News

The 2022-2023 colloquium series continues on Monday, October 3, with a talk by our very own Alexandra Pfiffner, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "Features, cues, and phonological contrast: A look at plosive voicing in Afrikaans," and the abstract is as follows:

Phonological voicing in obstruents is signaled by numerous acoustic cues, both spectral and temporal. Voicing contrasts have been featurally described as [±voice], [±spread glottis], fortis versus lenis, or a combination of features such as [±spread] and [±slack] vocal folds, depending on the cues utilized in a particular language. The problem that arises is that describing obstruent voicing contrasts with only cues or features, to the exclusion of the other, misses larger cross-linguistic patterns.

In this talk, I examine plosive voicing contrasts and positional neutralization in Afrikaans. Using data from perception and production experiments with native speakers, I show that acoustic cues (that are not necessarily linked to the definition of a distinctive feature) are integral to the realization of phonological contrast. To account for this data and unite the two views on describing voicing contrasts, I propose a new framework of cue-based features.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sept 28 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-5pm
  Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley) leads "A discussion on relationships, positionality, and accountability in collaborative language work."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Scott Borgeson (Michigan State): "Long-distance compensatory lengthening."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 30 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Noah Hermalin (UC Berkeley): "An introduction to phonographic writing systems."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Frances Sobolak (Cornell): "Light verbs, Case, and Voice head functionality."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Tzintia Montaño Ramírez (UC Berkeley): "Status of the patient subject in the Garifuna passives."

Congratulations to Gašper Beguš, Isaac Bleaman, and Alan Zhou (BA 2021), who were just published in Proceedings of Interspeech 2022!

• Beguš, Gašper and Alan Zhou. 2022. Modeling speech recognition and synthesis simultaneously: Encoding and decoding lexical and sublexical semantic information into speech with no direct access to speech data. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 5298-5302. [article] [asynchronous talk]
• Webber, Jacob J., Samuel K. Lo, and Isaac L. Bleaman. 2022. REYD – The first Yiddish text-to-speech dataset and system. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2363-2367. [article]

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sept 19 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "On ditransitive person restrictions in primary object languages."
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sept 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): "Postlabial raising and paradigmatic leveling in A'ingae: A diachronic study from the field."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 16 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Rachel E. Weissler (Oregon): "What is incorporated in emotional prosody perception? Evidence from race perception studies and analysis of acoustic cues."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Sept 19 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Baioud & Khuanuud 2022.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Frances Sobolak (Cornell): TBA.

The 2022-2023 colloquium series begins on Monday, September 19, with a talk by our very own Amy Rose Deal, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "On ditransitive person restrictions in primary object languages," and the abstract is as follows:

When a ditransitive is expressed with clitic pronouns or agreement for both objects, oftentimes restrictions are in place on the relative person of the two objects. A typical pattern is that the theme object must be 3rd person. This pattern has been the subject of intensive study by syntacticians over the last two decades. In this talk I investigate the implications of this work for primary object languages, where the "object markers" controlled by the patient in a monotransitive are controlled by the goal/recipient in a ditransitive. Various prominent syntactic analyses of person restrictions, when put together with commonly assumed ideas about the syntax of primary object languages, lead to the prediction that person restrictions should be absent in ditransitives in languages of this type. This prediction is wrong: in fact, it has proven hard to find a primary object language that LACKS a person restriction in ditransitives. I critically review two lines of analysis that have been pursued regarding these person restrictions, and propose a new approach grounded in my recent work on the person-case constraint (Interaction, Satisfaction, and the PCC).

Debbie Anderson will be participating in a webinar on September 28, 2022, from 10:30-12:30 that will discuss Unicode and internationalization. Her brief talk will focus on the process of adding characters and scripts into the Unicode Standard, so that the letters/symbols can (eventually) be used on computers and devices — important for those working with "lesser-used" languages. Other talks will discuss other ongoing projects of the Unicode Consortium.

The event is free but registration is required. There will be a live Q&A session afterwards.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Allegra Robertson has archived a new collection of materials related to her first summer of fieldwork with speakers of Yánesha' (Arawak; Peru) in June and July of this year. Many speakers are represented, in sound recordings of traditional stories, explanatory texts, grammatical and lexical elicitation, and transcription sessions, together with scanned field notes and photographs.

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

• Talk for Linguistics Graduate Students - Monday Sept 12 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-4pm
  Amy Honigman (Sr. Clinical Psychologist, Counseling and Psychological Services; Graduate Assembly Wellness Specialist)
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sept 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: LRWG) - 3:10-4pm
  Opening meeting: This first session will be an opportunity to introduce the new organizers and get to know each other.
• Phorum - Friday Sept 9 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
  Emily Grabowski (Berkeley): "Exploring phonetic time series analysis and representations."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 16 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Rachel E. Weissler (Oregon): "What is incorporated in emotional prosody perception? Evidence from race perception studies and analysis of acoustic cues."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Sept 12 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Welcome meeting and discussion of Papadopoulos 2021.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 9 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Sana Kidwai (Cambridge): "Marked Anticausatives in Urdu."

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sept 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Keren Rice (Toronto): "Ethics in linguistic work with Indigenous communities in Canada."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  CJ Brickhouse (Stanford): "Revisiting California's apparent low-back merger: A lot of thoughts about LOT and THOUGHT."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 9 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
  Emily Grabowski (Berkeley): "Exploring phonetic time series analysis and representations."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 2 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin.

Calques is sharing the following announcement from Amber Galvano, one of the co-organizers of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley:

Our first SLaB meeting will be Monday, September 12th, 2-3pm, in 5125 Dwinelle (Spanish & Portuguese Library) and on Zoom. The deadline to vote here on this semester's readings, the first of which will be discussed on the 12th, is next Wednesday, September 7th.

Congratulations to Andrew Garrett and Alice Harris on the publication of their article "Assessing scholarship in documentary linguistics" in Language!

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Jack Merrill (PhD 2018) has archived a new collection of materials related to Sereer (Senegambian; Senegal, The Gambia). The materials are audio recordings of elicitation sessions, and a FLEx database with over 5,000 lexical entries and scores of texts! The work is primarily in collaboration with speakers Maryama Diouf and Malick Loum, and Nico Baier (PhD 2018). It began in Berkeley in 2013 (Loum, Merrill, Baier), following the 2012-2013 field methods course for which Mr. Loum was the consultant; it continued in Senegal in 2015 (Diouf, Merrill). The FLEx database is a continuation of the one developed by class participants.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Aug 31 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4pm
  Round robin.
• Phorum - Friday Aug 26 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin.
• Phorum - Friday Sept 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  CJ Brickhouse (Stanford): "Revisiting California's apparent low-back merger: A lot of thoughts about LOT and THOUGHT."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 2 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin.

Congrats to Hannah Sande, who just published an article "The phonology of Guébie" with Language and Linguistics Compass!