News

April 11, 2021

Linguistics @ Cal Week 2021

Join us for the 2021 virtual Cal Week, taking place from April 24 to 30! Each year we enjoy meeting alumni, prospective students, and friends at Cal Day — to introduce ourselves or renew old acquaintances. We hope to return to this tradition of meeting face-to-face next year (not least so we can send the kids away with an ultrasound image of their tongue, or a spectrogram of their voice). This year, though, we are happy to highlight Prof. Peter Jenks's video on "What is Linguistics" and Prof. Larry Hyman's video on "Language Myths - the Freshman Seminar." Check them out here!

April 9, 2021

Faytak to Buffalo

Matt Faytak (PhD 2018) reports that, after a 2 year post-doc/lecturer position at UCLA, he has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo, and will start this August. Congrats, Matt!

Linguistics events this week (Apr 9-16, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

April 8, 2021

Lapierre accepts faculty position at UW

Myriam Lapierre will start a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington in fall 2021. Congratulations, Myriam!

SLUgS' 5th Annual Undergrad Linguistics Symposium

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) is excited to invite you to our Fifth Annual Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium that’s taking place on April 10 and 11 (Sat & Sun) from 10am to 3:45pm PT! The conference will feature undergraduate researchers in linguistics from across the country, who will be presenting on a range of topics from third language acquisition of Hindi, the syntax of English parentheticals, to glottal stop production in Yemba. We are also honored to feature a keynote presentation by Professor Eve Sweetser – you definitely don’t want to miss out!

Everyone is welcome regardless of major and background! You’ll be able to join the meeting via https://tinyurl.com/berkeleysymposium21. Hope to see you there!

April 7, 2021

Sales and Scott co-author blog post on teaching Mam

Read a new blog post co-authored by Tessa Scott and Henry Sales Hernandez for the Center for Latin American Studies, describing their efforts to teach Mam in Oakland!

Berkeley linguists to speak at Move and Agree

Tessa Scott was accepted to present at Move and Agree: Forum on the Formal Typology of A'-agreement. The forum is taking place online from May 31 to June 4 and is being co-hosted by McGill and UBC. Also scheduled to give invited presentations are Amy Rose Deal on "How agreement works, with special reference to A'-features" and Nico Baier (PhD 2018) on "On the nature of complex A/A'-probes." Congrats, all!

Berkeley linguists @ ACAL

This weekend a number of Berkeley linguists are presenting at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 51-52). Current affiliates who will be presenting include Hannah Sande, Maddy Bossi, and Katie Russell. Congrats, all!

April 5, 2021

Lin colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, April 12, with a talk by our very own Susan Lin, held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Looking inward: reflections on the role of articulatory research," and the abstract is as follows:

Many of the oldest and most fundamental works in the history of the field of phonetics were articulatory studies. Yet at present, articulatory phonetics accounts for a relatively small fraction of the research published in the most influential phonetics journals. We are in a time when the field is, rightly, reviewing the scientific rigor, ethical standards, and public safety of its research methodologies. It is therefore reasonable to ask what novel contributions articulatory phonetics research can still make, so as to warrant its continued or even renewed use. In this talk, I share phonetic and phonological insights that have resulted from articulatory research. All of these findings point to evidence at the articulatory level that is otherwise hidden from view; these are insights that could not have otherwise been gleaned from acoustic or perceptual data. Some of these findings were the product of targeted investigations and controlled experimentation, while others were incidental findings from other studies, and as such I also argue for the continued value of basic exploratory articulatory research.

Hyman appointed Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques

Larry Hyman has received notification from French Ambassador Philippe Etienne that he has been appointed Chevalier (Knight) in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. As Ambassador Etienne explains, "this honor reflects the French authorities' gratitude for [Larry's] efforts to promote French language and culture" and culminates a span of over 50 years in which Larry has studied abroad in Bordeaux, held visiting research positions in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, and received other invitations in France. He is also known for hosting many French visitors in Berkeley. Along with his French colleague, Clément Sanchez of the Collège de France, Larry has served as Director of the France-Berkeley Fund since 2010. More information is available here. Congratulations, Larry!

April 2, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Apr 2-9, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

March 30, 2021

Reyes blogs about language revitalization

Ever Reyes, member of the DE in Indigenous Language Revitalization and graduate student in the Department of Music, published a blog post on language revitalization for the Center for Latin American Studies.

March 29, 2021

Survey updates

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

  • We released a new collection of many hours of video recordings of Kawaiisu (Uto-Aztecan; California), featuring siblings Luther Girado (1941-2021), Betty Hernandez (1944-2014), and Lucille Hicks. In the videos, their team -- with Julie Turner, Laura Grant, Jon Hammond, and others -- is usually headed somewhere, talking about land and history, or doing something, like making elderberry jelly. The videos were made between 2012 and 2014 as part of a project funded by an NSF DEL grant awarded to the Kawaiisu Language and Cultural Center.
  • The Berkeley Language Center continues its digitization of their Linguistics Lectures collection, consisting of over 140 lectures given primarily as part of departmental colloquia between 1960 and 1985. The most recently digitized is a 24-part lecture course, "American Indian Languages," taught by Mary Haas. If you have information about the course (e.g., date, students enrolled), please write to scoil-ling@berkeley.edu.

March 26, 2021

Bleaman published in NLLT

Congrats to Isaac Bleaman, whose article "Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out" has just appeared online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Read it here!

Linguistics events this week (Mar 26-Apr 2, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

March 25, 2021

Berkeley linguists in LSA proceedings

Congrats to the current and former Berkeley linguists featured in the latest Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (Vol. 6, No. 1)!

March 23, 2021

NSF GRFP winners

Congratulations to graduate students Aurora Martinez Kane, Allegra Robertson, and Katie Russell and to undergraduate major Teela Huff (who will be attending UCLA for her linguistics PhD) on being selected for NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!

March 19, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Mar 19-26, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Spring Recess: March 22-26, 2021
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 19 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Round Robin!
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Thursday Mar 25 - Zoom - 4-5pm
    Practice WCCFL talks (part 1)
    Tyler Lemon: Low nominative agreement in Uab Meto (poster).
    Maksymilian Dąbkowski: Laryngeal feet in A’ingae: Implications for metrical theory.
  • Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 24 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
    Maya Wax Cavallaro (UC Santa Cruz): Laryngeal features and contrast in Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil final consonant allophony.
    For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

March 12, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Mar 12-19, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

March 11, 2021

Yuan colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 15, with a talk by Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Movement in Inuktitut incorporation," and the abstract is as follows:

Previous work on the Copy Theory of Movement has shown that the realization of movement chains may, in part, be regulated by morphological well-formedness conditions, such as affixation (Landau 2006, a.o.). In this talk, I provide a case study of this idea from noun incorporation (NI) in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit), based on my fieldwork. Incorporation in Inuktitut (and Inuit) is cross-linguistically unusual, in that a small set of verbs is obligatorily incorporating (i.e. affixal), while for most other verbs incorporation is not possible. An additional goal of this talk is therefore to further elucidate the nature of Inuit incorporation, informed by how exactly it interacts with clausal syntax.

Our starting point is a little-known observation by Johns (2009) that incorporation constructions in Inuktitut may surface with object agreement and passive morphology. I provide evidence that incorporated nominals are in fact syntactically active, thus accessible to case/agreement processes and able to undergo syntactic movement—despite surfacing within the verb complex. I analyze this pattern as a Stray Affix effect applied in the context of phrasal movement: the nominal complement of an incorporating verb is obligatorily pronounced, regardless of whether it has undergone movement, due to the affixal nature of the verb. I then extend this logic to account for some heretofore unnoticed restrictions on incorporated pronouns (building on my other work on Inuktitut clitic-doubling; Yuan 2021), and discuss possible morphological evidence for a movement analysis of control (cf. Polinsky and Potsdam 2002).