News

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

• Practice talks for LSA 2023 - Thursday Dec 29 - Zoom - 2-5pm

In addition to the practice LSA poster session held last Friday, there will be practice LSA talks on Thursday, December 29, at 2pm on Zoom. For questions, please contact organizers Katie Russell and Maksymilian Dąbkowski.

• 2:00pm — Edwin Ko
• 2:30pm — Chaya Nove
• 3:00pm — Katie Russell
  
• 3:30pm — Ernesto Gutiérrez
• 4:00pm — Gabriella Licata
• 4:30pm — Emily Grabowski

Zachary O'Hagan is in Austin, Texas this week giving a talk titled "Interaction of Causative and Antipassive in Caquinte" at the 14th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

Congratulations to Wesley dos Santos, whose manuscript "Asymmetries among person indexes in Kawahíva" was accepted for publication at the International Journal of American Linguistics! The manuscript can be read here (requires Berkeley credentials).

Lev Michael, Fernando de Carvalho, Thiago Chacon, Konrad Rybka, Andrés Sabogal, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri (PhD Environmental Science 2014), and Gereon Kaiping recently published "Deriving calibrations for Arawakan using archaeological evidence" in Interface Focus.

Isaac Bleaman and Chaya Nove will be giving a research talk at the 54th annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, held in Boston, December 18-20. Their talk is titled "The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe: A new resource for language research and pedagogy," and it is part of a panel on "Jewish Corpus Linguistics and Language Documentation."

Congratulations to the Berkeley linguists who will be presenting at the 2023 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Denver:

• Isaac L. Bleaman and Georg F.K. Höhn (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen & Humboldt): "Three-way preposition-determiner interactions in Yiddish: A corpus-based investigation"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Postlabial raising and paradigmatic leveling in A'ingae: A diachronic study from the field"
• Wesley dos Santos: "A nominalizer account of =a in Kawahíva (Tupí-Guaraní)"
• Emily Grabowski and Jennifer Kuo (UCLA): "Comparing k-means and OPTICS clustering algorithms for identifying vowel categories"
• Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete and Jesus Duarte (UCLA): "Perception of acoustic cues of voiced coronal stops by Spanish-English bilinguals"
• Edwin Ko and John Huelsenbeck: "Internal and external borrowing and their effects on linguistic phylogenies: A simulation study"
• Gabriella Licata: "A semiotic analysis of right-wing surveillance of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's communicative repertoire"
• Chaya R. Nove: "Regional distinctions in the length contrast of Central Yiddish vowels"
• Katherine Russell: "Variability in Paraguayan Guaraní nasal harmony: Interactions with morphosyntax"
• Myriam Lapierre (Washington; PhD 2021) and Katherine Russell: "Opposite directionality in [+/–F] agreement: The case of Tupí-Guaraní nasal harmony"

Please let us know if any presentations are missing from this list, so that we can update this story on our departmental website.

Both Michael Arrigo (graduate of RLL's Linguistics track, current lecturer in French) and Mairi McLaughlin (French) just had articles published in the latest edition of Synergies: Pays riverains de la baltique: http://gerflint.fr/Base/Baltique15/baltique15.html (dated 2021 but only just released!)

Michael's article is titled "L’incertitude à double sens: le conditionnel journalistique et la construction de l’objectivité et de la subjectivité dans les textes journalistiques," and Mairi's article, co-authored with Eva Havu, is titled "Le discours rapporté et l’agentivité du journaliste dans les dépêches d’agences de presse."

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

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 2 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Becky Jarvis (UC Berkeley): "Raising and head-external relatives in Atchan."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle and Phorum - Friday Dec 9 - Zoom - 10am
  Practice LSA poster session.

In the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast series, James McElvenny conducted an interview with Andrew Garrett about Alfred Kroeber and the forthcoming book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, 2023). Click here for more information.

The following statement in solidarity with the striking academic workers at UC was recently unanimously approved by the voting faculty members in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley:

We share the serious concerns about compensation that have animated the ongoing strike at UC. The cost of living here is high, and the graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in our department, who are central to academic life, are straining to cover living costs. We urge that these concerns be taken seriously, and we hope that an agreement that addresses them can be reached quickly.

Due to the ongoing strike, QP Fest 2022 will not take place on November 21 as previously announced. It will likely be rescheduled for the spring semester.

Jhonni Carr and Marguerite Morlan presented their research at I Congreso internacional sobre Paisaje Lingüístico: El entorno urbano y rural hispánico (1st International Conference on Linguistic Landscape: Hispanic urban and rural environments). Jhonni's talk was titled "Come work from Mexico, it’s truly magical: la gentrificación en el paisaje lingüístico de Mazunte," and Marguerite's was "Language choice and identity in the transgressive linguistic landscape of Catalonia."

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• In the last month, we've hosted three visits by Indigenous researchers: Richenda Ervin and Jonathan Geary (Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians), who visited twice (photo here); and Anthony Macias, Jessica Chaves, and Kim Carver (Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of Stewarts Point Rancheria; photo here).
• We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the 1974-1975 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lakota (Siouan; US), with primary consultant Ruby (LaPointe) Swift Bird (1927-2004) and Eva (Martin) Brown (1909-1996), both Oglala women from Pine Ridge (South Dakota), and instructor Wallace Chafe (1927-2019). The materials -- donated by Kenneth Whistler (PhD 1980), a student in the class -- include extensive in-class and secondary notes, compiled term papers, and lexical file slips. This course had a strong impact on other enrolled students, such as Robert Van Valin, whose dissertation became Aspects of Lakhota Syntax (PhD 1977).
• Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for other kinds of updates!

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Nov 14 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Wesley Y. Leonard (UC Riverside): "Insights from Native American Studies for Decolonizing Linguistics Pedagogy."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Nov 14 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Laura Alvarez López (Stockholm & UC Berkeley): "Variable use of the definite article before possessives in contemporary varieties of Portuguese in Africa, Brazil and Europe."

Note: Both of the above events will be canceled in the event of a UAW academic workers strike on Monday.

Please join us on Monday, November 21, for Qualifying Paper (QP) project presentations by graduate students in linguistics! The event will take place in Dwinelle 370, with a Zoom option.

QP Fest | November 21, 2022 | 3:10-4:35pm

3:10pm | Katherine Russell
Morpheme-specific nasal harmony in Atchan

3:25pm | Maksymillian Dąbkowski
Two grammars of A'ingae glottalization

3:50pm | Mingyu Yuan
An information-theoretic approach to language decline

4:05pm | Tzintia Montaño Ramirez
Status of the patient subject in the Garifuna passives

4:20pm | Rebecca Jarvis
Relative-clause structures in Atchan