News

The Script Encoding Initiative is recruiting a Postdoctoral Scholar for a two-year NSF-funded project on the politics of digitizing newly invented writing systems.

The role is ideal for researchers with strong qualitative or mixed-methods skills and an interest in writing systems and digital infrastructures. Regional expertise in West Africa or South Asia is a plus but not required. The position can start as early as January 2026, with flexibility in the start date.

Application review will begin November 18, 2025 (ignore the earlier portal date).

Full listing here: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05167

Eve Sweetser will be giving two talks in Germany in next two weeks:

• "Religious metaphors, embodiment and multimodality," keynote address for the International Conference on “Metaphors of Religion,” Ruhr Universität Bochum, Oct. 27, 2025
• "Embedded Narrative Viewpoint in Multimodal Story-telling," Linguistics Colloquium, University of Köln, Nov. 3, 2025

Maksymilian Dąbkowski has published an article titled "Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ]" in NELS 55: Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society, Volume One.

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Group in American Indian Languages - Wednesday Oct 22 - O'Hagan residence - 6pm
  Chloé Laplantine (Université Paris Cité): "Émile Benveniste's research on North American languages (1952-1953)"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Oct 21 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 3:40-4:30pm
  Presentation by Ester Alkanli, a longtime Berkeley resident and native speaker of Ladino from Istanbul
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Oct 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Cuitlahuac Arreola Martinez: "Balancing Identities in Language Work During Autumn"
• Phorum - Friday Oct 17 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Grace Brown (Stanford): "Gender Identity and Ideology Shape Perceptions of Masculinity in Male Speech"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 17 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): "Linguistic Elicitation and Style in a Language Documentation Context: Variable Click Production in Tjhauba"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 24 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Verónica Grajeda (UC Berkeley): "U.S. Spanish Nasal Neutralization: A Case Study on the production of /njV/ and /ɲV/"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 17 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): "Pronouns and personhood in Thai"

Congratulations to Amy Rose Deal, who has a new article entitled "Uncentered attitude reports" out in the Journal of Semantics.

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Nadine Grimm (Rochester): "Tone in Grammar and Grammar-Writing"
• Phorum - Friday Oct 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Hannah Sande and Sansan Claude Hien (UC Berkeley): "Puzzles in the Lobi (Gur) tone system: Downstep and floating tones"
• Phorum - Friday Oct 17 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Grace Brown (Stanford): "Gender Identity and Ideology Shape Perceptions of Masculinity in Male Speech"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 10 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley): "Acoustical Diphthongal Trajectory Variation in Hispanic Californian English"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 17 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Becky Everson (UC Berkeley): "Linguistic Elicitation and Style in a Language Documentation Context: Variable Click Production in Tjhauba"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Philip Shushurin: "Rethinking Adjacency: Deriving linear constraints in the Russian Noun Phrase (and beyond)" (Zoom talk)

Lev Michael and Christine Beier have just published a chapter titled "Non-verbal predication in Zaparoan languages" in Non-verbal predication in the world's languages, edited by Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci, and Denis Creissels (De Gruyter Brill).

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Oct 6 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Tom McCoy (Yale): "Using neural networks to test hypotheses about language acquisition"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 3:40-4:30pm
  Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley): "Introduction to Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Speech and Text Corpora: Resources, Processing, and Analysis"
• Phorum - Friday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "The typology of nasal contrast: The view from Kwa"
• Phorum - Friday Oct 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
  Hannah Sande and Sansan Claude Hien (UC Berkeley): "Puzzles in the Lobi (Gur) tone system: Downstep and floating tones"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Talk by Shulin Liu (UC Berkeley)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 10 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  HLS/LSA practice talk by Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Bernat Bardagil (Ghent): "Interlocutor morphology in Mỹky"

On Friday evening, at the end of the main session of AMP 2025, a Festschrift was announced in honor of Sharon Inkelas. Sharon's research has a profound influence on the fields of phonology and morphology, and her influence as a teacher, mentor, colleague, friend, and now administrator will also have a lasting impact on the field of linguistics and beyond.

Festschrift details:
Phonology at its interfaces
Edited by Hannah Sande, Larry Hyman, Darya Kavitskaya, Anne Pycha, Stephanie Shih, and Alan Yu

Table of Contents

Part 1: Phonology: representations and phenomena

• Florian Lionnet: Ineffability as a window into hidden grammar in Laal
• Andrew Garrett and Kai Schenck: Yurok rhotic vowels and vowel harmony: Phonetics, phonology, and morphology
• Paul Kiparsky: Neutrality and Harmony: A Finnish Perspective
• Larry M. Hyman & Mwaambi G. Mbûûi: The Superhigh Tone in Tiania (Kimeru, Kenya)
• Karee Garvin and Myriam Lapierre: Integrating Q Theory with Moraic Theory: A case study from Nanti stress
• David Mortenson: Paradigm Completion in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec: An Exploration of Some Computational Consequences of Q-Theory

• Yuni Kim: Cophonologies in the lexicon: an analysis of Coatlán Mixe verb stem allomorphy
• Mary Paster: Phonological identity and similarity effects on affixation
• Gabriela Caballero: Templatic truncation and metrical structure in Choguita Rarámuri length-alternating allomorphy
• Draga Zec: Phonology within morphology in South Slavic: the case of OV augmentation
• Nicholas Rolle, Emily Clem, and Virginia Dawson: Displacement as a response to non-local allomorphy: Evidence from Tiwa

• Tara McAllister + Yvan Rose: Trajectories for the elimination of child phonological patterns
• Alan Yu: Infixing pragmatically: Expressive infixation in English and Cantonese
• Peter Jenks and Hannah Sande: Prosodic inversion as infixation
• Stephanie S Shih; Jordan Ackerman; Noah Hermalin; Sharon Inkelas; Hayeun Jang; Jessica Johnson; Darya Kavitskaya, Shigeto Kawahara; Miran Oh; Rebecca L. Starr; Alan Yu: Cross-linguistic and language-specific sound symbolism: Pokémonastics