accented pronouns
Handout for the talk we’ll be presenting at CLS today:
Elise McClay & Michael Wagner: Accented unambiguous English pronouns: Complementary Preference, Parallel function, or Focus?
Comments welcome!
two papers on intonational tunes
… to be presented next week at semdial:
Daniel Goodhue, James Pickett and Michael Wagner. English reverse prosody in re- sponses to yes-no questions. Proceedings of Semantics of Dialogue (Semdial). [paper]
Wagner, Michael, Lauren Mak and Elise McClay. Incomplete Answers and the Rise- Fall-Rise Contour. Proceedings of Semantics of Dialogue (Semdial). [paper]
Dorit Abusch and Mats Rooth Talks
Dorit Abusch and Mats Rooth will give talks as part of a special issue of the Semantics Reading Group this Thursday, October 10, Leacock 738.
2.30-3.45pm Mats Rooth (Cornell University): Focus over new, farmer sentences, and directionality in focus licensing.
3.45pm Refreshments
4.00-5.15pm Dorit Abusch (Cornell University): Anaphoric relations in sequential and conflated pictures
Everybody is welcome.
Prosodylab Aligner Demo Pt 2
Next in our series of tutorial videos is how to use the options available through the Prosodylab Aligner, like using a different phonetic dictionary or training new models. Take a look if you’re interested & want to know more!
Prosodylab Aligner Demo
For those of you who are interested in using theProsodylab Aligner and are new to using Unix and/or Terminal on your computer, we’ve started making a series of video tutorials to show you how to use this software on your own. The videos will cover some basics and not-so-basics, from how to run the Aligner through Terminal to how to clean and prepare your data for training the Aligner on new models.
First in the series is an intro to the Aligner: what is it, what does it do, and how can you run it?
linguistics olympiad
This year, we are once again organizing a session of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, to be held at McGill on January 31. This is a fun competition that is a great way for us get some high school and cegep students (up to 12th grade) exposed to the field of linguistics. If you know of anyone who’d be interested, please forward this message.
Participation is free. No previous knowledge is required. More information and many practice problems are posted at the naclo website.
If you know any students at high schools or cegeps in the Montréal area who might be interested, please forward them this information. Students can register online until January 30 at 3pm, and we also accept walk-ins on the day of the contest.
The first round of the contest will take place on Thursday, Januar 31, from 10am to 1pm at McGill University (sign in starting at 9:15am; directions can be found at our website (see below). Students who perform well on the first round will be invited back for a second round, to take place on March 13. The winners of the invitational round will be eligible to represent North America at the International Linguistics Olympiad.
Check out the McGill Website for more information, or contact us at naclo.montreal@gmail.com.
Note: Currently the North American Olympiad is only held in English. If you are interested in developing materials in French for future years, we can put you in touch with the organizers of NACLO, who expressed interest in trying to make materials available in French as well.
experimental linguistics at mcgill
Note that the deadline for applications to our graduate programs is approaching fast: December 15!. Here’s some information about recent changes in our program.
More …a givenness illusion
This paper (which went online at the journal site a year ago) has now officially appeared:
Michael Wagner (2012). A givenness illusion. Language and Cognitive Processes 27 (10). 1433–1458
*Constituents that encode information that is salient in the discourse or “given” are often prosodically reduced and remain unaccented. What is given and new is usually defined at the level of meaning: given expressions are those that refer to salient referents or predicates that have been made salient by the previous discourse. This paper presents evidence from two production studies that sometimes, a constituent that semantically should be contrastive, and hence accentable, is treated prosodically as if it was given, and placing an accent on it is consistently avoided—an illusory case of givenness. This effect can be explained by assuming that givenness is not only evaluated in terms of semantic content, but also at the phonological level. Prosodically marking a semantic contrast requires the presence of a phonological contrast. This effect thus provides evidence that the notion of “antecedent” relevant for prosodic givenness-marking needs to include reference to linguistic form, and not just to referential meaning.**
eye-tracking/convocation
prosody.lab and the McGill speech learning lab now share a CFI-funded eye-tracking lab with a sound booth, an eyelink 2000 remote desktop eye-tracker and a positivescience free-view eye-tracker.
Check out our short clip from our demonstration at this year’s convocation (this is the first time we used it after our trainging session, so probably we could have gotten a better track with some more experience):
Congratulations to Elise McClay, Thea Knowles, Erin Olson, and Anna Prokofieva who just finished their B.A. at McGill!
And while we’re at it, also congratulations to four alumni’s from our labs who are now going to graduate school in various Linguistics programs: Eric Doty (now going for a Ph.D. to UPenn), Aron Hirsch (now going for a Ph.D. to MIT), Alex Piwowarek (now going for an M.A. to Saarbrücken, Germany), and Anna Prokofieva (going to do a degree in Computer Science at Columbia).
two conferences in montréal
Exploring the Interfaces I: Word Structure
McGill University
May 6-8 2012
7th North American Phonology Conference
Concordia University
May 4-5, 2012