News

Isaac Bleaman gave a research talk over Zoom for the Language and Linguistics Cluster at the National University of Singapore on Wednesday, April 6 (in Berkeley: Tuesday, April 5). The talk was titled "Language maintenance, prescriptive norms, and community divergence."

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.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Phorum - Friday Apr 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 1-2pm
  Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): The University Next Door: Sound change in an urban Rochester neighborhood.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Mar 30 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Chaya Nove (UC Berkeley): Variation and change in the acoustic correlates of a contrast in Yiddish peripheral vowels.
  Please contact Ben Papadopoulos for more information or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday Mar 28 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom
  Practice talks (note nonconsecutive times):
  Line Mikkelsen: Backward resumption: the case of Karuk - 12-1pm
  Wendy L. A. López Márquez: Internally headed relative clauses in Nuntajɨɨyi - 2-3pm
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 1 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Colin Brown (UCLA): TBA.

The Fourth Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL 4) will be held at UC Berkeley during the weekend of April 2-3.

All talks will take place in Dwinelle 370. The full program is available here.

More information from the conference organizers, Allegra Robertson and Wesley dos Santos:

What is SAL 4?
The conference consists of 24 talks by scholars working in different subfields of linguistics – from phonetics to typology to semantics – on the following languages: A’ingae, Caquinte, Chamikuro, Enlhet-Enenlhet, Guaraní, Guató, Iskonawa, Iquito, Ka’apor, Kawahíva, Kichwa, Panará, Maropa, Mʉteã, Nadëb, Nheengatu, Secoya, Shiwilu, Siriano, Tuparí, Wari’, and Yanesha’.

Do I need to register?
No! Attendance is open to all, and there is no registration fee. Please feel free to circulate this message.

How can I stay in the loop?
If you are interested in receiving future communications about the conference, please email sympamazlang@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.

An article by Gašper Beguš titled "Distinguishing cognitive from historical influences in phonology" has just been published in Language. Click here to read it. Congratulations, Gašper!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Spring Break!
• Zoom Phonology - Friday Mar 18 - Zoom - 9am
  Phonology problem set show-and-tell.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Katie Russell's article "Interactions of Nasal Harmony and Word-Internal Language Mixing in Paraguayan Guaraní" was just published in the journal Languages as part of a special issue on "Word Formation and Language Contact: A Formal Perspective." Congratulations, Katie!

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Hannah Sande, with the assistance of Julianne Kapner, has added 63 file bundles of audio and video recordings of elicitation, texts, and other activities related to work with speakers of Guébie (Kru; Côte d'Ivoire). The new bundles -- see 2014-15.081 through 2014-15.144 -- stem from in-person and virtual fieldwork done in 2018 and 2019, and also include other activities such as translation.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 16 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Tulio Bermúdez Mejía (UChicago): TBA.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 16 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Conversation and storytelling with Ed Field, citizen of Cherokee Nation and Cherokee language instructor in Tahlequah, OK.
• Phorum - Friday Mar 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm (note the time)
  Ryan Bennett (UC Santa Cruz): Prosodic smothering is idiosyncratic and lexical.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 11 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Selikem Gotah (NYU): On the Syntax of Tongugbe (Ewe) Nyá-constructions.

We are saddened to learn of the recent deaths of Haruo Aoki (PhD Berkeley 1965), Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley; and Terrence Kaufman (PhD Berkeley 1963), Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Aoki was an authority on Nez Perce, the author of a grammar and dictionary of the language and the editor of two Nez Perce text volumes. Kaufman was one of the foremost specialists in Mesoamerican Indigenous languages and a significant historical linguist. For more information about their lives and accomplishments see this Facebook post.

Congratulations to Mairi McLaughlin who just guest edited a special issue of L2 Journal on the Future of Translation in Higher Education.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Joshua Birchall (University of New Mexico): Producing community-oriented language materials with Markdown.
• Phorum - Friday Mar 4 - Zoom only - 1-2pm
  Andrew Cheng (Simon Fraser University; PhD 2020): Measuring creak in novel words in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech.
• Phorum - Friday Mar 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm (note the time)
  Ryan Bennett (UC Santa Cruz): Prosodic smothering is idiosyncratic and lexical.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Mar 9 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Discussion of Davidson 2022.
  Please contact Ben Papadopoulos for more information or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 4 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Wesley dos Santos (UC Berkeley): Reassessing Tupí-Guaraní "nominalizers" through Kawahíva.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 11 - 1303 Dwinelle and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Selikem Gotah (NYU): On the Syntax of Tongugbe (Ewe) Nyá-constructions.
• Zoom Phonology - Friday Mar 4 - Zoom - 9am
  Karee Garvin (University of Delaware; PhD 2021): Constraining place of articulation effects in phonotactic distribution.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Congratulations to Martha Schwarz, who successfully applied for a departmental Graduate Diversity Pilot summer grant to become certified in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)!

Annie Helms, Gabriella Licata, and Rachel Weiher's article "Influence of orthography in production and perception of /b/ in US Spanish" has just been published in Estudios de Fonética Experimental. Congrats, all!

Annie Helms's article "Bay Area Spanish: Regional sound change in contact languages" has been published in Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, as part of the special issue Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 17 with selected papers from the Going Romance conference in 2020. Congratulations, Annie!