News

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 1, 2023 at 3:10pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/92112030060)

Student Presenters

• Cecilia Elena Bachmann
  Honors Thesis Title: "Language: A Multidimensional Tool in Higher Education between Achievement and Oppression"
  Faculty Advisor: Isaac Bleaman (Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Justin Davidson (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Andres Sanchez
  Honors Thesis Title: "Accented Speech Recognition Disparities in Digital Voice Assistants: Addressing Spanish-Accented English"
  Faculty Advisor: Terry Regier (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Justin Davidson (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Aishwarya Jayadeep
  Honors Thesis Title: "From āṭutan̠ to khalbə: Examining the Heart of Liquid Adaptation in Malayalam’s English and Arabic loans"
  Faculty Advisor: Andrew Garrett (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Darya Kavitskaya (Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures)
• Cor Zanda
  Honors Thesis Title: "Parallel Morphological Changes in the Polynesian Thematic Suffixes"
  Faculty Advisor: Andrew Garrett (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Readers: Emily Drummond (PhD candidate, Department of Linguistics) and Peter Jenks (Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics)
• Bryce Wallace
  Honors Thesis Title: "The Vaccine Holocaust: The Rhetorical Use of Metaphor in Anti-vax Discourse"
  Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Lori Dorfman (Adjunct Professor, School of Public Health)
• Calvin Quick
  Honors Thesis Title: "Syntactic Variation in Early Modern Welsh Poetry: An Optimality Theoretic Approach"
  Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Myriah Williams (Lecturer, Celtic Studies)

Congratulations to Bryce Wallace ('23, Linguistics & English), who has received the prestigious Beinecke Scholarship! Read the story here.

Bryce was also recently named a Haas Scholar. A description of his project, "The Ethics of Literary Scholarship and the Burden of Representation: If and How the Humanities Articulate Otherness," is available here.

Edwin Ko has accepted a three-year (renewable) position as a Lecturer in Linguistics at Yale University, beginning July 1, 2023. He will be teaching courses in historical linguistics and other areas of linguistics, and continuing his research on the Crow language and Siouan comparative linguistics.

Congratulations to Erik Hans Maier, who recently filed his doctoral dissertation:

"A Treebank of the Karuk Language"
Committee: Line Mikkelsen (chair), Peter Jenks, Beth Piatote

Calques is happy to pass along this message from the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS):

Are you interested in Phonetics? SLUgS invites you to join us in a tour of the PhonLab in the linguistics department, headed by Professor Keith Johnson! Tour the lab and see what phoneticians do in person and see experiments in action. Tour is Nov 17th at 5pm, meeting at Dwinelle 1229!

Congratulations to Eric Wilbanks, whose doctoral dissertation, "The Integration of Social and Acoustic Cues During Speech Perception," was signed, sealed, and delivered last week!

Congratulations to Schuyler Laparle, who has accepted a position as Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University, beginning January 2023.

Jasper Talwani (class of 2023) was just selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow. This grant awards $5,000 for his proposed 8-week summer research project that will describe and analyze valency-changing suffixes in Highland Chontal, a language isolate of Oaxaca, Mexico, including a language revitalization workshop with Chontal collaborators in Santa María Zapotitlán. These funds will go to research expenses including equipment for community auto-documentation projects and the production and printing of pedagogical materials. He will produce his senior thesis on the basis of this collaborative research.

ASL at Berkeley, the first ASL club on campus, meets every other Wednesday to learn beginner signs, learn about Deaf culture and ableism, and build community! Additional information is available at the group's linktree. Please contact Beth Auclair with any questions.

Congratulations to Aurora Martinez Kane, who has received the 2021-2022 Mentored Research Award from the Graduate Division! More information on the fellowship is available here. Her research mentor on the award is Isaac Bleaman.

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.

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.'

Calques is happy to share the following updates from some of our graduating seniors in linguistics!

• Alexandra Butler will be starting her MA in Linguistics at UC Davis in the fall.
• Teela Huff will be starting her PhD in Linguistics at UCLA in the fall.
• Sophia Stremel will be starting her PhD in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz in the fall. She intends to specialize in syntax and its interfaces.
• Irene Yi will be working as a postbaccalaureate researcher in the Historical Linguistics Lab at Yale.

Congratulations, all!

Tabitha Bell, a linguistics major at UC Berkeley, is receiving Honorable Mention for the KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize for her work to create a better future for children and youth. She will be honored at an award ceremony hosted by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Wed., April 28, from 4-5:30pm. The event will feature a keynote by Donald K. Tamaki, Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP: "Am I an American or Not? The Perils to Democracy When Racism Shouts Louder Than Facts, the Rule of Law, and the Constitution." Click here to register. More details on the event and Tabitha's work are available here. Congratulations, Tabitha!

Congrats to Line Mikkelsen, whose paper Forms and functions of backward resumption: The case of Karuk, co-authored with Karuk tribal members Charron (Sonny) Davis, Vina Smith, Nancy Super (née Jerry), Peter Super Sr., and Charlie Thom Sr., has just appeared in Language! As the paper notes in its opening paragraph:

The research on Karuk reported here is the outcome of a collaboration between Karuk master speakers and Elders Sonny Davis, Julian Lang, the late Vina Smith, Nancy Super (née Jerry), the late Peter Super, Sr., and the late Charlie Thom, Sr.; Karuk language learners, researchers, and teachers Tamara Alexander, Robert Manuel, Crystal Richardson, Susan Gehr, Arch Super, Florrine Super, and Franklin (Frankie) Thom; and UC Berkeley linguists Andrew Garrett, Erik Maier, Line Mikkelsen, Karie Moorman, Ruth Rouvier, and Clare Sandy in Yreka, California, starting in 2010 and continuing through 2020. The work includes language documentation, linguistic analysis, language learning, development of language curriculum, educational support, language teaching, working through texts, (re)transcribing legacy recordings, linguistic elicitation with verbal and visual stimuli, and the development of ararahih-'urípih (= Karuk language net; http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~karuk/index.php), an online dictionary and morphologically parsed text corpus.

Congrats to Eric Wilbanks, whose NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant (with Keith Johnson) is being recommended for funding! The project, titled "On-line Integration during Speech Perception", will involve several experiments tracking the time-course of sociophonetic perception, and includes funding for an improved eye-tracking set-up for the lab.

The program for the 51th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (to be hosted virtually by the Université de Quebec à Montreal) has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and recent alumni:

• Amy Rose Deal: 3-on-3 restrictions and PCC typology
• Peter Jenks: Names as complex indices: On apparent Condition C violations in Thai
• Laura Kalin and Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): Deconstructing subcategorization: Conditions on insertion vs. position
• Edwin Ko: Feeding agreement: Anti-locality in Crow applicatives of unaccusatives

Congrats all!