News

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley): Diagnosing pragmatic bias: Kipsigis belief reports and polar questions.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Screening and discussion of Bicycles of Nhanderu.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday Mar 29 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Discussion of Sneller 2020
  Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Matti Marttinen Larsson (Stockholm University): Incipient probabilistic grammar change in real time: Language-internal effects on changing functions of locative constructions in European Spanish.
  Please email Isaac Bleaman to be added to the email list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 2 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Practice WCCFL talks (part 2)
  Emily Drummond: Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches.
  Wesley dos Santos: Long head movement is A-bar movement: the case study of Kawahíva.
  Rebecca Jarvis: Presuppositionality and syntactic nominalization in finite clausal complements.
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): Progressive nasalization in Paraguayan Guaraní: Interactions with loanword morphophonology.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Congrats to the current and former Berkeley linguists featured in the latest Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (Vol. 6, No. 1)!

• Annie Helms: "Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels"
• Julia Nee: "Understanding the effects of language revitalization workshops using long-format speech environment recordings"
• Joshua Martin: "D-linking and the semantics of wh-in-situ"
• Teela Huff and Myriam Lapierre: "The typologically rare approximant inventory of Kajkwakhrattxi: A series of natural sound changes"

Congratulations to graduate students Aurora Martinez Kane, Allegra Robertson, and Katie Russell and to undergraduate major Teela Huff (who will be attending UCLA for her linguistics PhD) on being selected for NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Spring Recess: March 22-26, 2021
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 19 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round Robin!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Thursday Mar 25 - Zoom - 4-5pm
  Practice WCCFL talks (part 1)
  Tyler Lemon: Low nominative agreement in Uab Meto (poster).
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski: Laryngeal feet in A’ingae: Implications for metrical theory.
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 24 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Maya Wax Cavallaro (UC Santa Cruz): Laryngeal features and contrast in Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil final consonant allophony.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 15 - Zoom - 3:10-5pm
  Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego): Movement in Inuktitut incorporation.
• Workshop honoring John Ohala - Friday Mar 12 and Saturday Mar 13 - Zoom
• Memorial for John Ohala - Saturday Mar 13 - Zoom - 8am
  Please contact Keith Johnson for the link.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 17 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Karolin Obert (UT Austin): When grammars collide: Reflections on Nadëb word order from the community’s perspective.
• Language, Computation, and Cognition Reading Group - Wednesday Mar 17 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Discussion of Thompson, Roberts, and Lupyan 2020.
  Email Noah Hermalin for more information.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 17 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Yuliana Kenfield (Western Oregon University): Decoloniality & Coloniality within Sociolinguistics: Ideological Practices in Higher Education.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday Mar 15 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Mark Amengual (UC Santa Cruz): How flexible are the sound systems of multilingual speakers? [abstract]
  Talk from 11:10-12pm, followed by Q&A session until ~1pm.
• Phorum - Friday Mar 12 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Anna Mai (UC San Diego): On the Relationship Between Interaction and Complexity in Phonology. (co-authored with Eric Meinhardt, Eric Bakovic, and Adam McCollum)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Mar 17 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Yosiane White (UPenn): Does workin' prime thinking? Exploring the processing of canonical and non-canonical suffix variants.
  Please email Isaac Bleaman to be added to the email list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 12 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): Presuppositionality and syntactic category in finite complement clauses.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 19 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round Robin!
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 17 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Katie Franich (University of Delaware): Syllabification of N in NC 'prenasalized' sequences in Medʉmba.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 15, with a talk by Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Movement in Inuktitut incorporation," and the abstract is as follows:

Previous work on the Copy Theory of Movement has shown that the realization of movement chains may, in part, be regulated by morphological well-formedness conditions, such as affixation (Landau 2006, a.o.). In this talk, I provide a case study of this idea from noun incorporation (NI) in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit), based on my fieldwork. Incorporation in Inuktitut (and Inuit) is cross-linguistically unusual, in that a small set of verbs is obligatorily incorporating (i.e. affixal), while for most other verbs incorporation is not possible. An additional goal of this talk is therefore to further elucidate the nature of Inuit incorporation, informed by how exactly it interacts with clausal syntax.

Our starting point is a little-known observation by Johns (2009) that incorporation constructions in Inuktitut may surface with object agreement and passive morphology. I provide evidence that incorporated nominals are in fact syntactically active, thus accessible to case/agreement processes and able to undergo syntactic movement—despite surfacing within the verb complex. I analyze this pattern as a Stray Affix effect applied in the context of phrasal movement: the nominal complement of an incorporating verb is obligatorily pronounced, regardless of whether it has undergone movement, due to the affixal nature of the verb. I then extend this logic to account for some heretofore unnoticed restrictions on incorporated pronouns (building on my other work on Inuktitut clitic-doubling; Yuan 2021), and discuss possible morphological evidence for a movement analysis of control (cf. Polinsky and Potsdam 2002).

The program for the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 39 (organized virtually by the University of Arizona) has just been released, with a schedule full of great work by Berkeley linguists!

• Emily Drummond: Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches
• Maksymilian Dabkowski: Laryngeal feet in A'ingae. Implications for metrical theory
• Rebecca Jarvis: Presuppositionality and syntactic nominalization in finite clausal complements
• Tyler Lemon: Low nominative agreement in Uab Meto
• Wesley dos Santos: Long head movement is A-bar movement: the case study of Kawahíva
• Joshua Martin (BA '17): Monoradical intersectivity and the morphosemantics of suppletion
• Samir Alam (BA '19) and Elango Kumaran (BA '17): Focus-sensitive restrictions on multi-argument agreement in Maithili
• Prerna Nadathur (former faculty lecturer) and Hana Filip (PhD '93): Telicity, teleological modality, and (non)culmination
• Bernat Bardagil (former postdoc): Learning and describing interlocutor indexicality in Mỹky

Congratulations to Gašper Beguš on the publication of his article "Estimating historical probabilities of natural and unnatural processes" in Phonology! Click here to download the article (Open Access).

A Zoom memorial event for John Ohala will be held at 8am (Pacific time) on Saturday, March 13. All are welcome to attend. Please contact Keith Johnson for the link.

In addition, if you would like to add to the remembrances page, which is now a part of John’s departmental web page, please visit this Google form. When you submit your entry on the form the text you entered will automatically appear on the remembrances page.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 3 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Kristina Balykova (UT Austin): Working with the last Guató speakers.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 3 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Víctor Cata and Rosemary Beam de Azcona: Challenging the reader: la traducción de lenguas minoritarias a lenguas coloniales.
  The talk will be held bilingually in English & Spanish / Se presenta de manera bilingüe español-inglés. RSVP here.
  
  A collection of short stories with themes of religion and gender, Nácasinu Diidxa, first published in a bilingual Isthmus Zapotec - Spanish edition, has been translated into English. In this conversation author Víctor Cata and translator Rosemary Beam de Azcona will discuss the significance of translating from Zapotec into colonial languages.
  Una colección de relatos que exploran temas de la religión y la diversidad sexual, Nácasinu Diidxa, que primero fue publicada en una edición bilingüe diidxazá (zapoteco del Istmo) - español, ahora se ha traducido al inglés. En esta conversación el autor, Víctor Cata, y la traductora, Rosemary Beam de Azcona, hablarán sobre el significado de traducir de lenguas como el zapoteco, cuyos hablantes experimentan la discriminación, a lenguas coloniales como el español y el inglés.
• Phorum - Friday Feb 26 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Susannah Levi (NYU): Talker familiarity helps speech perception. Does the benefit stop there?
• Phorum - Friday Mar 5 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): TBA.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 26 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Hadas Kotek (MIT): Top-down derivations: Flipping syntax on its head. Joint work with Bob Frank (Yale).
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 5 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Michael Diercks (Pomona): Bukusu object marking: At the interface of pragmatics and syntax. Joint work with Justine Sikuku (Moi University).
• Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 3 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
  Hossep Dolatian (Stony Brook): Orthography to Phonology: Constraints on the Armenian schwa.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Congratulations to Alexander Elias, who has been invited to give an hour-long "Early Career Researcher Plenary Talk" at the 13th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference (APLL13) hosted remotely by the University of Edinburgh on June 10-12, 2021. The title of his talk is "Phonemic Initial Glottal Stops in the Lesser Sundas: The Emergence and Spread of an Areal Sound Pattern."