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Alumni

August 30, 2019

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!
    Emily Drummond on El Capitan
  • 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.
     Kawahiva writig workshop
  • 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 KoJulia 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:
    Northern Pomo summer camp
  • 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):
     Lemon trip to Indonesia
  • 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": 
    Zapotec summer camp, Oaxaca   zapotec bingo
  • 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:
    Zach O'Hagan and 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):

August 25, 2019

The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23 have now been published, containing the following papers by faculty, students, and/or alumni: 

  • Pranav Anand & Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010)
        Now and then: Perspectives on positional variance in temporal demonstratives
    . pdf
  • Ruyue Agnes Bi (BA 2018) and Peter Jenks
        Pronouns, null arguments, and ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese pdf
  • Emily Clem (PhD 2019)
        Attributive adjectives in Tswefap: Vague predicates in a language with degrees. pdf
  • Virginia Dawson and Amy Rose Deal
        Third readings by semantic scope lowering: Prolepsis in Tiwa. pdf
  • Amy Rose Deal and Vera Hohaus
        Vague predicates, crisp judgments. pdf
  • Rachel Etta Rudolph (PhD 2019, philosophy)
        A closer look at the perceptual source in copy raising constructions. pdf

Congrats all!

Congratulations to Amalia Horan Skilton (PhD 2019), who has filed her dissertation and begun a 2-year NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship for her project entitled "Documenting multimodal language development in an indigenous Amazonian community". During the postdoc, Amalia will split her time between UT Austin, working with Pattie Epps and others, and MPI Nijmegen, working with Caroline Rowland and others in the new Language Development department.

May 9, 2019

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! 

April 9, 2019

Congrats to Hannah Haynie (PhD '12), who has accepted a tenure-track position in the linguistics department at the University of Colorado Boulder! 

April 1, 2019

Alumnus Len Talmy (Ph.D. 1972) writes to share the news that he has just returned from the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), near Tokyo, where he gave two talks on his recent Targeting book and consulted with the group there researching his motion typology.

March 25, 2019

Congrats to alumna Elise Stickles (PhD '16), who has just accepted a tenure-track position in the English department at the University of British Columbia! 

March 12, 2019

Congrats to Emily Cibelli (PhD '15) who has just published an article based on her PhD dissertation in Phonetica: Training Non-Native Consonant Production with Perceptual and Articulatory Cues.

March 8, 2019

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

  • Martha Schwarz archived 11 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes related to Kumal (Indo-Aryan; Nepal), from a week's fieldwork in July 2018. The recordings primarily consist of grammatical elicitation, with topics including verb paradigms, dative subjects and agreement, non-finite clauses, possession, deontic modality, negation, and more! You can listen to the Frog Story here.
  • Kelsey Neely archived sound recordings of 50 traditional stories in Yaminawa (Panoan; Peru). This is the beginning of a large archival deposit that will include recordings, transcriptions, field notes, databases, photographs, and other materials associated with Kelsey's ongoing fieldwork in Sepahua from 2013 to the present. She writes descriptions of the plots of each story, which are rich in expressive content, linguistic form, and cultural and historical value. As Kelsey writes, the stories blend cosmology and moral teaching with humor -- many describe marriages between humans and ñũshĩwu (archetypal anthropomorphic animal spirits) that fail due to the inability of the animal spirits to adapt to life in human society. Trees and manufactured objects such as pots are also animated. Recurrent themes include the importance of cooperation, the danger of selfishness, the value of individual skill, and warnings, particularly to men, to be careful with what they say and how they treat women.
  • Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008) archived over 1,300 digital files in 76 file bundles related to Choguita Rarámuri (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico). The collection consists primarily of sound recordings from 2011 to the present, most with corresponding .eaf transcription files! The recordings in file bundles 2019-01.001 through 011, and 013 are elicitation; those in 2019-01.015 through 075 are personal, historical, and procedural narratives, conversations, interviews, prayers, and oratory. As an example, check out the myth of the cave, as told by Luz Elena León Ramírez, here.
  • A preliminary (1980) dictionary of Barbareño Chumash (isolate; California), compiled by Kenneth Whistler is now available. One of Mary Haas's last students, Mr. Whistler received his PhD from this department in 1980, with a dissertation entitled Proto-Wintun Kin Classification: A Case Study of Reconstruction in a Complex Semantic System, available here.

March 6, 2019

The journal Language Documentation & Conservation has recently released a special publication entitled Reflections on Language Documentation: 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998, including three papers by faculty or alumni: 

February 21, 2019

This year's International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC) kicks off next week in Mānoa, Hawaiʻi, and features numerous presentations by Berkeley faculty, staff, students, and alumni:  

February 11, 2019

Congrats to Wesley Leonard (PhD 2007), subject of the February LSA member spotlightThe LSA Member Spotlight highlights the interests and accomplishments of a different LSA member each month.

February 2, 2019

Some new updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages regarding activities for 2019 so far:

  • Chris Beier & Lev Michael archived an initial 13 file bundles related to Iquito (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 8 hours of audio recordings of 59 texts from the early years of their research (2002-2005).
  • Zach O'Hagan added 63 file bundles from 2018 fieldwork to his collection on Caquinte (Arawak; Peru), including over 39 hours of audio and video recordings of stories, interviews, elicitation, and other interactions.
  • Vivian Wauters (MA 2012), now a graduate student in horticultural science at the University of Minnesota, archived 22 file bundles related to Arabela (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 36 hours of audio recordings of elicitation and some texts, field notes, and a FLEx database.
  • Three boxes of lexical file slips (herehere, and here) of Atsugewi (Palaihnihan; California) created by Len Talmy (PhD 1972) have been digitized and are available.
  • An unpublished manuscript on historical Tucanoan linguistics, written by Alva Wheeler (PhD 1970) as a term paper for a seminar taught by Mary Haas, has been digitized and is available.
  • Jorge Rosés (Alberta) & Erin Hashimoto (Alberta) archived "Time-aligned Annotations of Makah Narratives" (Wakashan; Washington), which combines speakers Ralph LaChester and Mabel Robertson's (1965) recordings of the language made with William Jacobsen (PhD 1964) with handwritten transcriptions of them, making them more accessible to users in ELAN and SayMore.

January 27, 2019

Zach O'Hagan has two new papers to appear in the proceedings of WSCLA, both based on his fieldwork on Caquinte and both in collaboration with 2018 PhD alumni: 
  • Baier, Nico and Zachary O'Hagan. to appear. Morphological Reflexes of Subject Extraction in Caquinte. Proceedings of WSCLA 23. [pdf]
  • Rolle, Nicholas and Zachary O'Hagan. to appear. Different Kinds of Second-position Clitics in CaquinteProceedings of WSCLA 23. [pdf]

Congrats, Zach! 

January 26, 2019

A new article by Stephanie Shih (BA '07) and Sharon Inkelas on Autosegmental Aims in Surface-Optimizing Phonology has just appeared in Linguistic Inquiry. Congrats, Sharon and Stephanie!  

January 23, 2019

Recent alumnus and current Googler Michael Greenberg (BA '16) writes to share news of Google's recently announced Interpreter Mode feature, on which he was the principle designer. He writes, "The feature is a synthesis of so much I learned at Cal, from cognitive linguistics to phonetics, language learning, and language acquisition." Check out this article about the "potentially world-changing" Intepreter Mode feature to learn more! 

January 22, 2019

Long time, no Calques! What have linguists been up to over winter break? 

  • Andrew Cheng took the runner up award at the LSA's Five Minute Linguist competition with his talk Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. A video recording of the entire event is on YouTube, and this link directs you to Andrew's talk (starting at around 19 minutes). Andrew also prepared to move to Philadelphia for the spring semester to teach two courses at his alma mater, Swarthmore College. He will return to Berkeley in the summer or fall!

Andrew Cheng LSA 2019

  • Emily Clem took her paper Cyclicity in Agree: Maximal projections as probes on the road, with colloquia at the University of Leipzig (IGRA) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then traveled to NYC for LSA, where she gave a shorter version of the same talk (which won 3rd place for the Student Abstract Award) as well as a joint talk with Virginia Dawson on Feature sharing and functional heads in concord:

Clem and Dawson LSA 2019

  • Virginia Dawson, in addition to the talk just mentioned, also gave a talk entitled Lexicalizing disjunction scope, after giving a festive welcome to 2019 with Tessa Scott, Jack Merrill (PhD '18), Myriam LapierreZach O'Hagan, Emily Clem, and Nik Rolle (PhD '18)!
     Berkeley linguists 2019
  • Amy Rose Deal traveled to Cambridge, MA, to attend a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on "What is good and what is possible? Searching for an interdisciplinary language".
  • Karee Garvin worked on her QP, went to Chicago for Christmas, traveled NYC for LSA (at which she gave 2 talks, one depicted below, and organized a special session on Inside Segments with Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas), and wrapped up the break with a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam.

Karee Garvin talk LSA 2019

  • Dmetri Hayes spent part of his break skiing in France, and eating and walking around in Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm and Barcelona, and along the way spent some time thinking about a computational semantics project to better leverage morphological information. 
  • Larry Hyman wrote a new paper on Causative and passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto? and then turned to prepare the handout (and slides) for his Philological Society paper in London next month, entitled Functions of vowel length in language: Phonological, grammatical & pragmatic consequences. (Berkeley locals will get to hear a version of this work on February 11.) He then attended the LSA meeting in New York where he finished his final year on the Executive Committee and had a GREAT time hanging out with his most immediate former graduate students Florian Lionnet, Jack Merrill, and Nik Rolle, and crashing the Amazonianist dinner at a Brazilian restaurant organized by Myriam Lapierre.
    Larry Hyman Nik Rolle
  • Julia Nee traveled to Mexico to help with a language revitalization camp for kids in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. In the photo below, Julia works with students to read the book Beniit kon xpejigan ("Benita and her balloons") which was written collaboratively with Zapotec speakers Veronica Bazán Chávez, Trinidad Martínez Sosa, Isabel Lazo Martínez, Efraín Lazo Pérez, and Berkeley undergrad Celine Revzani who worked as an LRAP apprentice on the project in Spring 2018.

Julia Nee

  • Tessa Scott gave a poster on Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko at LSA!
    Tessa Scott
  • Eve Sweetser traveled to Japan to give a three-lecture series on Figurative Language at the Tokyo University's Komaba campus.

  Did we miss you in this winter break linguist round-up? Let us know for next week's Calques!

November 15, 2018

The 2018 annual meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature is taking place this weekend in Denver.

November 1, 2018

A workshop on Multiple Agreement Across Domains is coming up this week in Berlin, hosted by the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS). Berkeley linguistics will be represented in three presentations by students and alumni: 

  • Emily ClemSwitch-reference as multiple agreement with cyclic expansion
  • Nico Baier (PhD '18): Multiple anti-agreement in Northern Italian dialects
  • Elango Kumaran (BA '18):  Non-projection, horizons, satisfaction, and feature exchange in cyclic probing

Congrats all!

October 30, 2018

The 50th Algonquian Conference took place last weekend in Edmonton, Alberta, featuring four talks by Berkeley faculty or alumni: 

  • Rich RhodesMorphological transitivity in Ojibwe
  • Amy Dahlstrom (PhD '86): A Meskwaki construction in narrative texts: independent pronoun + full NP
  • David Costa (PhD '94): Verb negation in Indiana Miami
  • Jerome Biedny, Matthew Burner, Andrea Cudworth, & Monica Macaulay (PhD '87): Classifier Medials Across Algonquian: A First Look

Berkeley authors are depicted below!

Cal faculty & alumni at the Algonquian Conference 2018