News

May 11, 2022

The Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley has awarded Samba Kane its Best Undergraduate Thesis award (with a $250 prize) for his honors thesis in Linguistics titled "Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar." Samba completed his thesis in December 2021, and his readers were Peter Jenks and Harold Torrence (UCLA). Congrats, Samba!

May 10, 2022

The 40th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 40) will take place virtually this weekend, May 13-15, 2022, and features work by a number of Berkeley linguists!

  • Himidan Hassen (Independent scholar), Peter Jenks, Sharon Rose (UC San Diego): "A'-satisfaction with φ-interaction in Tira"
  • Emily Drummond: "Argument-extraction restrictions do not constrain sluicing"
  • Line Mikkelsen: "Same and different are additive presupposition triggers" (invited talk; joint work with Dan Hardt, Copenhagen Business School)

The full program is available here.

Congrats to the following Berkeley linguists, who will be presenting at the 29th Manchester Phonology Meeting, taking place online from May 25 to 27. More information is available here.

  • Maks Dąbkowski: "A Q-Theoretic solution to A'ingae postlabial raising"
  • Julianne Kapner: "Affixal and default fixed segmentism: New categories for fixed elements in reduplication"
  • Katie Russell: "Nasalization in Atchan: Morpheme-specific harmony"

Additionally, Charles Chang (PhD 2010) will be featured as an invited speaker at a special session on "Second Language Phonology and Phonological Theory."

Katherine Russell will be presenting on "Nasalization in Atchan: Sensitivity to morpheme identity" at the 19th meeting of the Réseau Français de Phonologie - French Phonology Network, which is taking place at the University of Porto, Portugal, June 7-9. A provisional program can be found here.

Ben Papadopoulos (organizer), eleven of his current or former LRAP apprentices, and Jennifer Kaplan will give a panel publically presenting the Gender in Language Project and its preliminary findings for the first time at Lavender Languages and Linguistics 28 on May 23, 2022 at the University of Catania, Italy. These stellar students are Cooper Bedin, Carmela Blazado, Sol Cintrón, Sebastian Clendenning-Jimenez, Keira Colleluori, Jesus Duarte, Julie Ha, Zaphiel Kiriko Miller, Serah Sim, Chelsea Tang, and Irene Yi. Apart from the panel, four other individual papers from Jennifer, Sebastian & Zaphiel (presenting together), Keira, and Jesus will be presented. Ben and eight of the aforementioned students will soon be travelling to the conference. Information about the panel, as well as the individual papers being presented, may be found here. Congrats, all!

May 9, 2022

Congratulations to Madeline Bossi and Emily Drummond, whose proposals for NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (DLI-DDRI) grants have been recommended for funding! Maddy's proposal is titled "Syntax and its interfaces in Kipsigis" and Emily's is titled "Ergativity in Nukuoro (Polynesian Outlier)."

May 8, 2022

On Saturday, May 7, some 60-70 linguists and others from Berkeley and afar gathered at the Faculty Club for a celebration of Keith Johnson's career on the occasion of his retirement. (Keith will be a Professor of the Graduate School as of July 1.) In-person speakers included Molly Babel, Meg Cychosz, Erin Diehm, Andrew Garrett, and Steve Goldinger; speaking by video recording or Zoom were Mary Beckman, Christian DiCanio, Larry Hyman, Richard Wright, and a series of (other) former students. Terry Regier served as master of ceremonies; Meg, Andrew, Siti Keo, and Hannah Sande were co-organizers.

During the event, Molly Babel announced that she, Yao Yao, Elizabeth Strand, and Grant McGuire will be editing Training Curiosity: Papers in honor of Keith Johnson, a special issue of Language and Speech that celebrates Keith's career and contributions. In the spirit of Keith’s style, they encourage collaboration across researchers with complementary theoretical and methodological angles from academic and industry perspectives on topics that speak to Keith’s impact, and invite one-page abstracts by August 1, 2022. Please submit abstracts and inquiries to Molly Babel (molly.babel@ubc.ca).

Congratulations, Keith!

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Thanks to Ronald Sprouse, we have a new website with a new look! Much of the content remains the same, but there's a new blog, project spotlights, and collection spotlights. The first posts are by Andrew Garrett; graduate students Rebecca Jarvis and Katherine Russell, and their collaborator Timothée Kouadio; and Zachary O'Hagan. We'll be inviting others to contribute in the future. Our catalog and the pre-archive continue to function as before. Stay tuned for more new content in the coming months!

May 6, 2022

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

  • Belén Flores's Retirement Tea Party - Friday May 6 - Ishi Courtyard - 2-4pm
  • Phorum - Friday May 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
    Wesley dos Santos and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley): Apparent partial reduplication in Kawahíva is total reduplication of a particular spell-out domain.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday May 9 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): Same and different are additive presupposition triggers (Practice talk).

Photo from last week's Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium:

Presenters from Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium 2022

(From left: Cynthia Zhong, Cooper Bedin, Jenkin Leung, Margaret Asperheim)

Congrats to all of our thesis-writers!

May 2, 2022

Congrats to Julia Nee (PhD 2021), along with coauthors Genevieve Smith, Alicia Sheares, and Ishita Rustagi, on the publication of a new article titled "Linguistic justice as a framework for designing, developing, and managing natural language processing tools" in Big Data and Society! There's a blog post summary of the article here.

May 1, 2022

A new paper by Berkeley linguists and colleagues has just appeared in the Journal of Language Evolution:

Click here for the preprint PDF. Congrats to all!

April 29, 2022

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

  • Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium 2022 - Monday May 2 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 3:15pm
    - Cynthia Zhong: "Tonal Variations on 'bu' in Mandarin-English Code-Switching"
    - Cooper Bedin: "(A Computational Approach to) Acoustic Cues of Queer Speech"
    - Jenkin Leung: "Variation in Hong Kong Cantonese Nasal Onsets"
    - Margaret Asperheim: "One language or five thousand: A linguistic categorization analysis of Library of Congress classification and language resources"
  • Belén Flores's Retirement Tea Party - Friday May 6 - Ishi Courtyard - 2-4pm
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 29
    Meeting canceled.
  • Phorum - Friday May 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
    Wesley dos Santos and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley): Apparent partial reduplication in Kawahíva is total reduplication of a particular spell-out domain.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 29 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Carlos Cisnernos (UC Berkeley) and Anqi Zhang (Nanjing University): The non-scalar, epistemic nature of polarity sensitive wh-indefinites in Mandarin.
  • Zoom Phonology - Friday Apr 29 - Zoom - 9am
    Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley): Variation in two Paraguayan Guaraní nasalization patterns.
    For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

April 28, 2022

Congrats to Gašper Beguš and Alan Zhou (undergraduate student in the Berkeley Speech & Computation Lab) who have been published in ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Their article, titled "Interpreting Intermediate Convolutional Layers In Unsupervised Acoustic Word Classification," is freely available for a month here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9746849

April 26, 2022

Assistant Adjunct Professor Chris Beier has been awarded a 2022 Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). This grant will support her project entitled Transcription, Parsing, and Comparative Analysis of Tone in Iquito Texts. Beier will be on leave in order to carry out this project in Peru between June 2022 and August 2023.

Beier offered this description of the funded project: "This project advances the documentation and description of Iquito, a critically endangered Zaparoan language of northern Peruvian Amazonia, with a focus on its complex tonal system. Core activities include transcription, parsing, and analysis of texts from circa 1960; re-parsing of re-analyzed texts from 2002-2018; and comparative analysis of these texts to inform ongoing grammatical description of Iquito. Because Iquito's tonal system includes both boundary Hs and HLL melodies that surface in multiple domains and across word boundaries, text-based analysis of connected speech is an indispensable tool for discovery. Thorough documentation of Iquito’s tonal system will inform the typology of tone in Amazonia, and contribute to cross-linguistic typology and theories of grammatical tone."

Congratulations, Chris!

April 25, 2022

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 2, 2022 at 3:15pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/99993568290 )

Honors Student Presenters

  • Cynthia Zhong
    Honors Thesis Title: "Tonal Variations on 'bu' in Mandarin-English Code-Switching"
    Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Larry Hyman (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  • Cooper Bedin
    Honors Thesis Title: "(A Computational Approach to) Acoustic Cues of Queer Speech"
    Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Mel Chen (Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies)
  • Jenkin Leung
    Honors Thesis Title: "Variation in Hong Kong Cantonese Nasal Onsets"
    Faculty Advisor: Isaac L. Bleaman (Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Andrew Wong (Professor, Department of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies, California State University, East Bay)
  • Margaret Asperheim
    Honors Thesis Title: "One language or five thousand: A linguistic categorization analysis of Library of Congress classification and language resources"
    Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Terry Regier (Professor, Department of Linguistics)

April 23, 2022

Annie Helms presented at the 10th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech at the University of Barcelona on April 20. The slides for her talk, "Utilizing density-controlled vowel space area to examine the role of language dominance in the acquisition of Spanish and English vowel reduction patterns," are available here. Congrats, Annie!

April 22, 2022

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
    Samuel Akinbo (UMinnesota): Evaluative and Noun-class in Fungwa.
  • Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
    Gabriela Pérez Báez (UOregon): Increasing inclusion in academia in support of language.
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
    Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Two grammars of A'ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase (practice GLOW talk, in lieu of previously scheduled talk).
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 29 - Zoom only - 1-2pm
    Anne Hermes (CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle): Patterns of variability in secondary articulation in Tashlhiyt.
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz) and Uri Mor (UC Berkeley & Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): The Double Standard in Modern Hebrew: The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew in the 1940s and 1950s.
    Please contact Ben Papadopoulos for more information or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 29 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Carlos Cisnernos (UC Berkeley) and Anqi Zhang (Nanjing University): The non-scalar, epistemic nature of polarity sensitive wh-indefinites in Mandarin.
    (Note: the talk that was previously scheduled for 4/22 has been canceled)
  • Zoom Phonology - Friday Apr 29 - Zoom - 9am
    Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley): Variation in two Paraguayan Guaraní nasalization patterns.
    For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

April 20, 2022

Congrats to Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who will be giving a talk titled "Two grammars of A’ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase" at the 45th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium at Queen Mary University of London on 28 April. The program is available here: https://glowlinguistics.org/45/28-april-day-2-main-colloquium/

April 18, 2022

Johanna Nichols and her Helsinki colleagues have co-authored a new paper in Diachronica. Congrats, Johanna!

Grünthal, Riho, Volker Heyd, Sampsa Holopainen, Juha Janhunen, Olesya Khanina, Matti Miestamo, Johanna Nichols, Janne Saarikivi, and Kaius Sinnemäki. 2022. Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread. Diachronica. Advance online publication: https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20038.gru; supplement: https://zenodo.org/record/6345559.

This research was also featured in a press release to Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's main newspaper): https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/helsinki/art-2000008761777.html