Linguistics Department News (Calques)

Recent Stories

Updates from our graduating seniors 2023

May 11, 2023

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Aishwarya Jayadeep (BA 2023) will be starting an MS in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley this fall.
  • Chelsea Tang (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT this fall.
  • Calvin Quick (BA 2023) will be starting the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Toronto in September 2023.
  • Cid Bryan (BA 2022) is currently working as a substitute teacher and is getting ready to apply to graduate programs in the near future.
  • Dara Gaeuman (BA 2022) will be starting the master's program for clinical Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University in September 2023.
  • Cecilia Elena Bachmann (BA 2023) will begin working as the Emerging Adult Workforce and Education Coordinator for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles. She also has plans to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2024.
  • Noah Boihem (Linguistics BA, Computer Science BA 2023) will be attending Nuclear Power School to become a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy starting in October 2023. He will be assisting in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab until then.
  • Corina Chen (BA 2022) will be starting her M.Ed. at Stanford in June 2023 and is looking forward to becoming an English secondary school teacher in the SF Bay Area.
  • Gunjan Anand (BA 2023) will be starting her PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the fall.

Congratulations, everybody!

Berkeley linguists @ ICPhS 2023

May 10, 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), taking place in Prague in August:

  • Amber Galvano: "Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change"
  • Emily Grabowski: "Methodological trends in acoustic phonetic analysis"
  • Keith Johnson: "Individual differences in Speech Production: What is 'Phonetic Substance'?"
  • Yevgeniy Melguy: "Mechanisms of generalization for phonetic learning of accented speech"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Julian Martinez-Garcia (BA 2023): "Spirantization of word-final plosives in Standard Dutch"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba): "Stop voicing in two settler communities on the Canadian Prairies"

Berkeley linguists @ ACAL 2023

May 9, 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), taking place June 12-14, 2023, at the University of Connecticut:

  • Franco Liu and Shweta Akolkar: "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference and Focus Fronting in Lobi"
  • Shweta Akolkar and Franco Liu: "Morphological rɛ́-flex of focus in Lobi"
  • Anna Macknick: "STAMP as Asymmetric Negation in Lobi"
  • Katherine Russell: "Two types of negation in Guébie"
  • Amber Galvano and Sansan Hien: "Quantifying the Lobi vowel space"
  • Rebecca Jarvis: "Relative clause derivations and subject displacement in Atchan"

Beguš in ICASSP 2023

May 8, 2023

Gašper Beguš published a paper titled "Articulation GAN: Unsupervised modeling of articulatory learning" in proceedings of ICASSP 2023 (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing) with Alan Zhou, Peter Wu, and Gopala K. Anumanchipalli. The paper is available here.

Video of the presentation scheduled to be given at the conference in Rhodes, Greece on June 9 is available here.

Jarvis gives practice SALT talk

May 4, 2023

Becky Jarvis will be giving a SALT practice talk titled "Movement and interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" on Monday, May 8 at 1pm. The talk will take place in 1303 Dwinelle and over Zoom (password sscircle).

CLA updates

May 3, 2023

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Tessa Scott, Lucrecia Carrillo, and Henry Sales have accessioned a new collection, Documentary Materials on Mam, a Mayan language of Guatemala, Mexico, and the Bay Area. The collection consists of audio recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation, subtitled video recordings of narrative texts (with the assistance of Kenneth Gallanosa), typed field notes, and PDF scans of handwritten field notes. It spans multiple varieties of Mam, as spoken in the following towns in Guatemala: San Antonio Ixchiguán, San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán, San Juan Atitán (majority), San Rafael Petzal, and San Sebastián Huehuetenango.