News

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Terry Regier (UC Berkeley): "Cultural evolution explains efficient semantic systems"
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Presentation by Luke Gessler (Indiana University)
• Phorum - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Practice talks for Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Katie Russell: "Wordhood at the heart of Paraguayan Guaraní morphology"
  Kai Schenck: "Morphological domains in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony" (poster)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Research updates and discussion of Pacheco et al. 2024 and Hall-Lew 2024
• Spectrogram Club - Wednesday Mar 5 - Dwinelle 1229 - 12:30-1:30pm
  Bring your lunch and come keep your phonetics skills sharp by deciphering some spectrograms!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Meeting canceled
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Ahmad Jabbar (Stanford): "Conditional rhetorical questions"

Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside) will be leading a three-day workshop on "Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Language Attitudes and Bias" from 4-6pm on March 18, 20, and 21 in 5303 Dwinelle Hall. To register (for any or all sessions), kindly email Justin Davidson. Here is a description of the workshop:

In this 3-day intensive workshop, Dr. Licata will present a deep dive into methodologies and analyses for empirical studies of language attitudes and linguistic bias, including the matched guise test (MGT), the implicit association test (IAT), and relevant data analyses in R (exploratory factor analysis, ordinal regression, correlation analyses). Should you not see yourself as a sociolinguist working on attitudes and bias, the skills and software you'll be exposed to in the workshop are nice tools to have at your disposal, if even for the eventual mentoring of future students that would seek your guidance on how to use them!

Calendar:

Day 1 (March 18): Matched Guise and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Day 2 (March 20): Implicit Association Test

Day 3 (March 21): Quantitative Analysis via Ordinal Regression and Correlation Analyses

Gabriella Licata is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside and Lead Researcher at Mount Tamalpais College inside San Quentin Prison. She takes interdisciplinary approaches and uses mixed methodologies to uncover systemic [linguistic] discrimination as a resource for reform, abolition, and liberation. Gabriella additionally is the founder of a community-based consulting business, Restorative Research Consulting.

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 3, with a talk by our very own Terry Regier, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. His talk is entitled "Cultural evolution explains efficient semantic systems." The abstract is as follows:

It has been argued that systems of semantic categories across languages reflect functional pressure for efficient communication. There is also a long tradition of approaching systems of semantic categories in terms of cultural evolution: the process by which a cultural convention changes as it is repeatedly learned and used in communication. I will present recent computational work with Emil Carlsson and Devdatt Dubhashi that connects these two approaches. We find that (1) an existing model of cultural evolution produces color naming systems that are both efficient and similar to attested systems from a range of languages; and (2) this model of cultural evolution helps us understand an important case in which optimally efficient systems do not match empirical data. We argue that these two approaches taken together yield a more comprehensive understanding than either one taken alone.

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Carlos Yebra Lopez (Cal State Fullerton): Presentation of the book Ladino on the Internet in Ladino
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 26 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Alexia Hatun (UCLA): "A Safe Place for Language: Linguistic Accessibility and Vitality among Non-Dominant Languages" (with a focus on Western Armenian)
• Phorum - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): "Which 'u' and why: Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Practice talks for Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Katie Russell: "Wordhood at the heart of Paraguayan Guaraní morphology"
  Kai Schenck: "Morphological domains in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony" (poster)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley): "Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro 'have'-constructions"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Melissa Cronin (Stanford): "On the decomposition and anteriority of used to"

Congratulations to Justin Davidson, who has been awarded the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity. The award was made in recognition of his "transformative research and advocacy work on Spanish-English bilingualism, exceptional support and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students, innovative, inclusive teaching practices, and outstanding contributions to disability justice."

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

• Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): "Which 'u' and why: Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley): "Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro 'have'-constructions"

Former Berkeley linguistics graduate student Amy Tan, also the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and many other books, has donated her papers to UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. News articles about this gift are in Berkeleyside and the New York Times. (Photo below from the Bancroft Library: Amy Tan in the Rock Bottom Remainders.)

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Julia Swan (San José State University): "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
  Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley): "Orthographic Variation of Ladino Prenasal Vowels"
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Plain Language Workshop"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "Dependent case, first person plural and impersonal morphosyntax in Finnish"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro"

Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro on the publication of an article titled "Laryngealized vowels in Yánesha': A phonetic description and subsegmental analysis" in Folia Linguistica! An Open Access version of the article can be found here.