News

Gašper Beguš gave a talk titled "Language as Informative Imagitation" at a workshop on Invented, Constructed, and Emergent Languages in Multi-agent AI Systems at Harvard Kempner and MIT (program) on Monday, May 4.

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

• Undergraduate Honors Colloquium - Monday May 4 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 12:10-2pm
• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday May 4 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Emily Clem (UC San Diego): "Even dependent case is Agree"
• Workshop on Indigenous Archival Returns - Wednesday May 6 - Brayton Community Room, 162 Grimes Center - 10am-5pm
• Phorum - Friday May 1 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Michelle Kamigaki-Baron (University of British Columbia): "Evidence of gradient ambient learning across listeners of different language background: Do Pidgin speakers have an ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi advantage?"
• PhonLab - Friday May 8 - Dwinelle 1229 - 10:30am
  Jiahong Yuan (University of Science and Technology of China): "From Speech Analysis to Model-Brain Alignment: The Case of Tone Recognition"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday May 1 - Dwinelle 5303 and Zoom - 2-4pm
  Felicity Meakins (University of Queensland): "Social salience as a driver of language change"
  End-of-year social
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): "Locality constraints on Prosodic Inversion" (building on joint work with Hannah Sande and Wendy L. A. López Márquez)

The Occitan Studies Working Group is pleased to welcome Robin Chouleur (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) to give a talk called "Working For, With, and In Occitan: From Advocacy to Linguistic Normalization," taking place on Thursday, May 7, at 10am (on the dot!). It should broadly appeal to anyone thinking about creating and finding jobs in minority languages. Pre-registration is required; see poster or link.

Please join us for
The Undergraduate Linguistics Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 4, 2026
12:10–2pm
370 Dwinelle Hall (or Zoom for remote guests)

Student Presenters:

• Nyssa Combs
  Honors Thesis Title: "An Examination of /s/ Realization in the Basque Community of Bakersfield, California"
  Faculty Advisor: Nicole Holliday (Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
• Sinéad Neinast
  Honors Thesis Title: "L3 Acquisition in Spanish-English Bilinguals: How Language of Instruction Affects Perceptual Categories"
  Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
• Ella Mui Shonk
  Honors Thesis Title: "Pause Length and Conversational Overlap Variation Between White and Asian American Women"
  (Research is funded in part by the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, and in part by the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley)
  Faculty Advisor: Nicole Holliday (Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Darya Kavitskaya (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Linguistics)
• Arly Siu
  Honors Thesis Title: "The Interaction of Cantonese Tone and English Intonation in Code-switching"
  Faculty Advisor: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Alan Yu (Professor of Linguistics)

Distinguished author Amy Tan, who was a graduate student in our department (1974-1976), will receive the Alum of the Year Award at the Berkeley Charter Gala on May 21.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 29 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Stephanie Farmer: "The case for Muniche as an Arawakan language"
• Phorum - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Larry Lyu (UC Santa Cruz): "On the phonological representation of fricative vowels: Evidence from vocoid-fricative allophony in Nantong Chinese"
• Phorum - Friday May 1 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Talk by Michelle Kamigaki-Baron (University of British Columbia)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Riley VanMeter (UC Berkeley): "Perceptions of 'Extravagance': Quantifying Attitudes of Varying Stages of Grammaticalization"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Samba Kane (Stanford): "A Subject Extraction Asymmetry in Pulaar Relative Clauses"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Talk by Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley)

Julian Vargo gave a talk titled "How Does Font Support Vary?" at the Annual Unicode Technical Committee Meeting on April 21. He analyzed font support across major software vendors as part of the Script Encoding Initiative's broader project tracking "full stack support" timelines for minority scripts around the world.

The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series concludes on Monday, May 4, with a talk by Emily Clem (UC San Diego) titled "Even dependent case is Agree." The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm, and the abstract is as follows:

Many early generative approaches to case assignment took case to be the result of the same type of dependency-forming operation that results in morphological agreement (in Minimalism, the operation Agree). Under this type of approach, a functional head (probe) establishes a dependency with a nominal (goal), resulting in case being assigned to that nominal. But this view has been challenged, and to a large degree abandoned, in recent years in favor of configurational approaches to case assignment. Under configurational case approaches, it is a structural configuration (specifically, c-command) between two nominals that results in case being assigned to one of those nominals via configurational case rules. This type of configurational approach can derive so-called “dependent” case patterns, where the presence of morphological case on one nominal reflects – or is dependent on – the presence of another nominal in the structure.

In this talk, I explore crosslinguistic data from multiple dependent case patterns and argue that, even in these types of patterns that are taken to be evidence par excellence for configurational approaches to case assignment, we still see the hallmarks of Agree. Specifically, I demonstrate that case assignment is sensitive to: 1) structural locality to specific functional heads rather than other nominals, 2) c-command between functional heads and nominals rather than between nominals, and 3) hierarchy effects that indicate one-to-many probe-goal mappings. By reducing dependent case assignment to an instance of the independently warranted operation Agree, we are able to eliminate the need for configurational case rules from the grammar, resulting in a more parsimonious theory.

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 20 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Carly Tex (AICLS): "Strength in Strands: Weaving As a Way of Reflecting on Community Language Revitalization"
• Phorum - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Talk by Larry Lyu (UC Santa Cruz)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Riley VanMeter (UC Berkeley): "Perceptions of 'Extravagance': Quantifying Attitudes of Varying Stages of Grammaticalization"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Wendy L. A. López Márquez (UC Berkeley): "Internally-Headed Relative Clauses in Nuntajɨɨyi: Structure, Interpretation, and Restrictions"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Talk by Samba Kane (Stanford University)

Gašper Beguš, Maksymilian Dąbkowski (PhD 2025), Ronald Sprouse, and co-authors published a paper titled "The Phonology of Sperm Whale Coda Vowels" in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The paper was featured in The Guardian, National Geographic, Scientific American, CBBC, NPR (All Things Considered), and others.

Congratulations to Jhonni Carr (Continuing Lecturer, Spanish & Portuguese) on receiving a 2026 Distinguished Teaching Award! Calques readers are invited to attend the award ceremony on Wednesday, April 22, 5-7pm in the Jarvis Auditorium, Grimes Engineering Center.