An article by Gašper Beguš and coauthors titled "What if We Understood What Animals Are Saying?: The Legal Impact of AI-Assisted Studies of Animal Communication" just appeared in Ecology Law Quarterly. You can read it here.
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October 21, 2025
Isaac Bleaman will be traveling to Sweden to give two talks at Lund University on November 11 and 12:
- "'Reading' Spoken Yiddish: Transcribing and Analyzing Holocaust Survivor Testimonies," a paper delivered at a panel on "Histories of Reading: The Case of Yiddish Literature," YES - Seminars in Yiddish, European and East and Central European Studies, and Slavistics
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"Preserving the Past, Forging the Future: Digital Voices in Yiddish and Holocaust Studies," a research talk for the NORAH Seminar on Antisemitism and Holocaust Studies
October 20, 2025
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
October 19, 2025
October 17, 2025
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"
October 16, 2025
Gašper Beguš's project titled "Deep language learning: from fiwGAN to LLMs" has won the Peder Sather Grant. The grant will allow a collaboration and several workshops at the University of Oslo and UC Berkeley.
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
- We have accessioned the Wilma Moman Collection of Northern Sierra Miwok Sound Recordings (Miwokan; California), consisting of 41 audio recordings of short language lessons developed and spoken in 1997 by Mrs. Moman. The recordings were made and donated by her family.
- We have accessioned the Alice Anderton Collection of Indigenous Language Sound Recordings, consisting of nine cassette tape copies in the possession of Dr. Anderton at the time of her death in 2016. The tapes were first deposited with the Native American Languages collection of the Sam Noble Museum (University of Oklahoma) and transferred to the CLA last year.
- We have accessioned the Russell Schuh Collection of African Language Materials. The written materials in this collection consist primarily of notebooks on Bade, Bole, Ciwogai, Diri, Mburku, Ngas, Ngizim, Siri, and Warji, all languages of Nigeria, many including texts written by native-speaker authors. There are also audio recordings and other prepared material.
Amy Rose Deal and Zachary O'Hagan have published an article on "Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity" in NELS 55: Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.
Zachary O'Hagan is speaking about Indigenous languages and archives at the Berkeley Breakfast Club on Friday, October 17.
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who filed his dissertation, "Metrical stress and glottal stops in A'ingae: A study of cyclicity and dominance at the interface of phonology and morphology," on October 8! Maks has accepted a position as Research Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) beginning January 1.
October 14, 2025
Congratulations to Amy Rose Deal, who has a new article entitled "Uncentered attitude reports" out in the Journal of Semantics.
October 13, 2025
On October 3, Line Mikkelsen gave the 2025 Prytanean Lecture in connection with homecoming. She spoke about her cross-Atlantic collaboration with Kalaallisut speakers Grethe Schmidt and Ellen Thrane.
Richard Rhodes will be giving a paper at the 57th Algonquian Conference, hosted at the University of Winnipeg from October 17 to 19, 2025. The title of his presentation is "On the History of the Cree Languages."
October 10, 2025
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)
October 7, 2025
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).
October 3, 2025
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"
October 2, 2025
Gašper Beguš's work on modeling language in humans, animals, and machines was featured in Communications of the ACM, the official publication of the Association for Computing Machinery: https://cacm.acm.org/news/can-ai-talk-to-the-animals/
Congratulations to Alexandra Pfiffner on the publication of a new article, "Women of all ages lead tonogenesis in Afrikaans," in the Journal of Germanic Linguistics. Open access here!
September 29, 2025
The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, October 6, with a talk by Tom McCoy (Yale). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (password: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "Using neural networks to test hypotheses about language acquisition" and the abstract is as follows:
A central challenge in linguistics is understanding how children acquire their first language. A variety of influential hypotheses have been put forth about the learning strategies that children might use (e.g., the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis: Gleitman 1990). Such hypotheses have received important empirical support in controlled experimental settings (e.g., Naigles 1990), but it is challenging to test whether these hypotheses continue to hold for children’s large-scale, naturalistic input because it would be unethical to perform extensive interventions on a child’s primary linguistic data. In this talk, I will discuss how neural network language models - the type of system powering ChatGPT - can be used to test hypotheses about which strategies are effective for learning from naturalistic child-directed language, providing a source of evidence that complements the controlled experiments that can be run with actual children. I will discuss two case studies that use this paradigm. The first case study focuses on the aforementioned syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, which postulates that syntax plays a critical role in the acquisition of word meaning, especially for verbs. In support of this hypothesis, we find that syntactic information is central to the ability of neural networks to learn verb meanings. The second case study focuses on the poverty of the stimulus argument as it pertains to English polar questions - the argument that children’s input does not provide strong enough evidence for generic learning algorithms to recognize that English yes/no questions are driven by syntactic tree structure. In accordance with this argument, we find that neural networks trained on child-directed language struggle to learn the syntax-sensitive nature of this phenomenon. Taken together, these results illustrate one way in which neural network models can contribute to linguistic theory. (Work done in collaboration with Xiaomeng Miranda Zhu, Aditya Yedetore, Robert Frank, and Tal Linzen).
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
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