News

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.

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, February 10, with a talk by Julia Swan (San José State University), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Complementary Perspectives in Studies of Sound Change: A Case Study of Pre-/ɡ/ Merger." The abstract is as follows:

A pronunciation pattern affecting the vowels in FACE, DRESS and TRAP before the voiced velar /ɡ/ has been observed in many North American locales. In these communities, BEG and BAG are variably observed to raise and may merge with BAGEL, which is sometimes described as pre-velar raising or BAG-raising. The feature has been discussed as a diagnostic of variation within the Western U.S. dialect region. Drawing on sociophonetic analysis of young adults in the Pacific Northwest, I explore interspeaker variation and approximate a social meaning for the raised or merged variant. I complement this with a view from a collaborative perceptual study showing that, in communities where the BAG-BAGEL merger is attested in production, listeners also display less sensitivity to the phonemic distinction. Lastly, I provide a limited historical view of BAG-BEG-BAGEL merger to better pinpoint the timing of this development and explore possible explanations for its origins. Taken together, and corroborated by other scholarship, I argue that 1) despite these disparate locales and phonetically variable instantiations, there are unified articulatory and structural motivations for the pre-/ɡ/ phenomena affecting the front vowel system, 2) the phenomenon is best treated as a conditioned vowel merger rather than vowel raising, and 3) the diffusion of this feature among urban, West Coast, American talkers may be limited by its socioindexical meanings. This work underscores the importance of pursuing complementary approaches in the study of sound change that include variationist, community-level distinctions, an understanding of the interactional social meaning of the variants in local contexts, and studies of perception along with production.

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma): "The syntax of accompanying in Ch’ol (Mayan)"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of our winter break accomplishments and setting research goals for the spring semester!
• Phorum - Friday Jan 31 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): "Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants"

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who will be giving an invited research talk titled "Holocaust Testimonies in Yiddish Language Research and Pedagogy" at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies on February 24. More info is available here.