News

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• *dhworom - Friday Oct 2 - Zoom - 12-1pm
  We will be reading on alignment change within the Polynesian language family. Visit the *dhworom website for this semester's reading list.
  Please email Edwin Ko for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 30 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Larry Hyman (UC Berkeley): How far can you get with one language consultant? The case of noun reduplication in Runyankore.
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 30 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  Sumittra Suraratdecha (Mahidol University) will be presenting her work in language revitalization and reclamation in Thailand. Cosponsored by the Center for Race and Gender and the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies.
• Phonetics and Phonology Forum - Friday Oct 2 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Topic TBD. (Meeting might not take place.)
  Email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 2 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Lev Michael (UC Berkeley): TBA
• Zoom Phonology - Thursday Oct 1 - Zoom - 9-10am
  

  Florian Lionnet (Princeton; PhD 2016): ATR harmony in Kulaale.
  For the Zoom link and to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 23 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Katherine Russell (UC Berkeley): TBA.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Sep 22 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Practice presentations for the 49th meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO). Aurora Martinez Kane (UC Berkeley): "The unmarked emerges: An OT analysis of paragogue in traditional New Mexican Spanish" Ben Papadopoulos (UC Berkeley): "Latinx and the decolonization of Spanish" Please email Annie Helms for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Phonetics and Phonology Forum
  

  Friday Sep 18: No meeting (Annual Meeting on Phonology hosted by UC Santa Cruz)
  Friday Sep 25 - 3-4pm: Hossep Dolatian (Stony Brook University): Head-based bracketing paradoxes in Armenian compounds.
  Email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 25 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Lisa Hofmann (UCSC): TBA
  More information will be provided on the SSCircle website and in an email sent out to the mailing list. Please email Tyler Lemon or Maddy Bossi to be added to the mailing list!

Gašper Beguš will be giving a talk at the CompLang group at MIT on Tuesday, September 22, at 5pm EDT (2pm Pacific) over Zoom (p/w "Language"). Here is the title and abstract:

Modeling Language with Generative Adversarial Networks

In this talk, I argue that speech acquisition can be modeled with deep convolutional networks within the Generative Adversarial Networks framework. A proposed technique for retrieving internal representations that are phonetically or phonologically meaningful (Beguš 2020) allows us to model several processes in speech and compare outputs of the models both behaviorally as well as in terms of representation learning. The networks not only represent phonetic units with discretized representations (resembling the phonemic level), but also learn to encode phonological processes (resembling rule-like computation). I further propose an extension of the GAN architecture in which learning of meaningful linguistic units emerges from a requirement that the networks output informative data. I briefly present five case studies (allophonic learning, lexical learning, reduplication, iterative learning, and artificial grammar experiments) and argue that correspondence between single latent variables and meaningful linguistic content emerges. The key strategy to elicit the underlying linguistic values of latent variables is to manipulate them well outside of the training range; this allows us to actively force desired features in the output and test what types of dependencies deep convolutional networks can and cannot learn.

The advantage of this proposal is that speech acquisition is modeled in an unsupervised manner from raw acoustic data and that deep convolutional networks output not replicated, but innovative data. These innovative outputs are structured, linguistically interpretable, and highly informative. Training networks on speech data thus not only informs models of language acquisition, but also provides insights into how deep convolutional networks learn internal representations. I will also make a case that higher levels of representation such as morphology, syntax and lexical semantics can be modeled from raw acoustic data with this approach and outline directions for further experiments.

We received word this week that both Susanne Gahl and Lev Michael have been promoted to Full Professor!

Congratulations on this recognition of your excellence, and of your scholarly impact!

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• We released a new collection of materials on Imbabura Quichua (Quechuan; Ecuador), from the 2009-2010 graduate field methods course. The consultants were Mariana Chuquín and Augusto Oyagata, the instructor was Lev Michael, and students were alums Will Chang, Jessica Cleary-Kemp, Clara Cohen, Stephanie Farmer, Melinda Fricke, Laura Kassner, Roger Kroeger, Iksoo Kwon, Joshua Marker, Tom Recht, John Sylak-Glassman & Elisabeth Wehling.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 16 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): Audience and authorship in the Moro Grammar project.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Sep 15 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Discussion of Hawkey 2019. Please email Annie Helms for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Phonetics and Phonology Forum - Friday Sep 11 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft; PhD 2018): First-last harmony or outward-looking allomorphy in Cilungu grammatical tone.
  Please email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the Phorum mailing list.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 11 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Bonnie Krejci (Stanford): Variable unaccusative/unergative behavior in Russian (and beyond).
  More information is provided on the SSCircle website and in an email sent out to the mailing list. Please email Tyler Lemon or Maddy Bossi to be added to the mailing list!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 18 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin

• Zoom Phonology - Thursday Sep 17 - Zoom - 9-10am
  AMP Practice Posters. For the Zoom link and/or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact karee_garvin@berkeley.edu.Myriam Lapierre (UC Berkeley): Two types of [NT]s in Panãra: Evidence from production and perception.
  This talk provides articulatory and perceptual phonetic data on Panãra (ISO code: kre), a Northern Jê language of Central Brazil, supporting the existence of a previously undocumented phonological distinction. Maddieson & Ladefoged (1993) note that, while partially nasalized stops are sometimes described as post-oralized nasals and sometimes as pre-nasalized stops, they should have the same phonological representation. Panãra exhibits a distinction between exactly these two types of [NT] sequences, which arise from two distinct phonological processes. The data here is analyzed within the framework of Q Theory, a model of representational phonology which decomposes the segment (Q) subsegments (q q q), providing the level of granularity necessary to distinguish between post-oralized nasals and pre-nasalized stops.
  
  Richard Bibbs (UC Santa Cruz): Align-driven clitic movement in Chamorro.
  Prosodically dependent material, or clitics, often have limited distributional patterns subject to positional constraints, such as being unable to occur sentence-initially. Often clitic placement is accounted for syntactically. However, in several languages the position of clitics has been shown to be the result of prosodic factors. Previous work shows the interaction of Match–Theoretic mapping constraints and prosodic well-formedness constraints correctly captures rightward prosodic movement of clitics in Irish; however the use of Match–Theoretic mapping constraints is shown to be insufficient for clitic placement in Chamorro. Instead, alignment mapping constraints, alongside prosodic well-formedness constraints, are required to motivate leftward movement of clitics in Chamorro and correctly capture their linear position.

Congratulations (again!) to Larry Hyman, whose chapter "In search of prosodic domains in Lusoga" has appeared in the (open access) book Syntactic architecture and its consequences, vol. 1: Syntax inside the grammar (2020), edited by András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas, and Sten Vikner.

Congratulations to Larry Hyman, whose chapter "Possessive tone in Tswefap (Bamileke): Paradigmatic or derivational?" has appeared in African Languages in Time and Space: A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Akinbiyi Akinlabi (2020), edited by Eno-Abasi Urua, Francis Egbokhare, Oluseye Adesola, and Harrison Adeniyi.

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Larry Hyman and Thera Marie Crane (PhD 2011), now at the University of Helsinki, archived a new collection of sound recordings and field notes on Nzadi (Bantu, Democratic Republic of the Congo), from the fall 2008 undergraduate field methods course and a study group the following term. Simon Nsielanga Tukumu, a Jesuit priest then working toward an MA at the Graduate Theological Union, was the consultant, and the students in the class were Christina Agoff, Ian Coffman, Chad Hegelmeyer, John Keesling, José María Lahoz, Dillon Mee, Getty Ritter, Massoud Toofan, Salgu Wissmath, and Lue Yee Tsang. They also published a grammar in 2011! The project was featured in SFGate at the time.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

Bernat Bardagil gave an invited talk this week (September 3) at the Prosódia & Bilinguismo symposium, organized online by the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil, with the title "A esquerda da oração nas línguas Jê: estrutura prosódica e sintática."

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Sep 2 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Welcome (back) meeting: Join us via Zoom to catch up on summer developments. All are welcome!
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Sep 2 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
  The Language Revitalization Working Group (along with the Center for Race and Gender and the Center for Latin American Studies) will be hosting Henry Sales on Wednesday, September 2 from 4:10-5:00 PST. (Se presenta esta charla en inglés con interpretación al español.) Henry Sales is a native Mam speaker from San Juan Atitán, Guatemala, who works in Oakland as an activist, teacher, interpreter, volunteer, and advocate for mistreated and underrepresented Mayan populations. He will speak about his work teaching Mam classes at Laney College and Oakland High, and the many ways in which he works to preserve and celebrate Mayan language, traditions, and community in the Bay Area. For a Zoom link to join the meeting, please email jnee@berkeley.edu.
  [flyer in English] [flyer in Spanish]
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Sep 1 - Zoom (email Annie Helms) - 3-4pm
  The group will be selecting papers to read during the Fall semester.
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Sep 2 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Welcome meeting and discussion of Rosa & Flores 2017. Please email Isaac Bleaman for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB email list.
• *dhworom - Friday Sep 4 - Zoom - 12-1pm
  Edwin Ko will be organizing *dhworom, a historical linguistics reading group, which will be meeting biweekly Fridays 12-1pm this coming semester via Zoom. The focus of the group this fall will be on historical (morpho)syntax with special attention to the following topics: (a) change in morphosyntactic alignment, (b) grammaticalization, and (c) contact-induced (morpho)syntactic changes. The first meeting will be on Friday, September 4, 12-1pm. If you are interested in attending any or all of the meetings, please send Edwin an email at eddersko@berkeley.edu and he will add you to the mailing list.

Ruth Rouvier has just received a NFMLTA/NCOLCTL Dissertation Research Support Grant (the abbreviations stand for the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages). Congratulations, Ruth! Information about the grant program is available here.

Congrats to Bernat Bardagil, who gave a talk this week at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea on "The loss of Jê nominal verbs in Panará"!