Calvin Quick

Recent highlights

(Updated October 21, 2025) 

• Completed year 2 of the PhD program at UofT Linguistics in August 2025!

• Attended the month-long intensive Welsh Cwrs Haf ('Summer Course') in Aberystwyth, Wales.

• Presented research on Welsh object cliticization at WCCFL 43 in Seattle and the 29th Welsh Linguistics Seminar in Bangor, Wales, which provides a novel approach to deriving two agreement asymmetries in the language.

2025. (Non)agreement in Welsh. 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Poster. University of Washington. April 26. Poster; Handout. Draft proceedings paper (submitted).

2025. Intervention and extraction in Welsh agreement asymmetries. 29th Welsh Linguistics Seminar. Talk. Bangor University. July 4. Handout.

• Published in the Proceedings of the Association of Celtic Students, Volume XI on noncanonical syntax in the poetry of 12th century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. See also my article in Language and Literature for more on this project.

  • 2025. Towards a Refined Parameterization of Poetic FIT: Evidence from Dafydd ap Gwilym. Proceedings paper. In Proceedings of the Association of Celtic Students, vol. 11, ed. Freya Smith and Rebecca Madlener, 60-73. Association of Celtic Students. PDF.

• Participated in a week-long field trip to Nain, Nunatsiavut with other researchers in May 2025 (pictures below), as part of the Labrador Inuttitut research group headed by Prof. Susana Béjar at the University of Toronto. The primary reason for the trip was a workshop with community stakeholders on audio transcription and annotation software and implementation.

Past updates

(Updated October 14, 2024) 

• Presented a paper discussing some agreement patterns in Middle and Modern Welsh at the 43rd annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

2024. When and How to Agree: Insights from Middle and Modern Welsh. 43rd Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Harvard University. October 11. Slides.

• Published a peer reviewed article in Language and Literature on poetic syntax in a corpus of poems by the 14th century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. The article is available online Open Access.

2024. Constraints on verse form and syntactic well-formedness in the cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Article. Language and Literature 33(3): 199-220. DOI: 10.1177/09639470241273555

• Attended the 2024 Cwrs Haf intensive Welsh language course in Aberystwyth, Wales for four weeks in July 2024 at the Canolradd (Intermediate) level. Pictures from Wales below! The trip was funded by UofT's SELECT Languages program. Diolch yn fawr i'r tiwtoriaid a'r trefnyddion am wneud y cwrs yn brofiad arbennig!

• Presented research on agreement with nominals in Welsh at the 2024 meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association:

2024. Agreement with nominal antecedents in Welsh. Talk. Canadian Linguistic Association Conference 2024. Carleton University. June 18.

• Presented research on unusual syntax in medieval Welsh poetry at the 2024 meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America:

2024. Linguistic approaches to poetic data: a case study in Dafydd ap Gwilym’s cywyddau. Talk. Annual Meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America 2024. Fairleigh Dickinson University. April 5.

• Attended and presented research at three other regional and international conferences: the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton Syntax Workshop (at Carleton University), the Celtic Students Conference (online, at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest), and the Poetics and Linguistics Association Conference (at Sheffield Hallam University).

• Completed year 1 of the PhD program at UofT Linguistics!

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