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May 15, 2025

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • This semester we hosted 16 in-person visits! Six were community research visits sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival or the CLA's Community Research Grant, representing Miwokan, Nisenan, Salinan, Tachi, Washoe, and Wuksachi languages. Four were by individuals working with Kashaya, Ktunaxa, Patwin, and Wappo. The remainder included family groups, Ukiah-area high school students, prospective graduate students, SLUgS, and tribal and state governmental leaders. Five more languages were represented among these groups.
  • Wesley dos Santos (PhD 2024) has added several hundred audiovisual recordings of elicitation sessions, texts, and songs from 2020 forward in Júma and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau (Tupí-Guaraní; Brazil) to the collection Kawahiva Language Documentation Archive (see file bundles 2019-06.051 through 2019-06.060).
  • We've accessioned the Colección de grabaciones sonoras de la lengua ashaninka de Mariscela Amador Hernández  (Arawakan; Peru) consisting of eight cassette tape recordings from circa 1984. The tapes were discovered in 2021 in a Dwinelle Hall office that was about to be remodeled. They were only labeled with the names of the speakers, without information about the language or researcher.
  • We've accessioned the Coleção de Materiais da Língua Mỹky de Gisela Pauli (isolate; Brazil) consisting of five cassette tape recordings from 1996 of interviews, music, and speeches, in addition to scanned field notes. The donation of the materials was facilitated by former Berkeley linguistics postdoc Bernat Bardagil.
  • Zachary O'Hagan and Lev Michael have archived approximately 75 hours of sound recordings of elicitation sessions and other interviews related to Chamikuro (Arawakan; Peru), from two collaborations with Alfonso Patow Chota between June and August 2024 (see bundles 2022-08.015 through 2022-08.064).

In early April, Zachary O'Hagan was in Paris and Berlin in order to process archival materials from the late 1970s and early '80s related to Máíhɨ̃̀kì (Tukanoan; Peru), and to attend the annual meeting of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN). In early May, he participated in the 1st Workshop on Endangered and Minoritized Languages, hosted online by the Universidade do Minho (Portugal), giving a presentation titled "The Role of Linguistic Heritage Materials from Berkeley in California and Beyond."

May 13, 2025

At the 17th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference in Southfield, MI, August 7-10, Eve Sweetser, Lorianne Fan (BA 2024), and Kim Grogan (University of British Columbia) will present a paper titled "Multimodal metaphor data and enrichment of corpus interpretation."

May 12, 2025

At the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Buenos Aires, July 14-18, Schuyler Laparle (PhD, 2022) and Eve Sweetser will present a paper titled "Projecting viewpoint: Material and immaterial discourse anchors." Eve Sweetser will also present a paper "PANDEMIC IS WAR metaphors: Multimodal blends with varied inputs and meanings."

Larry Hyman and John Merrill (PhD, 2018) will be presenting talks at the Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop (LLACAN, Paris) on May 22-23:

  • Larry M. Hyman, "Limba verb extensions in Niger-Congo Perspective"
  • John Merrill, "Comparative reconstruction of Proto-Niger-Congo class markers"

The workshop website contains the program and abstracts. The workshop is free for participants and attendees. You can register to confirm your in-person attendance or to receive the Zoom link to attend online.

May 9, 2025

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

May 8, 2025

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2024, spring and summer 2025) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Luis Bejarano-Beltran (BA 2025) will be converting to a full-time Brand Marketing Coordinator for Chase Center Concerts and Events, under the Golden State Warriors.
  • Ajay Bhargava (BA 2025) will be starting a job as an engineer at Applied Intuition, working on software for autonomous vehicles.
  • Habiba Geweifal (BA 2025) will be starting her MS in Speech-Language Pathology at San Jose State University in Fall 2025.
  • Lindsay Hatch (BA 2025) will be taking a year off and then applying to graduate school to continue research.
  • Madison Fanucchi (BA 2025) will be attending San Jose State University to earn her Master's of Library and Information Science with a concentration on Archival Studies.

Congratulations, everybody!

May 7, 2025

News from the Script Encoding Initiative:

Helena Kansa is the Program Manager of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI). She is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and has a background in linguistics, anthropology, and foreign languages such as Italian and Arabic. In her role at SEI, Helena provides administrative and logistical support, oversees special projects like the script status database, and develops new initiatives like the upcoming SEI fieldwork fellowship. With a passion for advancing language accessibility, she is excited to assist SEI in promoting the digital representation of minority writing systems. As representative of SEI’s communications with the public, Helena hopes to cultivate new opportunities for collaboration with UC Berkeley students and the surrounding community. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, traveling, boxing, and working on her car. Helena welcomes anyone interested to reach out to her for any questions about SEI.

Please give her a warm welcome to the department. Helena is starting her role remotely, but will be around in person starting this summer. Feel free to drop by SEI's new office at Dwinelle 1224 to say hello!

May 6, 2025

There will be several presentations by current Berkeley linguists at this year's Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) in Minneapolis, May 15-17, 2025:

Anushah Hossain (Research Director, Script Encoding Initiative) will be speaking at two public events next week:

  • Tuesday, May 13 – "Character Building: Bridging Code and Culture through Unicode" at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Event details here.

  • Thursday, May 15 – "The Trailblazers that Made Bangla Computing Viable" at Adobe, San Jose, CA. Event details here.

Drop by if you find yourself in the South Bay, or catch the livestreams online.

May 5, 2025

The model that Gašper Beguš proposed in his 2021 Neural Networks paper will drive part of the Next Earth exhibition at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The opening night is May 10, 2025 at the Palazzo Diedo. More info is available here.

Maksymilian Dąbkowski has just published a new article on "Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination" in Proceedings of the 2023 and 2024 Annual Meetings on Phonology. Click here to read it.

Our own Myriam Lapierre (PhD 2021; currently Assistant Professor at the University of Washington) will be moving to McGill University, where she has accepted a position as Assistant Professor, starting in January 2026.

May 2, 2025

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

April 28, 2025

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 5, 2025 at 3:10pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94536362920)

Honors Student Presenters

  • Sarah Ertel
    Honors Thesis Title: "Prevelar Raising in Eastern Washington and the Eastern Washington English Corpus"
    Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
  • Lindsay Hatch
    Honors Thesis Title: "Implosives Cross-Linguistically"
    Faculty Advisor: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Hannah Sande (Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics)

Remembrances from the memorial gathering (February 22, 2025) for Ian Maddieson have been collected into a short booklet and published on eScholarship.

April 25, 2025

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

  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday May 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
    Ora de Echar Lashon (beginner-friendly conversation hour) with discussions of May Day and Ladino poetry across time and space!
  • Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Panel: Revitalization and re-awakening sleeping and near-sleeping languages, with Chelsi Sparti (Wintun), Jonathan Cirelli (Habematolel Pomo), and Shaunie Briggs (Salinan)
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Antón de la Fuente (Stanford): "Ideological Change and Phonological Variation in the Galician of O Grove"
  • Phorum - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Max Kaplan (UC Santa Cruz): "Phonotactics in speech perception: A crosslinguistic comparison of repair in onset clusters"
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 28 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
    Talk by Verónica Grajeda
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Andrew Simpson (USC): "Obligatory object shift in Chinese: Aspect, definiteness, and affectedness"
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Case sensitivity reflects case structure: Agreement, extraction, and clitics"

April 24, 2025

BayPhon, taking place at UC Santa Cruz on May 10, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

April 22, 2025

April 21, 2025