Berkeley Prof. (emeritus) William Shiyuan Wang is one of two recipients of the first Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences, organized by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and named in honor of the late Yuen Ren Chao, often regarded as the founder of linguistics in China and also later a founding member of Berkeley's Department of Linguistics.
Maksymilian Dąbkowski's paper "The phonology of A'ingae" has been published in Language and Linguistics Compass 13 (2024) e12512. Abstract:
"A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO639‐3:con) is an indigenous language isolate spoken in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. This paper presents the first comprehensive overview of the A'ingae phonology, including descriptions of (i) the language's phonemic inventory, (ii) phonotactics and a number of related phonological rules, (iii) nasality and nasal spreading, as well as (iv) stress, glottalisation, their morphophonology, and aspects of clause‐level prosody."
Johanna Nichols has three new articles:
Hannah Sande's chapter "Onomatopoeia in Guébie (Kru)" has been published in a new handbook, Onomatopoeia in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, edited by Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavol Štekauer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2024), pp. 223-235. Congratulations, Hannah!
We're thrilled to announce that Prof. Nicole Holliday will be joining the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics faculty as of July 1, 2024.
Prof. Peter Jenks will receive UC Berkeley's 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award. Given annually to a handful of faculty, this is the highest campus honor in recognition of sustained excellence in teaching.
Berkeley alumna Dr. Amalia Skilton (PhD 2019) has accepted a tenure-track position as a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Congratulations, Amalia!
Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Gašper Beguš have published a new paper, "Complex diachronies of final nasalization in Austronesian and Dakota", in Glossa 9/1 (2024). Abstract:
"Final nasalization of voiced stops is phonetically unmotivated (i.e. not a consequence of universal articulatory or perceptual tendencies). As such, final nasalization has been deemed an impossible sound change. Nonetheless, Blust (2005; 2016) proposes that final nasalization took place in four Austronesian languages: Kayan-Murik, Berawan dialects, Kalabakan Murut, and Karo Batak. In this paper, we argue final nasalization in these languages is not a single sound change and reduce it to a combination of phonetically grounded changes. We demonstrate that in Austronesian, final nasalization involved four steps: (i) fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of the fricatives, (iii) spontaneous nasalization before voiceless fricatives, and (iv) occlusion of the nasalized fricatives to nasal stops. Finally, we extend our account to final nasalization in Dakota (Siouan) and propose a new explanation for the development of the unnatural final voicing in the related Lakota language. Our results shed light on the role of phonetic naturalness in diachrony and synchrony. We maintain that while phonetically unnatural phonological processes may arise via a sequence of sound changes or analogical extension, sound changes are always natural and phonetically grounded."