News

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

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 Department of Linguistics is delighted to announce that Prof. Marilyn Vihman has accepted an appointment as a "Research Linguist" with the department. Vihman is one of the world's leading experts on the cross-linguistic study of phonological development in child language acquisition. Her CV lists over 100 publications including her books Phonological Templates in Development (2019) and Phonological Development: The first two years (2014, 2nd ed.). Welcome, Marilyn!