News

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  James Kari (Alaska Fairbanks): "Features of the Lower Tanana Dene Dictionary (to appear in 2023) and Geolinguistic Evidence of Dene/Ahtna Presence at High Water Levels of Glacial Lake Atna."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 370 - 4-5pm
  DE Welcome Back and Info night: Snacks and sharing about the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization; welcoming back DE students, hearing about projects, and encouraging new students to apply.
• Phorum - Friday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Allegra Robertson (UC Berkeley): "Rough around the edges: Representing root-edge laryngeal features in Yánesha’."
• Phorum - Friday Oct 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Annual Meeting on Phonology practice talks (Katie Russell, Gašper Beguš, Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Mia Gong (UC Santa Cruz): "A/A' operations at the clausal periphery: Agree, movement, and the interpretation of chains" (work in progress).
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Caitie Coons (UT Austin): "Toward inclusive linguistic typology: What understudied signed languages contribute."

On Tuesday, October 18, from 3 to 4pm, Linguistics graduate students and faculty will be representing the Berkeley Linguistics graduate program at the annual Graduate Diversity Admissions Fair. Please spread the word and encourage prospective graduate applicants to sign up for the admissions fair. It is entirely on Zoom. If you are a current graduate student and interested in taking part, please email Susanne Gahl or Line Mikkelsen.

Congratulations to Mingyu Yuan, who has been accepted into the Graduate Designated Emphasis in Cognitive Science!

Affiliated faculty member Mairi McLaughlin just had an article published in a special edition of META that brings together articles on "Exploring New Methods in Quantitative Translation Studies." Mairi's article is called "La traductologie de corpus et la traduction journalistique historique," or "Corpus-based translation studies and historical news translation." Congrats, Mairi!

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Alexandra Pfiffner (UC Berkeley): "Features, cues, and phonological contrast: A look at plosive voicing in Afrikaans."
• Undergraduate thesis practice talks - Thursday Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11:10am-12pm
  - Jasper Talwani: "Argument indexing in lajltayki- / tsome / Highland Chontal"
  - Chelsea Tang: "A description and theoretical analysis of Lobi STAMP morphs"
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-5pm
  Rebecca Jarvis, Julianne Kapner, and Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley): "Shared Experiences: A discussion of collaboration in fieldwork."
• Phorum - Friday Sept 30 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Noah Hermalin (UC Berkeley): "An introduction to phonographic writing systems."
• Phorum - Friday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Allegra Robertson (UC Berkeley): "Rough around the edges: Representing root-edge laryngeal features in Yánesha’."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Oct 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Practice NWAV talks:
  - Gabriella Licata: "From implicit to explicit bias: Assessing generational attitude changes towards US Spanish translanguaging repertoires"
  - Isaac Bleaman and Rhea Kommerell: "Detecting the envelope of variation using computational language models"
• 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."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Mia Gong (UC Santa Cruz): TBA.

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.