News

April 1, 2025

Davidson receives Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award

Congratulations to Justin Davidson on receiving the 2025 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award in recognition of his outstanding commitment to graduate student success.

Bleaman interview in In geveb

An interview with Isaac L. Bleaman about Yiddish corpus development was just published in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Click here to read it!

March 31, 2025

Beguš explains the 101 of AI and language

Gašper Beguš appeared in Berkeley News with a video explaining his work on AI and language in 101 seconds. Click here to see it!

Bleaman and Nove publish in LD&C

Congratulations to Isaac L. Bleaman and Chaya R. Nove (Brown University) on the publication of their article "The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe: Goals, methods, and applications" in Language Documentation & Conservation!

Garrett reviews McElvenny

Andrew Garrett's review of James McElvenny's A history of modern linguistics (2024) has appeared in Language 101 (2025), 195-199 (link here).

March 21, 2025

Linguistics events after Spring Break (Mar 21-Apr 4, 2025)

In and around the Department of Linguistics today and in the week following Spring Break:

March 17, 2025

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

March 14, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Mar 14-21, 2025)

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

March 13, 2025

Deal presents in Massachusetts

Last week Amy Rose Deal traveled to Massachusetts to give talks at UMass and in the MIT colloquium series (on case sensitivity in syntax), along with a ling-lunch talk on de re attitude reports.

March 11, 2025

Holliday publishes in PLoS ONE

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday and Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama) on the publication of their article "Gender and racial bias issues in a commercial 'tone of voice' analysis system" in PLoS ONE!

March 10, 2025

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • We've digitized Jaime de Angulo's manuscript The Clear Lake Dialect of the Pomo Language.
  • In the last several weeks, we've hosted State Secretary of Tribal Affairs Christina Snider-Ashtari and colleagues, Native high schoolers from the Ukiah region, who were able to consult the notes and recordings especially of past Berkeley students and alums Abraham Halpern, Robert Oswalt (PhD 1961), and Eero Vihman on Northern Pomo (Pomoan; CA), and Tribal visits representing Washo (isolate; CA, NV), Northern Sierra and Plains Miwok (Miwokan; CA), and Tachi (Yokutsan; CA), these visits sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS).
Davidson colloquium

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 17, with a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora." The abstract is as follows:

Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied in sign languages, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations, along with perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmental "non-manuals" and other simultaneous expression, the tight integration of iconic depiction into the grammatical structure, etc. The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is often considered to be another modality-specific feature, bearing on questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness, givenness, and contrast. This talk will provide new empirical arguments from sign languages for how the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity and what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure.

March 7, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Mar 7-14, 2025)

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

March 6, 2025

Lee-Wynant presents at ICLDC

Congratulations to Tyler Lee-Wynant, who will be giving two talks about his language revitalization work on Northern Pomo at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation this weekend:

  • 3/8 - "Language ideologies and language attitudes in a Northern Pomo high school class" (co-presenting with Catherine O'Connor, Boston University)
  • 3/9 - "Set-up of an open-access and community-independent online language course for a reawakening language: The case of Northern Pomo"

March 5, 2025

Berkeley linguists at Exploring Boundaries workshop

Several Berkeley linguists will present at an upcoming workshop on Exploring Boundaries: Phonological domains in the languages of the world in Tromsø, Norway on March 13-14, 2025.

Sande presents at UiT

Hannah Sande will present a talk on "Discontinuous harmony and cyclicity in Guébie" in the Linguistics Department at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

March 3, 2025

Melguy and Johnson publish in the Journal of Phonetics

Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy (PhD 2022) and Keith Johnson, whose article "What are you sinking about? Experience with unfamiliar accent produces both inhibition and facilitation during lexical processing" was published this week in the Journal of Phonetics.

Latinx Staff Award for Johnny Morales Arellano

Congratulations to Johnny Morales Arellano, Graduate Student Services Advisor for the Department of Linguistics, who has been named a recipient of Alianza's Latinx Staff Award! The award will be given during a ceremony taking place on campus (and Zoom) next Tuesday.

February 28, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Feb 28-Mar 7, 2025)

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

February 27, 2025

Licata workshop on quantitative approaches to language attitudes

Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside) will be leading a three-day workshop on "Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Language Attitudes and Bias" from 4-6pm on March 18, 20, and 21 in 5303 Dwinelle Hall. To register (for any or all sessions), kindly email Justin Davidson. Here is a description of the workshop:

In this 3-day intensive workshop, Dr. Licata will present a deep dive into methodologies and analyses for empirical studies of language attitudes and linguistic bias, including the matched guise test (MGT), the implicit association test (IAT), and relevant data analyses in R (exploratory factor analysis, ordinal regression, correlation analyses). Should you not see yourself as a sociolinguist working on attitudes and bias, the skills and software you'll be exposed to in the workshop are nice tools to have at your disposal, if even for the eventual mentoring of future students that would seek your guidance on how to use them!

Calendar:

Day 1 (March 18): Matched Guise and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Day 2 (March 20): Implicit Association Test

Day 3 (March 21): Quantitative Analysis via Ordinal Regression and Correlation Analyses

Gabriella Licata is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside and Lead Researcher at Mount Tamalpais College inside San Quentin Prison. She takes interdisciplinary approaches and uses mixed methodologies to uncover systemic [linguistic] discrimination as a resource for reform, abolition, and liberation. Gabriella additionally is the founder of a community-based consulting business, Restorative Research Consulting.