Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy, who recently filed his doctoral dissertation:
"Perceptual learning for speech: Mechanisms of phonetic adaptation to an unfamiliar accent"
Committee: Keith Johnson (chair), Frederic Theunissen, Terry Regier, Isaac Bleaman
Congratulations to Schuyler Laparle, who recently filed her doctoral dissertation:
"The shape of discourse: How gesture structures conversation"
Committee: Eve Sweetser (co-chair), Line Mikkelsen (co-chair), Elise Stickles, Dor Abrahamson
Dr. Laparle will be taking up a faculty position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
Congratulations to Raksit Tyler Lau-Preechathammarach, who recently filed his doctoral dissertation:
"From Voice Quality to Tone: Multilingualism in Northeast Thailand and Shifting Cue Weights"
Committee: Susan Lin (co-chair), Andrew Garrett (co-chair), Justin Davidson
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:
Calques is happy to share the following updates from some of our graduating seniors in linguistics!
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:
Congrats all!
Alice Shen has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. Congratulations, Alice!
Congrats to Edwin Ko, who has just been awarded a Foundation for Endangered Languages grant for his project entitled Development of Northern Pomo language revitalization camps!
Congratulations to Virginia Dawson, who has just accepted a tenure-track position in semantics at Western Washington University! Ginny will be joining Western's newest department.