News

Congratulations to Christian DiCanio (PhD, 2008) who has been awarded tenure at Buffalo!

Congratulations to Drs. Cheng, Cychosz, Dawson, and Shen who have recently completed their dissertations!

• Andrew Cheng: "Accent and ideology among bilingual Korean Americans”
  Andrew will be starting in a post-doctoral research position at UC Irvine in September.
• Meg Cychosz: "Phonetic development in an agglutinating language"
  Meg started a post-doctoral research position at the University of Maryland in August.
• Virginia Dawson: "Existential quantification in Tiwa: disjunction and indefinites"
  Ginny is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University.
• Alice Shen: "Costs and cues in the auditory comprehension of code-switching"
  Alice spent the summer working at Facebook and will be teaching at Reed College during 2020-21.

The dissertations are all available on our departmental website.

In connection with the campus celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University of California, the linguistics department has made a web page honoring some of the many women who have contributed to our work over the last 120 years:

https://lx.berkeley.edu/women-berkeley-linguistics

This may expand or evolve in the coming days and months. The committee that put the page together (Madeline Bossi, Margaret Cychosz, Andrew Garrett, Zachary O'Hagan, Emily Remirez, and Tessa Scott) is very grateful to the many contributors who wrote thoughtfully and shared pictures.

Our alum Jenny Lederer (PhD, 2009) has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of English Language and Literature at San Francisco State University. Congratulations, Jenny!

Now that 2019 is in the books, congratulations to our 2019 PhD alumni!

• Kenneth Paul Baclawski, Jr., PhD!
  Discourse connectedness: The syntax-discourse structure interface
• Kelsey C. Neely, PhD!
  The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru)
• Amalia E. Skilton, PhD!
  Spatial and non-spatial deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna
• Emily C. Clem, PhD!
  Agreement, case, and switch-reference in Amahuaca

Congrats to Zach O'Hagan, whose paper A Phonological Sketch of Omagua, co-authored with Clare Sandy (PhD 2017), has now been published in the International Journal of American Linguistics!

The 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place this weekend at Stony Brook. Berkeley is represented by two talks by current dept members and recent alumni:

• Karee Garvin, Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz and Sharon Inkelas: Modeling Vowel Quantity Scales in Q Theory
• Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Florian Lionnet (PhD '16): Phantom structure: A representational account of floating tone association

Congrats all!

The Proceedings of WSCLA 23 (Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas) have recently been published, containing the following papers by department members and recent alumni:

• Nico Baier (PhD '18) and Zachary O’Hagan: Morphological reflexes of subject extraction in Caquinte
• Bernat Bardagil: Person, case, and cliticization: the Panará PCC
• Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Zachary O’Hagan: Different kinds of second-position clitics in Caquinte

Congrats all!

The program for the 9th Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA IX) has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and recent alumni:

• Zachary O'Hagan: Complex Temporal Relations in Caquinte: The Case of =ta and =ja
• Wendy Liz Arbey López Marquez: Los aplicativos en el popoluca de la Sierra
• Myriam Lapierre, Tessa Scott, Karee Garvin: Morphologically conditioned (sub)segmental subtraction in Mam
• Kelsey Neely (PhD '19): Metrical phonology in the verbal domain in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru)
• Amalia Horan Skilton (PhD '19): Demonstratives and reaching space in Ticuna

Congrats all!

Just out from open-access publisher Language Science Press is Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, edited by Emily Clem (PhD 2019), Peter Jenks, and Hannah Sande (PhD 2017).  The book contains two papers by current Berkeley department members:

• The syntactic diversity of SAuxOV in West Africa
  Hannah Sande, Nico Baier, Peter Jenks
• On the derivation of Swahili amba relative clauses: Evidence for movement
  Isaac Gould, Tessa Scott

Congrats all!

In addition to all the publications that are listed here, here, here, and here, Berkeley linguists have been up to so much more!

• This summer Amy Rose Deal completed her first book, entitled A theory of indexical shift: meaning, grammar, and crosslinguistic variation. It will appear in late 2019 or early 2020 with MIT Press. The larger project from which the book springs is a study of the compositional semantics of different types of attitude reports crosslinguistically. A new manuscript on this topic, entitled Uncentered Attitude Reports, is available here. 
• As part of the High Art Project, Emily Drummond climbed Yosemite's iconic El Capitan this summer. The group performed three concerts on the wall over three and a half days, in a variety of genres (classical, jazz, folk, pop) all accompanied on electric guitar!
  
• Wesley dos Santos was in Brazilian Amazonia for a 3-month fieldwork trip with the Kawahiva groups Juma, Karipuna and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. He offered a workshop on the writing system of the language (photo below with participants), gave a talk at Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (Belém, Brazil) on Kawahiva Reported Speech (Tupi-Guarani), and participated in a workshop held in Rio de Janeiro for projects funded by Unesco and Museu do Índio to create digital dictionaries for Brazilian Indigenous languages.
   
• Larry Hyman spent a month in Paris (May 21-June 20) attending the annual business meeting of the France-Berkeley Fund, relaxing in his favorite city, and giving two talks: "The fall and rise of vowel length in Bantu" (University of Paris 3) and "Tonology of Luganda Noun Phrase Constituents at a Workshop on Nominal Expressions in the Bantu Languages" (LLCAN [Langues, Langages et Cultures d'Afrique Noir], CNRS, Paris). He thereafter rescued three "refugees" from the LSA Summer Institute at UC Davis. The rest of the summer he enjoyed the liberty of doing his research in Berkeley and preparing for his Fall courses, Linguistics 24, 140, and 290e.
  
• Darya Kavitskaya gave a poster with Sharon Inkelas at the 3rd Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference, held at the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, in June; the poster was entitled Cluster simplification in Russian-speaking children with SLI. Dasha also did some fieldwork on Crimean Tatar and recorded some Crimean Tatar words for a perception experiment on vowels, now under construction.
• Edwin Ko, Julia Nee, Erica Carson Jr., Catherine O'Connor (Boston University), Brady Dailey, and Ethan Rimdzius (Boston University) hosted the second two-day Northern Pomo language camp at Redwood Valley Rancheria, where participants used the Northern Pomo Language Tools website to work on their Northern Pomo language skills . Ko and Nee also presented the results of the first camp at SSILA in July. This is a picture of camp organizers & participants:
  
• Over the summer Tyler Lemon traveled to the island of Timor in Indonesia to engage in linguistic fieldwork and documentation training through a project funded by the Documenting Endangered Languages program of the NSF and directed by Professors Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon (University of Delaware).  Tyler was put on a team with two native speakers of Uab Meto (Timor-Babar, Austronesian) named Nona Seko and Yoakim Kenjam and lived in the village of Oelneke for 3 weeks to record speakers of the language.  The materials resulting from this project will be archived in Paradisec. Here is Tyler with his doumentation teammates Nona Seko (left, in blue and gold) and Yoakim Kenjam (right, in red):
   
• Julia Nee worked with Rosita Jiménez Lorenzo to host a three-week Zapotec summer camp for kids in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. The camp involved both classroom activities (including games like Bingo) and field trips to important sites in the area (including the Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán). Here are some bingo boards created by students, and a picture of students documenting a particular type of cactus while on a field trip to "La Cuevita": 
    
• Zach O'Hagan gave a talk in Lima in July at the conference Lenguas del Perú: Hacia un estado del arte. He spent time in La Merced, Satipo, and Atalaya finishing a monolingual book of Caquinte stories before traveling to the Caquinte community Kitepampani. At other points in the summer he was writing, curating a comparative lexical database of Arawak languages, working in the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, copy-editing parts of an upcoming handbook of Amazonian languages edited by Pattie Epps (UT) and Lev Michael, doing genealogy, and road-tripping, including with Virginia Dawson to install one Berkeley linguist in their new home in San Diego. Here is a picture of Zach with Caquinte speaker Antonina Salazar:
  
• Eric Wilbanks presented his work at ICPhS in Melbourne and had a published paper appear in Glossa!
• Eve Sweetser participated in a theme session on Figurative Language and Grammar at the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Workshop, Aug 5-6 at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan, with two co-authored papers: (1) Seiko Fuiji, Oana David, Paula Radetsky and Eve Sweetser, 'When metaphoric and literal meanings meet: CUT/BREAK verbs in English verb-particle constructions and Japanese compound verb constructions.'  (2) I-Hsuan Chen and Eve Sweetser, 'Metaphors, sentence structure, and CUT/BREAK verbs in Mandarin'. She also presented two papers at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Aug 6-10 also at Kwansei Gakuin University.  (1) 'Embedded viewpoint and stance in gesture and speech: multimodal stance-stacking.'  (2) Schuyler LaParle and Eve Sweetser, 'War is war - or is it? - Different genres show different metaphors for cancer'.
• Some Berkeley people are pictured at the 52nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia: Aimée Lahaussois (PhD 2002), David Peterson (PhD 1999), Jackson Sun (PhD 1993), Jim Matisoff (professor emeritus), David Bradley, Dominic Yu (PhD 2012):
  

Alumna Thera Crane (PhD 2011),currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Academy of Finland project “Stability and Change in Language Contact: The Case of Southern Ndebele (South Africa)", has received an additional 5-year research grant from the Academy of Finland to work on modality and multilingualism in South Africa. Congrats, Thera!