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March 9, 2023

Hinton speaks (online) in Sweden

On Wednesday, March 15, at 11am PDT, Leanne Hinton will be one of the speakers in an online event in Sweden to present the Swedish translation of her edited book Bringing Our Languages Home. [Flyer] [Press release]

Big Give is TODAY!

Big Give is an online fundraising tradition that began in 2014, giving alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends the chance to come together on one day to support the Berkeley campus community. This year you can show support for the Department of Linguistics, the California Language Archive, and the Society of Linguistics Undergrad Students (SLUgS). Big Give starts at 9 pm on Wednesday, March 8, and continues through 9 pm on Thursday, March 9, 2023. Watch for our emails around that time — you might even be able to help us win extra money in the hourly contests!

March 8, 2023

Beguš teaches at ESSLLI 2023

Gašper Beguš will offer a course on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech" at the ESSLLI summer school in Ljubljana, Slovenia (July 31 to August 11, 2023). Click here for the program and here for the course syllabus.

Ko speaks at the Language Vitality Initiative

Edwin Ko will be speaking (virtually) on the topic of "Migrating and Digitizing Materials" at the Language Vitality Initiative's Language Reclamation Landscapes, an educational series on language reclamation topics by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Administration for Native Americans.

March 7, 2023

Caponigro colloquium

The 2022-2023 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 13, with a talk by Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. His talk is entitled "Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How," and the abstract is as follows:

Headless Relative Clauses have been sadly neglected in linguistics — fortunately, not so by languages across the world and their speakers. Rarely mentioned in descriptive grammars and largely ignored by typological investigations, Headless Relative Clauses have received only limited attention in theoretical syntax or formal semantics, mainly based on the usual "language" suspects (i.e., some Germanic and some Romance). In this talk, I aim to vindicate them. I introduce and define varieties of Headless Relative Clauses, present a methodology to study them across languages, and highlight the insights they bring to the investigation of the crosslinguistic syntax/semantics interface, and also to the study of logical words, and fieldwork, typology. I hope to provide what is needed for those who want to study Headless Relative Clauses in whatever language they choose from whichever linguistic corner they prefer, starting from this last sentence, which contains 4 examples of a total of 3 different kinds of Headless Relative Clauses.

March 3, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Mar 3-10, 2023)

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

March 1, 2023

Bleaman and Nove speak at YiLaS 3

Two Berkeley linguists will be speaking at Yiddish Language Structures (YiLaS) 3, taking place in-person at University College London, March 27-29, 2023. Isaac Bleaman will be giving an invited keynote on "Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Sociolinguistic Variation in Yiddish," as well as a talk on "Definiteness Type as a Predictor of Preposition-Determiner Interactions in a Yiddish Corpus" co-authored with Georg Höhn (Georg August University of Göttingen / Humboldt University). Chaya Nove will be speaking on "The Hasidic Approach to Language in the Past and Present" and chairing a session on Hasidic Yiddish.

Session in memory of Gilles Fauconnier at ICLC-16

For the 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, taking place August 7-11, 2023, at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, a session in memory of the late Gilles Fauconnier (UCSD) has been accepted, including papers by Eve Sweetser (a session organizer) and Berkeley alums Iksoo Kwon and Seiko Fujii:

Session on Mental Spaces, Blends and Viewpoint, in memory of Gilles Fauconnier

  • Barbara Dancygier (University of British Columbia) and Lieven Vandelanotte (Université de Namur): “Be like” internet memes: discourse spaces, stance-stacking and viewpoint blends
  • Seiko Fujii (University of Tokyo): Embedded viewpoint and embedded insubordination constructions in Japanese and English
  • Iksoo Kwon (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies): Space embedding and epistemic stance: A Mental-space approach to I promise and I guarantee constructions
  • Anna Bonifazi (Universität Köln): A mental-space account of embedded viewpoint for anaphoric constructions countering coreference rules
  • Todd Oakley (Case Western Reserve University): Scalar Reasoning in Macroeconomics: The Rhetorical Oddities of Even
  • Lumi Kang and Iksoo Kwon (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies): What Happened to My Body My Choice?: Viewpoint Stacking and the Construal of Picket Signs
  • Terry Janzen (University of Manitoba), Barbara Schaffer (University of New Mexico), and Lorraine Leeson (Trinity College Dublin): Blended spaces in simultaneous interpreting: Signers' and gesturers' subjective representations of speakers' texts
  • Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley): Blending spaces to compose speech–and-gesture meaning
  • Tiago Timponi Torrent (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora) and Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University): Persistence of the base
  • Darren “Daz” Saunders (Université de Québec à Montréal): Mouth actions in blended spaces
  • Riccardo Ginevra (UCSC Milano) and Anna Bonifazi (Universität Köln): Mental space compression and viewpt in I-E texts
  • Jose Sanders, Kobie van Krieken, and Linde van Schuppen (Radboud University, Nijmegen): Viewpoint Embedding in the life-stories of people with schizophrenia
  • Kimberly Grogan (University of British Columbia): Blending for persuasive shock: Climate change activism
  • Kelsey Wilson (University of British Columbia): Reconciling layers of discourse in Dungeons & Dragons through the Discourse Viewpoint Space

February 27, 2023

Garrett publishes in Boom California

An article by Andrew Garrett, titled "'The Correct Way of Writing the Indian Language': Juan Dolores at the University of California," just appeared in Boom California, an online journal published by UC Press.

Beguš speaks at UMaryland and CMU

Gašper Beguš gave two invited colloquium talks recently, one at the CLIP colloquium at the University of Maryland and one at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

February 24, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Feb 24-Mar 3, 2023)

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
    Danny Law (UT Austin): "The Historical Comparative Semantics of Mayan Positional Roots: Developing a fieldworker's guide."
  • Phorum - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Nay San (Stanford): "Improving access to language documentation corpora using self-supervised models for speech."
  • Phorum - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Julia Swan (San José State): "Monophthongal /ow/ among Nordic Americans in Puget Sound: A Case of Functional Reallocation."
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
    Discussion of Lindberg et al. 2022.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Augustina Owusu (Boston College): "Definitely a question: definiteness markers in Akan ex-situ questions."
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Jiayi Lu (Stanford): "An adjunction analysis of clause chaining in Turkish."

February 22, 2023

Jarvis presents at SALT 33

Congrats to Becky Jarvis, who will be giving a presentation titled "Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" at the 33rd meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 33) hosted at Yale from May 12 to 14, 2023.

February 21, 2023

Hyman publishes in Studies in African Linguistics

Congrats to Larry Hyman, whose article "Deverbal nominalization in Runyankore" has just appeared in Studies in African Linguistics (though published as part of the last issue from 2022). Click here for the PDF.

February 17, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Feb 17-24, 2023)

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

February 16, 2023

O'Hagan speaks at Texas Linguistics Society

Zachary O'Hagan is in Austin to attend the 22nd meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society February 17-18, giving a keynote presentation titled "The Ashaninka Archival Collection of Gerald Weiss: Value in Legacy Documentation and Priorities in Preservation."

February 10, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Feb 10-17, 2023)

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

February 3, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Feb 3-10, 2023)

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

February 1, 2023

Rolle and Merrill publish in Phonology

Congrats to Berkeley PhD alumni Nicholas Rolle (2018) and John T. M. Merrill (2018) on the publication of their article "Tone-driven epenthesis in Wamey" in Phonology!

January 31, 2023

Publication of first two volumes of Amazonian Languages: An International Handbook

The first two volumes of Amazonian languages: An international handbook were officially published on January 30. Edited by Patience Epps and Lev Michael, these two volumes present grammatical descriptions of all reasonably well-attested linguistic isolates of the Greater Amazonian region. Volume I covers Aikanã to Kandozi-Shapra, and Volume II covers Kanoé to Yurakaré. (A chapter in Volume III will summarize what we know about the more poorly-attested isolates and small language families known only from colonial-era materials.)

Linguists currently or formerly affiliated with Berkeley contributed significantly to these volumes:

Introduction (freely available online): Patience Epps (UT Austin) and Lev Michael

Aʔɨwa: Christine Beier and Lev Michael

Cholón: Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus (University of Amsterdam) and Kelsey Caitlyn Neely (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme; Berkeley PhD 2019)

Muniche: Lev Michael, Stephanie Farmer (Berkeley PhD 2015), Greg Finley (Meta, Berkeley PhD 2015), Karina Sullón Acosta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), Christine Beier, Alejandrina Chanchari Icahuate (Munichis, Peru), Donalia Icahuate Baneo (Munichis, Peru), and Melchor Sinti Saita (Munichis, Peru)

Mỹky: Bernat Bardagil (University of Groningen; Berkeley postdoc 2017-2020)

Omurano: Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley PhD 2020)

Taushiro: Zachary O'Hagan

Warao: Andrés Romero-Figueroa (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello) and Konrad Rybka (University of Leiden; Berkeley postdoc 2015-2018)

In addition, Zachary O'Hagan was the editorial assistant in the first several years of the project.

The next volumes in the series will focus on the small language families of Greater Amazonia, and the final volumes, on the large language families of the region.

January 27, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Jan 27-Feb 3, 2023)

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 1 - Zoom (password: fforum) and Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4pm
    Gilles Polian (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology): "The Tseltal Multidialectal Dictionary."
  • Phorum - Friday Jan 27 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Mykel Brinkerhoff (UC Santa Cruz): "Testing the Laryngeal Complexity Hypothesis: Evidence from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec."
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Aglaia von Götz (UC Berkeley): TBD.