News

All News

November 7, 2024

UC Berkeley alumnus Charles Chang (PhD 2010) will be joining the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) as Professor of Linguistics, starting September 202

In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • SSCircle– Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): TBA
  • Phorum – Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Maya Wax-Cavallaro (UCSC): TBA

October 31, 2024

Mairi McLaughlin is co-organizing a book launch on Wednesday, November 6th online from 9-11am Pacific to celebrate the publication of the volume Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, which she edited with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh. The volume is intended to celebrate the career and many contributions of Wendy Ayres-Bennett so the book launch will include a response to the book by Wendy and some remarks about her career.

In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • SSCircle & Fforum – Friday, November 1 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Zachary O'Hagan & Lev Michael (UC Berkeley): Reconsidering Chamikuro tense-marked determiners: Methodological and analytical perspectives
  • Phorum – Friday, November 1 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Santiago Barreda (UC Davis): TBA
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Nov. 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
    Adam Mahler (Harvard) on “Editorial Cruxes and Early Judeo-Spanish texts”
  • LRWG – Wednesday, Nov. 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Anushah Hossain (UC Berkeley) on the The Politics of Script (Re)Vitalization: Case Studies of Lampung (Indonesia) and Bété (Côte D'Ivoire)
  • SSCircle – Friday, November 8 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Akil Ismael (UC Berkeley): TBA
  • Phorum – Friday, November 1 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    TBA

There will be six talks by Berkeley linguists at NWAV 52 in Miami, November 7-9, 2024:

  • Amber Galvano: "Measuring Sibilants in Speech & Sexuality Research: Beyond Spectral Moments"
  • Anna Knall: "Gender Assignment Variation in Spanish-English Mixed Noun Phrases"
  • Nicole Holliday: “'I Don’t Like My Conversations Being Judged By an AI'”: Issues of Bias and Quality in Social Feedback Speech Technology"
  • Julia Peck: "Multilingualism and Gender Assignment:Three Parallel Systems for Loanwords in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish?"
  • Rhosean Asmah: "Coronal Stop Deletion in Megan Thee Stallion's Rap and Speech"
  • Niko Schwarz: "Phonetics of Liquid Neutralization in Isla Margarita, Venezuela"

Congrats, all!

October 24, 2024

Richard Rhodes is giving a talk called "The funny medial construction" on Sunday, October 27 at the 56th Algonquian Conference. Congrats!

In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • SSCircle– Friday, October 25 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Huilei Wang (UCLA): Apparent overt extraction from Mandarin relative clauses
  • Phorum – Friday, October 25- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Yin Lin Tan (Stanford): Towards an indexical account of English in Singapore: Sociophonetic variation and Singlish
  • Halloween party! – Tuesday, October 29 - Ishi Court - 4:30-6:30pm
    Everyone in the Linguistics community is invited; family and significant others are welcome to join.
  • SSCircle & Fforum – Friday, November 1 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Zachary O'Hagan & Lev Michael (UC Berkeley): Reconsidering Chamikuro tense-marked determiners: Methodological and analytical perspectives
  • Phorum – Friday, November 1 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Santiago Barreda (UC Davis): TBA

October 22, 2024

Gašper Beguš gave two invited talks:

  • An invited plenary talk at the Bridging East and West: Cutting-Edge Perspectives in Language and Cognitive Science conference organized by the Beijing Language and Culture University on October 20, 2024. His talk was titled "New ways of modeling language".
  • An invited talk titled "Jezikoslovne zmožnosti velikih jezikovnih modelov'' at the Mednarodni dan slovarjev 2024 conference, at the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language on October 14, 2024.

Congrats!

October 17, 2024

In and around the Linguistics Department in the next week:
  • SSCircle – Friday, October 18

    Cancelled for NELS!

  • Phorum – Friday, October 18 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Richard Wang (UC Santa Cruz): Morphosyntax-Prosody Mismatch in Beijing Mandarin: Evidence from Retroflex Lenition
  • LRWG – Wednesday, Oct. 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Vanessa Raffin (E-Reo): E-Reo: Empowering Language Revitalization with Digital Tools
  • SSCircle – Friday, October 255 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Huilei Wang (UCLA): TBD
  • Phorum – Friday, October 25- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Yin Lin Tan (Stanford): Towards an indexical account of English in Singapore: Sociophonetic variation and Singlish

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • In the last two weeks we have hosted two more visits supported by the new CLA Community Research Grant: Kashaya community members and collaborating linguists (left to right) Gene Buckley (PhD 1992), Gavin Antone, Jr., and Anthony Steele; and Nisenan community members (left to right) Wanda Enos Batchelor, Robin Bradley, and Billyhawk Enos (see photographs below).
  • Line Mikkelsen, Grethe Schmidt, and Ellen Thrane have accessioned the new collection Kalaallisut Language Materials (Eskaleut; Greenland), featuring video recordings primarily of elicitation sessions conducted on Zoom, and (forthcoming) of Ellen and Grethe's teaching conversational Kalaallisut to students in Linguistics 170 this semester. Their collaboration began in September 2022 (Mikkelsen and Thrane) and continued in May of this year (with Schmidt). The collection-level metadata is written in English, Kalaallisut, and Danish!

Kashaya

Kashaya community members and collaborators

Nisenan

Nisenan community members

October 15, 2024

Alexandra Pfiffner is giving a colloquium talk at the University of Manitoba on October 18, titled "An audiovisual phonetic analysis of the Mandarin sibilant merger." Congrats!

The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony (Nancy A. Ritter & Harry van der Hulst, editors), has just appeared in print with several contributions by current and former Berkeley linguists:
2. The role of consonants in vowel harmony, Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (PhD 2001)
13. Phonology that will not harmonize, Larry M. Hyman
39. Psycholinguistic approaches to vowel harmony, Anne Pycha (PhD 2008) and Sara Finley
51. Vowel harmony in non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages, Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) and Olanike Ola Ori
68. Umlaut in Germanic languages, Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (PhD 2001) and Richard Wiese
Congrats, all!

October 10, 2024

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

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 11 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Travis Major (USC): Raised heads and subjects in Uyghur relative clauses
  • SLab – Friday, October 11 -Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
    Research discussion & updates
  • Phorum – Friday, October 11- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Modeling stochasticity, gradience, and domain effects in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony with Gestural OT.
  • NELS practice talk – Monday, October 14 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4:10-5pm
    Amy Rose Deal and Zach O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity

  • Berkeley Language Center (BLC) Found in Translation working group - Thursday October 17 - Zoom - 12-1pm
    Johnny Laforêt (Princeton):  
    “The place of Haitian Creole and French in the Linguistic Landscape of Haiti: A Case Study of Haitians Interacting Online”
  • SSCircle – Friday, October 18: No meeting. Have fun at NELS 55!
  • Phorum – Friday, October 18- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Richard Wang (UC Santa Cruz): Morphosyntax-Prosody Mismatch in Beijing Mandarin: Evidence from Retroflex Lenition

Mairi McLaughlin is giving a paper called News as a Site of Language Contact from the Early-Modern Period to the Contemporary at a workshop on Language Contact in Translation on 17-18 October in Germersheim, Germany.
Andrew Garrett's book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California has been reviewed or featured in two new publications:
Larry Hyman gave the following talk on October 10, 2024 at the Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique (LLACAN, UMR 8135) research lab of the CNRS, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris:  "

October 6, 2024

At 12 noon on Thursday, October 17, in the Bancroft Library Roundtable series, Andrew Garrett will present a Zoom talk “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall — Indigenous and University Histories in Bancroft Collections.” Register at ucberk.li/kroeber. Abstract:
"Much of Andrew Garrett’s book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, 2023) is grounded in The Bancroft Library’s collections relating to anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber; Kroeber’s family, including his second wife, Theodora, and his daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin; his colleagues, students, and collaborators throughout California; and Phoebe Hearst, who directed and funded his work. In this presentation, Garrett will talk about a few of the archival objects — manuscripts and photos — that had a significant impact on how he framed his argument about Kroeber’s documentation of Indigenous stories."

October 3, 2024

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

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm

    NELS practice talks:
    1. Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ] (Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
    2. Person hierarchy effects from φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva (Wesley dos Santos)
    3. The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian (Akil Ismael & Jessica Göbel)

  • Phorum – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pmMarko Drobnjak (Univeristy of Ljubljana): VOICE: Verifying How Speech Perception Shapes Credibility in Legal Contexts – A Statistical and Experimental Approach with Future Machine Learning Potential
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Oct. 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
    Conversation hour: learn to make (Turkish) coffee and tea in Ladino! (snacks included)

  • LRWG – Wednesday, Oct. 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley) with a workshop on "Creating mini zines for accessible language materials"

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 11 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Travis Major (USC): TBD
  • Phorum – Friday, October 11- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Modeling stochasticity, gradience, and domain effects in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony with Gestural OT.

Gašper Beguš and Maksymilian Dąbkowski published a paper on "The blurring history of intervocalic devoicing" in the Journal of Linguistics. The paper proposes a new explanation for an unusual sound change--intervocalic devoicing. The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000197. Congrats!

October 1, 2024

Two Berkeley linguists presented at the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) this weekend at the University of Texas at San Antonio: