Many areas of linguistics — especially those involving corpus data, computational methods, or experimental work — rely on forms of collaboration that are not visible from the author line. Corpora must be assembled, cleaned, documented, and sometimes shared. Data may require multi‑person annotation. Statistical analyses must be designed, implemented, and checked. Software pipelines are written, adapted, and maintained. Fieldwork materials are prepared. Experimental designs are refined. Across these activities, supervisors, research assistants, programmers, annotators, and colleagues often contribute essential components of the final publication.

Other empirical fields confronted this shift earlier. As genomics, biomedicine, and psychology became more computational and more collaborative, informal acknowledgements proved insufficient. Many journals in those areas now require structured contribution statements. Linguistics is encountering the same issue for the same reason: our methods have become more technical and more distributed than our authorship conventions assume.

Some linguistics journals have already recognized this. Venues published by major houses such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer have adopted or encouraged CRediT, and several interdisciplinary journals that regularly publish linguistics research require it. But adoption remains uneven across the discipline. Many core theoretical journals still do not mandate structured contribution statements, and authorship norms vary widely between subfields. As a result, contribution clarity is not yet a consistent expectation in linguistics as a whole.

This is why broader use of CRediT would be beneficial.

CRediT, the Contributor Role Taxonomy, provides a structured vocabulary for describing contributions to scholarly work. It includes roles such as Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing. It does not determine authorship; it simply clarifies who did what.

This clarity is especially important in methods sections. A methods section is meant to justify a procedure, not rely on the implicit authority of a name. Someone may write a pipeline, suggest a corpus, or comment on a coding scheme without endorsing every later use of that work. Consultation is not co‑design. Software development is not validation. And naming a contributor inside a methods section can unintentionally imply a level of involvement or endorsement that did not occur.

A structured contribution statement avoids this ambiguity. It distinguishes roles that are often conflated: “Software” is not “Formal analysis.” “Resources” is not “Validation.” “Supervision” is not “Methodology.” These distinctions may appear bureaucratic, but they promote precision that generic acknowledgements cannot provide.

Clear role descriptions also protect contributors and authors alike. For contributors, a defined role makes their work visible without implying responsibility for downstream uses they did not review. For authors, a contribution statement ensures that methodological justification rests on the method itself, not on the perceived authority of someone named near it.

Linguistics journals could adopt a simple version of this practice with minimal effort. Submission guidelines could encourage short CRediT‑style statements. Student proceedings could do the same. Research teams could agree on roles early in a project rather than reconstructing them after the fact.

Even without formal requirements, authors can use the categories informally:

Co‑author A: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

Co‑author B: Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Contributor C: Software

The specific format matters less than the principle: state what each person did, and avoid letting a name stand in for a description.

CRediT will not resolve every authorship question, nor will it replace judgment about who qualifies as an author. But it would reduce one persistent problem: contributors being named in ways that imply endorsement or responsibility without specifying their actual role.

Linguistics has changed. Its methods now resemble those of fields that adopted contribution statements years ago. Our authorship practices should evolve accordingly. A strong article should tell readers not only what was found, but how the work was done — and who is responsible for each part of it.

The article, entitled “Linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with neological (non-)diffusion: A protocol for a scoping review of the English- and French-language literatures (1952–2026),” sets out the methodological plan for a scoping review on the factors associated with the diffusion — and non-diffusion — of neologisms.

This is an important milestone for the thesis. The review aims to map how researchers have studied neological diffusion across more than seven decades of English- and French-language scholarship. More specifically, it asks what kinds of linguistic, social, institutional, communicational, and methodological factors have been associated with whether new lexical items circulate, stabilize, remain marginal, or disappear.

Publishing a protocol is not the same thing as publishing results, but that is precisely why I find it valuable. A protocol makes the research design visible before the review is completed. It clarifies the questions being asked, the sources being searched, the eligibility criteria being applied, and the information that will be charted from the included studies. For a project that deals with a heterogeneous literature — across linguistics, terminology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, corpus studies, and related fields — that kind of explicit methodological groundwork is essential.

The article is also part of a broader commitment to open and transparent research practices. The protocol is accompanied by materials deposited on OSF, including search documentation and data-charting resources. My hope is that these materials will make the review easier to evaluate, reproduce, and build on.

I am grateful to my co-authors, Émilie Paquette Raynard, Nicolas Gignac, Davie Dulude, and Bruno Courbon, for their contributions to this project. I am especially thankful to Bruno for his continued guidance as the thesis takes shape, and to the team for helping move this first major piece of the project forward.

The next step is to complete the review itself: finishing the source collection, screening the records, charting the data, and synthesizing what the literature can tell us about the conditions under which neologisms diffuse — or fail to diffuse.

It feels good to see this first protocol published. Doctoral work often advances through long stretches of planning, reading, revising, and reorganizing before anything becomes publicly visible. This publication makes one part of that work visible, and marks a real step forward in the thesis.

The presentation was especially interesting to me because tourism offers a rich testing ground for the study of neology. New words in this domain do not emerge only because new objects or practices need to be named. They also circulate through institutions, promotional discourse, regional identities, commercial branding, and changing cultural imaginaries of travel. Tourism vocabulary sits somewhere between specialized terminology, public-facing communication, and everyday language. This makes it a particularly useful site for thinking about how neologisms are formed, stabilized, and diffused.

One aspect that stood out to me was the way tourism neology can reveal tensions between linguistic creativity and institutional framing. A new tourism-related term may begin as a descriptive label, a promotional invention, a regional marker, or a calque from another language. But once it begins circulating, it can be taken up by dictionaries, tourist offices, journalists, online platforms, and speakers themselves. In other words, tourism vocabulary gives us a compact view of several processes that matter more broadly in neology: formation, selection, legitimation, and diffusion.

The talk also connected closely with questions I am currently working through in my own research. My doctoral project focuses on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with the diffusion and non-diffusion of neologisms. Tallarico’s examples were a reminder that diffusion is rarely just a matter of linguistic form. The social life of a word depends on who uses it, where it appears, what kinds of texts carry it, and whether institutions or communities have reasons to repeat it.

This was also a good reminder that specialized domains are not closed linguistic spaces. Tourism, in particular, constantly moves between expert discourse and general discourse. A term may be created within a professional context but addressed to tourists, residents, policymakers, or the general public. That movement across audiences is precisely where neological diffusion becomes visible.

Attending from home while taking care of Georges made the event feel less like a break from ordinary life than a continuation of it. I was listening to a talk about how words travel while managing the small logistics of family life in the background. In a way, that felt appropriate: diffusion is also about circulation across spaces, routines, and contexts. Academic ideas, like words, do not move in ideal conditions. They move through the actual conditions we have.

Overall, the presentation gave me several useful points to think about as I continue working on my scoping review and on the empirical parts of my thesis. Tourism neology seems to offer not only a specialized lexical field, but a particularly clear window onto the broader mechanisms through which new words become visible, usable, and sometimes durable.

Of the nine manuscripts submitted after the conference, five completed the editorial process and are included in the volume. They reflect the diversity of the work presented at the JDL, with contributions addressing different languages, theoretical questions, empirical materials, and methodological approaches. As always, the proceedings provide students and early-career researchers with an opportunity to develop a conference presentation into a complete scholarly publication.

The volume also includes my editorial, “Préparer un résumé scientifique informatif et bien structuré : un facteur clé pour être accepté·e en colloque”. Abstracts are often treated as a minor preliminary exercise, but they play a decisive role in how a proposal is evaluated and in whether readers can understand the purpose, methods, and contribution of the research. The editorial draws on recurring issues encountered when evaluating and editing student submissions.

Because I am currently on parental leave, I cleared my participation with the BBAF beforehand. The presentation concerned work completed before the beginning of my leave: the protocol for our scoping review of the linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with neological diffusion.

The talk gave me an opportunity to present the logic of the review in greater detail: why the literature needs to be mapped systematically, how we intend to identify relevant studies, and how we plan to extract and classify the many different factors that researchers have associated with the diffusion—or non-diffusion—of new words.

I do not particularly enjoy giving presentations. Preparing them takes time, and I rarely feel entirely comfortable speaking in front of a room. Still, presentations have a value that is difficult to reproduce through publications alone. They make it possible to discuss a project while it is still developing, receive immediate reactions, and meet people whose expertise may help move the work forward.

That was certainly the case today.

I met Xavier Darras, from the Office québécois de la langue française, and Giovanni Tallarico. Both responded favourably to the project and indicated that they would do what they could to help us recruit specialists for the scoping review.

This is especially valuable because the next stage of the review depends on obtaining informed feedback from researchers and practitioners with expertise in neology, terminology, and related fields. Identifying relevant specialists—and persuading them to contribute their time—is not a minor part of the process.

The presentation therefore accomplished more than simply communicating the protocol. It helped create connections that may strengthen the review itself.

I am still unlikely to become someone who looks forward to presenting. But today was a useful reminder that the most important part of a conference presentation may happen after the final slide.

My first peer review

I recently completed my first peer review for an academic journal (Lingua, to be precise).

When the invitation arrived, my first reaction was hesitation. The manuscript dealt with a subject adjacent to my own research, but not one in which I would describe myself as a specialist. I knew some of the relevant literature and was comfortable with the broader theoretical questions, yet I worried that this was not enough. Was I really the right person to evaluate the work of another researcher?

Eventually, I realized that I had misunderstood why I had been invited. The editors were not necessarily asking me to know everything about the manuscript’s highly specific subject. They were asking whether I could assess the argument from a broader perspective: whether the paper made its contribution clear, situated that contribution within a larger scholarly conversation, and provided evidence that supported its principal claims.

Seen in those terms, I did have something useful to offer.

As I read the manuscript closely, three main problems emerged.

Congratulations are due to the students whose candidacies were recognized. Their projects clearly made a strong impression, and being selected in a university-wide competition is a significant achievement.

The result may not be the one I had hoped for, but I do not regret applying. My candidacy was built around several years of involvement in student scholarly publishing, particularly my work as editor-in-chief of the Actes des Journées de linguistique in 2024 and 2025. The project was substantial enough that I believed I had a realistic chance. That, in itself, was a sufficient reason to submit an application.

That work matters. A student conference is not just a line on a CV, and it is not just an annual event that needs to be kept alive. At its best, it is a space where people can try out ideas, receive serious feedback, learn how academic publishing works, and see themselves as part of a research community. That is worth protecting.

But for JDL 2026, I need to take more of a backseat.

Part of the reason is practical. For me, 2026 has to be a year where my newborn son and doctoral work come first. I am at a point in my PhD where I need to be more selective about how I spend my time. My thesis, my articles, my research data, and the next stages of my academic file need more attention. Service work is valuable, but it can expand very easily. It often becomes the kind of work that is urgent, visible, and never quite finished.

There is also a broader reason. I do not think this type of position should be held for too long by the same person.

For the 2026 proceedings, Alejandro Fallas Godínez will take on the role of incoming editor-in-chief. I am very happy about that. Alejandro brings his own strengths, priorities, and way of working to the project, and that is exactly what the JDL needs. A healthy collective project should not simply reproduce the habits of the person who happened to be most involved in the previous cycle.

When one person remains central to a project like the JDL for too many cycles, even with good intentions, the project can start to reflect that person too strongly. Personal preferences can start to look like institutional norms. What begins as care for the project can slowly become overcontrol. And because you become more efficient, it can also lead to a ratchet effect, as we pointed out in our 2025 editorial.

That is not healthy for the JDL.

The JDL should not depend on one person’s habits, standards, taste, or availability. It is a collective project, one that has been alive since 1987. It should continue to be shaped by different cohorts, different priorities, different styles of organization, and different ideas about what a student conference can be. Continuity matters, but so does renewal.

Taking a backseat does not mean disappearing. I still care about the event, and I still want it to succeed. I am happy to offer advice, share documents, explain past decisions, and help make the transition easier. But I do not want to be the person through whom everything has to pass.

That is better for me, and I think it is better for the JDL.

A collective project has to remain collective. Sometimes that means stepping forward. Sometimes it means stepping back.

I am about to go on paid parental leave.

That sentence feels simple, but in the context of a PhD it carries a surprising amount of weight. Doctoral timelines are often imagined as linear: coursework, exams, data collection, analysis, writing, defence. Even when everyone knows that life is more complicated than that, the imagined shape of the degree still tends to be uninterrupted. Progress is measured in milestones, submissions, chapters, articles, conferences, and deadlines.

A child does not fit neatly into that calendar.

Georges arrived earlier than expected, and his first year has changed the rhythm of my doctoral work in ways that are difficult to summarize. There have been hospital memories, appointments, paperwork, fatigue, joy, worry, and then the ordinary, repetitive, beautiful work of caring for a baby. The thesis has continued in the background, sometimes steadily and sometimes not. But it has no longer been possible — or desirable — to pretend that doctoral research exists outside the rest of life.

This is why paid parental leave matters.

Through the Tri-agency award-holder rules, a SSHRC doctoral award can be interrupted for paid parental leave. In administrative terms, this is a policy about award interruptions, eligibility, primary caregiving, and stipend payments. In human terms, it means that I can pause my doctoral funding and step more fully into caregiving without treating that pause as a rupture or a personal failure.

I find that important.

Graduate students are often encouraged to think of funding as recognition: a sign that a project is promising, that an application was successful, that a student has demonstrated potential. That is true, but it is incomplete. Funding is also infrastructure. It is one of the things that makes research materially possible. It pays rent. It buys time. It protects continuity. And, in this case, it creates room for a doctoral student to become a parent without the entire structure of the degree collapsing.

I am grateful for that.

I am also aware that going on leave produces its own complicated feelings. Part of me is relieved. Part of me is anxious about stepping back from a project that already feels too large and too delayed. Part of me worries about losing momentum. Another part of me knows that the language of “momentum” can become cruel when applied to care work, illness, birth, prematurity, and family life.

There is a strange tension here. On paper, parental leave is an interruption. But in reality, it is not an interruption of life. It is life. The administrative system pauses the award so that caregiving can happen, but the broader work of becoming a researcher does not simply stop. I suspect this year will shape how I understand academic work, institutional support, and the hidden conditions that make scholarship possible.

I do not know exactly what returning will look like. I know there will be data to collect, articles to write, collaborators to update, and timelines to revise. I know I will probably return with some frustration about lost time. But I also hope I will return with a clearer sense of what kind of academic life I want to build: one that does not depend on pretending that care is peripheral to serious work.

For now, I am trying to accept the pause as legitimate.

Not as a detour from the doctorate, and not as an apology.

As part of it.

This marks an important milestone in my PhD. The examination was based on a substantial written document of about 70 pages, in which I presented the current state of my doctoral project, its theoretical and methodological foundations, and the next stages of the research.

I am especially grateful to the members of my committee, who agreed to evaluate the document within a tight timeline before I began parental leave. I know that reading and assessing a long doctoral examination document requires a significant investment of time and attention, and I truly appreciated their generosity, availability, and constructive feedback.

With this second examination completed, the project is now moving more fully into the thesis research phase. The next steps include continuing work on the scoping review, advancing the empirical components of the thesis, and preparing for the next stages of data collection and analysis.

It feels good to reach this point. Doctoral work is rarely linear, and this milestone represents not only the completion of a program requirement, but also a clearer sense of where the project is going.

Our son, Georges Auguste Dulude-McKee, arrived much earlier than expected - 2.5 months, to be exact. (He’s doing okay, but he won’t be released from hospital untill around his original due date) His premature birth has reshaped the past several months—and, unsurprisingly, our plans for the beginning of 2026.

Postponing the trip was not a difficult decision. A research stay abroad always requires a certain amount of coordination. Travelling with a very young baby requires considerably more. Travelling with a baby who arrived prematurely, and whose first months have involved additional medical care and follow-up, is another matter altogether. Returning to France in January is therefore neither realistic nor desirable for us.

My doctoral work remains important, and I still intend to spend time in Grenoble as part of my co-supervision. But the timetable must now accommodate the needs of our family rather than the other way around.

For the moment, that means remaining in Québec, adjusting to life as a family of three, and giving Georges the time he needs to grow stronger.

Conference proceedings collect written articles developed from presentations given at a conference. In the case of the Journées de linguistique, they provide student and early-career researchers with an opportunity to transform a presentation into a formal academic publication and to gain experience with peer review, revision and editorial production.

I served as editor-in-chief of the 2024 proceedings and oversaw the project from the initial submission and evaluation stages through revision, production and publication.

The work continued until August 2025, but the articles were not held back until the entire collection was ready. Instead, we used a rolling publication model: each manuscript was published as soon as it had completed the evaluation, revision and production process.

This allowed six manuscripts to be published before the end of December 2024. By May 2025, nine manuscripts were available, even though the remaining administrative and editorial work on the project continued into August.

Dear donor,

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the expression Zoom apéros — or “Zoom happy hours” — quickly became part of everyday life, referring to virtual gatherings with friends that tried to make up for the absence of shared moments in person. The fact that both the expression and the practice largely disappeared after lockdowns were lifted says something important: nothing truly replaces the richness and ease of face-to-face exchange. Thanks to your generous support, I was able to experience this firsthand.

The travel award gave me the freedom to travel to Grenoble, France, for a training stay in June, where I met my research co-supervisor in person for the very first time. My meetings with Olivier, a computer science specialist at Université Grenoble Alpes, helped us develop a genuine working relationship, one that will support a lasting collaboration. They also opened up new avenues of reflection that no video call could have sparked in quite the same way.

I also have wonderful personal memories of the stay, including discovering sérac, a fresh cheese from the foothills of the French Alps, which I warmly recommend to anyone visiting the region.

I am therefore deeply grateful for your commitment to supporting emerging researchers, and for making my first in-person meetings with my co-supervisor possible.

With sincere gratitude,

Gabriel Frazer-McKee SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in Linguistics Specialist in neology in Quebec French Université Laval

Memory from an excursion to Chamrousse, in the French Alps, with my co-supervisor Olivier and my fellow doctoral students Rim and Ola, after a productive week of work in Grenoble. The fresh mountain air offered a welcome contrast to the stifling heat of the city, aptly nicknamed “the Bowl.”

Although Olivier and I have been working together remotely, meeting in Grenoble makes it possible to discuss the project in greater depth and to work through methodological questions more naturally. Our conversations are helping me clarify several aspects of the scoping review and think more concretely about the computational components of the thesis. They are also opening new directions for our longer-term collaboration.

The final week of the stay is devoted to an online course offered by Utrecht University on AI-aided systematic reviewing. I am following the course from Grenoble and learning to use ASReview, an open-source tool that combines active learning with human screening decisions to prioritize records during evidence synthesis.

This training comes at an ideal point in the project. The searches for my scoping review have produced tens of thousands of potentially relevant records, making an efficient and transparent screening strategy essential. Over five intensive days, the course covers the principles behind active learning, the practical use of ASReview and the methodological decisions involved in integrating machine-assisted screening into a review.

The stay has also provided time to discover Grenoble and its surroundings. Olivier has introduced me not only to colleagues and research environments at Université Grenoble Alpes, but also to places such as the Charmant Som and the oak of Venon. These excursions have made the visit both scientifically productive and personally memorable.

The three weeks have confirmed the value of spending time in the same place as one’s collaborators. I am leaving Grenoble with a stronger methodological foundation for the review, several new research ideas and a much more concrete sense of the collaboration that Olivier and I are building around the thesis.

It was an unusually good fit for my doctoral research. Although my work focuses primarily on the factors associated with the diffusion—or disappearance—of neologisms, studying lexical innovation requires engaging with a much broader set of questions: What exactly counts as a neologism? How can new words and meanings be detected in corpora? When should they be included in dictionaries or terminological resources? How do social and cultural conditions influence their emergence and circulation?

The school approached these questions from a different perspective each day. We began with the basic concepts and categories used to describe neology before turning to its relationship with lexicography, terminology, sociolinguistics, and technology. Morning sessions introduced the theoretical foundations of each area, while the afternoons were generally devoted to practical exercises involving real linguistic data.

This combination was one of the program’s main strengths. The training covered not only conceptual distinctions but also the practical work required to build resources, extract neological candidates, document new lexical units, and present the resulting data. We were introduced to tools and resources including TermoStat, FAIRterm, ParlaMint, Sketch Engine, Lexonomy, and Wikibase. Even when a particular tool did not correspond directly to my own research design, seeing how other researchers operationalize and process lexical innovation helped me situate my methods within the wider field.

I was particularly looking forward to the session led by Kris Heylen and Uri Horesh on neology in cultural and social contexts. Its emphasis on language contact, lexical borrowing, sociolinguistic variation, and cultural change connected closely with my interest in the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that shape neological diffusion.

Unfortunately, Lisbon intervened.

The evening before the session, a bicycle courier ran over my foot. Nothing was broken, thankfully, but by the following morning my foot was so badly bruised that I could not even hobble well enough to attend. Missing one of the sessions most closely related to my own work was frustrating, although I was mostly relieved that the accident had not caused a more serious injury—or ended the week altogether.

Beyond the individual courses, the training school offered something that can be difficult to obtain when working on a highly specialized doctoral project: a view of neology as a genuinely international and interdisciplinary research area. The same basic phenomenon—lexical innovation—can be approached as a question of linguistic structure, dictionary-making, terminological management, technological infrastructure, social variation, or language policy. Each perspective brings its own concepts, methods, and assumptions.

The week in Lisbon therefore gave me more than a collection of techniques. It helped me better understand where my own research sits within the field, what it shares with neighbouring traditions, and where those traditions sometimes speak past one another. It also provided an opportunity to meet researchers working on similar questions in different languages and institutional contexts—the kind of contact that can lead to conversations and collaborations long after a training school has ended.

Even with one bruised foot and one unfortunately missed session, the first ENEOLI Training School was an important and timely part of my doctoral training.

The core of the system consisted of two Sony cameras: an FX30 and a ZV-E1. One provided a stable wide or medium shot of the speaker and presentation area, while the other offered a closer angle. Having two perspectives made it possible to introduce some visual variation during longer presentations and to cut away when someone crossed in front of a camera or a speaker moved outside the expected frame.

I am interested in learning how to film and edit well for reasons that extend beyond the conference itself. Video is becoming increasingly useful in teaching, whether for producing short explanations, demonstrating concepts, creating asynchronous material, or presenting course content in a more visually engaging form. Recording the Journées de linguistique gave me an opportunity to develop those skills through a real project with real constraints.

The most important improvement over the previous year was the addition of Deity TC-1 timecode boxes. These kept the cameras and the external audio recordings on a shared clock, allowing the files to be synchronized automatically during editing.

The difference was substantial. The year before, I had recorded presentations using an FX30 and a cellphone. Because the two devices did not share timecode, I had to synchronize every clip individually using the recorded audio. For a single clip, this was manageable. Across several presentations, however, aligning the files one at a time took hours before the actual editing could even begin.

With synchronized timecode, the clips from both cameras and the corresponding audio could be assembled almost immediately. There were still occasional adjustments to make, but the most repetitive part of the process had largely disappeared. The timecode boxes did not make the finished videos look dramatically different on their own; their value was in making the production workflow far more efficient. Across the six presentations, they saved hours of work.

Audio remained the most important part of the recordings. Viewers will generally tolerate an imperfect camera angle, but they will not continue watching a presentation they cannot understand. The cameras were therefore only part of the system. The speakers’ microphones and the room audio also had to be captured clearly and incorporated into the synchronized workflow.

The set-up was probably more ambitious than strictly necessary for a student conference. It also occupied an awkward middle ground. This was not a television crew or a fully staffed professional production, but it was considerably more involved than placing a single camera on a tripod and pressing record. “Semi-professional” seems like the most accurate description: professional equipment and methods, operated on a limited scale by someone who was simultaneously helping to run the event.

Filming six presentations still generated a considerable volume of footage. Each talk had to be reviewed, edited, titled, and exported. The two-camera set-up nevertheless made the videos easier to shape, while timecode removed one of the most laborious stages of the previous year’s workflow.

There is also a longer-term value to doing this properly. Conference presentations are often ephemeral: they take place once, in one room, for the people who happen to be present. A clear and carefully edited recording gives the presenters’ work a life beyond the event itself. It also creates a record of the conference and of the research being carried out by students and early-career scholars at this particular moment.

The six completed presentations are available as a YouTube playlist.

The finished videos required a significant investment of time, but the process was much more efficient than it had been the year before. Just as importantly, it gave me practical experience with a form of communication that I hope to incorporate more deliberately into my teaching.

This is not an easy decision. Teaching has been a consistent part of my academic life for years, and I value both the work itself and the experience it gives me. It is tempting to accept each new opportunity, particularly when teaching remains an important part of the academic profile I am building.

But teaching a course requires much more than the hours spent in the classroom. There is preparation, grading, communication with students, course administration, and the less visible mental effort involved in moving repeatedly between teaching and research. Even a familiar course can fragment the longer periods of concentration that writing a dissertation requires.

At this stage of the PhD, I need to protect those periods.

My dissertation is composed of several interconnected research projects, each involving substantial data collection, analysis, and writing. Finishing it will require sustained attention rather than whatever time remains after other commitments have been met. Continuing to teach two courses each year would make progress possible, but slower and more difficult than it needs to be.

Teaching one course per year feels like the right balance. It allows me to remain active in the classroom, continue developing my teaching experience, and maintain an important part of my academic identity. At the same time, it creates more room for the work that now has to take priority: completing the research, writing the articles, and finishing the dissertation.

There will always be another course that would be interesting to teach. The PhD, however, needs to be finished.

For now, doing less teaching is part of making that happen.

My questions were:

1. In what ways and to what extent does neology depend, on the one hand, on the language in which it occurs and, on the other, on non-linguistic or extralinguistic reality?
2. What methodological approaches can be used in corpus linguistics to identify neologisms and trace their diffusion?
3. What are the main characteristics of neology in Quebec French?

At first glance, each question seemed closely aligned with my doctoral research. One concerned the relationship between neology, language structure, and extralinguistic reality. Another focused on corpus-based methods for detecting neologisms and tracing their diffusion. The third addressed the characteristics of neology in Quebec French.

The difficulty was not that the questions were unrelated to my expertise. It was that they were extraordinarily broad.

Specific research questions are often much easier to answer. They define their objects, delimit the relevant evidence, and make it possible to construct an argument around a relatively precise problem. These exam questions did almost the opposite. Each could have supported a book-length treatment. Before answering them, I first had to decide what a satisfactory answer could reasonably include—and, just as importantly, what it would have to leave out.

That made the exam an exercise not only in knowledge, but also in intellectual judgment. I had to impose structure on large and sometimes fragmented bodies of scholarship, distinguish central issues from secondary ones, and develop a defensible answer without pretending that the question could be settled exhaustively.

I did not quite complete the work within the six-week deadline, partly because of difficult personal circumstances at the time. The delay slightly affected my final result: I received an A rather than an A+. Although I was disappointed, particularly after investing so much effort in the responses, the exam was nevertheless successfully completed.

Looking back, the most valuable lesson was not any particular fact about neology. It was learning how to respond when a question is much larger than the space available to answer it. Broad questions initially feel liberating because they leave room to explore. In practice, they demand considerable discipline. The challenge is to find a coherent path through the literature, make the limits of the answer explicit, and still arrive at a meaningful position.

Passing the exam marked an important step in the doctorate. It also clarified the intellectual territory in which my thesis would develop: the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions of neological diffusion, the methodological problem of detecting new words in corpora, and the particular institutional and sociolinguistic context of Quebec French.

Abstract

There are broad disagreements between existing models regarding the mental representations and processes involved in the “DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME” construction, including divergences regarding the semantics of the degree device, the category status of the proper name, the construction’s expressed meaning, its compositionality, and, crucially, the operation holding between the degree device and the proper name. Our corpus-based investigation of two competing models from Construction Grammar and Formal Semantics shows that while both make useful contributions to the scientific understanding of the construction, neither is empirically adequate. Most importantly, we find that the construction participates in several non-predicted expressed meanings; multivariate analyses show that the three meanings amenable to statistical analysis cluster with different semantic usage-features. We argue that the best way to account for the construction’s semantics/pragmatics is via a previously-dismissed cognitive mechanism: an enrichment/strengthening-type operation whereby a pragmatically-supplied scale is added to the message.

Today, the federal government confirmed that the annual value of doctoral scholarships will increase to $40,000 beginning September 1, 2024. The increase applies not only to future competitions, but also to people who already hold an award.

In my case, this adds approximately $40,000 to the total value of my fellowship.

That is a rather remarkable sentence to be able to write.

The original award was worth $80,000 over four years. It will now provide approximately $120,000 over the same period. Nothing about the research project has changed, and I have not had to submit another application. The financial conditions under which I can complete the project have simply—and substantially—improved.