News

Congratulations to Schuyler Laparle, who has accepted a position as Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University, beginning January 2023.

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! His project is entitled "Documenting and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Holocaust Survivors," and it will involve developing a large corpus of conversational Yiddish for language research and community engagement. The project was described in a recent announcement to LSA members and publicized in the Forward (first in Yiddish and then in English translation).

Congratulations to Leanne Hinton on the publication of Flutes of Fire: An Introduction to Native California Languages, Revised and Updated! This is a newly expanded edition of her 1994 book -- "an approachable, entertaining, and informative classic on Native culture-keeping." Read all about it here!

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• In late May we received a very generous grant of $500,000 from the Arcadia Fund! Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, "supports work to preserve endangered cultural heritage, protect endangered ecosystems, and promote access to knowledge." This grant will provide needed support for our operations over a five-year period, including support to bring Indigenous community researchers to the Berkeley campus for visits to our archive.
• For the first time since 2019, we co-hosted in-person the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, organized by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS). From May 22-28, 15 faculty members, graduate students, and alumni volunteered as linguistic partners supporting Indigenous Californians working with some 25 languages.
• We published Report 20 of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, Mutsun Text Collection: mutsun riicakma hummen. It's a monumental 7,175-page philological work by Natasha Warner (PhD 1998), Lynnika Butler, Heather Van Volkinburg, and Quirina Geary, "24 years after starting it as an Excel spreadsheet," as Natasha puts it, based on relationships that formed at Breath of Life in the 1990s.
• We accessioned the following new archival collections, most documenting the history of field methods instruction in the department:
  • Materials for Mutsun Text Collection (2022-11), archival materials associated with Warner et al. (2022).
  • Limba Field Materials (2022-06), from Nik Rolle's (PhD 2018) work with speaker Kondeh Mansaray and others in Sierra Leone in April and May.
  • Berkeley Undergraduate Field Methods: Lobi (2021-33), from Hannah Sande's spring 2022 course with speaker Sansan Claude Hien.
  • Berkeley Field Methods: Garifuna (2021-25), from Lev Michael's 2021-2022 course with speaker Frank Palacio.
  • Berkeley Field Methods: Abo (2021-10), from Larry Hyman's 2010-2011 course with speaker Achille Massoma.
  • Berkeley Undergraduate Field Methods: Dafing (2021-24), from Peter Jenks's spring 2016 course with speaker Rassidatou Konate.
  • Berkeley Field Methods: Irish (2021-31), from Jim Matisoff's 1991-1992 course with speaker Joan Keefe.
• We added materials to the following extant archival collections:
• Guébie Fieldwork Collection (2014-15): sound recordings of elicitation and texts, field notes, and typed transcripts from Hannah Sande and Katie Russell's nearly 80 (mostly remote) work sessions 2020-2022 (see 2014-15.145 through 2014-15.223). Archiving was aided by Julianne Kapner.
• Nukuoro Field Materials (2019-24): videos and typed notes from grammatical elicitation conducted on Zoom in 2021 with speakers Mina Lekka and Johnny Rudolph (see 2019-24.157 through 2019-24.187).
• Documentary Materials on Chamikuro (2019-31): new and updated Praat TextGrids for previously archived sound recordings (see 2019-31.043).

We wrote to our soon-to-be and recent undergraduate alumni (from 2022 and 2021) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

• Nicholas Ngai (BA 2022) will be starting his master's degree in computer science at UC Berkeley.
• Dara Gaeuman (BA, fall 2022) will be applying to grad school for Speech Language Pathology programs.
• Cynthia Zhong (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT this fall.
• Anjali Kantharuban (BA 2022) will be beginning an MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge in October 2022. Afterwards, she will do her PhD in Language and Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, studying ways to make natural language computer systems functional on a wider variety of languages and dialects.
• Irene Yi (BA 2021) will be starting in the Linguistics PhD program at Stanford in the fall.
• Ivori White (BA 2022) will be moving to Japan in August to teach English. Before she moves she will be practicing her Japanese and napping her days away.
• Charles Zhang (BA 2021) started a job working on quantum computers in September 2021 and will pursue a further degree in comparative linguistics.
• Margaret Asperheim (BA 2022) will be starting an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in August.
• Noah Usman (BA, fall 2021) has started a job as an Insights Associate at Pakistani-American investment firm i2i Ventures, the sister company of startup accelerator Invest2Innovate.
• Jesus Duarte (BA 2022) will be starting his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at UCLA in the fall.
• Carmela Blazado (BA 2021) will begin the Master’s Program for Speech-Language Pathology at University of the Pacific in August 2022.
• Anna Shim (BA 2022) will be starting at UC Berkeley's BE3 graduate program in education starting June 2022.
• Tegan Lakshmanan (BA 2022) will be starting her PhD in Math at UC Berkeley in the fall.
• Grant Brooks Goodman (BA 2022) will be working at SiriusXM/Pandora as a software engineer in August 2022.
• Cooper Bedin (BA 2022) will be beginning a PhD program in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in September.
• Kevin Yu (BA 2021) will be starting his PhD in linguistics at the University of Florida in fall 2022.

Congratulations, everybody!

Peter Jenks will be giving a plenary at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS) hosted by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa next Thursday, May 19, 3:30-4:30pm Hawaii Time (virtual). The title of the talk is "Semantic Distinctions in the Thai Pronominal System."

Congratulations to Madeline Bossi and Emily Drummond, whose proposals for NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (DLI-DDRI) grants have been recommended for funding! Maddy's proposal is titled "Syntax and its interfaces in Kipsigis" and Emily's is titled "Ergativity in Nukuoro (Polynesian Outlier)."

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

• Belén Flores's Retirement Tea Party - Friday May 6 - Ishi Courtyard - 2-4pm
• Phorum - Friday May 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Wesley dos Santos and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley): Apparent partial reduplication in Kawahíva is total reduplication of a particular spell-out domain.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday May 9 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): Same and different are additive presupposition triggers (Practice talk).

Photo from last week's Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium:

(From left: Cynthia Zhong, Cooper Bedin, Jenkin Leung, Margaret Asperheim)

Congrats to all of our thesis-writers!

Congrats to Julia Nee (PhD 2021), along with coauthors Genevieve Smith, Alicia Sheares, and Ishita Rustagi, on the publication of a new article titled "Linguistic justice as a framework for designing, developing, and managing natural language processing tools" in Big Data and Society! There's a blog post summary of the article here.

A new paper by Berkeley linguists and colleagues has just appeared in the Journal of Language Evolution:

• Noga Zaslavsky*, Karee Garvin* (PhD 2021), Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, and Terry Regier. 2022. The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past. Journal of Language Evolution. (* = co-first authors, contributed equally)

Click here for the preprint PDF. Congrats to all!

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

• Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium 2022 - Monday May 2 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 3:15pm
  - Cynthia Zhong: "Tonal Variations on 'bu' in Mandarin-English Code-Switching"
  - Cooper Bedin: "(A Computational Approach to) Acoustic Cues of Queer Speech"
  - Jenkin Leung: "Variation in Hong Kong Cantonese Nasal Onsets"
  - Margaret Asperheim: "One language or five thousand: A linguistic categorization analysis of Library of Congress classification and language resources"
• Belén Flores's Retirement Tea Party - Friday May 6 - Ishi Courtyard - 2-4pm
• Phorum - Friday Apr 29
  Meeting canceled.
• Phorum - Friday May 6 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Wesley dos Santos and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley): Apparent partial reduplication in Kawahíva is total reduplication of a particular spell-out domain.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 29 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Carlos Cisnernos (UC Berkeley) and Anqi Zhang (Nanjing University): The non-scalar, epistemic nature of polarity sensitive wh-indefinites in Mandarin.
• Zoom Phonology - Friday Apr 29 - Zoom - 9am
  Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley): Variation in two Paraguayan Guaraní nasalization patterns.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Congrats to Gašper Beguš and Alan Zhou (undergraduate student in the Berkeley Speech & Computation Lab) who have been published in ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Their article, titled "Interpreting Intermediate Convolutional Layers In Unsupervised Acoustic Word Classification," is freely available for a month here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9746849