News

Gašper Beguš appeared on WNPR's morning show Where We Live on Monday, February 24, 2025. You can listen to the episode here.

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 3, with a talk by our very own Terry Regier, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. His talk is entitled "Cultural evolution explains efficient semantic systems." The abstract is as follows:

It has been argued that systems of semantic categories across languages reflect functional pressure for efficient communication. There is also a long tradition of approaching systems of semantic categories in terms of cultural evolution: the process by which a cultural convention changes as it is repeatedly learned and used in communication. I will present recent computational work with Emil Carlsson and Devdatt Dubhashi that connects these two approaches. We find that (1) an existing model of cultural evolution produces color naming systems that are both efficient and similar to attested systems from a range of languages; and (2) this model of cultural evolution helps us understand an important case in which optimally efficient systems do not match empirical data. We argue that these two approaches taken together yield a more comprehensive understanding than either one taken alone.

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

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Carlos Yebra Lopez (Cal State Fullerton): Presentation of the book Ladino on the Internet in Ladino
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 26 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Alexia Hatun (UCLA): "A Safe Place for Language: Linguistic Accessibility and Vitality among Non-Dominant Languages" (with a focus on Western Armenian)
• Phorum - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): "Which 'u' and why: Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Practice talks for Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Katie Russell: "Wordhood at the heart of Paraguayan Guaraní morphology"
  Kai Schenck: "Morphological domains in Yurok rhotic vowel harmony" (poster)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley): "Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro 'have'-constructions"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 28 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Melissa Cronin (Stanford): "On the decomposition and anteriority of used to"

Congratulations to Justin Davidson, who has been awarded the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity. The award was made in recognition of his "transformative research and advocacy work on Spanish-English bilingualism, exceptional support and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students, innovative, inclusive teaching practices, and outstanding contributions to disability justice."

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

• Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): "Which 'u' and why: Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley): "Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro 'have'-constructions"

Former Berkeley linguistics graduate student Amy Tan, also the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and many other books, has donated her papers to UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. News articles about this gift are in Berkeleyside and the New York Times. (Photo below from the Bancroft Library: Amy Tan in the Rock Bottom Remainders.)

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Julia Swan (San José State University): "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger"
• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
  Julian Vargo (UC Berkeley): "Orthographic Variation of Ladino Prenasal Vowels"
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Plain Language Workshop"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): "Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "Dependent case, first person plural and impersonal morphosyntax in Finnish"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro"

Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro on the publication of an article titled "Laryngealized vowels in Yánesha': A phonetic description and subsegmental analysis" in Folia Linguistica! An Open Access version of the article can be found here.