News

January 21, 2020

Michael publishes in Language & Linguistics Compass

A new article by Lev Michael and Natalia Chousou‐Polydouri on Computational phylogenetics and the classification of South American languages has just appeared in the journal Language and Linguistics Compass. Congrats Lev and Natalia! 

January 20, 2020

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following update from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • In December we published the first Survey Report in five years, Jane and Kenneth Hill's 1473-page magnum opus "Comparative Takic Grammar," which covers a wide range of topics related to this branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family in incredible detail. Jane Hill, born in Berkeley in 1939, received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA in 1966, with a dissertation titled "A Grammar of the Cupeño Language." She went on to become Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona beginning in 1983, retiring in 2009. Sadly, Jane passed away in November 2018, as Ken writes in the preface, shortly after the completion of the first draft of this monograph.

January 17, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Jan 17-24, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

January 16, 2020

Berkeley @ WCCFL 38

The program for the upcoming 38th annual meeting of the West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and alumni:

  • Tessa Scott: Two types of "composite" probes
  • Madeline Bossi: A morphological account of promiscuous agreement and *local > local in Kipsigis
  • Virginia Dawson: Disjunction is not Boolean: novel evidence from Tiwa
  • Nicholas Baier (PhD '18) and Gloria Mellesmoen: Spelling out object agreement in Central Salish
  • Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD '10): TBA (invited talk)

Congrats all!

Elias publications

Congrats to first-year student Alexander Elias, whose paper "Are the Central Flores languages really typologically unusual?" is to appear in a book called Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating (eds David Gil and Antoinette Schapper), and whose paper "Kabyle Double Consonants: Long or Strong?" will appear in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics!

Alexander has also recently learned that his MA thesis Lio and the Central Flores languages has been nominated for two prizes, the Leiden University Thesis Prize and the Jan Brouwers Thesis Prize!

January 14, 2020

Scott paper accepted at Linguistic Inquiry

Congrats to Tessa Scott, whose paper "Two types of Resumptive Pronouns in Swahili" has been accepted for publication in Linguistic Inquiry!

January 13, 2020

O'Hagan publishes in IJAL

Congrats to Zach O'Hagan, whose paper A Phonological Sketch of Omagua, co-authored with Clare Sandy (PhD 2017), has now been published in the International Journal of American Linguistics!

January 12, 2020

Bleaman publishes bibliography of Yiddish linguistics

Congrats to Isaac Bleaman, whose entry on Yiddish Linguistics has now been published with Oxford Bibliographies!

January 11, 2020

Anderson receives NEH grant
Congrats to Deborah Anderson, whose "Universal Scripts Project" has just received an NEH Preservation and Access grant! The project will support preparation of eight scripts—six historical and two modern—for inclusion in the international Unicode standard, to aid research using materials in historical scripts and to promote communication in minority language communities. This is a part of the larger Script Encoding Initiative.
Hyman books now in paperback

Larry Hyman writes to share the news that his 2019 edited volume Phonological Typology (Hyman & Plank, eds.),  along with his 2018 edited volume The Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation in Bantu (van der Wal & Hyman, eds.), is now available in paperback!

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following set of updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Amalia Skilton (PhD 2019) added 46 new file bundles to one of her three extant collections on Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), based on her 2019 fieldwork in Cushillococha. These file bundles -- totaling nearly 1TB -- correspond to different (anonymized) children, and typically include daylong audio recordings, as well as audio and video recordings of task-oriented and undirected interactions between children and caregivers.
  • Kenneth Hill has archived a new collection of papers focused on Serrano (Uto-Aztecan; California), including field notes (digitized), sound recordings (digitized), 7 boxes of lexical file slips, and 2 boxes of mingograms. The sound recordings are original reel-to-reel tapes dating from his dissertation fieldwork in 1963 and 1964 with speakers Sarah Martin and Louis Marcus, and include word lists, sentence translation, and 20 texts. There are also short sound recordings of Cahuilla, Nahuatl, Cusco Quechua, and Efik. Ken received his PhD in linguistics from UCLA in 1967, with a dissertation titled "A Grammar of the Serrano Language" supervised by William Bright, the first recipient of the PhD in the modern instantiation of this department (1955). Ken was a visiting assistant professor here in 1964-1965, before moving to Michigan, where he supervised Rich Rhodes' PhD dissertation (1976).
South American Nasality Project meeting

The first workshop for the NSF-funded South American Nasality Project (Co-PIs Susan Lin and Lev Michael) was held December 11-15, here in the department. Several participants are pictured below: first row (left to right): Marina Magalhães (U de Brasilia), Lorena Orjuela (UT Austin), Myriam Lapierre (UC Berkeley), Kelsey Neely (UT Austin); second row: Wesley dos Santos (UC Berkeley), Wilson Silva (U of Arizona), Jorge Labrada (U of Alberta), Lev Michael (UC Berkeley), Adam Singerman (U of Chicago), Thiago Chacon (U de Brasilia). Also participating, but not pictured: Susan Lin, Ronald Sprouse, and Paula Floro (all UC Berkeley).

December 13, 2019

Beier and Michael updates
Chris Beier writes to share the following report:
Lev Michael and I, Chris Beier, are thoroughly enjoying our current sabbatical year, which began in June and will end in August 2020. This sabbatical, which we are spending almost entirely in Peru, is dedicated to doing the culminating fieldwork, analysis, and writing necessary to produce major outputs of the long-running Iquito Language Documentation Project, which we launched in 2002. 
So far, we have reached two major milestones:

• First, in August, we released a new Iquito–Loretano Spanish "students dictionary" and delivered it on paper to the Iquito heritage community. At almost 400 pages, it is a much better resource than its predecessors, and everybody in the community seems very pleased with it! We have also made the PDF available free online, at the Cabeceras Aid Project website.

• Then this week, we submitted a final (we hope) draft of our Iquito–English Dictionary to our publisher, Abya-Yala. This dictionary is about 650 pages and is quasi-encyclopedic in its content, so we are equally happy to have finished it! We'll be back with more news once it is actually published and available for distribution.
• Last but not least, and simultaneously, Lev is back on campus briefly (December 10 to 17)  for the first in a series of workshops that are part of an exciting new three-year NSF-funded project, "Nasal segments and nasal harmony in South American languages: Field phonetics and typology", which he, Susan Lin, and Myriam Lapierre are co-leading.
Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following set of updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Linguistics in action

Here's a photo of the LRAP wrap-up meeting for this semester:

December 10, 2019

Bardagil in Brazil

This week, postdoc Bernat Bardagil will be giving a talk called "Quotative strategies in Panará (Jê)" at the Workshop on Speech and Attitude Reports, organized by Leibniz-ZAS and held at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Belém (Brazil).

December 7, 2019

Kavitskaya in Scotland

This week, Dasha Kavitskaya will be traveling to Scotland to give a plenary talk at the Fourth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology. The title of the 2-part talk is “Conditions on sound change: precepts and propositions”.

Hyman in Japan

This week, Larry Hyman will be traveling to Japan to give an invited talk at the Word Prosody and Sentence Prosody Conference at the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics. The title of the talk is Prosodic asymmetries in nominal vs. verbal phrases in Bantu.

December 6, 2019

Linguistics events this week (Dec 6-13, 2019)

In and around the linguistics department in the next (RRR) week:

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle and Phorum- Friday Dec 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Larry Hyman: Prosodic Asymmetries in Nominal vs. Verbal Phrases in Bantu
  • Berkeley Language Center Lecture Series - Friday Dec 6 - B-4 Dwinelle Hall - 3-5pm
    Presentations of Instructional Development Research Projects, including Dmetri Hayes on Teaching Karuk and Yurok Online: A Story of Pain and Healing
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB) - Tuesday Dec 10 - Dwinelle 3401 - 3:30-5pm
    Annie Helms: Generating Continua in TANDEM-STRAIGHT   (This workshop is designed to familiarize linguists with the application TANDEM-STRAIGHT, which can be used to create a continuum from two endpoint audio files. The resulting continua can be used as stimuli for discrimination and identification tasks in speech perception experiments.)

December 5, 2019

Linguistics in action

Peter Jenks sends a photo of the happy aftermath of Kenny Baclawski's successful dissertation defense yesterday morning: