News

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 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.