Linguistics Department News (Calques)

Phantomatics, an art installation that resulted from a collaboration between Agnieszka Kurant and Gašper Beguš, is being exhibited at Palazzo Diedo concurrent with the Venice Biennale and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Keith Johnson reports a number of activities in the spring semester:

• A joint talk with Alexandra Pfiffner on the Voices of Oakland project at the Stanford Speech and Cognition Lab (Berkeley alumna Meg Cychosz's new lab) - March 11.
• A Phonlab workshop and undergraduate honors thesis defense at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting Berkeley alumni Jevon Heath, Melinda Fricke and their children Malcom and Josie - April 16-18.
• Another Phonlab workshop and colloquium talk on "Vowels in the Brain" at the University of Kentucky, visiting Berkeley former visiting student Kevin McGowan - April 23-25.
• This semester Keith also joined the editorial board of Phonetica.

The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe has just published a new batch of interviews and surpassed the 300-hour milestone! As of today, 326.3 hours of manually transcribed speech from 171 Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors are available to the public online. The corpus is being developed with Isaac Bleaman's NSF CAREER grant.

Several current and former UC Berkeley linguistics affiliates will be presenting at two co-located conferences at the University at Buffalo: the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 57) (May 21-23) and the Third Conference on Bantoid Languages and Linguistics (Bantoid 3) (May 20-21). The full programs are available here.

• Pius W. Akumbu (Visiting Scholar 2015-16): "Low tone anticipatory spreading in Babanki: A typological anomaly"
• Pius W. Akumbu & Jeffrey Wills: "Concord and prefix interaction in Bantoid: The case of class 7 kV- and a-"
• Matthew Faytak (PhD 2018) et al.: "Nasal aerodynamics of the Gbagyi syllable"
• Larry M. Hyman & Daniel Ibrahim Kamara: "Noun Class and Number Marking in Limba (Thɔnkɔ Dialect)"
• Rebecca Jarvis & Katherine Russell: "Assessing language shift in an urban West African context: Two investigations of Atchan language use"
• Alice Lee-Kleinberg: "The semantics of definiteness in Amharic"
• Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016): "Subtractive Morphology in Fanya (Bua, Chad)"
• Nafisa Rashid: "An Insight into Accent Shifting through Vowel Monophthongization in the Ghanaian-American Singer Amaarae"
• Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) [ACAL Plenary]: "Tone diachrony beyond tonogenesis: Reconstructing the tone melodies of Proto-Edoid (Niger-Congo)"
• Nicholas Rolle: "The MPaNCA Project: Findings in the noun class morphomics of Bantoid"
• Katherine Russell & Hannah Sande: "Two typologically distinct nasality systems in West Africa: A nasal and oral airflow study of Atchan (Kwa) and Guébie (Kru)"