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September 29, 2025

Forthcoming Festschrift for Sharon Inkelas

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
Part 2: At the interface of phonology and morphology
  • 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
Part 3: Phonological interfaces beyond morphology
  • 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 

McCoy Colloquium

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).

September 26, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 26-Oct 3, 2025)

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

September 25, 2025

Kane returns from New Mexico

Aurora Martinez Kane has just concluded her tenure as a Greenleaf Visiting Scholar at the University of New Mexico. On her two-month trip, she did a mix of work with archival materials and field interviews with New Mexican Spanish speakers for her dissertation project in consultation with UNM faculty and archivists.

September 23, 2025

Hyman visit to Rochester

Larry Hyman gave a colloquium at the University of Rochester on September 12: "Prosodic domains in the Bantu noun phrase."

He also made a presentation on "Limba verb extensions in Niger-Congo perspective" in Nadine Grimm's "Languages of Africa" class on September 11, 2025.

September 21, 2025

Lionnet Colloquium

The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, September 29, with a talk by Florian Lionnet (Princeton). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (password: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "Areal alignment and the phonological diversification of Bua languages (Chad)" and the abstract is as follows:

Bua languages (Niger-Congo) form a relatively compact group of 10 languages spoken by small communities in southern Chad. The group is split into two noticeably different branches: Riverine languages along the Middle Chari River, and Inland languages further east. Comparative data shows that proto-Bua had a vowel system characterized by an ATR contrast and ATR harmony, three contrastive plosive series (voiceless, voiced, implosive), and a two-tone system.

In this talk, I show how Riverine languages lost the ATR contrast, reinterpreted ATR harmony as height harmony, developed interior vowels, enriched the plosive system with a series of prenasalized consonants, and innovated a third tone. I also show that Inland languages, on the other hand, maintained the proto-Bua ATR contrast and harmony, but drastically simplified the three-way plosive contrast, to the point of having no laryngeal contrast at all in some languages.

I argue that the changes that took place in Riverine Bua languages are the result of areal alignment, that is, a historical alignment of their sound systems to the phonological profile found in the Middle Chari area where they are spoken, and more generally in the Central African linguistic area. This alignment was made possible by the language ecology in which these languages are spoken, an ecology characterized by egalitarian multilingualism. The characteristics of the Inland phonological systems, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to the influence of any areal signal.

September 19, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 19-26, 2025)

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

September 18, 2025

Beguš and Sprouse in Nature news

A paper on whale vowels by Gašper Beguš, Ronald Sprouse, and collaborators was recently featured in a news feature in the journal Nature.

September 16, 2025

Zhou, Bamman, and Bleaman article on cultural NLP

Naitian Zhou, David Bamman, and Isaac L. Bleaman have published an article titled "Culture is not trivia: Sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" in Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Read it here!

September 15, 2025

Garrett on Inuktun (Polar Inuit)

Andrew Garrett's paper "Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit)" has appeared in Anthropological Linguistics 64 ("2022" [actually 2025]), pp. 263–298 (open-access here).

AMP 2025 at UC Berkeley

The Annual Meeting on Phonology
September 25-27
Sutardja Dai Hall (Sep. 25-26) and Dwinelle Hall (Sep. 27)

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP), founded in 2013, is held every Fall and showcases high-quality research in all areas of phonology. AMP 2025 will be held at UC Berkeley, and it will feature four invited talks (three in the main session and one in the special session) as well as other poster and talk sessions, all focused on aspects of phonology.

The main session of AMP 2025 will be held September 25-26, 2025, in Sutardja Dai Hall. This will be followed by a special session on "Deep Phonology: Doing phonology with deep learning" on September 27 in Dwinelle Hall.

The AMP program can be found here, more information can be found on the website here. To register, please follow this link. Berkeley students can volunteer to help out with AMP organizational duties in exchange for free registration (check the "Yes, I volunteer!" box in the registration link). We hope to see you there!

September 12, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 12-19, 2025)

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

September 11, 2025

Beguš in American Bar Association Journal

Gašper Beguš's work on AI, law, and animal rights has recently been featured in the ABA Journal, the official publication of the American Bar Association.

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Emily Drummond (PhD 2023) and Margaret Asperheim have accessioned more than 140 items into the collection Nukuoro Field Materials (see items 2019-24.188 forward). Dating from 2022, 2023, and 2024, the materials in these items include, among other things, recordings of stories, interviews, and elicitation sessions created both on Zoom and again in person in Micronesia.

September 10, 2025

Robertson Molinaro starts a job a Wispr

Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro (PhD 2025), who will start her new job on September 22 as a Computational Linguist & Data Annotation Lead at Wispr, a voice dictation company based in San Francisco. There she will be working on speech recognition and style personalization to help adapt the tool to diverse speakers and contexts.

September 9, 2025

Galvano accepts job at Meta

Congratulations to Amber Galvano, who has just accepted a full-time position as a Linguistic Engineer at Meta after having spent the summer working as a Linguistic Engineering Intern, and will finish her dissertation remotely from the Seattle area.

September 8, 2025

Remembering Robin Lakoff: A Memorial at UC Berkeley

Dear colleagues, friends, and family,

You are warmly invited to join us in celebrating Robin Tolmach Lakoff's life and her immense impact on Linguistics and beyond. The UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics will be hosting a memorial service at the Alumni House, UC Berkeley, on Sunday, November 2, 2025, from 1-4 p.m. PST. This gathering will provide an opportunity to honor Robin's memory, share stories, and connect with one another.

To assist us with event planning, please contact Susan Luong for the RSVP form, which includes an option to share a reflection or memory of Robin that may be incorporated into the tribute.

We hope you can join us as we remember and celebrate a truly remarkable individual.

With sincere regards,
Prof. Peter Jenks, Chair
Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

(Image: Robin Lakoff during RobinFest in May 2012, courtesy of Sharon Inkelas)

September 5, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Sep 5-12, 2025)

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

  • Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sep 8 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
    Jody Kreiman (UCLA): "What do listeners know about voices?"
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Tuesday Sep 9 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3:40-4:30pm
    Beginner-friendly conversation hour (introducing ourselves and our families), SNACKS!
  • Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4pm
    Fall Welcome - Join us for snacks, socializing, and taking turns sharing about the LR work we're involved with. It'll also be an opportunity to ask for and give advice about projects. No need to prepare anything - come as you are!
  • Phorum - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
    Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy in Chamikuro"
  • Phorum - Friday Sep 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4:10-5pm
    Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): Dissertation exit talk
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 5 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
    Welcome! Introductions, research updates and goal setting
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 5 - 3-4:30pm
    Round robin! Join us again at Amy Rose's house.

September 4, 2025

Announcing the 2025-2026 SEI Research Fellows

The Script Encoding Initiative's Research Fellows program provides mentorship and funding for early-career scholars from anywhere in the world to pursue innovative research on scripts and their digitization. Thanks to the generous support we received during this spring's Big Give campaign, we are delighted to announce an expanded cohort of three Research Fellows for 2025–26!

This year's fellows are Febri Muhammad Nasrullah (working on indigenous Indonesian scripts), Julie Sayo (working on the Kulitan script from the Philippines), and Jordan Williams (documenting ancient Nsibidi writing from Nigeria and Cameroon). Read the announcement on the SEI blog to learn more about their work. 

NSF award to SEI to study newly-invented writing systems

The Script Encoding Initiative has been awarded a two-year research grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, under the Science and Technology Studies program. This project will investigate modern "neographies" — newly invented scripts — and the challenges they pose for the technical standards-makers: when, and on what grounds, does a script earn a place in the world's digital infrastructure?

SEI will soon be recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join the project. Stay tuned for the job announcement!