- Peter Jenks enjoyed the holidays in the Bay Area with his family and managed to do a little cross country skiing. He also matched LRAPs for the spring, read and reviewed some great syntax papers, finished a proceedings paper with Ruyue Bi for SuB 23 called 'Pronouns and ellipsis in Mandarin,' and finished chapter 14 of the Moro grammar on 'Auxiliaries'.
- Jesse Zymet traveled to the LSA to give a poster entitled "Learning a frequency-matching grammar together with lexical idiosyncrasy: MaxEnt versus mixed-effects logistic regression". Then, just before the semester began, he gave a talk at Stanford's P-Interest, titled "Lexical propensities in phonology: corpus and experimental evidence, grammar, and learning". Attendees gave great feedback, and he really enjoyed meeting with Stanford phonologists/phoneticians in person.
Faculty
January 24, 2019
January 22, 2019
Long time, no Calques! What have linguists been up to over winter break?
- Andrew Cheng took the runner up award at the LSA's Five Minute Linguist competition with his talk Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. A video recording of the entire event is on YouTube, and this link directs you to Andrew's talk (starting at around 19 minutes). Andrew also prepared to move to Philadelphia for the spring semester to teach two courses at his alma mater, Swarthmore College. He will return to Berkeley in the summer or fall!
- Emily Clem took her paper Cyclicity in Agree: Maximal projections as probes on the road, with colloquia at the University of Leipzig (IGRA) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then traveled to NYC for LSA, where she gave a shorter version of the same talk (which won 3rd place for the Student Abstract Award) as well as a joint talk with Virginia Dawson on Feature sharing and functional heads in concord:
- Virginia Dawson, in addition to the talk just mentioned, also gave a talk entitled Lexicalizing disjunction scope, after giving a festive welcome to 2019 with Tessa Scott, Jack Merrill (PhD '18), Myriam Lapierre, Zach O'Hagan, Emily Clem, and Nik Rolle (PhD '18)!
- Amy Rose Deal traveled to Cambridge, MA, to attend a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on "What is good and what is possible? Searching for an interdisciplinary language".
- Karee Garvin worked on her QP, went to Chicago for Christmas, traveled NYC for LSA (at which she gave 2 talks, one depicted below, and organized a special session on Inside Segments with Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas), and wrapped up the break with a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam.
- Dmetri Hayes spent part of his break skiing in France, and eating and walking around in Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm and Barcelona, and along the way spent some time thinking about a computational semantics project to better leverage morphological information.
- Larry Hyman wrote a new paper on Causative and passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto? and then turned to prepare the handout (and slides) for his Philological Society paper in London next month, entitled Functions of vowel length in language: Phonological, grammatical & pragmatic consequences. (Berkeley locals will get to hear a version of this work on February 11.) He then attended the LSA meeting in New York where he finished his final year on the Executive Committee and had a GREAT time hanging out with his most immediate former graduate students Florian Lionnet, Jack Merrill, and Nik Rolle, and crashing the Amazonianist dinner at a Brazilian restaurant organized by Myriam Lapierre.
- Julia Nee traveled to Mexico to help with a language revitalization camp for kids in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. In the photo below, Julia works with students to read the book Beniit kon xpejigan ("Benita and her balloons") which was written collaboratively with Zapotec speakers Veronica Bazán Chávez, Trinidad Martínez Sosa, Isabel Lazo Martínez, Efraín Lazo Pérez, and Berkeley undergrad Celine Revzani who worked as an LRAP apprentice on the project in Spring 2018.
- Tessa Scott gave a poster on Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko at LSA!
- Eve Sweetser traveled to Japan to give a three-lecture series on Figurative Language at the Tokyo University's Komaba campus.
Did we miss you in this winter break linguist round-up? Let us know for next week's Calques!
November 28, 2018
This coming week Lev Michael will be in Florianópolis, Brazil, where he will be giving a plenary talk entitled Captive-taking and language contact in Amazonia at the 10th meeting of Associação Brasileira de Estudos Crioulos e Similares. Before the December 5 talk, he'll be giving a mini-course (Dec 3-4) at the same conference, entitled ''El contacto lingüístico en la Amazonía: Áreas, procesos y metodologías" (Language contact in Amazonia: Areas, processes, and methodologies).
In previous travel, talk and class news, on November 8 Lev gave a 'conferencia magistral' at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) entitled La gramaticalización impulsada por la cultura: el caso de las evidenciales reportativas en el idioma nanti (Culture-driven grammaticalization: The case of Nanti reportative evidentials), and on November 9 he gave a class for faculty members at UNAM and other affiliated universities entitled "Temas y metodologías en la lingüística antropológica" (Topics and methodologies in Anthropological Linguistics).
The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) will be holding its 2018 Undergraduate Research Symposium this Saturday, featuring undergraduate researchers from across the country. The keynote speaker will be Keith Johnson. The symposium features presentations by Berkeley students Benjamin John Papadopoulos, Yvette Wu, and Rachel Arsenault. The program is available here. Congrats all!
Open-access linguistics book publisher Language Science Press has just published an interview on its blog with Larry Hyman, the most prolific LangSci author to date! The interview can be read here.
November 21, 2018
The Leader of the Pack: A Festschrift in Honor of Peggy Speas has been published this week, including a paper by Amy Rose Deal entitled Indexiphors: Notes on embedded indexicals, shifty agreement, and logophoricity.
November 15, 2018
The 2018 annual meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature is taking place this weekend in Denver.
November 13, 2018
- “Bantoid verb extensions”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns, and verbs, 175-199. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- “Third person pronouns in Grassfields Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 201-223. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- “More reflections on the nasal classes in Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 225-238. Berlin: Language Science Press.
November 9, 2018
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 9 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): I can't believe what's not butter: Deriving distributed factivity - Fieldwork Forum - Tuesday Nov 13 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM [note special time and place!]
Haley De Korne (University of Oslo): Language reclamation as a socio-political practice: Strategies of engagement in multilingual environments - Group in American Indian Languages (GAIL) - Thursday Nov 15 - 6pm [note: talk begins at 6]
Kate Hedges and Leanne Hinton (UC Berkeley): Konkow Maidu language and texts - SLUgS - Thursday Nov 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm
SLUgS will be hosting a language exchange night for members to share information about languages they speak and learn about other languages. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 16 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz) & Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): CP complements to D
November 1, 2018
On-going this semester is a Learning in Retirement course, offered through the Berkeley Retirement Center, entitled The Origins and Nature of Language. The course lecture this week was delivered by Eve Sweetser, and next week's lecture will be given by Terry Regier:
- Eve Sweetser: Why are Languages so different? Slides Audio Link with Slides
- Terry Regier: What are the consequences of linguistic diversity for perception and thought?
Tuesday, November 6, 2018, 2-4 pm, Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Building
Congrats, Eve and Terry!
In place of the general meeting of BLS this February, there will be a workshop on the topic of countability distinctions. Here is the call for papers:
BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions
08-Feb-2019 - 09-Feb-2019
Countability distinctions and mass nouns are a topic of long-standing interest in semantics, grammar, and the philosophy and psychology of language. Recent work on this topic has pushed our understanding forward in three separate but related directions:
- There is more than one type of countability distinction relevant to natural language: nouns like furniture are different from nouns like sand both in how quantity judgments are carried out (Barner and Snedeker 2005) and in which types of adjectival modification are possible (Rothstein 2010, Schwarzschild 2011).
- A semantics for mass nouns can be given that captures the many grammatical parallels between water and furniture without ascribing the same status to the minimal elements in their denotations (Chierchia 2010, Landman 2011).
- The crosslinguistic picture on countability distinctions is more nuanced than originally thought: there are languages where all nouns combine with numerals in apparently similar ways (Lima 2014, Deal 2017), and in languages where classifiers are necessary to mediate noun-numeral combinations, there nevertheless exist countability-related distinctions among nouns diagnosable by quantity judgments and adjective distribution (Cheung, Li, and Barner 2010, Rothstein 2010).
For this workshop, held in place of the general meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, we invite submissions for talks on all aspects of countability distinctions in natural language. Submissions may address questions including, though not limited to, the following:
- What are the ways in which countability distinctions are manifested in particular languages?
- Are morphosyntactic differences in the distribution of count versus mass nouns traceable directly to their semantics, or to their syntax, or to both?
- What do countability distinctions show us about nominal semantics? What do they teach us about nominal syntax?
- How should we choose among theories of mass noun semantics (or syntax) currently on the market?
- Are countability distinctions a language universal? Which distinctions are subject to variation (if any), and which (if any) are not?
- How are countability distinctions represented psychologically, and acquired by children?
Invited speakers (confirmed):
David Barner (UC San Diego)
Suzi Lima (University of Toronto)
Conference website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/
Contact: blsworkshop@berkeley.edu
Organizing Committee:
Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Paula Floro, Peter Jenks, Tyler Lemon, Line Mikkelsen, Tessa Scott, Yi-Chi Wu
Call for Papers:
Submission deadline: November 30, 2018
Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=blsw1
Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (12-point type, Times New Roman, single line spacing, 1 inch margins) including examples and references.
Submissions must be anonymous and are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author or two joint abstracts per author.
Reviews and notifications of acceptance will be returned to authors by mid-December.
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 2 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Amy Rose Deal: Clausal complementation vs. “relative embedding”: On knowledge and happiness in Nez Perce - Phorum - Monday Nov 5 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Jennifer Bellik (UCSC): Vowel intrusion in Turkish onset clusters -
Antikoni, by Beth Piatote - Tuesday Nov 6 - Hearst Museum of Anthropology - 5:30-7 p.m.
- Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 9 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): TBA
October 30, 2018
The 50th Algonquian Conference took place last weekend in Edmonton, Alberta, featuring four talks by Berkeley faculty or alumni:
- Rich Rhodes: Morphological transitivity in Ojibwe
- Amy Dahlstrom (PhD '86): A Meskwaki construction in narrative texts: independent pronoun + full NP
- David Costa (PhD '94): Verb negation in Indiana Miami
- Jerome Biedny, Matthew Burner, Andrea Cudworth, & Monica Macaulay (PhD '87): Classifier Medials Across Algonquian: A First Look
Berkeley authors are depicted below!
The Proceedings of NELS 48 have just been published in a three-volume set. The set contains three papers by faculty and/or alumni:
- Boris Harizanov and Line Mikkelsen, Resumption and Chain Reduction in Danish VP Left Dislocation
- Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18), Output-Output Correspondence via Agreement by Projection
- Hannah Sande (PhD '17) and Peter Jenks, Cophonologies by phase
Congrats all!
October 25, 2018
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) 11 - Saturday and Sunday Oct 27 and 28 - Dwinelle 370
CUSP will feature semantics and pragmatics talks all day Saturday, as well as Sunday morning, with speakers from across the state! - Phorum - Monday Oct 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Sarah Bakst and Caroline A. Niziolek (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Self monitoring in L1 and L2: a magnetoencephalography study - Climate Committee - Monday Oct 29 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm and 4-5pm
For everyone, from 3pm to 4pm, we will have a discussion of the 'impostor phenomenon', facilitated by Dr. Amy Honigman from UC Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). For graduate students only, from 4pm to 5pm, Dr. Honigman will talk about the mental health and wellness services that are available for grad students and how to access them. - Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Nov 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5:30PM
Catalina Torres (University of Melbourne): TBA - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 2 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Amy Rose Deal: Clausal complementation vs. “relative embedding”: On knowledge and happiness in Nez Perce
October 18, 2018
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Susan Steele: The architecture of inflection - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 1229 - 11-12:30pm [note special time and place!]
Ashwini Deo (Ohio State): The emergence of split-oblique case systems: A view from the Bhili dialect continuum (Indo-Aryan) - Phorum - Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Eleanor Glewwe (UCLA): Complexity bias and substantive bias in phonotactic learning - Linguistics Department Colloquium- Monday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-5 pm
Ashwini Deo (Ohio State): Marathi tense marking: A window into the lexical encoding of tense meanings - Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Oct 25 - 554 Barrows Hall - 4-5:30PM [note special location!]
Line Mikkelsen, Beth Piatote, Sean Brown, and Lou Montelongo (UC Berkeley): The Many Lives of Indigenous Languages - SLUgS - Thursday Oct 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm
Living catalogue: brief overview of linguistics electives for Spring 2019
October 17, 2018
This weekend features la tercera conferencia sobre Sistemas de Sonido de Latino América (SSLA3) -- Sound Systems of Latin America III -- at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Berkeley linguistics will be represented in five presentations by students, faculty, and '08 alumni:
- Yuni Kim (PhD '08): “La relación entre ortografía e investigaciones fonológicas: Algunas posibilidades en amuzgo. Can phonological research contribute to Amuzgo orthography development – and vice versa?” [invited talk]
- Myriam Lapierre and Lev Michael: “Nasal harmony in Tupí-Guaraní: A comparative synthesis”
- Christian DiCanio (PhD '08) and Richard Hatcher: “Does Itunyoso Triqui have intonation?”
- Gabriela Caballero (PhD '08): “Direccionalidad y localidad en el condicionamiento de alomorfos en Tarahumara Central”
- Myriam Lapierre (University of California, Berkeley): “Word-initial [I] epenthesis in Panará: A prosodic analysis”
Congrats, all!
October 16, 2018
On Oct 27 and 28, Berkeley will be hosting the annual meeting of California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics, a.k.a. CUSP. CUSP is an informal annual conference that brings together people working in formal semantics and pragmatics at universities across the state. This year, Berkeley linguistics will be represented by presenters Ginny Dawson and Line Mikkelsen (along with visiting scholar Peter Alrenga). You can find the program and the RSVP form here.
October 11, 2018
Calques has received some great photos from last weekend's NELS/AMP double-header!
At NELS: Schuyler Laparle, Emily Clem, Nico Baier (PhD '18), Tessa Scott
Tessa Scott with her NELS poster
Schuyler Laparle with her NELS poster
Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) presenting his poster (joint work with Larry Hyman)
Berkeley phonologists at AMP: Gabriela Caballero (PhD '08), Alan Yu (PhD '03), Andrew Shibata (BA '17), Hannah Sande (PhD '17), Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18), Jesse Zymet
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Round robin! - Phorum - Monday Oct 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm
Kayla Palakurthy (UCSB): The role of similarity in sound change: Variation and change in Diné affricates; Myriam Lapierre & Lev Michael (Berkeley): Nasal harmony in Tupí-Guaraní: A comparative synthesis - Linguistics Department Colloquium- Monday Oct 15 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-5 pm
Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz): Demonstrative pronouns and competition - GAIL - Thursday Oct 18 - 6pm [note: talk begins at 6]
Andrew Garrett: Yurok rhotic vowels and vowel harmony - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Susan Steele: The architecture of inflection
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