News

NELS is again remote this year, hosted online by Rutgers on Halloween weekend. The program has just been released, advertising talks by numerous Cal linguists and alumni:

• Madeline Bossi: Negative bias and pragmatic reasoning in Kipsigis belief reports
• Emily Clem (PhD '19): Accounting for parallels between inverse marking and the PCC
• Virginia Dawson (PhD '20): Direct numeral modification in a classifier language
• Amy Rose Deal: Negative concord as downward Agree
• Emily Drummond: Abstract Case without morphological case
• Rebecca Jarvis: Elided antecedents and exceptive sluices
• Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD '10): Locating animacy in the grammar

Congrats all!

Hannah Sande will be giving an invited talk at the Epenthesis Workshop at Stony Brook on Friday called "Epenthesis or deletion? CVCV~CCV alternations in Kru languages." Congrats, Hannah!

Darya Kavitskaya and Florian Wandl (University of Zurich) will present at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) on September 16 in the special session "Phonological diversity matters." The title of the talk is "A rare contrast in Slavic: The palatalization of rhotics." The conference program is available here.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Wesley dos Santos added recordings of 78 texts in Juma and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau (Tupian; Brazil) to his collection of Kawahiva language materials, principally stories told by Mandei Juma, with some conversations with Aruká Juma and Awip Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau.
• The California Language Archive hosted a visit by Susan Albright, Heidi Barlese, Nicholas Cortez, and Candace Gonzalez, sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, to consult archival materials related to Northern Paiute (Numic, Uto-Aztecan; CA, OR, ID, NV). They worked with original notes written by native speaker Gilbert Natchez (c1882-1942) from the 1910s (e.g., here), other papers associated with Walter L. Marsden (1858-1913), recordings by Margaret Wheat (1908-1988), notes and recordings by Sydney Lamb (PhD 1957), and recordings by Michael Nichols (PhD 1974). The group also visited the Bancroft Library.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Ronald Sprouse (UC Berkeley): Computing needs of Linguistics Department field research.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm
  David Gaddy (UC Berkeley): Decoding silent speech with electromyography.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm
  Jon Rawski (SJSU): Abductive learning of phonotactic constraints.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Organizational meeting. Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  TBD.
• Zoom Phonology - Monday Sep 13 - Zoom - 10-11am
  Myke Brinkerhoff (UCSC): Tone and phonation in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec.
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Christine Beier and Lev Michael archived a new collection related to their fieldwork in 2008 and 2010 with rememberers of Aʔɨwa (isolate; Peru) Delia Luisa Andi Macahuachi and María Estrella Clavoy. The collection consists of sound recordings of elicitation sessions, field notes, photographs, and transcriptions in TextGrids. Some file bundles were designed specifically to be referenced in their chapter on the language in Epps and Michael's (forthcoming) Amazonian Languages: An International Handbook.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 8 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4pm
  Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): Lessons from the Preservation of the Ashaninka Collection of Gerald Weiss.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm
  Round robin. Feel free to bring any data you'd like to talk through with the group!
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 10 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Organizational meeting. Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Erika Mayer (UMass Amherst): Likelihood, Predictability, and the Online Processing of Even.

Congratulations to Alice Shen (PhD 2020), who has accepted a position as a computational linguist at Grammarly!

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) archived a new collection related to his fieldwork with speakers of Yanesha' (Arawak; Peru) between 1977 and 1984. The collection consists of over 75 sound recordings of interviews, stories, myths, and songs, together with many photographs. Transcriptions and translations will be added at a later date.
• We released a new collection of recordings and field notes from the 2020-2021 graduate field methods on Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupian; Paraguay) taught by Lev Michael, with language consultants María Gómez and Irma Ovelar.
• We reorganized materials related to the 1983-1984 graduate field methods course on Hopi (Uto-Aztecan; Arizona) into a new collection. The class was taught by Leanne Hinton, with language consultants Roy Albert and Bob Namoki.
• Esther Ramer (PhD Ancient Greek & Roman Studies 2021) archived a sound recording (with transcription and translation) of a story, 'The Settling of MacDowell Lake,' told by Albert James, and transcribed and translated by Ivan Ramer.
• We digitized Yuen Ren Chao's (1967) lecture Dimensions of Fidelity in Translation, the 54th Annual Faculty Research Lecture, sponsored by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate and hosted by Chancellor Roger Heyns.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Round robin discussion: Summer developments, future research plans, and FForum plans for the semester
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 1 - Dwinelle 1226 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Round robin
  If interested in attending remotely, please email jnee@berkeley.edu for the Zoom link.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 3 - Zoom (p/w 294083) - 12-1pm
  Round robin. Feel free to bring any data you'd like to talk through with the group!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Aug 27
  Round robin in Amy Rose Deal's backyard (walking group leaves Dwinelle at 3:10, or email Becky at rjarvis@berkeley.edu for the address)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Erika Mayer (UMass Amherst): TBD

Congrats to Zachary O'Hagan, who became an associated member of the Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima, part of the research group Amazonía indígena contemporánea: Relaciones interétnicas, lenguas e historia with anthropologists Emanuele Fabiano and Joshua Homan.

Berkeley linguists have been engaged in many ways over the summer, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. We're happy to share the stories that were submitted to Calques during its summer hiatus:

• Isaac Bleaman received faculty fellowships from the Hellman Fellows Fund and the Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowships program. The title of his project is "Documenting the linguistic diversity of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors," and funds will support a postdoctoral researcher during 2021-2022. He also gave a public lecture (in Yiddish) at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research titled "Standardization in contemporary Yiddish: Case studies from Hasidic Jews and Yiddishists." A recording is available here.
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a talk titled "A'ingae syntax conditions the representation of glottalization" at the 28th Manchester Phonology Meeting; gave a lightning talk (presented a poster) titled "Complex left periphery in A'ingae" at the 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas; presented an asynchronous poster titled "Morphological domains and idiosyncrasies in A'ingae stress" at the phonological symposium of Amazônicas VIII; presented a poster co-authored with Roman Feiman titled "Evidence of accurate logical reasoning in online sentence comprehension" at the 47th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology; and published an article titled "A'ingae (Ecuador and Colombia) ― Language snapshot" in the journal Language Documentation and Description 20.
• Justin Davidson was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
• This summer, through the magic of Zoom, Amy Rose Deal shared work on Agree(ment) in three continents without leaving Berkeley -- a mini-course at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a tutorial (slides) at the McGill/UBC Move/Agree Forum (alongside a great talk on Agree by Tessa Scott), and an invited talk titled Without uninterpretability at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar.
• Karee Garvin, Katherine Russell, and Hannah Sande will present at the 5th American International Morphology Meeting, August 26-29. Their talk is entitled "There is no unified generative analysis of STAMP morphs."
• Jorge Hankamer (UCSC) and Line Mikkelsen are co-authors of a new article, "CP complements to D," published in Linguistic Inquiry. Read it here!
• In collaboration with Ivoirian linguistics student Timothée Kouadio, Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis have begun remote fieldwork on the Ebrié language, a highly understudied Kwa language of Côte d'Ivoire. They hope to travel to Côte d'Ivoire to work with the Ebrié community in person in the future.
• Myriam Lapierre's article "A phonological analysis of Panãra" has been accepted for publication at the International Journal of American Linguistics.
• Gabriella Licata (Romance Languages and Literatures) passed her QEs in May and had a paper accepted for publication at the Journal of Language and Discrimination entitled, "Sorry, not sorry. A critical and pragmatic analysis of Ted Yoho’s non-apology." She also had a Teacher's Perspective published in the L2 Journal, "A Raciolinguistic Perspective on the Structure of Language Programs and Departments," which will be presented at the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium in September.
• Julia Nee has spent the summer working for the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership at the Berkeley Haas school of business, where she's developing guidance for tech companies looking to use more inclusive language, particularly as they develop AI tools. Some of these resources will be publicly launched at an event in October, so stay tuned for more!
• Zachary O'Hagan spent time with linguist friends in San Diego, Hollister, Vic (Catalonia), and Berlin, where he was part of a widely acclaimed remake of Nimoy's (1987) Three Men and a Baby with two Berkeley alumni. In addition to managing the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, Zach reviewed two articles; co-organized the general session at AMAZONICAS VIII, presenting on Caquinte voice alternations at AMAZONICAS VIII (slides); published an academic obituary of anthropologist Gerald Weiss (Spanish version in press; English pre-print here); and participated in biweekly Salinan (isolate; California) language meetings. He spent time in the Bancroft Library creating new metadata for the Margaret Langdon [PhD 1966] Papers as part of the Survey's current NEH grant related to Yuman and Uto-Aztecan languages, and traveled to Carmichael and Reno to retrieve archival materials from anthropologist Allen Johnson (UCLA) and linguist Heather Hardy (UNR) related to Matsigenka (Arawak; Peru) and Tolkapaya Yavapai (Yuman; Arizona), respectively. He also received a grant from the Endangered Language Fund for a project titled "Documenting Omurano through Urarina Oral Narrative."
• Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD 1986) is a co-author, together with Michael Ellsworth and Collin F. Baker, of "FrameNet and Linguistic Typology," appearing in Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 61–66, June 10, 2021, Association for Computational Linguistics. She and Kyoko Ohara also organized a panel at the International Pragmatics Association (Winterthur, Switzerland & online, June 27- July 2, 2021), entitled "Interactional Frames and Language Resource Development." The two also contributed a paper to that panel entitled, "Interactional Frames in a Literary Work: Multiple Levels of Interaction."
• A paper by Hannah Sande and Taylor Miller (SUNY Oswego) was published in Languages in May: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/6/2/100
• Tessa Scott visited the highlands of Huehuetenango, Guatemala this summer to immersively learn Mam language and culture. Her research with co-author Henry Sales titled "The spell out of Mam subject enclitics" was accepted to be presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics VI (FAMLi 6) in Chiapas, Mexico this November. Their Mam language and culture classes at Laney College start Aug 28th for the Fall semester; it will be their 6th time teaching Mam together.
• Noah Usman presented the results of a remote speech study of Majhi Panjabi speakers at the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, under the title "Voicing Contrasts and Prosody in Majhi Panjabi," supervised by Keith Johnson and Emily Remirez. He also published the op-ed The Official Language: A Case for Structural Reform in the Summer 2021 issue of U-Lingua, the Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain (p.16). Since May, Usman has also served as Project Lead for the Jewish Languages Documentation and Revitalization Project at Wikitongues, and published the following articles for the American Pakistan Foundation based on the sociolinguistic issues involved: We Can't Take Urdu for Granted, and Linguistic Diversity in Pakistan.
• What If Babel Was Just a Myth?, a new film by Sandrine Loncke featuring Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016) and the Láàl-speaking community in Southern Chad, has been released. A trailer is available to watch here.

Congrats, all!

Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Madeline Bossi archived a new collection related to her work on Kipsigis and Tugen (Southern Nilotic; Kenya) with speakers Linus Kipkoech and Robert Langat (Kipsigis) and Nicholas Kipchumba Koech (Tugen). A major portion of the collection consists of video recordings of elicitation sessions conducted on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• José Armando Fernández Guerrero archived a new collection of recordings, transcriptions, and translations of stories in the Ja'a variety of Kumiay (Yuman; Mexico, US) told by Yolana Meza Calles (some on Zoom). The stories were published as Ja'a Kumiay: Jwañow Tipey Aam in the Survey's Publications in Language Maintenance and Reclamation, together with a coloring book, Tipey Aam Awilk Tañorj.
• Susan Steele archived a new collection of sound recordings of Luiseño (Uto-Aztecan; California) and Ichishkíin (Sahaptian; Pacific Northwest), together with over 2200 pages of field notes of Luiseño spanning the 1970s to '90s. Speakers Villiana Hyde (1903-1994, Luiseño) and Hazel Miller (c1917-1989, Ichishkíin) are featured.
• We released a new collection related to the 2017-2018 field methods course taught by Lev Michael on the San Juan Atitán variety of Mam, with speaker Henry Sales. (See here for a summary of the department's field methods classes since its inception.)
• Justin Spence (PhD 2013) added 185 new file bundles to the collection Materials of the Hupa Language Documentation Project (see 427-599, 1416-1429). The materials stem from a longtime collaboration with speaker Verdena Parker and others, and include sound recordings of elicitation sessions, (re-)transcription and translation of texts (many of them told by others and/or archived previously), discussions of cultural topics, and more.
• Larry Hyman and Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016) archived a new collection of recordings, field notes, and a draft lexicon of Teke (Bantu; Congo, Gabon) from their work in 2016 and 2018 with speaker Christophère Ngolele.
• Hannah Pritchett (MA 2009) archived a small new collection of recordings and photographs from an exploratory field trip in 2009 to work with speakers of Koho (Austroasiatic; Vietnam) and Chru (Austronesian; Vietnam).
• We digitized papers from a graduate seminar that Leanne Hinton taught on Aikanã (isolate; Brazil) in fall 1992 (here and here). The course was based on the documentary materials collected by Harvey Carlson (1954-1994, BA 1985), who received a President's Undergraduate Fellowship to do fieldwork in Brazil in 1984, facilitated by visiting professor Aryon Rodrigues (1925-2014), who had taught a course on South American indigenous languages in winter 1983.
• We digitized more of Series 1 and Series 2 of the Laura Buszard-Welcher Papers on the Potawatomi Language (Series 1: here and here; Series 2: here, here, here, and here), consisting of Buszard-Welcher's (PhD 2003) notes and Charles Hockett's transcriptions of Potawatomi (Algonquian; Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario) stories from the 1930s and '40s.
• We digitized three volumes of papers on indigenous languages of the Americas written at Harvard and collected by Karl Teeter (1929-2007, PhD 1962) during his early years there (here, here, and here). Authors include Berkeley linguists such as Robin Lakoff and Alan Timberlake, among others such as Ives Goddard and the late Michael Silverstein (1945-2020).

An article featuring Zachary O'Hagan and the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages appeared in Berkeley News in late May 2021, just after Calques went on summer break. Click here to read it!

The 10th World Congress of African Linguistics, hosted by Leiden University and taking place from June 7 to 12, 2021, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

• Karee Garvin, Katherine Russell, and Hannah Sande: "A typological survey of STAMP morphology in the Macro-Sudan Belt"
• Katherine Russell and Hannah Sande: "The interaction of tone, segmental auxiliaries, and word order in Guébie TAMP morphology"

Congrats, all!

The 14th annual conference of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM14), hosted by the University of Vilnius and taking place online from June 23 to 26, 2021, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

• Eve Sweetser, Schuyler Laparle, Kelly Jones, Daniel Getter, and Akash Kulgod: "Choosing source domains to guide metaphoric health reasoning"
• Schuyler Laparle: "Constructing metaphors in space: a microanalysis of political argumentation"

Congrats, all!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Commencement - Sunday May 16
  Congratulations to all of our graduates!
  • The Department of Linguistics commencement website goes live at 2pm (PST) on Sunday, May 16
    https://virtualgrad.marchingorder.com/berkeley/294/xxiv/
  • And a virtual reception for graduates will take place at 1pm (PST) on Monday, May 17
    https://gather.town/app/kNlyMBWglya61B3L/berkeleylx
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Tuesday May 18 - Zoom - 11am-12:30pm
  AFLA Practice Talks
  Emily Drummond: Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches.
  Tyler Lemon: Nominative agreement below TAM and negation in Uab Meto.
  Zach Wellstood: A free relative analysis of event existential constructions in Aklanon.

The 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25), hosted by Sogang University and taking place online from May 28 to 30, 2021, will feature presentations by the following Berkeley linguists:

• Katherine Russell: "Progressive nasalization in Paraguayan Guarani: Interactions with loanword morphophonology"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Complex left periphery in A'ingae"