News

Congrats to the undergraduate winners of the 2019 Sawyer Scholarship for Applied Linguistics:

• Teela Huff and Nicholas Carrick,  Creating Xavante Pedagogical Materials 
  In Summer of 2019, Teela Huff and Nicholas Carrick are traveling with Myriam Lapierre to work with a Xavante community that expressed interest in the benefits of linguistic research. While in Eastern Mato Grosso, the three hope to record stories with community consent for the purpose of creating recreational and lexical pedagogical materials. In collaboration with this Xavante community, the long-term goal of this project is to help preserve and maintain Xavante language and culture through linguistic means.
• Karina Fong-Hirschfelder, The Influence of French Polysemous Words on English in French-English Bilingual Children 
  Karina will be using the funds from the Sawyer Scholarship to create a study/stimular and start data collection for an experiment with Mahesh Srinivasan. This experiment will be one of many in a study on French polysemous words and their influence on English speakers, both bilingual and monolingual. Karina will be elaborating on this work during the upcoming academic year as part of her Honors Thesis.

This weekend is the Symposium for American Indigenous Languages (SAIL) at the University of Arizona. Berkeley will be represented by postdoc Bernat Bardagil Mas, giving a talk entitled Language documentation as anticipated historical linguistics? and grad student Zachary O'Hagan, leading a plenary workshop called Using the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages - California Languages Archive.

Congrats to fifth-year grad student Emily Clem, who has just accepted a tenure-track position in the linguistics department at UC San Diego! 

The 4th volume of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America has just been published, showcasing research presented in January at the 2019 Annual Meeting. In the collection are three papers by students and faculty: 

• Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham
• Virginia Dawson: Lexicalizing disjunction scope
• Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Sharon Inkelas: Recent advances in Q theory: segment strength

Congrats all!

Last weekend was a busy one for Berkeley linguists, with department members at conferences in Dwinelle Hall dedicated to Celtic and Amazonian languages as well as attending conferences in other locations! 

Numerous Berkeley attendees at the Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL III)

Virginia Dawson and Samantha Wathugala at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 9, Reed College, Portland (after presenting their paper, In support of a choice functional analysis of Sinhala ðə)

And to cap things off with some true linguistics in action: here's Susan Lin presenting Linguistics: making sense from noise at the East Bay Science Cafe, last Thursday (March 14). 

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

• Martha Schwarz archived 11 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes related to Kumal (Indo-Aryan; Nepal), from a week's fieldwork in July 2018. The recordings primarily consist of grammatical elicitation, with topics including verb paradigms, dative subjects and agreement, non-finite clauses, possession, deontic modality, negation, and more! You can listen to the Frog Story here.
• Kelsey Neely archived sound recordings of 50 traditional stories in Yaminawa (Panoan; Peru). This is the beginning of a large archival deposit that will include recordings, transcriptions, field notes, databases, photographs, and other materials associated with Kelsey's ongoing fieldwork in Sepahua from 2013 to the present. She writes descriptions of the plots of each story, which are rich in expressive content, linguistic form, and cultural and historical value. As Kelsey writes, the stories blend cosmology and moral teaching with humor -- many describe marriages between humans and ñũshĩwu (archetypal anthropomorphic animal spirits) that fail due to the inability of the animal spirits to adapt to life in human society. Trees and manufactured objects such as pots are also animated. Recurrent themes include the importance of cooperation, the danger of selfishness, the value of individual skill, and warnings, particularly to men, to be careful with what they say and how they treat women.
• Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008) archived over 1,300 digital files in 76 file bundles related to Choguita Rarámuri (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico). The collection consists primarily of sound recordings from 2011 to the present, most with corresponding .eaf transcription files! The recordings in file bundles 2019-01.001 through 011, and 013 are elicitation; those in 2019-01.015 through 075 are personal, historical, and procedural narratives, conversations, interviews, prayers, and oratory. As an example, check out the myth of the cave, as told by Luz Elena León Ramírez, here.
• A preliminary (1980) dictionary of Barbareño Chumash (isolate; California), compiled by Kenneth Whistler is now available. One of Mary Haas's last students, Mr. Whistler received his PhD from this department in 1980, with a dissertation entitled Proto-Wintun Kin Classification: A Case Study of Reconstruction in a Complex Semantic System, available here.

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

• Tessa Scott archived 34 file bundles related to Ndengeleko (Bantu; Tanzania), from her fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. The audio recordings consist primarily of elicitation (accompanied by scanned and typed field notes), with four short texts and discussions with speakers of consent for the project.
• George Kamau (BA 1962) was discovered to be the language consultant for Prof. William Shipley's winter-spring 1962 field methods course on Kikuyu (Bantu; Kenya), then listed as 220B "Linguistics Laboratory." His recordings are items 002-005 here. In 1959 Mr. Kamau was part of the first cohort of 81 Kenyans brought from Nairobi to various universities in the US as part of a series of airlifts sponsored by the African American Student Foundation. The goal was to educate a generation of young Kenyans for post-British rule. Barack Obama, Sr. was part of the same cohort.
• Last week it was reported that Prof. Wallace Chafe, at Berkeley from 1962 to 1986, passed away on February 3. Recordings from the second field methods course he taught here, on Dakota (Siouan; US) in fall-winter 1963-4, are items 012 and 013 here.

This Monday we will have a series of presentations by current graduate students in the colloquium spot -- 3:10-5pm, 370 Dwinelle: 

• Alice Shen:  Pitch cues in the perception of code switching

• Amalia Skilton: Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: Experimental evidence from Ticuna and Dutch

• Emily Clem: The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes

• Myriam Lapierre: Two types of [NT]s in Panãra: Evidence from production and perception

This year's International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC) kicks off next week in Mānoa, Hawaiʻi, and features numerous presentations by Berkeley faculty, staff, students, and alumni:  

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics & Near Eastern Studies special lecture - Friday Feb 15 - 254 Barrows Hall - 2pm 
  Lutz Edzard (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg): The morphosyntax of compounding in Semitic
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (Berkeley): Anaphoric definites as anchored definites
• Ling 47 ("Communication Disorders")  special event - Friday Feb 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4pm
  Viewing and discussion of the documentary When I Stutter
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 20 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11-12:30PM 
  Practice talks for ICLDC: Julia Nee (Berkeley): Communication Based Instruction and Evaluation of Language Revitalization; Anna Berge (Alaska Native Language Center) and Edwin Ko (Berkeley): Interactive Maps, Place, and Context 
• Philosophy Dept Work in Progress Talk - Wednesday Feb 20 - Moses 301 - noon-1
  Amy Rose Deal (Berkeley): Factivity and uncentered attitudes
• Climate care tea/coffee hour - Friday Feb 22 - 3401 Dwinelle - 2-3pm
  Discussion of goal setting
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm
  Jorge Hankamer (Santa Cruz) & Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley): CP complements to D 

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions - Friday Feb 8 & Saturday Feb 9
  Join us for talks including keynotes by Suzi Lima (Toronto) and David Barner (UCSD)!  The complete program is available here. 
• Phorum - Monday Feb 11 - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm
  Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, & Bruno Ferenc Segedin (UCD): Talking Tech: How does voice-AI influence human speech? 
• Linguistics Colloquium - Monday Feb 11 - 370 Dwinelle -  3:10-5pm 
  Larry Hyman: The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11-12:30PM 
  Andrew Garrett, Dmetri Hayes, and Ronald Sprouse: TBA 
• SLUgS - Thursday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm  
  Viewing of Atlantis 
• Linguistics & Near Eastern Studies special lecture - Friday Feb 15 - 254 Barrows Hall - 2pm
  Lutz Edzard (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg): The morphosyntax of compounding in Semitic
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks: TBA

Some new updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages regarding activities for 2019 so far:

• Chris Beier & Lev Michael archived an initial 13 file bundles related to Iquito (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 8 hours of audio recordings of 59 texts from the early years of their research (2002-2005).
• Zach O'Hagan added 63 file bundles from 2018 fieldwork to his collection on Caquinte (Arawak; Peru), including over 39 hours of audio and video recordings of stories, interviews, elicitation, and other interactions.
• Vivian Wauters (MA 2012), now a graduate student in horticultural science at the University of Minnesota, archived 22 file bundles related to Arabela (Zaparoan; Peru), including over 36 hours of audio recordings of elicitation and some texts, field notes, and a FLEx database.
• Three boxes of lexical file slips (here, here, and here) of Atsugewi (Palaihnihan; California) created by Len Talmy (PhD 1972) have been digitized and are available.
• An unpublished manuscript on historical Tucanoan linguistics, written by Alva Wheeler (PhD 1970) as a term paper for a seminar taught by Mary Haas, has been digitized and is available.
• Jorge Rosés (Alberta) & Erin Hashimoto (Alberta) archived "Time-aligned Annotations of Makah Narratives" (Wakashan; Washington), which combines speakers Ralph LaChester and Mabel Robertson's (1965) recordings of the language made with William Jacobsen (PhD 1964) with handwritten transcriptions of them, making them more accessible to users in ELAN and SayMore.

The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages has just sent along some updates on its activities in Fall 2018:

• Kenny Baclawski archived 67 file bundles related to his 2014 and 2015 fieldwork on Cham (Austronesian; Vietnam), including audio recordings of texts, and of elicitation on grammar and sociolinguistic variation.
• Karee Garvin archived 32 file bundles related to her 2017 fieldwork on Nafaanra (Senufo; Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire), inclulding audio recordings of phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and narrative elicitation, and field notes.
• Edwin Ko archived 17 file bundles related to his 2018 fieldwork on Crow (Siouan; Montana), including audio recordings of elicitation and texts, and photographs.
• Amalia Skilton archived 625 gigabytes (here, here, and here) of audio and video recordings of Ticuna (isolate; Peru, Colombia, Brazil), spanning fieldwork from 2015 to the present. Included are transcriptions of some 3 hours of conversation, 3 hours of interviews, and 8 hours of traditional monologic texts.

Stay tuned for more Survey updates from this new year!