News

The Center for Jewish Studies is sponsoring a lecture on "Hebrew: From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue" by Keren Mock (Stanford and Sciences Po Paris), taking place on Tuesday, February 3 from 5-6:30 PM in 370 Dwinelle Hall. Click here for more information and the link to register.

Calques is happy to introduce a visiting scholar in Linguistics! Freja Lauridsen is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at Lund University. Her research interests lie in historical language change, with a particular focus on historical morphosyntax in the Germanic languages, especially the Scandinavian languages and English. Her Ph.D. project investigates the parallel development of modal auxiliary verbs in Danish and English, including the evolution of the so-called losers of grammaticalisation - that is, preterite-present verbs that underwent partial grammaticalisation but never fully developed into modal auxiliaries. A central focus of the project is the Common Germanic etymon 'munu' and its grammaticalisation paths in Danish and English. The project adopts a corpus-based approach, drawing on historical manuscript data.

Freja will share an office in Dwinelle 1228.

Tyler Lemon (PhD 2024) has begun an internship on the Data Analytics & Engineering team at Fleetio, a truck fleet management software company based in Birmingham, Alabama. Tyler is working primarily on internal data questions and database management.

On Friday, December 5, Maksymilian Dąbkowski presented his dissertation (filed in October) on "Metrical stress and glottal stops in A'ingae," which shows based on data collected during fieldwork in A'ingae-speaking communities in Ecuador that phonology must by cyclic and morpheme-sensitive, and that phonological domains correspond to morphosyntactic domains. In January, Maks is starting a position as a Research Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong. Congrats, Maks! Maks is pictured below in front of his presentation slides with committee members Darya Kavitskaya, Peter Kasuga-Jenks, and Hannah Sande. Not pictured: Committee member Lev Michael.

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

• Linguistics Holiday Potluck - Monday Dec 8 - Ishi Court
• Phorum - Friday Dec 5 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Dissertation presentation
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Dec 5 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Marguerite Morlan & Verónica Grajeda (UC Berkeley): Accommodation project brainstorm
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm (note time)
  Practice SSILA talks
  - Tyler Lee-Wynant: "The syntax of Northern Pomo wh-questions"
  - Line Mikkelsen: "Periphrastic negation in Kalaallisut"

Members of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) gave multiple talks at this year's Unicode Technology Workshop, held in Mountain View, CA. Topics by SEI's network included: "Assessing a Script's Unicode Readiness," "Guidelines for Handling Unstandardized and Undeciphered Scripts in Unicode," "Capturing Script Dynamism: The Indic Case," and more.

A reflection on the event is available on SEI's blog.

On Friday, November 21, Andrew Garrett, Leanne Hinton, Tyler Lee-Wynant, and Madeleine Strait hosted Victoria Carlson, Ryan Fleisher, Nikki Peters, and Brittany Vigil-Burbank from the Yurok Tribe at its monthly language workshop, held for the first time on the Berkeley campus. The morning focused on Yurok syntax and the afternoon featured a visit to the Bancroft Library to inspect early-twentieth-century Yurok manuscripts. (Photo by Zachary O'Hagan.)

Debbie Anderson was recognized by the Unicode Consortium for her two decades of contributions to the Unicode Standard and to the field of script digitization. The Unicode Bulldog Award is "to be given to those tenacious champions of Unicode who have produced solid achievements in promoting its use around the globe. This award is called the Bulldog Award; once they bite, they never let go!"

Presenters highlighted her supervision of more than 120 scripts into modern digital infrastructure, as well as her mentorship of the next generation of researchers and technologists. A well-deserved honor!

Unicode Consortium CEO Toral Cowieson recognizing Debbie Anderson with the Bulldog Award at the 2025 Unicode Technology Workshop. Photo credit: Elango Cheran

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

• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Nov 21 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
  Justin Davidson (UC Berkeley) leads a discussion of Montrul 2025
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Practice LSA talks
  - Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley), Emily Clem (UC San Diego), Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Reverse prolepsis in Kalaallisut"
  - Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley), Grethe Schmidt (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat), and Ellen Thrane (Umiaq, Kalaallit Illuutaat): "Focus fronting, Q-Particles and anti-pied-piping"

Tessa Scott (PhD 2023) has just published the article "Formalizing two types of mixed A/Ā movement" in Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics.