2012 – 2013

Automne 2012
Octobre

Veronique Lacoste – DLLL
Universität Freiburg (Germany)
‘Language variation, acquisition and usage in creole-speking communities: Jamaican children in school and Haitians in the Canadian diaspora’
jeudi le 11 octobre à 17 hres
Ross Building S562, Campus Keele

Diana Brydon, University of Manitoba, CRLC
Walkyria Monte Mòr, University of Sao Paolo
Lynn Mario Menezes de Sousa, University of Sal Paolo
Brazil-Canada Knowledge Exchange: a projet and a field
Lundi le 15 octobre à 17 hres
salle A100Pavillon York (nouvel auditorium), Glendon

Symposium, English Studies Department, Glendon
Senior Common Room
les 15 et 16 Octobre de 9 hres à 16 hres
SCR (3rd floor), Glendon

Miriam Meyerhoff, The University of Auckland – DLLL
« Defining « indefinite » in N’kep (Vanuatu) »
Mardi le 16 octobre, Campus Keele

Jordana Garbati, University of Western Ontario – DLLL
« Inclusion of English Language Learners in Core French: Ontario Teachers’ Perspectives »
jeudi le 18 octobre, Keele Campus

Souad Hamerlain, RGTTC
« From ‘Logos’ to ‘Anthropos’: Toward a Territorialization of Translation in Light of Algerian Literary Works. »
Jeudi le 18 octobre à 14 hres
Room C204 Pavillon York, Glendon

Bill Downes, CRLC
‘Language, Affectivity and Aesthetic Values’
Jeudi le 25 octobre à 18 hres
salle 170 Pavillon York, Glendon

Novembre

Barbara Burnaby, Memorial University of Newfoundland, CRLC
Abstract for “How Have Aboriginal North Americans Responded to Writing Systems in Their Own Languages?”
Jeudi le 8 novembre à 18 h
Salle A100 Pavillon York, Glendon

Lawrence Venuti, Temple University, USA, RGTTC
‘Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation »
Vendredi le 16 novembre à 18 hres
salle 129 Pavillon York, Glendon

Nate Charlow (University of Toronto) – DLLL
Jeudi le 22 novembre, Campus Keele

Rebecca Pardo (University of Pennsylvania) – DLLL
Jeudi le 29 novembre, Campus Keele

*************************************************************************************

Souâd Hamerlain
From ‘Logos’ to ‘Anthropos’: Towards a Territorialization of Translation in Light of Algerian Literary Works
Western philosophy witnessed the emergence of the term logos thanks to Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 – 475 BC.) who bracketed it within a general vision linking to the deep-seated order of the cosmos. It was taken afterwards by the Sophists to refer to discourse, whose non-technical definition would be an instance of speaking. Anthropos, on the other hand, refers to humanity in a broad sense. I intend in this lecture to highlight the social dimension of translation by examining the way in which the symbiotic bond between both these terms materializes discursively in literary translation. Focusing on the case of Arabic-English translation, I discuss my own experience translating, or tradapting (to use Michel Garneau’s 1978 neologism) Algerian drama. The resulting effect is, I believe, that by territorializing it, translation can be made less ‘rigid’ and more ‘humane’.

Souâd Hamerlain was born in Mostaganem (Algeria) where she obtained an M.A. and a PhD in Language and Communication. She has been working at the University of Mostaganem since 2003 where she teaches General Linguistics, Phonetics, Lexical Semantics, Discourse Analysis, and Translation. Her research focuses on the translation of poetry and drama. Her publications include “Translating Algerian Arabic Drama into English: An Intercultural Process”, in El-Tawassol la Revue des Sciences Sociales et Humaines de l’Université Badji Mokhtar-Annaba, N° 25, 2010, and “Towards a Model of Tradaptation”, in Studies in English, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, United Kingdom, 2011

William Downes
Language, Affectivity and Aesthetic Values
This talk explores the relationship between human affective-motivational systems as described by “affective neuroscience” and language in its role as the creator of felt experience. It sketches out a neo-Kantian theory of aesthetic judgement with respect to science, to natural beauty and to linguistic beauty or “poetics”; i.e. ‘good writing’. It then attempts to construe these judgements as expressions of felt experience. It contrasts such aesthetic values with other ‘person making’ value systems such as market and moral values.

These ideas are a development of Downes, ‘The Language of Felt Experience’ Language and Literature 9.2 (2000); Language and Religion (2011), Cambridge University Press and ‘Complexity, Relevance and the Emergence of Culture’, in Tseng, M-Y (ed.) Investigating Language at the Interface (2012).

Barbara Burnaby, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Abstract for “How Have Aboriginal North Americans Responded to Writing Systems in Their Own Languages?”
Despite numerous tragic injustices, conflicts and misunderstandings over the centuries among European newcomers, Aboriginal inhabitants and their respective descendants, a myriad of creative outcomes have evolved from the contact between them, not the least being unique forms and practices of literacy in North American indigenous languages. Reliable information about Aboriginal language literacy is largely scattered, even buried, in various kinds of documents, mostly written by non-Aboriginal people. However, in recent decades, research on literacy among Aboriginal people has diversified, and Aboriginal writers have contributed their specific views on the topic of literacy in their environment.
The current paper reviews literature on Aboriginal literacy in North America to explore Aboriginal perspectives on literacy in their languages from direct and indirect documentation. Because the literature is fragmentary at best and, until recently, largely recorded only from Euro-North Americans points of view, a thematic approach has been taken here to indicate possible trends throughout the complex history of North America since 1500.

Barbara Burnaby has a B.A. in Fine Art (1965), an M.A. in Linguistics (1972), and a Ph.D. in Education Theory (1979), University of Toronto. She has taught English as a foreign language in Japan and English as a second language to adult immigrants in Toronto. Through contracts, she taught pre-service teacher training courses in English as a second language, language in Native education, and adult literacy for immigrants. In the 1970s and early 1980s, she was involved in the development of the Native Language Instructors Training Program for Ontario as well as provincial policy on the teaching of Native languages in provincial schools. At the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) from 1979 to 2000 she did research on language arts for Native children, teacher training in English as a second language, benchmarks for adult immigrants learning English, and oral fluency and literacy in Native languages in various parts of Canada. From 1991 to 1995 she was Chair, Department of Adult Education (OISE). She organized the Stabilizing Indigenous Language Conference in 2000. Also 2000, she moved to Memorial University of Newfoundland where she was Professor and Dean, Faculty of Education. Currently she is semi-retired and holds the position of Honorary Research Professor at Memorial.

Lawrence Venuti
‘Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation »
Intertextuality enables and complicates translating, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translation to interpretive possibilities that vary with audiences in the receiving culture. Professor Venuti will argue that to activate these possibilities and improve the study and practice of translation, we must theorize the relative autonomy of the translated text and increase the self-consciousness of translators and readers of translations alike. He will explore these ideas by considering several cases, including translations of David Mamet’s play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study, The Freudian Slip, as well as his own version of Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir, 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed.

Lawrence Venuti, professor of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), and Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013), as well as the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed., 2012). His translations include the anthology, Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel, The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (2009), which won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize

Winter 2013

January

Alister Cumming (OISE, University of Toronto)
“Where do language, literacy, and culture intersect? And what should
educational researchers do about it?”
January 24, Keele Campus

January

Robert Bayley, (University of California, Davis) CRCL
The Role of Frequency in Syntactic Variation: Evidence from U.S. Spanish
January 21 at 5 p.m.
salle N732 Ross Building, York Campus

María Constanza Guzmán, RGTTC
‘Tracing Latin American Intellectual History: Translation in the Journals ‘Marcha’ and ‘Casa de las Americas’
January 22 at 6 p.m.
salle A202York Hall, Glendon Campus

Alister Cumming (OISE, University of Toronto) – DLLL
“Where do language, literacy, and culture intersect? And what should
educational researchers do about it?”
January 24, Keele Campus

Février

Raymond Mougeon and
Francoise Mougeon, (Glendon, York University) CRCL
Variation on the Canadian FL1 — FL2 continuum: The case of French locative prepositions with place names (text)
February 14 at 6 p.m.
salle 349 York Hall, Glendon Campus

Ellen Bialystok (York University) – DLLL
February 28, Keele Campus

Mars

Shodja Eddin Ziaïan, Glendon, York University, CRCL
Contacts linguistiques et culturels franco-iraniens
March 21, 2013 at 5:30 P.M.
Room A301 York Hall, Glendon Campus

4th Glendon Graduate Student Conference in Translation Stuides
‘Beyond Mediation? Exploring Translation and Interpretation in the Current Globalized Landscape’
March 23, 2013 – Glendon Campus

English Department
Assessing, Monitoring and Promoting Arctic Indigenous Languages: an Arctic Council and ICC Project.
Carl-Christan Olsen (Puju), Director of Greenland Language Secretariat; Chairman of ICC Language Commission.
Lenore Grenoble, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Slavic Linguistics, University of Chicago
Keren Rice, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
Jeela Palluq-Cloutier, Inuit Language Authority, Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
Hishinlai’ Kathy Sikorski, Alaska Native Language Centre, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Ian Martin, English Department and Linguistics Program, Collège universitaire Glendon College, York University
March 25, 2013 at 4:30 P.M.
Room A100 York Hall, Glendon Campus

Alfredo Modenessi, (Universidad Autonoma de Mexico) RGTTC
‘He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural’ A schizoid look at the politics of Shakespare translation across the Altlantic’
March 26 at 6 p.m.
salle 115 Manoir, Glendon Campus

May

Mirela Cherciov, (Glendon, Université York) CRCL
‘I’m every language’: Bilingual profiles in migrant contexts
May 14 at 5 p.m. Room A108 York Hall – Glendon Campus

*************************************************************************************

Robert Bayley
The Role of Frequency in Syntactic Variation: Evidence from U.S. Spanish

With the rise of exemplar theory (Bybee 2001, 2010), the role of frequency has received considerable attention in studies of phonological variation and change (see e.g. Bybee 2002; Díaz-Campos 2005, 2006; Fife-Muriel 2009). However, the role of frequency in morphosyntactic variation has received relatively little attention. In this talk, I report on an examination of the role of lexical frequency in morphosyntactic variation, specifically in variation between Spanish null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPPs). Based on a series of multivariate analyses of more than 8,600 tokens from 29 Mexican-origin speakers in California and Texas, I present evidence that questions the generalizability of Erker and Guy’s (2012) suggestion that frequency either activates or amplifies constraint effects on SPP variation. The results of this study show that fewer constraints reach significance in an analysis with frequent verb forms only than in an analysis with non-frequent forms only. Moreover, in all except one instance, in cases where linguistic conditioning factors reach significance in both analyses, the effects are stronger in the analysis with non-frequent than with frequent verb forms. Finally, when all verb forms are combined in a single analysis, non-frequent forms are significantly more likely to co-occur with overt pronouns than are frequent forms. The results presented here suggest that the rich array of linguistic constraints identified in this study and elsewhere explain most of the observed patterning of SPP variation in U.S. and other Spanish dialects and that lexical frequency has only a minor effect. Finally, the results presented here suggest that the view that frequency activates and/or amplifies overt SPP use in not tenable.

Robert Bayley (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, he served as the Fulbright-York Chair in Linguistics. He has conducted research on variation in English, Spanish, ASL, and Italian Sign Language as well as ethnographic studies of language use in Mexican immigrant and Mexican American families. His recent book-length publications include Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, Methods, and Applications (ed. with Ceil Lucas, 2007), The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (with Carolyn McCaskill et al., 2011), and The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics (ed. with Richard Cameron & Ceil Lucas, 2013).

María Constanza Guzmán
Tracing Latin American Intellectual History: Translation in the Journals Marcha and Revista Casa de las Américas
Historically, translation has been a continuous discursive practice in Latin America. Although largely invisible, translators have been key agents in Latin American intellectual history. Translation is a constant praxis when it comes to mapping the circulation and dissemination of ideas and the production of knowledge in the American continent. Throughout the XX century and to this day, translation has been a necessary condition for developing and shaping thought in Latin America.
This presentation is an initial report on a research project aimed to study the relationship between translation and intellectual history in Latin America. The project investigates the translation practices of a number of Latin American cultural journals during the second half of the XX century. This report focuses specifically on the translation practices of two influential cultural journals: the Cuban Revista Casa de las Américas and the Uruguayan Marcha. The discussion will be based on the translation practices of these two journals, and will address the role of various agents of translation (e.g., authors, translators, editors), the relationship between translation and editorial policies in these two cases, the strategies, methods, and thematic and disciplinary patters that can be observed in the translations, and the intersections between the translated narratives and other narratives and forms of discourse.

María Constanza Guzmán is Associate Professor in the School of Translation and the Department of Hispanic Studies at Glendon College, York University. She coordinates the Spanish-English Translation Certificate and the Research Group on Translation and Transcultural Contact, and is affiliated with the graduate programs in Translation Studies and Humanities at York. Her scholarly interests are Latin American Literature and Translation Studies. Her publications include several articles, translations, and the book Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator’s Visible Legacy.

Raymond Mougeon and Françoise Mougeon
Variation on the Canadian FL1 — FL2 continuum: The case of French locative prepositions with place names

In our presentation we report on some of the findings of on-going research on variation in the use of basic locative prepositions with locality and ‘country’ names in the speech of L1 and L2 Canadian francophones. According, to reference works: i) with localities, preposition à is used (e.g. je vis/je vais à Ottawa); ii) with masculine country names with an initial consonant, preposition au is used, (e.g. je vis/je vais au Canada); iii) with feminine ‘country’ names with an initial consonant and iv) with country names with an initial vowel, preposition en is used (e.g. je vis/je vais en France/en Uruguay). Further, with localities and with subdivisions of countries (e.g. provinces, counties, regions, etc.), it is possible to use preposition dans. However, such use is marked, dans expresses a view of the place as bounded space (e.g. ils essaient de trouver un appartement dans Paris ‘they’re trying to find an apartment in the city of Paris’). Finally, as indicated by the examples illustrating use of à, au and en, French uses the same prepositional forms in directional or non-directional contexts. The above-mentioned rules differ from those of English. When the verb is directional, English uses preposition to with locality and country names, (e.g. I’m going to Canada/Ottawa). When the verb is non-directional, English uses in with country names, (e.g. I live in Canada), but it can use either in or at with localities. However, the latter option is marked and conveys the notion that the locality is viewed as a ‘point on the map’, e.g. The flight from Moncton to Edmonton stops at Toronto.

Alexandre (2005) carried out the first corpus-based study of variability in the use of French prepositions in the four contexts mentioned above. Her study was based on adolescent speech from Mougeon’s Quebec City corpus and Mougeon and Beniak’s Franco-Ontarian corpus, collected in 1978 in a majority community and three minority communities. Given that preposition choice with place names in French is complex and at variance with English, Alexandre hypothesized that speakers from the minority communities would evidence a lower mastery of such choice than speakers from Quebec City and the Franco-Ontarian majority. Her hypothesis was generally supported by her calculation of frequencies but, in two of the four contexts under study, the number of prepositional tokens found in several communities was not high enough to constitute a strong confirmation of her hypothesis.

Our own research pursues the following objectives: i) to provide a more solid confirmation of Alexandre’s hypothesis, ii) to refine her analysis; and iii) to pursue and expand the comparative approach initiated by Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner (2010) who compared the patterns of a variation found in the Mougeon and Beniak Franco-Ontarian corpus with those found in Mougeon and Nadasdi’s (1986) French immersion corpus. To achieve these goals, we base our own research on: i) the new Franco-Ontarian corpus of Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner collected in 2005 in the same communities included in the Mougeon and Beniak corpus; ii) Mougeon and Nadasdi’s (1986) French immersion corpus and iii) F. Mougeon’s corpus of university level FL2 speakers who attended either core French or French immersion programs. Further, in our analysis of the data, we include not only tokens where speakers used a given preposition, but also, where they omitted the expected preposition and thus we widen the envelope of variation.

In our presentation we document the vast array of variants and types of omissions used in each of the four contexts (e.g. with localities: à, en, dans, au, omissions in sequences of place names) by the various speaker groups in our expanded FL1 — FL2 data set. Further, we provide data on the distribution of the different variants in terms of number and percentages and noticeable fluctuations in the frequency of the variants. These data allow us to identify thresholds on the FL1 — FL2 continuum where use of a given variant is either absent, emerges or undergoes a sharp rise. For instance, with localities, use of en instead of expected à, emerges only in the minority Franco-Ontarian communities, undergoes a noticeable rise in the weakest minority community and continues to rise according to level of exposure to and use of French in the FL2 corpora. The distribution of prepositional variants across the four contexts and different speaker groups also reveals a hierarchy of mastery of the expected prepositions under study: the expected preposition is used more often with localities than with countries—reflecting the additional difficulty of gender assignment with the latter place names. We complete our presentation with an overview of the findings of a multivariate factor analysis performed on the tokens of prepositional usage and omissions found with locality names in the Franco-Ontarian corpus. This analysis reveals that speaker gender and SES have little or no influence on variant choice and that the internal factor +/- direction and the external factor of community of residence exert a sizable influence on most of the variants. This suggests that, with locality names, variation in prepositional usage is best viewed as the manifestation of processes of variant substitution reflecting the complexity of the prepositional subsystem under study and having limited socio-stylistic salience.
References
Mougeon, R., Nadasdi, T. & Rehner, K. 2010. The sociolinguistic competence of immersion students, Bristol, Multilingual Matters. .

Shodja Eddin Ziaïan, Glendon/Université York
Contacts linguistiques et culturels franco-iraniens
La coïncidence entre l’équinoxe du printemps, célébrée par la culture iranienne comme nouvel an, et la semaine de la francophonie est-elle absolument fortuite ?!
Des rapports linguistiques et culturels du temps des Mages et du développement de la chrétienté, à l’époque de la renaissance et des Lumières, en particulier citant La Fontaine dont nombre de fables sont des copies de contes iraniens et dont se dégage donc la même morale pédagogique, puis à l’époque plus contemporaine où la langue française enrichira de centaines de mots la langue persane et que la culture française fera bouger le monde iranien, socialement et politiquement, le conférencier dont la vie s’est déroulée de manière intermittente entre les mondes francophone (Suisse, Belgique, France et Canada) et iranien, nous présente, de manière anecdotique et parfois surprenante, multiples facettes de la parenté linguistique et culturelle franco-iranienne.

Department of English Studies
Assessing, Monitoring and Promoting Arctic Indigenous Languages: an Arctic Council and ICC Project.
Carl-Christan Olsen (Puju), Director of Greenland Language Secretariat; Chairman of ICC Language Commission.
Lenore Grenoble, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Slavic Linguistics, University of Chicago
Keren Rice, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
Jeela Palluq-Cloutier, Inuit Language Authority, Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
Hishinlai’ Kathy Sikorski, Alaska Native Language Centre, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Ian Martin, English Department and Linguistics Program, Collège universitaire Glendon College, York University

The permanent members of the Arctic Council represent more than fifty languages from at least eight language families. Some languages cross international boundaries (eg. Northern Saami, Gwitch’in, Aleut) and some are spoken in small geographic enclaves. All face pressure from dominant national languages. While some (Kalallisut, Nenets) score relatively high on scales of language vitality, most Arctic indigenous languages face varying degrees of endangerment.
The need for a pan-Arctic languages assessment is urgent. Indigenous peoples, their lands and their lifestyles are undergoing drastic changes. Shift from the ancestral language is symptomatic of cultural, political, social, economic and environmental upheaval. Meanwhile, members of these communities know (and research confirms) that knowledge and use of the indigenous languages can be a powerful tool to cope and thrive. While vitality has been described for some Arctic indigenous communities, updated data and analysis is needed, particularly in light of indigenous self-determination and other political movements over the past decades.
The project intends to provide a foundation for policy development, and will help member countries of the Arctic Council (Canada, U.S., Russia, Denmark (representing Greenland and the Faeroes), Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland) and the Permanent Participants represented by the ICC (Inuit Circumpolar Council), the Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwitch’in International Council, Aleut International Council, the Saami Council, and RAIPON (Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North), to identify priority areas for action while illuminating areas where language revitalization initiatives are having a positive impact.
The members of the planning group of this circumpolar language policy project are meeting at Glendon March 25-26, and this is an opportunity to publicly present the project to interested members of the Toronto academic community concerned with the future of Arctic languages.

Alfredo Modenessi, (Universidad Autonoma de Mexico) RGTTC
‘He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural’ A schizoid look at the politics of Shakespare translation across the Altlantic’

Although the visible literatures of Latin America and Spain enjoy equal reputation and market value, today Latin American writers prefer to be published by the conglomerates of Spain, whose readers significantly outnumber their Latin American counterparts. Thus, the writers of Latin America not only go where business shows better promise, but also increasingly contribute to widen a gap in cultural recognition. Translation, as much a creative contributor to literary tradition, doesn’t enjoy the equity but participates in/of the divide. Nowadays, Latin American translators depend on what the Spanish industry leaves outside its potent grasp, or else become effective but subordinate labour for publishers who require them to adjust their native practices to the “needs” of Spanish readers. The case of drama is peculiar. Playwrights produce textual matrices for performance. Drama translation renders scripts rather than books. However, Shakespeare’s plays are often (mis)construed as the latter. Moreover, as material for translation, Shakespeare beckons prejudice. Source texts may be fixed but translations are creative exercises in separation and difference, not in sameness. Yet, in Latin America the historic practice has been to render the voices in Shakespeare, howsoever fictional, as if they came from the Spanish side of the Atlantic, upon mistaken but ingrained preconceptions about the authority of Iberian norms, and upon mechanical concepts of what translating a “classic” entails. Latin Americans who use Iberian standards, therefore, compel the primary users of their texts to try and do the impossible: not to differ, for translating into Spanish is different from translating in/to Spanish otherness. Can translation foster dialogue across and within a shared language and its cultures outside the walls of print? In a “postcolonial” space, can translating Shakespeare epitomize a reformulation of the very terms in which the dialogue takes place, given that the Latin American translator is an/other, a third player in an otherwise hypothetically symmetrical scenario for two?

This talk seeks to explore these issues, from practical consideration of several projects that have recently sought to render Shakespeare “whole” and “anew” into Spanish, as well as of my recent—and schizoid—experience as a translator of Shakespeare who has produced texts of the same play in both Mexican/Latin-American and Iberian norms.

ALFREDO MICHEL MODENESSI holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and is Professor of English Literature and Translation at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). He is the only Mexican member of the International Shakespeare Conference, and a professional stage translator and dramaturge. He has published on American drama, translation, and Shakespeare, in Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Shakespeare Survey, Cambridge and Oxford University Press, The Arden Shakespeare, Greenwood, and Routledge, among others. He has translated and adapted over 40 plays, including Shakespeare’s Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, Richard III, Julius Caesar, 1Henry IV (for the London Festival “Globe to Globe”), Marlowe’s Edward II, Arden of Faversham, and works by Tom Stoppard, Paula Vogel, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Atholl Fugard, August Wilson, Andrew Bovell, and so forth. He is on the board of the International Shakespeare Yearbook (Ashgate) of 1611—the e- journal of translation of the University of Barcelona—and of the MIT website Global Shakespeares. He is currently preparing a book on the presence of Shakespeare in Mexican cinema and a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, as well as translations of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, parts 1 and 2.

Mirela Cherciov
Drawing from the results of a larger study on L1 attrition and sociolinguistic factors and the literature on the individual’s own perception concerning bilingual and bicultural identity, the talk presents the dynamics between L1 loss and L2 acquisition in Romanian-English migrants. Specifically, it investigates the incidence of L1 attrition in the bilingual group, the existence of a possible relationship between the levels of L1 and L2 proficiency, and the influence of sociolinguistic and cognitive factors on L1 attrition and L2 acquisition in bilingual contexts.
Mirela Cherciov received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto (Department of French). Her thesis focused on linguistic and sociolinguistic factors linked to L1 attrition in adult migrants, a research project partly funded by SSHRC and OGS grants. Her other research interests include issues related to bilingual language development across the lifespan, adult L2 acquisition, pedagogy and FSL. She currently teaches at the Language Training Centre for French Studies at Glendon Campus.