I feel vindicated by that.

 

What do you appreciate the most in men?

Just make me laugh, be reasonable, be honest, and it helps if you have similar taste to me, in music, food, drink, in particular.

 

What do you appreciate the most in women?

The same as men.

 

What is your greatest quality?

I have about as many great qualities as I do great achievements.  You'd have to ask my fiancee if there's anything great about me at all, but she's biased.

Bienvenue Édson Reis Meira

Édson est un post-doctorant qui travaille avec Maria-Luisa Rivero.

Chercheur brésilien, licencié de lettres classiques de l'Université de São Paulo (1997-2001). Il a debuté ses recherches scientifiques en 2000, en traduisant un traité de Plutarque. Après cela, il a fait un postgrade en linguistique historique à l'Université de Théssalonique, en Grèce (2001-2003). Sa dissertation de postgrade porte sur le processus de remplacement de l’infinitif par des formes finies dans le dialecte cypriote du Moyen Ȃge. Il a obtenu son doctorat en 2010 au sein du Département de Linguistique de l’Université d’Athènes. Sa thèse doctorale concerne l’évolution de l’infinitif depuis les premiers témoignages de la langue grecque jusqu’au grec moderne et trois de ses dialectes (le tsaconien, le pontique et le grec du Sud de l’Italie). Il était boursier des fondations grecques Kosta & Elenis Ourani (2001-2004) et IKY (2004-2008). Il a participé à des divers congrès scientifiques et il a publié assez d’articles sur des aspects évolutifs du grec. À présent il mène une recherche postdoctorale sous la direction  de Madame Maria Luisa Rivero à l’Université d’Ottawa, avec une bourse du Bureau Canadien de l’Éducation Internationale (BCEI). Cette recherche porte sur la modalité dans l’histoire de la langue grecque. Il s’intéresse à la dialectologie du grec, du portugais et de l’arabe.    

 

Merci Édson!

Eta Schneiderman

Eta Schneiderman retired on June 30, 2010 after being a member of the Department for 34 years. She joined the Department of Linguistics on July 1, 1976 at the tender age of 26. She came to us from OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, shortly after obtaining her PhD in Linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Eta served as Chair of Linguistics during a period when the department occupied temporary quarters (without air conditioning!) and then moved into our present location. She did a great deal of work to ensure that our space in the Arts Building was sufficient for our needs; it didn't come easy and we have much to thank her for. Additionally, Eta instigated the system of assistantships. Eta participated fully in all levels of our programs, from teaching first year courses to supervising numerous masters and doctoral candidates. Eta's interests were broad but focused mostly on neurolinguistics and neurologically-based disorders of language. We salute her and wish her well as she pursues a number of interests in her retirement. All the best, Eta.

Ian Mackay

Welcome Michael Barrie

Mike Barrie is joining us this year as a visiting professor. Following the Hiatus tradition, we've asked him a few questions to get to know him better.

How would you complete the sentence...

When I was growing up, I wanted to be.....

A bunch of different things: a pilot, an actor, a business man (because whenever I saw limousines on TV they looked comfortable to ride in), a scientist, and a store clerk (because cash registers looked they would be fun to use).

On a desert island, I would bring....

a café (that's right...the whole thing, complete with barista)

Most people don't know that I.....

collect demi-tasses

 

In my free time I....

 sing in a choir

If I had a million dollars, I would.....

do something really boring like put most of it into RRSPs, but set up a small trust with the rest with the proceeds going to various charities

How do you react when someone asks "So, you are a linguist. How many languages do you speak?"

I simply answer the question now without elaborating. Nine times out  often the person goes on to ask something else about what I do which allows me clear up the myth.

 

In a perfect world, what would you do if you were..

     an artist?

 Be composer-in-residence for a symphony orchestra

 

    a student again?

 take physics and/or music

 

List of favorites:

favorite movie(s): Death Becomes Her, Kung Fu Mahjong II

favorite book(s): Catcher in the Rye

favorite food: Rack of lamb

favorite sport: Don't really have one

 

 What do you miss the most about X? (X = whatever you like!)

 X=Toronto, the cafés

 X=Vancouver, the Asian food

 

 What do you like most about Ottawa?

 the museums

 

 Tomorrow is the end of the world. What would you do today?

 Go back to see my family and go out for a really nice dinner

 

 You are going to live another 500 years. How are you going to spend  this time?

 Do music professionally

 Study physics

 

 What is a good student to you?

 One whose heart is engaged in learning

 

 What is a good graduate student to you?

 One from whom I can learn something

 

 What is your greatest achievement in your life?

 I hope it's yet to come...

 

 Were you a good working student?

 For the most part...but I would be a better one now...

 

 What is your greatest quality?

 I suppose my tenacity.

Welcome!

We would like to welcome all new graduate students to the department. You will find some of their names below:

Abdulrahman Alamri

Saleh AlQahtani

Michele Burkholder

Jean Bruno Chartrand

William Dalton

Laura Katronic

Lyra Magloughlin

Welcome everyone!