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September 7, 2023

Beguš featured in Science News Explores

Gasper Beguš' research on Generative AI and whale communication was featured in Science News Explores: https://www.snexplores.org/article/artificial-intelligence-animal-language-technology

September 6, 2023

Jenks presents at Definiteness across Domains

Peter Jenks is giving a talk (via Zoom) at the 4th meeting of the Definiteness across Domains DFG network this Sunday at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The talk is entitled "Anaphoric bare nouns without indices". The program is available here: https://www.definiteness-across-domains.org/4th-meeting/.

Survey updates

Zach O'Hagan sends the following report from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

September 4, 2023

Kavitskaya publishes in the Journal of Historical Linguistics

Darya Kavitskaya published an article with co-author Florian Wandl "On the reconstruction of contrastive secondary palatalization in Common Slavic" in the Journal of Historical Linguistics. Congrats, Dasha!

August 31, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Sep 1-8)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Mikkelsen teaches on non-verbal clauses in Mexico
Line Mikkelsen just returned from teaching a two-week intensive workshop on non-verbal clauses at CIESAS-sureste in San Cristóbal, Chiapas, Mexico (photo below). Participants included PhD students and professors in the graduate program in "Lingüistica Indoamericana" at CIESAS, as well as linguists from other institutions in Mexico. Our own Wendy López Márquez, who is an alum of the CIESAS MA program, was also in attendance.

August 30, 2023

Scott's research featured by UCB Social Science Matrix
Recent Berkeley Linguistics PhD Tessa Scott and her work with the Mam language community (spoken in Guatemala and diaspora communities in Mexico and the US) are featured in this article from the Social Science Matrix: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/language-revitalization-in-.... Congrats, Tessa!
O'Hagan on a research trip in South America
Zachary O'Hagan spent seven weeks in South America this summer, presenting on focus in Caquinte (Arawak; Peru) at AMAZONICAS IX in Bogotá and on 17th-century Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní; Peru) toponyms at SALSA XIV in Leticia, Colombia, followed by four weeks in Iquitos, Peru. There he worked with speakers of Urarina (isolate) and Taushiro (isolate), presented preliminary results from the California Language Archive's recent acquisition of Urarina legacy archival materials to Urarina school teachers (with Emanuele Fabiano, in nearby Nauta), was a panelist at the Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos's second conversatorio "¿Qué Amazonía Queremos?" and rekindled relationships with school teachers and others at a meeting in San Joaquín de Omaguas for the revitalization of Omagua.
Deal promoted to Full Professor

Amy Rose Deal has been promoted to Full Professor!  Congratulations, Amy Rose!

August 24, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Aug 25-Sep 1, 2023)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

August 16, 2023

Sande receives NSF CAREER Award

Congratulations to Hannah Sande; who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! The project is entitled Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages.

Bossi files dissertation
Congrats to Madeline Bossi, who has just filed her dissertation Epistemic modality across syntactic catergories in Kipsigis! Starting in mid August, Maddy will be working as the Programs Data Manager for DREAM Charter School in New York City. She'll be running data collection and analysis for all of the school’s extracurricular programs, as well as leading UX research on the products that the data team uses and creates to make sure they’re working as user-friendly as possible.
Scott files dissertation

Congrats to Tessa Scott on her dissertation Pronouns and agreement in San Juan Atitán Mam, filed in May! Tessa has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Berkeley Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellowship Program starting in September. She will be working in the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science on undergraduate education policy and advising. In this position she will also continue her research and work on Mam.

Summer summary 2023

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques during the summer break:

Dabkowski receives NSF grant
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski who was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant entitled Nominal and deverbal morphology in an endangered language (i.e. A'ingae).
Ko files dissertation

Congratulations to Edwin Ko who recently filed his dissertation on "Studies in Crow Linguistics". He is beginning a position in Yale's Linguistics Department starting this month.

May 11, 2023

Updates from our graduating seniors 2023

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Aishwarya Jayadeep (BA 2023) will be starting an MS in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley this fall.
  • Chelsea Tang (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT this fall.
  • Calvin Quick (BA 2023) will be starting the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Toronto in September 2023.
  • Cid Bryan (BA 2022) is currently working as a substitute teacher and is getting ready to apply to graduate programs in the near future.
  • Dara Gaeuman (BA 2022) will be starting the master's program for clinical Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University in September 2023.
  • Cecilia Elena Bachmann (BA 2023) will begin working as the Emerging Adult Workforce and Education Coordinator for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles. She also has plans to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2024.
  • Noah Boihem (Linguistics BA, Computer Science BA 2023) will be attending Nuclear Power School to become a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy starting in October 2023. He will be assisting in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab until then.
  • Corina Chen (BA 2022) will be starting her M.Ed. at Stanford in June 2023 and is looking forward to becoming an English secondary school teacher in the SF Bay Area.
  • Gunjan Anand (BA 2023) will be starting her PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the fall.

Congratulations, everybody!

May 10, 2023

Pfiffner conference talk and travel grants

Alexandra Pfiffner will be giving a talk with co-author Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba) at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association on June 1. She has also been awarded an International Phonetics Association travel grant and a Professional Development Fund grant from Berkeley to sponsor her summer conference travel.

Berkeley linguists @ ICPhS 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), taking place in Prague in August:

  • Amber Galvano: "Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change"
  • Emily Grabowski: "Methodological trends in acoustic phonetic analysis"
  • Keith Johnson: "Individual differences in Speech Production: What is 'Phonetic Substance'?"
  • Yevgeniy Melguy: "Mechanisms of generalization for phonetic learning of accented speech"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Julian Martinez-Garcia (BA 2023): "Spirantization of word-final plosives in Standard Dutch"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba): "Stop voicing in two settler communities on the Canadian Prairies"

May 9, 2023

Berkeley linguists @ ACAL 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), taking place June 12-14, 2023, at the University of Connecticut:

  • Franco Liu and Shweta Akolkar: "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference and Focus Fronting in Lobi"
  • Shweta Akolkar and Franco Liu: "Morphological rɛ́-flex of focus in Lobi"
  • Anna Macknick: "STAMP as Asymmetric Negation in Lobi"
  • Katherine Russell: "Two types of negation in Guébie"
  • Amber Galvano and Sansan Hien: "Quantifying the Lobi vowel space"
  • Rebecca Jarvis: "Relative clause derivations and subject displacement in Atchan"