Awards and Funding

S  Professor MARIANNE IGNACE received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Impact - Partnership Award during a December 4 ceremony at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The award recognizes her intellectual leadership and community co-operation, and the impact she has made beyond the social sciences research community. 

> SSHRC 2019 PARTNERSHIP AWARD WINNER PROFILE  
 

S  Lecturer HEATHER BLISS was awarded a teaching development micro-grant from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Reconciling Curriculum Grant Program. With the funding, Bliss will work with an Indigenous undergraduate student to develop new content for a linguistics course examining Indigenous languages in Canada. 

Linguistics in the News

S  Adjunct professor TRACEY DERWING was quoted in a CBC article on accent reduction services/accent clarity training. As a companion piece to the article, Derwing was also interviewed on CBC Radio One where she discussed her research around the impact of accents on second language learners in the workplace, and the perception of accented speech by listeners unfamiliar with accents. 

> SAY WHAT? WHY SOME NEWCOMERS ARE PAYING TO REDUCE THEIR ACCENTS 

> DO ACCENTS REALLY AFFECT OUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKERS? 

First Nations Languages Program Partnership

S  The Squamish Chief published a profile article on JONNY WILLIAMS, a student currently in his final year of the SFU Squamish Language Immersion Program. The two-year program is a partnership between SFU's First Nations Languages Centre, the Department of Linguistics, and Kwi Awt Stelmexw, a non-profit organization from the Squamish Nation community. 

> ONE TO WATCH  
 

CBC News published a profile article on SFU honorary degree recipient Elder Ruby Peter, and her work with the Shhwulmuhwqun—Language House and the Hul'q'umi'num' Language Academy which partners with SFU's Department of Linguistics and First Nations Languages Program. 

> ELDERS AND GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN SHARE THE LEGACY OF LEARNING HUL'Q'UMI'NUM'

Podcast

S  Professor MAITE TABOADA was interviewed by Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science and Technology (WWEST) on their Best of the WWEST Podcast series. In the interview, Taboada talked about her work on the Gender Gap Tracker, and her journey that took her to computational linguistics at SFU.

> BEST OF THE WWEST PODCAST - EPISODE 67 

Publications and Presentations

S  A paper based on alumna FIONA WILSON's MA thesis was published in Diachronica. The paper, "The role of frequency of use in lexical change" was published together with associate professor Panayiotis Pappas and biological sciences professor Arne Mooers.

This is a great accomplishment for Wilson and the Department of Linguistics graduate program as it is not often a paper based on a MA thesis is accepted by a prestigious academic journal. 

The role of frequency of use in lexical change: Evidence from Latin and Greek 

Abstract:
Based on the number of words per meaning across the Indo-European Swadesh list, Pagel et al. (2007) suggest that frequency of use is a general mechanism of linguistic evolution. We test this claim using within-language change. From the IDS (Key & Comrie 2015) we compiled a comparative word list of 1,147 cognate pairs for Classical Latin and Modern Spanish, and 1,231 cognate pairs for Classical and Modern Greek. We scored the amount of change for each cognate pair in the two language histories according to a novel 6-point scale reflecting increasing levels of change from regular sound change to external borrowing. We find a weak negative correlation between frequency of use and lexical change for both the Latin-Spanish and Classical-Modern Greek language developments, but post hoc tests reveal that low frequency of use of borrowed words drive these patterns, casting some doubt on frequency of use as a general mechanism of language change.

Wilson, Fiona M., Panayiotis A. Pappas, and Arne O. Mooers. 2019. The role of frequency of use in lexical change: Evidence from Latin and Greek. Diachronica, 36:4, 584-612.