Linguistics

While the lab up on the fifth floor of Craigie Hall remains dormant, we have been keeping busy between thesis defenses transitioning projects to online data collection, and starting up new ones. We currently have three different studies on English underway, and another one on Turkish in the works.

To bring people up to speed on what is going on, and to map out some plans of where to go, a regular reading group will start up, to talk about a combination of theoretical work underlying some of what we are up to, and experiments that we can use as inspiration for further work. The idea of this group will just be to get together, read papers, and discuss a) the analysis and b) how the analysis makes predictions for future studies and interacts with the data we are already collecting.

The phonetics/phonology reading group meets weekly to discuss recently published work and ongoing research in phonetics and phonology. Previous topics of discussion have included prosody, phonation, acoustic phonetics, and automatic speech recognition, among others. If you are interested in joining us, please contact Steve Winters.

Our group is interested in the scientific study of the nature of language as part of human cognition. We discuss a wide range of topics in linguistics (from theoretical syntax to laboratory phonology and child language acquisition) in our regular meetings with external or internal scholars or in conferences and larger events we organize with national and international scholars.

We are also interested in the linguistics of Indigenous languages in Canada, especially those of Alberta, and the revitalization efforts for those languages. We often organize events with the local Indigenous communities. Finally, we also have several professional development events where we connect with linguists working in the Industry.

You can find more about our group and events at Calgary Linguistics. If you are interested in joining or attending a meeting, please contact Dimitrios Skordos (dimitrios.skordos@ucalgary.ca).

The Vendler Group is a joint group between members of the Linguistics division and the Department of Philosophy. Our readings and discussions are generally around issues in semantics and pragmatics, including specific topics such as mass nouns and plurality, naming, reference resolution, and other issues on the philosophy of language. Over the past several years, the group has been extraordinarily successful in generating interdisciplinary discussion, and we have good reason to think that this will continue.