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!
Jennifer Kaplan (UC Berkeley): "Gender in/and French: Teaching Inclusive French in the First-Year Language Classroom and Beyond"
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!
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"
Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Deglottalizing contamination in A'ingae historical derivatives"
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"
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:
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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