News

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).
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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

Calques is happy to pass along this message from the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS):

Are you interested in Phonetics? SLUgS invites you to join us in a tour of the PhonLab in the linguistics department, headed by Professor Keith Johnson! Tour the lab and see what phoneticians do in person and see experiments in action. Tour is Nov 17th at 5pm, meeting at Dwinelle 1229!

Congratulations to Edwin Ko on the publication of a new article, "On the origins of multiple exponence in Crow," in the journal Diachronica.

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Nov 7 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Justin Davidson (UC Berkeley): "Legitimizing non-nativeness: Language contact in Barcelona and the California Bay Area."
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Nov 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Rachael Samberg (UC Berkeley): "Understanding & managing rights issues in linguistics research."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Nov 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (passcode LRWG) - 4-5pm
  Discussion of Perley 2012.
• Phorum - Friday Nov 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Rachel Walker (UC Santa Cruz): "Gestural organization and quantity in English rhotic-final rhymes."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 4 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Jasper Talwani (UC Berkeley): "Valency and agentive alignment in Highland Chontal (lajltayki-/tsome), a language of Oaxaca."

Congratulations to Eric Wilbanks, whose doctoral dissertation, "The Integration of Social and Acoustic Cues During Speech Perception," was signed, sealed, and delivered last week!

The final Linguistics Colloquium of fall 2022 will take place on Monday, November 14, with a talk by Wesley Y. Leonard (UC Riverside) in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. His talk is entitled "Insights from Native American Studies for Decolonizing Linguistics Pedagogy," and the abstract is as follows:

Despite the increasing focus on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in the discipline of Linguistics, members of Native American and other Indigenous communities remain underrepresented—and often feel unwelcome. A recurring concern is that Linguistics is not accountable to Indigenous histories, protocols, and ways of engaging with language. A wider issue is that colonization is endemic, and academic norms have developed around colonial logics.

Drawing from critical tools in Native American Studies, this colloquium's objective is to build capacity for teaching linguistics in ways that promote JEDI for Native American and other Indigenous communities. It will begin with a summary of how colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, and related -isms guide Linguistics, and how Indigenous conceptual tools can be leveraged in response. We will then explore these principles through a consideration of how Linguistics is and could be taught.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Nov 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley) with Emanuele Fabiano (University of Coimbra) and Joshua Homan (Universidad San Francisco de Quito): "Disease and violence in shift from Omurano to Urarina on the Urituyacu River in Peru."
• Phorum - Friday Oct 28 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Michael Obiri-Yeboah (Georgetown): "Grammatical tone interactions in complex verbs in TAM constructions in Gua."
• Phorum - Friday Nov 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Rachel Walker (UC Santa Cruz): "Gestural organization and quantity in English rhotic-final rhymes."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Oct 31 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Holliday 2021.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 28 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Iara Mantenuto (CSU Dominguez Hills): "Disanaphor morphemes in San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 4 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Jasper Talwani (UC Berkeley): "Valency and agentive alignment in Highland Chontal (lajltayki-/tsome), a language of Oaxaca."

Congratulations to Jennifer Kaplan, who has just published an article in Languages titled "Pluri-grammars for pluri-genders: Competing gender systems in the nominal morphology of non-binary French." The article discusses the different ways non-binary Francophones innovate French nouns that don't conform to the masculine/feminine grammatical gender system.

The 2022-2023 colloquium series continues on Monday, November 7, with a talk by our colleague Justin Davidson (UC Berkeley), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. His talk is entitled "Legitimizing non-nativeness: Language contact in Barcelona and the California Bay Area," and the abstract is as follows:

Like many subfields of Linguistics, research and theory from Variationist Sociolinguistics traditionally focused on the speech of monolingual English communities, leading to continued calls to expand the scope to non-Anglo and/or multilingual communities (Bayley and Preston 1996; Bayley, Preston, and Li 2022). A shift, minimally, from an idealized monolingual speaker to a multilingual speaker, would better align linguistic theory with the reality of human experience in that only a minority of people live their entire life with exposure to (and/or use of) exclusively one language. Nevertheless, research on multilinguals and multilingualism begets a series of important questions that inform linguistic theory and the methodologies we incorporate in our research: Who is and who isn't multilingual? At what point does a learner of a second language become a full-fledged speaker of that language? What are the consequences of using native and/or monolingual speaker speech norms as benchmarks for multilingual speech phenomena?

In order to begin answering these and other questions pertaining to multilingualism, in this talk I present findings from a pair of sociophonetic investigations carried out in two Spanish-speaking bilingual communities distinguished, among other factors, by the sociopolitical status of Spanish: Barcelona, Spain and the California Bay Area. In spite of considerable diversity in language dominance, I aim to show, respectively in each community, how variation in the production of the alveolar lateral /l/ or orthographic <b/v> evidences dynamic and full participation in community-wide, sociolinguistically-conditioned speech norms. These findings ultimately support the continued broadening of linguistics research to include a wider range of speakers, and furthermore crucially serve to legitimize the speech of non-native speakers.