News

The Department of Linguistics will host a one-day workshop on Indigenous archival returns on Wednesday, May 6. Participants will share their experiences bringing intangible (and some tangible) heritage and knowledge back from archives to Indigenous communities (mostly in California). Domains of knowledge under discussion will include art, history, language, math, and science. A list of participants is at the workshop website:

https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett/archival-returns.html

For updates, check this website; for questions, email Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu).

Berkeley linguists past and present are attending the Isolate Languages Workshop at Ghent University in Belgium this week:

• Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020): "An Anti-Swadesh Look at the Juruena Valley: Charting the Limits of Lexical Comparison across Unrelated Languages"
• Stephanie Farmer (PhD 2015): "Muniche, an isolate no longer?"
• Zachary O'Hagan: "What was the language of the Tabalosos, Lamas, and Suchiches of Peru? Evidence from a 17th-century Census"

The new Undergraduate Academic Building (being completed next to Dwinelle Hall) has a mural, "150W" (150 Years of Women at Berkeley), featuring portraits of 41 individuals. A campus news story is here and a run-down of the individuals is here. Two of the 41 featured individuals were drawn from the department's own "Women in Berkeley Linguistics" webpage, created by a committee whose members were Andrew Garrett, Emily Remirez, Maddy Bossi, Meg Cychosz, and Zach O'Hagan. Notably, too, the women chosen for the UAB installation, Ascención Solórsano (Mutsun) and Laura Fish Somersal (Southern Pomo, Wappo), were part of the broader Berkeley linguistics community by virtue of their roles as engaged collaborators on language projects over many years. This highlights the committee's goals of defining our department community as inclusively as possible.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 18 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Panel discussion with Claudia Iron Hawk, Wendy L. A. López Márquez, and Hei Vangz (UC Berkeley): "Identity and Fieldwork: Perspectives from Working within our Communities (Part II)"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Lev Michael (UC Berkeley) and Samuel Piahuantze (Ashéninka community linguist): "Stress and (non-)cyclicity in Pichis Ashéninka"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Marko Drobnjak: "LLM-Assisted Welfare Language Accessibility: A User-Centered Experimental Framework"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez (CSU Long Beach): "Ideological Change in Progress or Age-Grading? Evidence from California's Spanish Perceptual Dialectology"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): Data analysis brainstorm session on results from sociolinguistic/multilingualism surveys, Tjhauba people in Nxamasere, Botswana
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal, Margaret Asperheim, Chase Boles, and Alice Lee-Kleinberg (UC Berkeley): "On diagnosing clitic doubling semantically: Amharic objects revisited"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Aslı Kuzgun (Stanford): "A puzzle in the distribution of genitive case in Turkish"

Dakota Robinson was invited by the Berkeley Center of Excellence in French and Francophone Studies to give a talk on her research. Her presentation, titled "La francophonie et les langues régionales: Multilingualism and language attitudes among contemporary Breton speakers," will take place on Tuesday, March 17, from 12-1pm in the Library of French Thought (Dwinelle 4229). Click here for more information.

Congratulations to Jennifer Kaplan, whose article "Between prescriptivism and polemic: L’écriture inclusive in the opinion pieces of Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération" has just appeared in Discourse & Society! Read it here.

Congratulations to Wesley dos Santos (PhD 2024), who is the recipient of the 2026 DELAMAN Award for his archived collection of language documentation materials for Kawahiva! Click here for the full announcement.

Congrats to Amy Rose Deal, whose article "Clausal complementation as relativization, revisited" has just been published in Syntactic Theory and Research. Read it here!

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

• Virtual Career Panel - Friday Mar 6 - Zoom - 3-5pm
  Presenters: Nancy Frishberg, Hadas Kotek, Julia Nee, and Katie Sardinha
• Phorum - Friday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Larry M. Hyman (UC Berkeley): "A Gap in OCP Tonal Effects"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Marguerite Morlan (UC Berkeley): "The Politeness Paradox: Experimental Insights into Language Ideologies in Catalonia"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Mar 6 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Montrul 2025, led by Justin Davidson
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 27 - Zoom only - 3:10-4:30pm
  Madelaine O'Reilly-Brown (Stanford): "A new paradigm: Person-conditioned asymmetries in Uyghur nominalized clauses"

Congratulations to Alexandra Pfiffner on the publication of a new article, "Acoustic Cues and Obstruent Devoicing in Minnesotan English," in American Speech. Read it here!

Gašper Beguš gave two talks at the NYU School of Law: an invited Faculty Colloquium and a Distinguished Speaker series talk. More info is available here.

Gašper Beguš was an invited panelist at a MBZUAI x SESE Symposium organized at UC Berkeley. More info is available here.

The massive Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages (81 chapters, 1196 two-column pages!), edited by Lutz Marten, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, Nancy C. Kula, and Jochen Zeller, was recently published, appearing with the following chapters authored by present and past Berkeley linguists:

• Larry M. Hyman, Chapter 6: Tone
• Josephat Rugemalira (PhD 1993), Chapter 11: Noun classes and agreement
• Thera Marie Crane (PhD 2011), Chapter 28: Lexical structures and lexical semantics
• Jeff Good (PhD 2003), Chapter 32: Historical morphosyntax and syntactic change
• Armindo Ngunga (PhD 1997) & Carlos J. Manuel, Chapter 79: Emakhuwa (P31)