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March 11, 2025

Holliday publishes in PLoS ONE

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday and Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama) on the publication of their article "Gender and racial bias issues in a commercial 'tone of voice' analysis system" in PLoS ONE!

March 10, 2025

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • We've digitized Jaime de Angulo's manuscript The Clear Lake Dialect of the Pomo Language.
  • In the last several weeks, we've hosted State Secretary of Tribal Affairs Christina Snider-Ashtari and colleagues, Native high schoolers from the Ukiah region, who were able to consult the notes and recordings especially of past Berkeley students and alums Abraham Halpern, Robert Oswalt (PhD 1961), and Eero Vihman on Northern Pomo (Pomoan; CA), and Tribal visits representing Washo (isolate; CA, NV), Northern Sierra and Plains Miwok (Miwokan; CA), and Tachi (Yokutsan; CA), these visits sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS).
Davidson colloquium

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 17, with a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora." The abstract is as follows:

Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied in sign languages, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations, along with perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmental "non-manuals" and other simultaneous expression, the tight integration of iconic depiction into the grammatical structure, etc. The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is often considered to be another modality-specific feature, bearing on questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness, givenness, and contrast. This talk will provide new empirical arguments from sign languages for how the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity and what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure.

March 7, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Mar 7-14, 2025)

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

March 6, 2025

Lee-Wynant presents at ICLDC

Congratulations to Tyler Lee-Wynant, who will be giving two talks about his language revitalization work on Northern Pomo at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation this weekend:

  • 3/8 - "Language ideologies and language attitudes in a Northern Pomo high school class" (co-presenting with Catherine O'Connor, Boston University)
  • 3/9 - "Set-up of an open-access and community-independent online language course for a reawakening language: The case of Northern Pomo"

March 5, 2025

Berkeley linguists at Exploring Boundaries workshop

Several Berkeley linguists will present at an upcoming workshop on Exploring Boundaries: Phonological domains in the languages of the world in Tromsø, Norway on March 13-14, 2025.

Sande presents at UiT

Hannah Sande will present a talk on "Discontinuous harmony and cyclicity in Guébie" in the Linguistics Department at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

March 3, 2025

Melguy and Johnson publish in the Journal of Phonetics

Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy (PhD 2022) and Keith Johnson, whose article "What are you sinking about? Experience with unfamiliar accent produces both inhibition and facilitation during lexical processing" was published this week in the Journal of Phonetics.

Latinx Staff Award for Johnny Morales Arellano

Congratulations to Johnny Morales Arellano, Graduate Student Services Advisor for the Department of Linguistics, who has been named a recipient of Alianza's Latinx Staff Award! The award will be given during a ceremony taking place on campus (and Zoom) next Tuesday.

February 28, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Feb 28-Mar 7, 2025)

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

February 27, 2025

Licata workshop on quantitative approaches to language attitudes

Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside) will be leading a three-day workshop on "Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Language Attitudes and Bias" from 4-6pm on March 18, 20, and 21 in 5303 Dwinelle Hall. To register (for any or all sessions), kindly email Justin Davidson. Here is a description of the workshop:

In this 3-day intensive workshop, Dr. Licata will present a deep dive into methodologies and analyses for empirical studies of language attitudes and linguistic bias, including the matched guise test (MGT), the implicit association test (IAT), and relevant data analyses in R (exploratory factor analysis, ordinal regression, correlation analyses). Should you not see yourself as a sociolinguist working on attitudes and bias, the skills and software you'll be exposed to in the workshop are nice tools to have at your disposal, if even for the eventual mentoring of future students that would seek your guidance on how to use them!

Calendar:

Day 1 (March 18): Matched Guise and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Day 2 (March 20): Implicit Association Test

Day 3 (March 21): Quantitative Analysis via Ordinal Regression and Correlation Analyses

Gabriella Licata is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside and Lead Researcher at Mount Tamalpais College inside San Quentin Prison. She takes interdisciplinary approaches and uses mixed methodologies to uncover systemic [linguistic] discrimination as a resource for reform, abolition, and liberation. Gabriella additionally is the founder of a community-based consulting business, Restorative Research Consulting.

February 25, 2025

Holliday speaks at UCLA and Vassar

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday, who gave a colloquium talk last week at UCLA and will be giving a related talk this week at Vassar College!

Beguš on WNPR

Gašper Beguš appeared on WNPR's morning show Where We Live on Monday, February 24, 2025. You can listen to the episode here.

February 24, 2025

Sande speaks in Leipzig

Hannah Sande is giving an invited talk entitled "Exploring prosodic domains and morpheme-specific tonology in Lobi (Gur)" at Universität Leipzig on Friday, February 28. Congrats, Hannah!

Berkeley linguists at Variation in Cyclicity workshop

There will be two Berkeley talks at the upcoming workshop on Variation in Cyclicity at DGfS in Mainz, Germany, March 4-7:

  • Hannah Sande will give a plenary talk on "Discontinuous harmony in Guébie: Consequences for cyclic spell out."
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski will talk about "The spell-out of A'ingae functional phases and its phonological consequences."

February 23, 2025

Regier colloquium

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 3, with a talk by our very own Terry Regier, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. His talk is entitled "Cultural evolution explains efficient semantic systems." The abstract is as follows:

It has been argued that systems of semantic categories across languages reflect functional pressure for efficient communication. There is also a long tradition of approaching systems of semantic categories in terms of cultural evolution: the process by which a cultural convention changes as it is repeatedly learned and used in communication. I will present recent computational work with Emil Carlsson and Devdatt Dubhashi that connects these two approaches. We find that (1) an existing model of cultural evolution produces color naming systems that are both efficient and similar to attested systems from a range of languages; and (2) this model of cultural evolution helps us understand an important case in which optimally efficient systems do not match empirical data. We argue that these two approaches taken together yield a more comprehensive understanding than either one taken alone.

February 21, 2025

Linguistics events this week (Feb 21-28, 2025)

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

February 20, 2025

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • In the last couple of years, Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020) has facilitated the acquisition of three legacy collections of materials related to Mỹky (isolate; Brazil). One of these collections has been accessioned. The two others, from the family of American missionary Robert Meader (1912-1997) and German anthropologist Gisela Pauli, are currently being cataloged. Digital copies of photographs and -- thanks to the quick work of Digital Revolution -- sound recordings are already making their way home. In the photographs below, Mỹky-speaking elders peruse some of Meader's photographs, dating from 1936 forward (top, February 2024), and listen to Pauli's recordings of the late Tapurá, from 1996 (bottom, February 2025).

Job opportunity with the Script Encoding Initiative

The Script Encoding Initiative is hiring a part-time Program Manager! The first deadline for review is February 28th. Learn more about the position here.

Hossain speaks in France

Congratulations to Anushah Hossain, who will be giving two talks in France this week. She is a keynote speaker at Automatic Type Design 3 , a conference focused on the histories and futures of digital type technologies. She will also represent the Script Encoding Initiative in a talk at UNESCO's Language Technology for All event in honor of International Mother Language Day.