Sabbatical Report

In 2019-2020, I had my second sabbatical from the University of Toronto. It was a busy and fulfilling year, with lots of travel in the first half of the year, and lots of home-office time in the second half.

2019

I began with a Francoprovençal-focused month (July) in Italy. Highlights included returning to Faeto to spend a few weeks with old friends and hone my fieldwork skills, a visit to Valais to learn about another Francoprovençal community, and some vacation time in Sardinia. [Click the links for details and pix.]

August in Toronto, working on papers, meeting with students, and hosting Jonathan Kasstan to move forward with our joint-FP endeavours.

September in London, St. Rémy de Provence, Münster and Paris

October in Oregon for NWAV 48 and some R&R

November in Switzerland and Essen, Germany

A quick trip to Maine in December to talk about chocolate

2020

I continued the Heritage Language Variation and Change project, working with students and colleagues including:

• lots of talks and some papers coming out, listed here
• preparing a book manuscript proposal about the HLVC project
• upgrading our data archiving system
• supporting student research on heritage languages including
  • Tagalog intensifiers and (r)
  • Faetar subject pronouns
  • Cantonese "lazy pronunciation"
  • Slavic case systems
  • Italian apocope
• defining "linguistic complexity" from a variationist sociolinguistic framework
• investigating Cantonese tone mergers in spontaneous speech
• continuing to explore Polish devoicing patterns and acoustic cues
• tracking patterns of Differential Object Marking in Italian
• exploring covariation across linguistic variables in Cantonese and Italian
• considering lexical effects on Italian VOT

Less connected with Heritage Languages, I worked on:

• how accents of different ethnic groups in Toronto are perceived, with Michol Hoffman and James Walker
• how students' language practices shift during a pandemic, with Maya Ravindranath Abtahian

Plus,

there was reviewing books, articles and abstracts, advising students, grant applications, learning more about social media, online teaching, online survey technology, and some great downtime at home and on the water.