For postdoc Carol Rose Little‘s Winter 2021 LING 215 “Languages of the World” course, each student picked a language to work with throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, they created final projects on an aspect of their language. You can take a look at some previews of their final projects here:
Category Archives: Student news
LING 215 “Languages of the World” final project video
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Filed under Postdoc news, Presentations, Student news
Royer et al. in Tlalocan
A paper by Justin Royer, Pedro Mateo Pedro (U. Toronto), Elizabeth Carolan (BA ’14), Jessica Coon, and Magdalena Torres has been accepted for publication in Tlalocan, a journal that specializes on the documentation of texts and narratives from Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica. The paper is entitled “Atz’am k’ik’ atz’am: The story of Xuwan and a grammatical sketch of Chuj”, and is available on LingBuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005630
Abstract: This article and text provide a new take on the San Mateo saltwater sources from the perspective of Xuwan, a San Mateo resident who for her entire life has been working in the extraction, production, and merchandising of atz’am k’ik’ atz’am ‘the black salt’, a culturally-valued good which forms a quintessential aspect of Chuj life and culture. In addition to recounting her experiences with black salt, Xuwan comments on several other aspects of Chuj life, both in the past and in the present. The article is introduced with a short grammar sketch of Chuj, which highlights the prominent grammatical features found in the text.
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Fieldwork Lab at CILLA IX
McGill linguists of past and present gathered at UT Austin last week for the 9th Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA IX). Presentations by current affiliations included:
- Scott Anderbois (Brown), Miguel Oscar Chan Dzul (U Oriente), Jessica Coon (McGill), Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM): Las construcciones relativas “superlibres” en lenguas mayas [“Super-free” relative constructions in Mayan languages]
- Justin Royer (McGill): La distribución de los sufijos de categoría en chuj y la interfaz entre sintaxis y prosodia [The distribution of status suffixes in Chuj and the syntax–prosody interface]
The full program is available here.
Cora Lesure (BA ’16), Lauren Clemens (Post-Doc ’14–’15), Jessica Coon, Justin Royer, Robert Henderson (Post-Doc ’13–’14)
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Georges Awaad in McGill Reporter
The McGill Reporter picked up Georges Awaad’s story, now with video, more on Chuj and interviews with me and with Justin Royer. Nice work Georges!
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Georges Awaad in Montreal Gazette
Undergraduate Field Work Lab member Georges Awaad was featured this week in the Montreal Gazette for his impressive command of languages. While we know that speaking lots of languages isn’t necessary for being a linguist, it certainly doesn’t hurt! Georges began research Chuj (Mayan) this past year, which is the language alluded to at the end of the article
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Justin Royer in Yuxquen
Justin is currently doing fieldwork in Yuxquen, a Chuj community located in Guatemala. While in Guatemala, Justin will be working on several projects, including a new project on the interface between syntax and prosody in Chuj, the focus of his second Eval paper. For this research trip, Justin is funded by a McGill Graduate Mobility Award.
Justin in Yuxquen with Yun and Elsa
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Clint Parker at University of Arizona
Third year PhD student Clint Parker is at the University of Arizona this week for two conferences. This past weekend he presented a poster at the Symposium on American Indian Languages. His poster, based on work from his second Eval paper, was titled “On the roles and responsibilities of universities in Indigenous Language Revitalization: A Canadian Perspective”. Next weekend he will give a talk titled “Agreement, clitic doubling, and vestigial ergativity in Shughni” at the Second North American Conference on Iranian Linguistics.
Clint with at his poster with SAIL organizer Wilson Silva
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Ben Oldham’s research showcased at McGill
BA honours student Ben Oldham‘s research was showcased on McGill’s Faculty of Arts website this week:
Ben conducted summer research funded by a McGill Arts Research Internship Award and will present his work this Monday at the annual McGill Undergraduate Research Event. He summarized his results in this Intro to Fieldwork blog page, which also includes lots of references. Congrats Ben!
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Justin Royer at NELS
Justin Royer presented a poster on Chuj nominal classifiers, “Domain restriction and noun classifiers in Chuj (Mayan)”, at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS 49) at Cornell University last week.
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Fieldwork Lab at FAMLi V
Fieldwork Lab members of past and present were in Antigua Guatemala last week for the 5th meeting of Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi V). Jessica gave a plenary talk titled ‘Construyendo verbos en chuj y ch’ol.’ Other talks and posters were:
- Scott AnderBois, Oscar Chan Dzul, Jessica Coon, and Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez – Free relatives in Ch’ol and Yucatec Maya and the typology of headless relative clauses
- Paulina Elias (BA ’18) – El rol de los direccionales en construcciones posicionales y locativas en Chu
- Cora Lesure (BA ’15) – Chuj glottalized vowels across contexts
- Carol-Rose Little (BA ’12) & Morelia Vázquez Martínez (RA) – La distribución e interpretación de sustantivos en el Ch’ol: Un estudio práctico de corpus
- Justin Royer (PhD) – Las configuraciones referenciales en Chuj
- Justin Royer (PhD) & Luis Alonso-Ovalle – La expresión de la modalidad de decisión arbitraria en Chuj
Morelia, Justin, Cora, Paulina, Robert, Jessica, and Carol-Rose
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