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Students

April 21, 2021

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!

December 17, 2020

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.

December 10, 2020

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.

October 8, 2020

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!

April 7, 2020

Alice Shen has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. Congratulations, Alice!

March 6, 2020

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!

February 25, 2020

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.

February 4, 2020

January 23, 2020

Congrats to Meg Cychosz, first author of a new paper to appear:

Cychosz, M., Romeo, R. R., Soderstrom, M., Scaff, C., Ganek, H., Cristia, A., Casillas, M., de Barbaro, K., Bang, J., Weisleder, A. (to appear). Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ah37c

Here is a link to the Open Science Framework ethics repository created for the article.

January 16, 2020

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 13, 2020

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!

December 5, 2019

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

November 22, 2019

Congrats to Meg Cychosz and Keith Johnson, whose paper (authors Cychosz, M., Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Johnson, K.) entitled Spectral and temporal measures of coarticulation in child speech will appear next month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America!

Berkeley SLUgS (Society for Linguistics Undergraduate Students) is hosting its Fourth Annual Linguistics Symposium on Saturday, November 23rd. This year’s symposium features a wide variety of undergraduate speakers presenting on topics ranging from poetry in ASL to child language acquisition, as well as a keynote by Larry Hyman. Coffee & breakfast will be provided; see the schedule here and facebook event here.

November 7, 2019

Congrats to Zach O'Hagan and Lev Michael, whose paper (with Natalia Chousou-Polydouri) entitled Phylogenetic classification supports a Northeastern Amazonian Proto-Tupí-Guaraní homeland has been published in the open-access journal LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas.

November 6, 2019

Congrats to grad student Ruth Rouvier, who has been awarded a mini-grant from the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues. Ruth's grant project is entitled Yurok Language Revitalization: Affective Stance and Language Learning.

October 22, 2019

Congrats to first-year grad student Wendy López, who has just been named winner of the 2019 Wigberto Jiménez Moreno Prize for best Linguistics Master's Thesis by Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia! Wendy's award-winning thesis is entitled Mecanismos morfosintácticos de cambio de valencia y diátesis en el nuntajɨɨyi (Sierra Popoluca).

October 10, 2019

The programhas just been released for the upcoming Acoustical Society of America (ASA) meeting in San Diego. The department will be represented by the following talks (thanks to Emily Remirez for compiling these):

  • Andrew Cheng - 'No' versus 'Aniyo': Back vowel diphthongization in heritage Korean
  • Meg Cychosz - Novel acoustic measures of coarticulation reveal morphological planning in child speech
  • Emily Grabowski - Effects of pitch height and contour on duration perception
  • Emily Remirez - Phonetic cues influence judgment of syntax

Congrats all!

The 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place this weekend at Stony Brook. Berkeley is represented by two talks by current dept members and recent alumni:

  • Karee Garvin, Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz and Sharon Inkelas: Modeling Vowel Quantity Scales in Q Theory
  • Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Florian Lionnet (PhD '16): Phantom structure: A representational account of floating tone association

Congrats all!

October 9, 2019

Berkeley Linguistics graduate students were recently awarded a campus GROW grant, in support of wellness activities for grad students, and participated in a screen printing workshop last Friday. Students printed posters, tote bags, and t-shirts with designs by Julia Nee and Emily Remirez. Pictured at the workshop and with its results are Allegra Robertson, Edwin Ko, Meg Cychosz, Julia Nee, and Emily Remirez.

Allegra Robertson, Edwin Ko Meg Cychosz, Julia Nee, Emily Remirez