Linguistics Department News (Calques)

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Kathryn Davidson (Harvard): "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora"
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): "Some challenges of establishing focus structure through elicitation"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Cooper Bedin (UC Santa Barbara): "Towards participant-driven analyses in sociolinguistic studies of gender and sexuality"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Talk by Rhosean Asmah (UC Berkeley)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Hall-Lew 2024
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): "Cross-clausal movement and its limits"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Talk by Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis)

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday and Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama) on the publication of their article "Gender and racial bias issues in a commercial 'tone of voice' analysis system" in PLoS ONE!

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 17, with a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora." The abstract is as follows:

Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied in sign languages, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations, along with perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmental "non-manuals" and other simultaneous expression, the tight integration of iconic depiction into the grammatical structure, etc. The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is often considered to be another modality-specific feature, bearing on questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness, givenness, and contrast. This talk will provide new empirical arguments from sign languages for how the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity and what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure.

Congratulations to Tyler Lee-Wynant, who will be giving two talks about his language revitalization work on Northern Pomo at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation this weekend:

• 3/8 - "Language ideologies and language attitudes in a Northern Pomo high school class" (co-presenting with Catherine O'Connor, Boston University)
• 3/9 - "Set-up of an open-access and community-independent online language course for a reawakening language: The case of Northern Pomo"