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Past Events

  • 2024 Jan 25

    Practice talks for NELS

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow Street, Room 420

    Yağmur Sağ and Tanya Bondarenko & Patrick Elliott will present their NELS talks. 

    Yağmur's talk:

    Fake Mass Nouns and Associative Plurality

    A significant debate surrounds the count vs. mass distinction, with theories seeking to capture variation while maintaining a universal logical basis (Link 1983; Rothstein 2010; Schwarzschild 2011; Grimm 2012, a.o.). One aspect of variation involves “fake mass nouns”, which are ontologically count but mimic mass nouns by resisting pluralization and direct combination with numerals. This study...

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  • 2023 Nov 30

    Anastasia Tsilia, Hayley Ross

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420

    Title of Anastasia's talk: How does negation interact with the iconic use of space?

    Abstract: In this talk we will ask how negation, and negative meanings more in general, interact with iconic co-speech gestures. We will focus on depictive (Davidson, 2023) as well as diagrammatic-like iconicity (Tsilia and Davidson, forthcoming), while we will also compare the behaviour of iconic co-speech gestures with that of iconic loci in ASL. Theories differ in their predictions with Ebert and Ebert (2014) predicting iconic co-speech gestures to be...

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  • 2023 Nov 16

    Nozomi Tomita presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420

    Title: Exploring the Meaning of Negation Signs

    Abstract: Through possession and existential sentences in Japanese Sign Language(JSL) Sign languages have been shown to express existential and possessive sentences in related ways that also connect to expressions of location, just like spoken languages, based on data from American Sign Language (ASL),  Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) and Croatian Sign Language (HZJ)  (Chen Pichler et al. 2008), which raises the question about similarities and differences across sign...

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  • 2023 Nov 09

    Yiyang Guo presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Theme maximalization encoded by verbal classifiers: bian in Mandarin Chinese

     

    Maximalization strategies and their syntactic representations are at the centre of a long debate (Filip and Rothstein 2006; Filip 2008; Martínez Vera 2021; a.o.). Semantically, events can be...

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  • 2023 Oct 26

    Ankana Saha presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420

    This collaborative project with Yagmur Sag, Kate Davidson, and Jian Cui investigates an unexpected contrast between demonstrative descriptions and definite descriptions on their anaphoric uses. If two (or more) discourse referents are introduced in the preceding sentence, it is perfectly natural to refer to one of them in the following sentence using a definite description. Use of demonstrative descriptions in the same context, however, is degraded, with existing accounts of anaphoric demonstratives and definites providing no explanation for this contrast. Saha, Sag, and Davidson (2023)...

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  • 2023 Oct 19

    Hande Sevgi presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420

    Late exposure to the first language has effects on linguistic and cognitive skills. In this study, we investigate the comprehension of zero-anaphora in native and late Deaf adult Turkish Sign Language signers to understand their reference-tracking strategies in the absence of morphological cues and see if there are differences between these groups. The results of the task conducted with 32 participants (16 native adult signers – 16 late-...

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  • 2023 Oct 12

    Kate Davidson and Chloe Frey present

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420
    Title: Contrastive inference in English, ASL, and Mandarin

    Kate will present some fresh results of an experimental pragmatics project led by last spring's co-op student Chloe Frey (who may be able to join us!) on contrastive inferences for adjectives in both English (with co-speech gesture) and ASL (including classifiers). English results are a replication of earlier contrastive inference work in gesture; extending the question to modifiers in ASL, we find that adjectival modifiers based on classifiers pattern like English adjectives and not English gesture. We... Read more about Kate Davidson and Chloe Frey present
  • 2023 Oct 05

    Marianthi Koraka presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, 420
    Research on imperative constructions has revealed that imperatives in many languages exhibit common properties, such as subject omission, resistance to combine with negation and non-embeddability (among others) (cf. Han 2001; Aikhenvald 2010). From a semantic/pragmatic perspective, imperatives are an interesting case regarding the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, since a sentence like Go home! can convey a variety of meanings (imperative speech acts) such as commands, permissions, advice, etc. (cf. Portner 2007, Kaufmann 2011;... Read more about Marianthi Koraka presents
  • 2023 Sep 28

    Tory Sampson presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420
    Reduplication, also known as doubling or productive repetition, involves copying either a whole or a part of a prosodic word, resulting in a shift in semantic meaning, whether compositional or idiomatic (Inkelas & Zoll 2005, Stolz 2011). Many spoken languages employ reduplication for various linguistic functions, including indicating plurality, aspect, distributivity, adverbials, adjectival intensification, and derivational morphology. For example, in Walpiri, the term kamina 'girl' is reduplicated as kamina kamina 'girls,' while in French Creole, salé 'salty' is reduplicated as sa(lé)-... Read more about Tory Sampson presents
  • 2023 Sep 21

    Xiaoyan Xiao presents

    1:30pm to 3:00pm

    Location: 

    2 Arrow, Room 420
    In this talk, Xiaoyan will share findings from her team’s past and current work on Chinese sign language (CSL) and Deaf people in China. Their previous findings give a general picture of the status quo of Chinese Deaf people‘s access to information and social services. She will share some of the work she has done in... Read more about Xiaoyan Xiao presents

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