All News
December 5, 2024
Lev Michael will be on research leave during Spring and Fall 2025 to carry out research supported by a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship. Lev is planning to work with speakers of four Arawakan languages, Asháninka, Ashéninka, Nomatsigenga, and Yanesha', on a variety of topics aimed at clarifying the historical and language contact relationships among Peruvian Arawakan languages and their non-Arawakan neighbors. Congrats, Lev!
November 29, 2024
- Linguistics Department Colloquium – Monday, December 2 - Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (lx-colloq) - 3-5pm
Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside), Brian Asey Gonsoulin, Mesro Coles, Rob Tyler, and Habib Watkins (Mount Tamalpais College): "The Sociolinguistic Labor of Incarcerated People" - Canadian Studies Program – Tuesday, December 3 - 223 Philosophy Hall and Zoom (RSVP here) - 12:30-2 p.m.
Summer Sands-Macbeth (Queen’s University, Ontario): Efforts at Indigenous Language Revitalization at Bkejwanong
- SSCircle – Friday, December 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): TBA - BLC Fellow Forum – Friday, December 6 - Dwinelle B-4 & Zoom - 3-5pm
Jennifer Kaplan (UC Berkeley): "Gender in/and French: Teaching Inclusive French in the First-Year Language Classroom and Beyond"
November 26, 2024
Berkeley linguists are giving 18 presentations, as well as moderating and hosting several sessions, at the LSA and its sister societies, January 9-12, 2025. Congrats, all!
- Gašper Beguš: 5-minute linguist talk: "Artificial Language Learners"
- Nicole Holliday, moderator for a session on "Variation and change"
-
Julianne Kapner, session organizer for "Using oral histories for sociolinguistic research"
-
Gašper Beguš, presenter in a 2-day tutorial on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech", with Bruno Ferenc Segedin, Alan Zhou, Sneha Ray Barman, Jingyi Chen
-
Sarah Ertel: "Prevelar raising in eastern Washington English"
-
Nafisa Rashid: "Krio Heritage Speakers and Their Use of Prepositions and Verb Serialization"
-
Nicole Holliday and Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley): "AAE morphosyntactic and prosodic feature use among students: Effects on sociolinguistic awareness and school discipline"
- Julian Vargo: "Evidence for the Effect of Visual Input on L2-Learner Vowel Production"
- Anna Knall: "Gender Assignment Strategies in Mixed Noun Phrases: Evidence from Spanish-English Bilinguals in California"
-
Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Deglottalizing contamination in A'ingae historical derivatives"
- Alexandra Pfiffner, Lindsay Hatch, & Katherine R. Russell: "Acoustics and Aerodynamics of Nghlwa Implosives"
-
Amber Galvano, Sansan Claude Hien, and Hannah Sande: "Phonetic and phonological patterning of glottalized sonorants in Lobi"
-
Madeleine Oakley (CSU San Marcos) and Hannah Sande: "The acoustic properties of implosives in Guébie (Kru)"
-
Amber Galvano: "The role of sexuality in an intersectional approach to vowel space variation"
-
Isaac Bleaman & Chaya Nove (Brown) – "Sources of linguistic variation in testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors"
-
Julianne Kapner & Maya Ravindranath Abtahian (U. of Rochester): "Oral histories for community-engaged sociolinguistics: insights from the 19th Ward"
- Julianne Kapner: "The Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project: oral history for diaspora sociolinguistics"
- Kai Schenck: poster on An Emergent analysis of Yurok initial h"
- Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Gašper Beguš: poster on "Large language models and linguistic recursion"
- Gašper Beguš: poster on "CiwaGAN: Informative imitation with articulatory learning"
The proceedings of WCCFL 39 were just published (the conference was originally held in Spring 2021), including papers by four current and recent Berkeley PhD students:
A workshop on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Languages, Cultures, and History of Contemporary Amazonia will be held at Berkeley on December 13, in 1229 Dwinelle Hall, with several talks by current and former Berkeley linguists:
- 10:00AM Emanuele Fabiano (Coimbra), Joshua Homan (Kansas) & Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley), "New Perspectives on Omurano (isolate; Peru) Based on Archival Records and Oral Histories"
- 10:45AM Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley), "A Close Reading of Elicitation with a 99-year-old Speaker of Chamikuro (Arawakan; Peru)"
- 11:30AM Stephanie Farmer, "Reflections on the Documentation of Muniche (isolate; Peru) Fifteen Years Later"
- 1:30PM Lev Michael (Berkeley), "Linguistic Phylogeny and the Arawakan Settlement of the Greater Ucayali Basin"
- 2:15PM Karen Shiratori (Coimbra), "The Song of Atxu: The Right to Memory and the Recovery of the Language of a Hi-Merimã Survivor"
- 3:00PM Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen (Helsinki), "Apurinã Language Vitality and Deforestation on the Purús River"
- 3:45PM Laura R. Graham (Iowa), "A’uwẽ (Xavante) Mrémé in the Brazilian Linguistic Landscape"
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
- Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020) has accessioned a new collection of recordings of stories, songs, and other cultural events, notes, and photographs related to the documentation of Mẽbêngôkre (Jê; Brazil) in 2015 in the Xikrín community of Djudjêkô (pictured below, from catalog item 2024-32.014), part of the Xikrín do Cateté Indigenous Territory. Mẽbêngôkre is also spoken by the Kayapó people.
November 21, 2024
- Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB) – Friday, November 22 - Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125) - 3-4pm
Research updates - SSCircle – Friday, November 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Abby Roberts (UC Berkeley): Characterizing Nukuoro Copulas: Analysis and Implications - Phorum – Friday, November 22 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Suyuan Liu (University of British Columbia): TBA - Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Nov. 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
Ora de echar lashon (beginner-friendly conversation hour) on what we are grateful for and Ladino folk music. Delicious snacks provided as always! -
Linguistics Department Colloquium – Monday, December 2 - Dwinelle 370 and on zoom (lx-colloq) - 3-5pmGabriella Licata (UC Riverside), Brian Asey Gonsoulin, Mesro Coles, Rob Tyler, and Habib Watkins (Mount Tamalpais College): "The Sociolinguistic Labor of Incarcerated People"
Katherine Russell's paper on "A unified account of grammatical tone and length in Gã", was just published in the ACAL proceedings volume Pushing the boundaries: Selected papers from the 51-52 Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Congrats!
Larry Hyman will give a virtual keynote speech at the 2024 International Forum on Phonology, held at Tianjin Normal University this weekend. His talk "Milestones in the Development of Generative Phonology" will take place at 5pm Pacific Saturday, November 23 (Sunday morning in China). The conference is being held in honor of Wang Jialing, who introduced optimality theory into China. Congrats, Larry!
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
- This week we host the fourth visit supported by the new CLA Community Research Grant: Kawaiisu community members and collaborating linguists (left to right) Merlene Everson, Laura Grant, Sophia Kendrick, and Brandi Kendrick. They are consulting on the cataloging of the forthcoming Maurice L. Zigmond Collection of Uto-Aztecan Language Materials acquired in April of last year. The CLA has previously collaborated with Grant, Everson, and others to archive the born-digital collection Kawaiisu Conversations and Landscapes Project, which features the voices of Everson's mother, the late Betty Girado Hernandez, her aunt, and uncle.
Nicole Holliday is quoted in an article on ‘Government by the worst’: why people are calling Trump’s new sidekicks a ‘kakistocracy’ in the Guardian. From the article: “Americans, Holliday says, love labels.
November 17, 2024
Scott AnderBois and Maksymilian Dąbkowski's new paper "The semantics and expression of apprehensional modality" has appeared in Language and Linguistics Compass 19(1), e70002. The abstract is below. Congrats!
Abstract: Apprehensionality refers to the semantic domain of negative prospective epistemic modality and the formal expressions used to encode it. In this article, we break down the apprehensional situation into five prototypical components: (I) future reference, (II) possibility, (III) negative evaluation, (IV) avertive intent, and (V) a preferred action. In doing so, we propose a framework for comparing synchronic and diachronic aspects of the semantics and expression of apprehensional modality across languages. We discuss several recent formal accounts of three apprehensional morphemes—Francez's account of Biblical Hebrew pen, Dąbkowski and AnderBois's of A'ingae -sa'ne, and Phillips's of Australian Kriol bambai—relate their formalisms to the apprehensional situation schema, and evaluate their predictions. We summarise previous findings on the grammaticalisation pathways towards and among apprehensional morphemes. We find that apprehensionals grammaticalise from a wide range of sources, including components I–IV of the apprehensional schema. Among the apprehensional functions themselves, both subordination and insubordination are commonly encountered.
November 15, 2024
Erik Hans Maier (Linguistics PhD '22) has started a new staff position here at Berkeley as the Undergraduate Research and Curricular Program Analyst for the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships in the College of Letters & Science Undergraduate Division.
November 14, 2024
Zachary O'Hagan is in Palm Springs this week representing the California Language Archive as part of the annual conference of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM).
Amber Galvano received the COZIL travel grant to support their participation in the LSA 2025 meeting. Congrats!
- SSCircle – Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): Quirks of head-internal relativization: Lessons from Northern Tujia - Phorum – Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Maya Wax-Cavallaro (UCSC): TBA -
Gi-ga-miinigoowiz Mamaandaawiziwin (May the Force be With You): A Star Wars Journey Towards Indigenous Language Revitalization
Tuesday, November 19 - 223 Philosophy Hall - 12-1:30pm - LRWG – Wednesday, Nov. 20 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
Jacqueline Brixley (USC) on creating Wordle and other interactive language games for language revitalization - SSCircle – Friday, November 22 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Abby Roberts (UC Berkeley): TBA - Phorum – Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Suyuan Liu (University of British Columbia): TBA
November 7, 2024
- SSCircle – Friday, November 8 - No Meeting
- Phorum – Friday, November 8 - No Meeting
- Speaking up: Career Pathways for Language and Linguistics Students – Friday, November 8 - Dwinelle 370 - 2-3:30pm
Juan Rosas, Senior Health Equity Educator
- SSCircle– Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): TBA - Phorum – Friday, November 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Maya Wax-Cavallaro (UCSC): TBA
- 1 of 54 Full listing: News (Current page)
- 2 of 54 Full listing: News
- 3 of 54 Full listing: News
- 4 of 54 Full listing: News
- 5 of 54 Full listing: News
- 6 of 54 Full listing: News
- 7 of 54 Full listing: News
- 8 of 54 Full listing: News
- 9 of 54 Full listing: News
- …
- next › Full listing: News
- last » Full listing: News