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October 10, 2024

Andrew Garrett's book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California has been reviewed or featured in two new publications:
Mairi McLaughlin is giving a paper called News as a Site of Language Contact from the Early-Modern Period to the Contemporary at a workshop on Language Contact in Translation on 17-18 October in Germersheim, Germany.

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

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 11 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Travis Major (USC): Raised heads and subjects in Uyghur relative clauses
  • SLab – Friday, October 11 -Dwinelle 5125 - 3-4pm
    Research discussion & updates
  • Phorum – Friday, October 11- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
    Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Modeling stochasticity, gradience, and domain effects in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony with Gestural OT.
  • NELS practice talk – Monday, October 14 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4:10-5pm
    Amy Rose Deal and Zach O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity

  • Berkeley Language Center (BLC) Found in Translation working group - Thursday October 17 - Zoom - 12-1pm
    Johnny Laforêt (Princeton):  
    “The place of Haitian Creole and French in the Linguistic Landscape of Haiti: A Case Study of Haitians Interacting Online”
  • SSCircle – Friday, October 18: No meeting. Have fun at NELS 55!
  • Phorum – Friday, October 18- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Richard Wang (UC Santa Cruz): Morphosyntax-Prosody Mismatch in Beijing Mandarin: Evidence from Retroflex Lenition

Larry Hyman gave the following talk on October 10, 2024 at the Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique (LLACAN, UMR 8135) research lab of the CNRS, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris:  "

October 6, 2024

At 12 noon on Thursday, October 17, in the Bancroft Library Roundtable series, Andrew Garrett will present a Zoom talk “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall — Indigenous and University Histories in Bancroft Collections.” Register at ucberk.li/kroeber. Abstract:
"Much of Andrew Garrett’s book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, 2023) is grounded in The Bancroft Library’s collections relating to anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber; Kroeber’s family, including his second wife, Theodora, and his daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin; his colleagues, students, and collaborators throughout California; and Phoebe Hearst, who directed and funded his work. In this presentation, Garrett will talk about a few of the archival objects — manuscripts and photos — that had a significant impact on how he framed his argument about Kroeber’s documentation of Indigenous stories."

October 3, 2024

Gašper Beguš and Maksymilian Dąbkowski published a paper on "The blurring history of intervocalic devoicing" in the Journal of Linguistics. The paper proposes a new explanation for an unusual sound change--intervocalic devoicing. The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000197. Congrats!

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

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm

    NELS practice talks:
    1. Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ] (Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
    2. Person hierarchy effects from φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva (Wesley dos Santos)
    3. The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian (Akil Ismael & Jessica Göbel)

  • Phorum – Friday, October 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pmMarko Drobnjak (Univeristy of Ljubljana): VOICE: Verifying How Speech Perception Shapes Credibility in Legal Contexts – A Statistical and Experimental Approach with Future Machine Learning Potential
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Oct. 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4pm
    Conversation hour: learn to make (Turkish) coffee and tea in Ladino! (snacks included)

  • LRWG – Wednesday, Oct. 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley) with a workshop on "Creating mini zines for accessible language materials"

  • SSCircle – Friday, October 11 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Travis Major (USC): TBD
  • Phorum – Friday, October 11- Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm

    Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Modeling stochasticity, gradience, and domain effects in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony with Gestural OT.

October 1, 2024

Two Berkeley linguists presented at the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) this weekend at the University of Texas at San Antonio:

September 30, 2024

Several UC Berkeley linguistics faculty and students will present at NELS 55, to be held at Yale on October 17-18, 2024.

  • Hannah Sande, plenary talk on "Discontinuous harmony in Guébie: Consequences for cyclic spellout"
  • Amy Rose Deal and Zachary O'Hagan, talk on "Person and aspect in Taushiro split ergativity"
  • Elango Kumaran (former Berkeley undergraduate linguistics major), talk on "No categorical gang effects"
  • Akil Ismael and Jessica Göbel, poster on "The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian"
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski, poster on "Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ]"
  • Wesley dos Santos (PhD 2024), poster on "Person hierarchy effects from Φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva"

Congrats, all!

September 28, 2024

The Script Encoding Initiative led by Anushah Hossain and Deborah Anderson was awarded two grants this summer to continue its work on making writing systems available on digital devices. A four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation will support research on over twenty writing systems that are not yet incorporated in the Unicode Standard, a widely-implemented communication standard. A second two-year grant from the Internet Society Foundation will support science communication projects to demystify SEI’s work on language technologies for public audiences. Visit SEI’s websiteto learn more about their work.

September 26, 2024

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

Larry Hyman and Johanna Nichols, together with several co-editors, have published a volume on "Language change for the worse" with Language Science Press. The full citation is below. Congrats!

Enke, Dankmar W., Hyman, Larry M., Nichols, Johanna, Seiler, Guido, Weber, Thilo & Hölzl, Andreas (eds.). 2024. Language change for the worse. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 33). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5116353

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Andrew Garrett's essay "Remembering Anna Morpurgo Davies" has appeared as part of "Anna Morpurgo Davies, 10 years on", a collection of memorial essays published by the Philological Society on the tenth anniversary of the death of Anna Morpurgo Davies (1937-2014), whose career included stints as a Be

September 25, 2024

Larry Hyman presented a paper "Latent high tones in Limba (Tonko dialect; Sierra Leone)" at a workshop on Pertinacious Phonology & Morphology, 
organized by Aditi Lahiri (Oxford University), held September 23- 25, 2024 at Ettington Park Hotel. Congrats!

September 24, 2024

 Two talks will feature Berkeley linguists at the upcoming workshop on Understanding Obviation at McGill (https://obviationworkshop2024.wordpress.com)

September 23, 2024

Mairi McLaughlin gave a keynote presentation called "Variation, varieties, variants: the role of the media" at the 14th Kongress der Frankoromanistikverbands in Passau, Germany on September 26th. Congrats!

Hannah Sande will give a colloquium talk on Discontinuous Harmony in Guébie at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign on Monday, October 7.