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May 13, 2025

At the 17th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference in Southfield, MI, August 7-10, Eve Sweetser, Lorianne Fan (BA 2024), and Kim Grogan (University of British Columbia) will present a paper titled "Multimodal metaphor data and enrichment of corpus interpretation."

May 12, 2025

At the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Buenos Aires, July 14-18, Schuyler Laparle (PhD, 2022) and Eve Sweetser will present a paper titled "Projecting viewpoint: Material and immaterial discourse anchors." Eve Sweetser will also present a paper "PANDEMIC IS WAR metaphors: Multimodal blends with varied inputs and meanings."

Larry Hyman and John Merrill (PhD, 2018) will be presenting talks at the Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop (LLACAN, Paris) on May 22-23:

  • Larry M. Hyman, "Limba verb extensions in Niger-Congo Perspective"
  • John Merrill, "Comparative reconstruction of Proto-Niger-Congo class markers"

The workshop website contains the program and abstracts. The workshop is free for participants and attendees. You can register to confirm your in-person attendance or to receive the Zoom link to attend online.

May 9, 2025

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

May 8, 2025

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2024, spring and summer 2025) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Luis Bejarano-Beltran (BA 2025) will be converting to a full-time Brand Marketing Coordinator for Chase Center Concerts and Events, under the Golden State Warriors.
  • Ajay Bhargava (BA 2025) will be starting a job as an engineer at Applied Intuition, working on software for autonomous vehicles.
  • Habiba Geweifal (BA 2025) will be starting her MS in Speech-Language Pathology at San Jose State University in Fall 2025.
  • Lindsay Hatch (BA 2025) will be taking a year off and then applying to graduate school to continue research.
  • Madison Fanucchi (BA 2025) will be attending San Jose State University to earn her Master's of Library and Information Science with a concentration on Archival Studies.

Congratulations, everybody!

May 7, 2025

News from the Script Encoding Initiative:

Helena Kansa is the Program Manager of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI). She is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and has a background in linguistics, anthropology, and foreign languages such as Italian and Arabic. In her role at SEI, Helena provides administrative and logistical support, oversees special projects like the script status database, and develops new initiatives like the upcoming SEI fieldwork fellowship. With a passion for advancing language accessibility, she is excited to assist SEI in promoting the digital representation of minority writing systems. As representative of SEI’s communications with the public, Helena hopes to cultivate new opportunities for collaboration with UC Berkeley students and the surrounding community. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, traveling, boxing, and working on her car. Helena welcomes anyone interested to reach out to her for any questions about SEI.

Please give her a warm welcome to the department. Helena is starting her role remotely, but will be around in person starting this summer. Feel free to drop by SEI's new office at Dwinelle 1224 to say hello!

May 6, 2025

There will be several presentations by current Berkeley linguists at this year's Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) in Minneapolis, May 15-17, 2025:

Anushah Hossain (Research Director, Script Encoding Initiative) will be speaking at two public events next week:

  • Tuesday, May 13 – "Character Building: Bridging Code and Culture through Unicode" at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Event details here.

  • Thursday, May 15 – "The Trailblazers that Made Bangla Computing Viable" at Adobe, San Jose, CA. Event details here.

Drop by if you find yourself in the South Bay, or catch the livestreams online.

May 5, 2025

The model that Gašper Beguš proposed in his 2021 Neural Networks paper will drive part of the Next Earth exhibition at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The opening night is May 10, 2025 at the Palazzo Diedo. More info is available here.

Maksymilian Dąbkowski has just published a new article on "Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination" in Proceedings of the 2023 and 2024 Annual Meetings on Phonology. Click here to read it.

Our own Myriam Lapierre (PhD 2021; currently Assistant Professor at the University of Washington) will be moving to McGill University, where she has accepted a position as Assistant Professor, starting in January 2026.

May 2, 2025

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

April 28, 2025

Remembrances from the memorial gathering (February 22, 2025) for Ian Maddieson have been collected into a short booklet and published on eScholarship.

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 5, 2025 at 3:10pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94536362920)

Honors Student Presenters

  • Sarah Ertel
    Honors Thesis Title: "Prevelar Raising in Eastern Washington and the Eastern Washington English Corpus"
    Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
  • Lindsay Hatch
    Honors Thesis Title: "Implosives Cross-Linguistically"
    Faculty Advisor: Alexandra Pfiffner (Lecturer, Department of Linguistics)
    Second Reader: Hannah Sande (Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics)

April 25, 2025

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

  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday May 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
    Ora de Echar Lashon (beginner-friendly conversation hour) with discussions of May Day and Ladino poetry across time and space!
  • Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Panel: Revitalization and re-awakening sleeping and near-sleeping languages, with Chelsi Sparti (Wintun), Jonathan Cirelli (Habematolel Pomo), and Shaunie Briggs (Salinan)
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Antón de la Fuente (Stanford): "Ideological Change and Phonological Variation in the Galician of O Grove"
  • Phorum - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Max Kaplan (UC Santa Cruz): "Phonotactics in speech perception: A crosslinguistic comparison of repair in onset clusters"
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 28 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
    Talk by Verónica Grajeda
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Andrew Simpson (USC): "Obligatory object shift in Chinese: Aspect, definiteness, and affectedness"
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Case sensitivity reflects case structure: Agreement, extraction, and clitics"

April 24, 2025

BayPhon, taking place at UC Santa Cruz on May 10, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

April 22, 2025

April 21, 2025

Larry Hyman has been invited to be the commencement speaker at the UCLA Linguistics Department Graduation on June 15, 2025. UCLA is also Larry's alma mater.

April 18, 2025

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "What was the language of the Tabalosos, Lamas, and Suchiches of Peru? Evidence from a 17th-century Census and Sacramental Records"
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Irene Yi (Stanford): "Axes of Differentiation and Language Ideologies in Mountain vs. Town variation of /l/ alveo-palatalization in Ganguhua"
  • Phorum - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Antón de la Fuente (Stanford): "Ideological Change and Phonological Variation in the Galician of O Grove"
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11am-12:10pm
    Practice talks for WCCFL:
    - "Perceptual adaptation in Spanish: Implications for vowel-specific factors in the learning of novel accents" (Niko Schwarz)
    - "Feature interaction in the Tira agreement complex" (Peter Jenks)
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Katherine Johnson (Stanford): "Focus and clefts in Tiriki: Evidence for hyperactivity"
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Andrew Simpson (USC): "Obligatory object shift in Chinese: Aspect, definiteness, and affectedness"