News

Susan Steele, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during 2018-19, has published a new book, The Table (Big Hat Press), "a memoir of the stages and changes in the life of the marriage between two academics." Click here for more information and to order the book.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Phorum - Friday Sep 24 - Zoom (online only) - 12-1pm
  AMP2021 practice talks
  - Francesco Burroni (Cornell), Raksit T. Lau-Preechathammarach (UC Berkeley), and Sireemas Maspong (Cornell): Unifying Initial Geminates and fortis stops via laryngeal specification: Three case studies from Pattani Malay, Salentino, and Dunan
  - Katie Russell: Nasal harmony and interactions with lexical strata in Paraguayan Guaraní
  - Maksymilian Dąbkowski: Prosody drives Paraguayan Guaraní suffix order
• Phorum - Friday Oct 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm
  Yevgeniy Melguy (UC Berkeley): Mechanisms of listener adaptation in perceptual learning for speech.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Oct 1 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Practice NWAV talks.
  Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Jack Martin (William & Mary): 85 Years after Haas: Collaborative Documentation of Muskogee (Creek) Oral History.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 4-5pm
  Language revitalization materials show-and-tell! Bring any language revitalization materials that you've been working on, that you've used in the past, or that you are inspired by. We will have a round-robin-style show-and-tell along with time for discussion. We'll ask everyone to briefly describe their material, what they liked about it, and what they didn't particularly like or would like feedback on.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 12-1pm
  Jon Rawski (SJSU): Abductive learning of phonotactic constraints.
• Phorum - Friday Sep 24 - Zoom (online only) - 12-1pm
  AMP2021 practice talks
  Katie Russell: Nasal harmony and interactions with lexical strata in Paraguayan Guaraní
  Maksymilian Dąbkowski: Prosody drives Paraguayan Guaraní suffix order
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Discussion of Holliday & Squires 2021. Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): The logic of agreement: Movement, morphology, and composite probes.

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.