News

Assistant Adjunct Professor Chris Beier has been awarded a 2022 Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). This grant will support her project entitled Transcription, Parsing, and Comparative Analysis of Tone in Iquito Texts. Beier will be on leave in order to carry out this project in Peru between June 2022 and August 2023.

Beier offered this description of the funded project: "This project advances the documentation and description of Iquito, a critically endangered Zaparoan language of northern Peruvian Amazonia, with a focus on its complex tonal system. Core activities include transcription, parsing, and analysis of texts from circa 1960; re-parsing of re-analyzed texts from 2002-2018; and comparative analysis of these texts to inform ongoing grammatical description of Iquito. Because Iquito's tonal system includes both boundary Hs and HLL melodies that surface in multiple domains and across word boundaries, text-based analysis of connected speech is an indispensable tool for discovery. Thorough documentation of Iquito’s tonal system will inform the typology of tone in Amazonia, and contribute to cross-linguistic typology and theories of grammatical tone."

Congratulations, Chris!

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 2, 2022 at 3:15pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/99993568290 )

Honors Student Presenters

• Cynthia Zhong
  Honors Thesis Title: "Tonal Variations on 'bu' in Mandarin-English Code-Switching"
  Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Larry Hyman (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
• Cooper Bedin
  Honors Thesis Title: "(A Computational Approach to) Acoustic Cues of Queer Speech"
  Faculty Advisor: Keith Johnson (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Mel Chen (Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies)
• Jenkin Leung
  Honors Thesis Title: "Variation in Hong Kong Cantonese Nasal Onsets"
  Faculty Advisor: Isaac L. Bleaman (Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Andrew Wong (Professor, Department of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies, California State University, East Bay)
• Margaret Asperheim
  Honors Thesis Title: "One language or five thousand: A linguistic categorization analysis of Library of Congress classification and language resources"
  Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Terry Regier (Professor, Department of Linguistics)

Annie Helms presented at the 10th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech at the University of Barcelona on April 20. The slides for her talk, "Utilizing density-controlled vowel space area to examine the role of language dominance in the acquisition of Spanish and English vowel reduction patterns," are available here. Congrats, Annie!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Samuel Akinbo (UMinnesota): Evaluative and Noun-class in Fungwa.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Gabriela Pérez Báez (UOregon): Increasing inclusion in academia in support of language.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Two grammars of A'ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase (practice GLOW talk, in lieu of previously scheduled talk).
• Phorum - Friday Apr 29 - Zoom only - 1-2pm
  Anne Hermes (CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle): Patterns of variability in secondary articulation in Tashlhiyt.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz) and Uri Mor (UC Berkeley & Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): The Double Standard in Modern Hebrew: The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew in the 1940s and 1950s.
  Please contact Ben Papadopoulos for more information or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• 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.
  (Note: the talk that was previously scheduled for 4/22 has been canceled)
• 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 Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who will be giving a talk titled "Two grammars of A’ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase" at the 45th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium at Queen Mary University of London on 28 April. The program is available here: https://glowlinguistics.org/45/28-april-day-2-main-colloquium/

Johanna Nichols and her Helsinki colleagues have co-authored a new paper in Diachronica. Congrats, Johanna!

Grünthal, Riho, Volker Heyd, Sampsa Holopainen, Juha Janhunen, Olesya Khanina, Matti Miestamo, Johanna Nichols, Janne Saarikivi, and Kaius Sinnemäki. 2022. Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread. Diachronica. Advance online publication: https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20038.gru; supplement: https://zenodo.org/record/6345559.

This research was also featured in a press release to Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's main newspaper): https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/helsinki/art-2000008761777.html

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Richard Rhodes retirement celebration - Monday Apr 18 - Patio, Faculty Club - 4-6pm
• Phorum - Friday Apr 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Lily Xue Gong (UC Berkeley): Phonemic segmentation of narrative speech in human cerebral cortex.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Rachel Walker (UC Santa Cruz): Gestural Organization and Quantity in English Rhotic-final Rhymes.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 22 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Iara Mantenuto (CSU Dominguez Hills): TBA.
• Zoom Phonology - Friday Apr 15 - Zoom - 9am
  Jamilläh Rodriguez (UNC Chapel Hill): Towards a unifying account of tone lowering in Copala Triqui: A case study of possessive constructions.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Hannah Sande will be giving a colloquium talk at Stanford called "Accounting for discontinuous vowel harmony in Guébie" (based on joint work with Emily Clem and Maks Dąbkowski). The talk will take place on April 26 at noon in the Greenberg room on the Stanford campus.

The UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics is celebrating the distinguished career of Professor Richard Rhodes at the Patio of the Faculty Club on Monday, April 18, 2022, from 4 to 6 PM. Congratulations, Rich!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 11 - Zoom and 370 Dwinelle - 3:10-4:30pm
  Zenzi M. Griffin (UT Austin): Talking and timing: Using eye movements to study language production.
• Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) - Saturday Apr 9 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 9am-4:30pm
  Come out to the Sixth Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium and support undergraduate research! The Symposium schedule can be found here. All are welcome.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Richard Bibbs (UC Santa Cruz): Wewewa Pronominal Marking.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 13 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Jenny Davis (Chickasaw Nation, UIllinois Urbana-Champaign): TBA.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 8 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Marko Drobnjak (UC Berkeley): Evaluation of testimony: Speech perception vs. witness credibility.
• Phorum - Friday Apr 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Lily Xue Gong (UC Berkeley): Phonemic segmentation of narrative speech in human cerebral cortex.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 13 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Practice talks.
  Please contact Ben Papadopoulos for more information or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 8 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Schuyler Laparle (UC Berkeley): By the way, did you know that digression is multimodal?.
• Zoom Phonology - Friday Apr 15 - Zoom - 9am
  Jamilläh Rodriguez (UNC Chapel Hill): Towards a unifying account of tone lowering in Copala Triqui: A case study of possessive constructions.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

The 2021-2022 colloquium series continues on Monday, April 11, with a talk by Zenzi M. Griffin (UT Austin), held via Zoom (with an in-person screening in Dwinelle 370) at 3:10pm. The talk is entitled "Talking and timing: Using eye movements to study language production," and the abstract is as follows:

People do not retrieve all of the words they will use in an utterance before beginning to speak. At the same time, they do not appear to blurt out each word as it is prepared. A wealth of experimental and observational data testify to this. But then how do speakers coordinate the preparation and articulation of words over time? In this talk, I will discuss eye-tracking and other experiments from my lab on the time course of language production.

Gašper Beguš gave two invited talks this week, and a third is coming up on Friday (in-person in Berkeley):

1. At the Harvard School of Engineering (Soft Math Lab): "Approaching unknown communication systems with unsupervised deep neural networks trained on speech." Link to the event description.

2. At École Normale Supérieure (Cognitive Machine Learning Team): "Deep Learning, Language Acquisition, Auditory Brainstem Response, and Phonology"

This Friday's talk:

3. At the UC Berkeley NLP seminar (hybrid): "Cognitive modeling, neural network interpretability, and GANs"
Friday, April 1, from 11-12 Pacific. This talk will be held in-person in South Hall 202.

Jasper Talwani (class of 2023) was just selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow. This grant awards $5,000 for his proposed 8-week summer research project that will describe and analyze valency-changing suffixes in Highland Chontal, a language isolate of Oaxaca, Mexico, including a language revitalization workshop with Chontal collaborators in Santa María Zapotitlán. These funds will go to research expenses including equipment for community auto-documentation projects and the production and printing of pedagogical materials. He will produce his senior thesis on the basis of this collaborative research.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Madeline Bossi has archived 51 new file bundles of recordings and notes from elicitation sessions on Kipsigis (Southern Nilotic; Kenya) with speakers Linus Kipkoech, Victor Mutai, and Kiplangat Yegon. See file bundles 2019-26.102 through 2019-26.152 here. The work dates from June 2021 through March 2022, and the bundles include useful descriptive titles (e.g., "Grammatical elicitation: Converbial phrases and complementation") and descriptions.