The Concordia Linguistics Faculty, of the Dept. of Classics, Modern
Languages and Linguistics, invite you to join us for the following
presentation.

Speaker: Diane Massam, Professor, Linguistics Dept., University of Toronto

Abstract:

Are There Subjects and Predicates in Niuean?

Since Aristotle, it has been considered that all natural language
sentences consist of a subject and a predicate. Niuean, a Polynesian
language spoken in Niue and New Zealand shakes the foundations of this
claim. First, Niuean has verb-initial word order, so that a sentence
like She likes it is spoken as Likes she it. In this word order
subject/predicate structure is unclear, since the subject interrupts the
putative predicate. Second, Niuean has ergative case marking, wherein
the agent of an intransitive sentence has the same case as the patient
of a transitive sentence, rather than the same case as the agent of a
transitive sentence, as in nominative case marking systems as in
English. For example, while in English we say She touched her/She ran,
in Niuean, the system is akin to She touched her/Her ran. Such case
systems also raise questions about the nature of subject/predicate
structure, since they fail to uniquely identify a subject across
sentence types. I present an analysis of Niuean grammar that allows us
to maintain subjecthood and predication as universal, although we have
to modify our views of these concepts in order to include the full range
of language types.

Time: Friday, March 15, 17h00.

Place: Concordia Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), room H-527.

Dr. Kristine Onishi is a very enthusiastic professor from McGill’s Psychology Department.  She will be giving a talk on the subject of interpreting other people’s intentions through language.  A fascinating and (maybe) intuitive topic that makes for a great friday talk.

Reading Communicative Intent In Infacy

Infants seem to understand that others have internal states that underlie observable behaviour. Do they also understand that these internal states play a role when people communicate with each other? I’ll describe data suggesting they do, and that they also understand some constraints on the updating of internal states.

everyone is welcome.

Time: Friday, March 8, 14h00.
Place: Concordia Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), room H-527.

We are very happy to welcome Professor Charles Boberg (McGill) as our first academic speaker of the semester. The following is an abstract of his upcoming talk. Everyone is welcome to join.

This paper reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English.  The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis.  Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified, which were first reported in Boberg (2004).

After discussing the historical development of Montreal’s English-speaking community, the present paper undertakes an apparent-time analysis of these differences, to see whether they are getting smaller over time, as might be expected under the assumption that post-immigrant generations gradually assimilate to the linguistic and cultural patterns of their adopted homelands.  While Jewish Montrealers show some signs of convergence with the British-origin standard, Italians appear to be diverging from that model: on several measures, the speech of young Italians is further away from Standard Canadian English than that of their parents.  It is suggested that the unusual persistence and even intensification of ethno-phonetic variation in English-speaking Montreal reflects both the residential and social self-segregation of its ethnic communities and the local dominance of French, which reduces contact between non-British speakers and native Canadian English varieties.

Time: Friday, February 8, 14h00.
Place: Concordia Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), room H-527.