News

The Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium is on Saturday, April 15th from 10am to 5pm in Dwinelle 5125 (Spanish and Portuguese Library). Talks range from ASL phonology, colonial language policy, epicene pronominalization, abbreviations, thematic suffixes, Native American English perception, and more! Come meet and engage with the next generation of linguists!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Deborah Anderson (UC Berkeley) with Craig Cornelius (Google) and Kamal Mansour: "Language Preservation and Documentation with Unicode: Character encoding, keyboards and fonts."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm (note different time)
  Yan García (CSU Long Beach and Tlahtoltapazolli): "Community Nahuatl Teaching in Los Angeles."
• Phorum - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Marie Tano (Stanford): "Stancetaking and the construction of Black American identities in the United States."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Lorenzo García-Amaya (Michigan): "Investigating the impact of long-term bilingualism on filled-pause production and fluency patterns in Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals" (remote talk).
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Nicoletta Biondo (UC Berkeley): "Bridging theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience: Fine-grained linguistic differences do matter during online language comprehension."

Congratulations to Andrew Cheng (PhD 2020) who has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Hawai'i to start in August 2023! Andrew also has a new paper out in the Journal of Linguistic Geography titled "A comparative study of English vowel shift and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions."

The 2022-2023 colloquium series concludes on Monday, April 10, with a talk by Laura Kalin (Princeton), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "On the nature of linearization: Insights from infixes and infixation," and the abstract is as follows:

How do abstract syntactic structures come to have a linear order? It is widely assumed in the generative literature that linearization follows the syntax (see, e.g., Chomsky 1995, Nunes 1999, 2004, Moro 2000, Berwick & Chomsky 2011). But, there is no consensus on the precise timing and nature of post-syntactic linearization, with proposals split along the following lines (among many others): (i) is linearization determined entirely by structural relationships?; (ii) does linearization within a word obey the same principles as linearization across words?; and (iii) does linearization of an affixal morpheme with respect to its stem take place prior to or simultaneous with (i.e., as part of) exponence? For some varying proposals, see e.g. Lieber 1992, Noyer 1992, Embick 2010, Arregi and Nevins 2012, Bye and Svenonius 2012, Idsardi and Raimy 2013, Myler 2017, Georgieva et al 2021, Felice 2022, Hewett 2022.

In this talk, I use infixes and infixation as a window into linearization and the post-syntactic component. In very brief, what I will propose is that basic linear order (for all morphemes) is established cyclically, from the bottom of a spelled-out structure upward, interspersed with exponence; at each terminal, linearization properly precedes exponence, and can be influenced by various non-structural factors. In addition, I will argue for one point of re-linearization which is also cyclic, but which takes place after exponent choice. The evidence will include and go beyond the type of case study considered in Kalin 2022.

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

• Spring Break!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Emil Carlsson (Chalmers University of Technology/UC Berkeley) and Terry Regier (UC Berkeley): Discussion of in-progress work.

This past weekend, several Glottal Non-Stops participated in the Oakland Running Festival (running the 10k & half marathon)!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo (CU Boulder): "Some differences in the sound system of three Zapotec languages of the Valley of Oaxaca."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm (note different time)
  Mskwaankwad Rice (Minnesota): "Power and positionality: A case study of Linguistics' relationship to Indigenous languages."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 17 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Simon Todd (UC Santa Barbara): "Building implicit linguistic knowledge through passive exposure."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 20 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Huang et al. 2022.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): "Topic and focus in Tira."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Emil Carlsson (Chalmers University of Technology/UC Berkeley) and Terry Regier (UC Berkeley): Discussion of in-progress work.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the winter-spring 1980 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lakota (Siouan; US), with consultants Eva (Martin) Brown (1909-1996), previously a consultant for the 1974-1975 course, and Mary (Afraid of Enemy) McDaniel (1917-1992), and instructor Wallace Chafe (1927-2019). Mrs. McDaniel was a granddaughter of Solomon Afraid of Enemy, who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890; she was also the great-granddaughter of the Oglala Sitting Bull (d. 1877). The single notebook in the collection was recovered at an estate sale at the former home of Knud Lambrecht (PhD 1986) in Alameda in 2019!

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego): "Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How."
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Michael Everdell (UT Austin) and Gabriela García Salido (UNAM): "Evidentiality as the source of discourse-genre: Evidence from O'dam (Durango, Mexico)."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Amber Galvano (UC Berkeley): "A Q-theoretic approach to cross-dialectal <st> Spanish production."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 17 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Simon Todd (UC Santa Barbara): "Building implicit linguistic knowledge through passive exposure."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Shweta Akolkar & Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference & Focus Fronting in Lobi."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): "Topic and focus in Tira."

Gašper Beguš will offer a course on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech" at the ESSLLI summer school in Ljubljana, Slovenia (July 31 to August 11, 2023). Click here for the program and here for the course syllabus.