News

On Tuesday, May 4, this year's Linguistics Research Apprentice Program wrapped up with a Zoom meeting where mentors and apprentices spoke about the projects.

This year's cohort includes 7 graduate mentors with 8 projects: Wesley dos Santos, Emily Drummond, Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach, Schuyler Laparle, Ben Papadopoulos, Tessa Scott, and Eric Wilbanks. There were 29 undergraduate Apprentices: Kabini Achrekar, Margaret Asperheim, Cooper Bedin, Miranda Cheung, Char Juin Chin, Jesus Eduardo Durante, Julie Duran, Chandler Fliege, Kat Huynh, Matthew Ji, Samba Kane, Anjali Kantharuban, Jenkin Leung, Molly Pinder, Sophia Stremel, Nina Sirna, Lauren Szeto, Chelsea Tang, Tran, Melody, Xingyue Tu, Jay Eduardo Urbano Gonzales, Stacey Vu, Irene Yi, Crystal Wang, and Ivori White. Irene appears to be the winner of the "apprentice on most projects" prize, and Sophia gets the "longest work on one project" prize. A meeting screenshot is below and more information about the projects can be found here.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Honors Colloquium - Monday May 3 - Zoom - 3-5pm
  Presentations by Teela Huff, Sophia Stremel, Stacey Vu, Irene Yi, and Kevin Yu.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Melissa Campobasso: Hearts Gathered Waterfall School: A Salish Montessori Immersion School.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Yuni Kim (University of Essex; PhD 2008): Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Peer-editing NWAV abstracts.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Pied-piping by Cyclic Agree. In defense of feature percolation.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday May 3 - Zoom - 2-3pm
  Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): English non-manner how-clauses as answers to deficient questions (SALT practice talk).
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Katie Franich (Delaware): Syllabification of N in NC 'prenasalized' sequences in Medʉmba.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

The Linguistics Department Honors Colloquium will take place on Monday, May 3, from 3 to 5 PM. The Zoom access code is 966 0052 6874.

The following students will present:

Teela Huff
Thesis title: LAMA: A Simple Tool for Sharing Audio-Linked Lexical Data
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Larry Hyman (Reader)

Sophia Stremel
Thesis title: The Syntax of English Parentheticals: An Adjunction Analysis
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Peter Jenks (Reader)

Stacey Vu
Thesis title: The Phonetics of Iquito Tone
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Chris Beier (Reader)

Irene Yi
Thesis title: "Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Mandarin 然后用中文完成": Towards Sociolinguistically-Aware Computational Models of Codeswitching Using Classification and Regression Trees (CART)
Prof. Gasper Begus and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Faculty Co-Advisors)

Kevin Yu
Thesis title: Pragmatic Influences on Argument Word Order in Karuk Narrative Texts
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Eve Sweetser and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Readers)

Format: Each student will have 15 minutes to present and 5 for questions.

Isaac Bleaman will be giving an invited research talk (in English) and leading a workshop (in Yiddish) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 2-3, as part of a graduate research seminar on "The Yiddish Object." The title of his lecture is The Yiddish sentence: Social meaning reflected in grammatical variation and it is open to the public. The title of his workshop is Borokhovs yidishe filologye un di legitimkayt fun der yidisher shprakh 'Borokhov's Yiddish philology and the legitimacy of the Yiddish language.'

This Saturday at LSRL 51 (Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages), Mairi McLaughlin (French) and Justin Davidson (Spanish and Portuguese) will be presenting a joint paper entitled "Translator style as a sociolinguistic variable: Variation in news translation from English to Romance."

Supplementing last week's list of updates from our graduating seniors, we've received the following news:

• Cecelia Di Mino, who graduated in December 2019, will be starting an Ed.M. this fall at the Harvard School of Education, studying 'Human Development and Education.'

Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Zachary O'Hagan is in Boca Raton, Florida (April 29-May 3) to inventory and retrieve portions of a large linguistic and ethnographic archival collection deriving from the fieldwork of anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1932-2021), who worked in Ashaninka (Arawak; Peru) communities beginning in 1961.
• Uriel Weinreich's (1966) lecture Current Questions in Semantic Theory, delivered at Berkeley the year before his death, is now available as part of the ongoing digitization of the Linguistics Lecture collection. The collection consists of over 140 lectures given primarily as part of departmental colloquia between 1960 and 1985.
• We released a new collection of materials on Sereer (Senegambian; Senegal, The Gambia), from the 2012-2013 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Malick Loum, the instructor was Peter Jenks, and students were Nico Baier, Kayla Begay, Oana David, Erin Donnelly, Matthew Faytak, Jevon Heath, Jack Merrill, Kelsey Neely, Melanie Redeye, and Vivian Wauters.
• We released a new collection of materials on Shanenawa (Panoan; Brazil), from Prof. Gláucia Vieira Cândido's research with speakers Maria Iraci Brandão and Militão Brandão. Wesley dos Santos, who was Prof. Cândido's student at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, facilitated the delivery of tapes, slides, and negatives for digitization in 2019.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 26 - Zoom - 3:10-5pm
  Gabriela Caballero (UC San Diego): Lexical-grammatical tone interactions in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological representation and orthographic implications.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Gladys Camacho Rios (UT Austin): L1 insights on South Bolivian Quechua language documentation.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Yuni Kim (University of Essex; PhD 2008): Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech) and Aaron Dinkin (San Diego State): We THOUGHT we knew a LOT about New Orleans English (oh)... But we did NOT.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Vera Hohaus (Manchester): Composing meanings with alternatives: A case of no variation?
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Pied-piping by Cyclic Agree. In defense of feature percolation.
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Arto Anttila (Stanford) and Adams Bodomo (University of Vienna): Downstep in Dagaare.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, April 26, with a talk by Gabriela Caballero (UC San Diego), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Lexical-grammatical tone interactions in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological representation and orthographic implications," and the abstract is as follows:

There has been a long tradition of documentation of the highly complex and diverse tonal systems of Mixtec language varieties (Oto-Manguean; Mexico) since Pike’s (1944, 1948) seminal work. But while most previous research has focused on lexical tone, interactions between lexical and grammatical tone in these languages have been relatively understudied in comparison (cf. Palancar et al. 2016 on Yoloxóchitl Mixtec). Based on ongoing research conducted with Claudia Juárez Chávez, Michelle Yuan and students (UC San Diego), this talk presents an analysis of the tone system in San Juan Piñas Mixtec (SJPM), a previously undocumented variety, focusing on lexical-grammatical tone interactions. We analyze SJPM grammatical tone as involving concatenation of floating tonal morphemes in a layered hierarchical structure, where tonal overwriting/avoidance of lexical tone by grammatical tone results from dominance properties of tonal exponents (Rolle 2018) and general tonal processes. We argue lexical tone in SJPM involves three tonal primitives (/H/, /L/, and /M/) and that lexical-grammatical tone patterns contribute evidence for tonal representation: some, but crucially not all, surface [M] tones are underspecified. This contrasts with analyses of other Mixtec varieties where [M] is uniformly analyzed to be underspecified as /∅/ (Daly & Hyman 2007, Carroll 2015). Finally, grammatical tone patterns may also be determined by the tonal representation of root morphemes, as evidenced by a pattern of non-local tone association in roots that sponsor floating tones. This talk concludes by considering the implications that the tonal analysis of SJPM has for the orthographic representation of the language in the development of resources for language reclamation led by Claudia Juárez Chávez, our native speaker collaborator.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 21 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada (U Alberta): Using pre-existing collections for fieldwork training.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday Apr 19 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Discussion of Kim & Wong 2020
  Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Natasha Warner (with collab. from Seongjin Park) (U Arizona): Perception of all English sound sequences: The roles of probability and duration.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm
  Workshopping a manuscript by Emily Clem (UCSD): Toward a unified account of inverse marking and the Person-Case Constraint.
  (Please email Tyler Lemon or Maddy Bossi to get a copy of the manuscript!)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Vera Hohaus (Manchester): Composing meanings with alternatives: A case of no variation?
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Apr 21 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Jen Smith (UNC Chapel Hill): Productivity and naturalness in loanword phonology.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Congrats to Yevgeniy Melguy and Keith Johnson on the publication of their article in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America!

Melguy, Y.V and Johnson, K. "General adaptation to accented English: Speech intelligibility unaffected by perceived source of non-native accent," Acoust. Soc. Am. 149 (4), April 2021, 2602-2614. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0004240.

Isaac Bleaman consulted for a feature story on the Hasidic community and COVID-19 published in The Atlantic last week. Click here to read the article.