News

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Annual Departmental Fall Meeting - Monday August 24 - Zoom - 3pm

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:

• Andrew Cheng filed his dissertation, "Accent and Ideology among Bilingual Korean Americans" and accepted a one-year postdoctoral position at the Department of Language Science at UC Irvine. He will be working with Dr. Judith Kroll and Dr. Gregory Scontras on heritage bilingualism research and teaching a few courses in phonetics and sociolinguistics. In addition, he is excited to announce two organized symposia, one on language contact and change in Asian American/Asian Canadian communities, and the other on Asian representation and identity in the field of linguistics and in academe, both of which he will be moderating at the upcoming LSA meeting in (maybe virtual) San Francisco.
• Julia Nee wrote Calques to share:
  This summer, I spent a lot of time thinking my teaching approaches. I re-designed Ling 155 (building on Rich Rhodes's syllabus and assisted greatly by Emily Remirez) to be based on learning objectives and following principles for equitable grading. If you'd like to learn more about that you can check out this best practices for assessment summary from the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program that features some of my course materials, or just ask me about it! I also participated in a panel discussion on the topic, which you can see here. In other fun news, a group of Cal linguists (me, Andrew Garrett, Martha Schwarz, Allegra Robertson, Meg Cychosz, and Amalia Skilton) completed an 80.1 mile relay run over 7 (socially distanced!) days to raise over $3000 for COVID-19 relief.
• Zachary O'Hagan was part of a virtual panel Archiving and Language Documentation for ABRALIN ao Vivo, with Ana Paula Brandão (U. Federal do Pará), Pattie Epps (UT), Susan Kung (UT), Denny Moore (Museo Goeldi), and Jorge Rosés Labrada (Alberta).
• Emily Remirez wrote Calques to share:
  This summer I collaborated with Julia Nee to teach Linguistics 155AC, including adapting a mixed methods, term-long research project for the remote, short summer term. Students were invited to reflect on their own experiences with language, linguistic discrimination, and other concepts from class. I am very proud of their projects! I also continued to work with Keith on writing a Python library implementing the Generalized Context Model for speech perception and presented on this work as a guest lecture for Andrew C and Geoff's Linguistic Data class. Outside of work, I stepped out of my comfort zone and launched an art-thing called third ear prints, and started taking pet portrait commissions!
• Isaac Bleaman's article "Implicit standardization in a minority language community: Real-time syntactic change among Hasidic Yiddish writers" has appeared in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
• Amy Rose Deal received word that her book A theory of indexical shift will be published in October!
• Susanne Gahl gave a talk at a LabPhon satellite workshop, "Us(e)Phon: Usage-based Approaches to Phonological Change," in July. The title of her talk was, "Which age-related changes in pronunciation are lexical? And why don't we already know?"
• Terry Regier wrote to share the news of two publications and one presentation:
  - Yang Xu, Emmy Liu, and Terry Regier. "Numeral systems across languages support efficient communication: From approximate numerosity to recursion." Open Mind. (This elaborates and extends an earlier conference paper of the same name.)
  - Francis Mollica, Geoff Bacon, Yang Xu, Terry Regier, and Charles Kemp. "Grammatical marking and the tradeoff between code length and informativeness." In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
  - Sonnet Phelps, Amit Millo, Kevin Holmes, and Terry Regier. "Categorical perception as inference under uncertainty: New evidence from color." Poster presentation at the (virtual) 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Leanne Hinton wrote with an update on the Breath of Life Institute:
  As usual, we (the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, plus Andrew and myself) started planning early in the year for our biennial Breath of Life Archival Institute for California Indian Languages (BOL). But by April it was clear we’d have to put it off – as of now, that would be to June 2021. But instead we held a series of six Saturday morning sessions on Zoom for everyone who had applied, made all the digital archival materials for the attending language groups available for the groups to research or download, had videos and live discussion by Kayla Begay (PhD 2017) and Crystal Richardson on linguistics, and a memorable panel by Stan Rodriguez and Loren Bommelyn. Participant projects were presented on the last day. One benefit of the virtual venue is that some of the Linguists who were experts on participating languages who lived as far away as Hawai’i or the East Coast, would not have been able to come in person, but were now able to work virtually as linguistic partners with the language teams. Many thanks to the staff at the Bancroft Library and to SCOIL, for their help in making this event work for everyone!
• Ernesto Gutiérrez Topete and Annie Helms presented talks at the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), hosted by UT Austin, which was entirely online this year. Ernesto's talk was titled "Frequency and efficiency in Spanish fixed expressions" and Annie's talk was titled "Sociophonetic variability in the production of Spanish /e/ by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Barcelona."
• Mairi McLaughlin shared the news that Michael Arrigo (RLL, Linguistics track) filed his dissertation entitled "Rumor Has It: The Press Conditional in French and Spanish" in August. His committee members were Professor Mairi McLaughlin (Chair), Professor Andrew Garrett, and Professor Richard Kern. Mike is now a lecturer in the French Department at UC Berkeley.
• Beth Piatote was invited to write a short story for the SF Chronicle series "The Throughline" about life after COVID-19. Her theme was "rewriting the rules," and here is her take on it!
• Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD 1986) wrote to share two new publications — one paper and one edited proceedings volume:
  - Ronen Tamari, Chen Shani, Tom Hope, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Omri Abend, and Dafna Shahaf. "Language (Re)modelling: Towards Embodied Language Understanding." In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
  - Tiago T. Torrent, Collin F. Baker, Oliver Czulo, Kyoko Ohara, and Miriam R. L. Petruck (eds.). Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet.
• At the end of June, Paula Floro retired as Department Manager after almost 24 years at Berkeley Linguistics. At the same time, Paula started a new "full-time, lifetime job": helping to raise her first grandchild, Arabella!
  
  

Semantics and Linguistic Theory 30, hosted virtually by Cornell this year, has been taking place this week and has featured the following talks by department members and alumni:

• Prerna Nadathur: Causality and aspect in ability, actuality, and implicativity
• Scott AnderBois and Maksymilian Dąbkowski (first year grad student!): A'ingae =sa'ne APPR and the semantic typology of apprehensional adjuncts
• Nicholas Fleisher (PhD 2008): Unconcealed Questions
• Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010): Embedded presents and the structure of narratives

Congrats all!

The program for Sinn und Bedeutung 25, co-hosted virtually by University College London and Queen Mary University of London, has now been posted, and Berkeley will be represented by:

• Madeline Bossi, "N-effects are not-P-effects: Pronoun competition in Scottish Gaelic," abstract, project page
• Schuyler Laparle, "Multi-modal QUD management: case studies of topic-shifting," abstract, project page

The conference will be held September 1-9, and you can find information about how to attend for free here. Note that the Bossi talk will be asynchronous and the Laparle talk will be synchronous.

Congrats, Maddy and Schuyler!

Congratulations to Drs. Cheng, Cychosz, Dawson, and Shen who have recently completed their dissertations!

• Andrew Cheng: "Accent and ideology among bilingual Korean Americans”
  Andrew will be starting in a post-doctoral research position at UC Irvine in September.
• Meg Cychosz: "Phonetic development in an agglutinating language"
  Meg started a post-doctoral research position at the University of Maryland in August.
• Virginia Dawson: "Existential quantification in Tiwa: disjunction and indefinites"
  Ginny is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University.
• Alice Shen: "Costs and cues in the auditory comprehension of code-switching"
  Alice spent the summer working at Facebook and will be teaching at Reed College during 2020-21.

The dissertations are all available on our departmental website.

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Emily Drummond has archived a new collection of materials on Nukuoro (Polynesian, Micronesia). This is a diverse set of 125 file bundles beginning in 2015 and including audio recordings of elicitation sessions, oral narratives, and conversational texts; field notes; transcriptions; and photos and videos documenting cultural and other practices. The primary speaker contributors are Mina Lekka, Johnny (Soni) Rudolph & Ruth (Analidele) Rudolph, with many others.
• Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016), now a faculty member at Princeton, has archived a new collection of materials on Cèmuhî, Nemi, and Paicî (Kanak, New Caledonia). This is a collaboration with consultants Anna Gonari, Hélène Nimbaye, Moïse Pwaili, Michel Tutugoro, Jean-Claude Vaiadimoin, and Aman. The collection includes sound recordings and associated ELAN/TextGrid files of phonological elicitation on tone and coarticulation, and for measurements of oral and nasal airflow.
• We released linguistic materials on Cupeño (Uto-Aztecan, California), made by Berkeley alum (BA 1960) and anthropologist Jane Hill (1939-2018) in collaboration with speakers Roscinda Nolasquez, Frances Bosley, James Brittian & Venturo Leir, primarily during fieldwork from 1962 to 1964 for Hill's PhD dissertation A Grammar of the Cupeño Language (UCLA 1966). Divided into five series, the core of the collection is 11 scanned notebooks filled with elicitation on grammar and vocabulary and with transcriptions of texts, alongside 11 digitized reel-to-reel tapes. Some of the recordings were copied to cassettes that accompanied Hill & Nolasquez's (1973) Mulu'wetam: The First People: Cupeño Culture, Mythology, and Cupeño Language Dictionary.
• We released a new collection of materials on Falam Chin (Kuki-Chin, Myanmar), from the 2007-2008 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Ni Luai Thang, the instructor was Alice Gaby, and students were Amy Campbell, David Kamholz, Dominic Yu, Heather Todd, Justin Spence, Michael Ellsworth, Ramón Escamilla & Russell Rhodes.
• We released a new collection of materials on Garifuna (Arawakan; Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua), from the 2011-2012 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Dr. Philip Timothy Palacio, the instructor was Lev Michael, and students were alums Chundra Cathcart, I-hsuan Chen, Emily Cibelli, Shinae Kang, Eric Prendergast, Christine Sheil, Tammy Stark & Elise Stickles.
• We released a new collection of materials on Turkmen (Turkic; Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), from the 2013-2014 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Nazik Aytjanova, the instructor was Dasha Kavitskaya, and students were Sarah Bakst, Antony D'Avirro, Matt Goss, Herman Leung, Auburn Lutzross, Jonathan Manker, Orchid Pusey & Katie Sardinha.
• We released new collections of materials on San Pedro Necta Mam & Todos Santos Cuchumatán Mam (Mayan, Guatemala), from the 2018-2019 graduate field methods course. The consultants were Wendy Ruiz (San Pedro Necta) & Brenda Calmo Jerónimo, Gerardo Gerónimo Lorenzo & Rudy Pablo (Todos Santos), the instructor was Lev Michael, and students were Martha Schwarz, Schuyler Laparle, Tyler Lemon & Wesley dos Santos.

The Faculty of the Berkeley Linguistics Department issued a statement on the George Floyd killing.

https://lx.berkeley.edu/statement-george-floyd-killing

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday June 17 - Zoom - 2pm
  Anaruth Hernández: Language Revitalization Matters: Exploring the loss of a language.

In connection with the campus celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University of California, the linguistics department has made a web page honoring some of the many women who have contributed to our work over the last 120 years:

https://lx.berkeley.edu/women-berkeley-linguistics

This may expand or evolve in the coming days and months. The committee that put the page together (Madeline Bossi, Margaret Cychosz, Andrew Garrett, Zachary O'Hagan, Emily Remirez, and Tessa Scott) is very grateful to the many contributors who wrote thoughtfully and shared pictures.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday June 10 - Zoom - 2pm

In response to the presumed COVID-19-related death of one of the last speakers of Omagua, Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima, on May 10 in Iquitos, Peru, Zach O'Hagan was interviewed by freelance journalist Barbara Fraser for a piece in the New Humanitarian (English) about the role of the Catholic church in the local health response and the effects on indigenous people. He was also interviewed by Juan Francisco Ugarte of Salud con Lupa for a series of obituaries -- one for doña Amelia (Spanish) -- that outlet is doing in response to COVID-19. Zach wrote an obituary for Amelia of his own (Spanish & English) and a reflection on the perseverance of Omagua people since 1542 (Spanish).

On June 2, Leslie Francesca Hyman married Matthew Cascardi, son of Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts and Humanities, in an intimate and joyful Zoom ceremony, courtesy of Oakland City Hall. As Larry has been saying all along, "I'm not losing a daughter, I'm gaining a dean!"

Congratulations to the happy couple and their families!

Congratulations to our colleagues Zack Bekowies and Mairi McLaughlin on the publication of their chapter in a new edited volume available from Oxford University Press:

Bekowies, Zack, and Mairi McLaughlin. 2020. "The Loss of Clitic Climbing in French: A Gallo-Romance Perspective," in Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar, ed. by Sam Wolfe and Martin Maiden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Congratulations to Nina and Gašper Beguš on the birth of their son Emil!

Our alum Jenny Lederer (PhD, 2009) has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of English Language and Literature at San Francisco State University. Congratulations, Jenny!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday May 27 - Zoom - 2pm

Very recent PhD graduate Virginia Dawson will be giving a (remote) talk at the NYU Semantics Group this Friday, May 22, at 10:30 am Pacific. The title of her talk is "Deriving obligatory narrow scope disjunction." Please email Ginny for the Zoom link.

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Teresa McFarland (PhD 2009) has archived a new collection of field notes, sound recordings, and photographs related to Filomeno Mata Totonac (Totonac-Tepehuan; Veracruz, Mexico), from dissertation fieldwork spanning 2003 to 2009, with additional interviews done by Berkeley undergrads in 2015. We digitized 95 minidiscs (about 135GB), which document a rich research project on many aspects of phonology and morphosyntax, alongside many texts. Each file bundle represents a day, and includes page number references to the field notes and indications of transcriptions of texts.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Zoom Phonology - Tuesday May 19 - Zoom (email Karee Garvin) - 12pm
  Caitlin Smith (Johns Hopkins University) and Charlie O'Hara (USC): Learnability of derivationally opaque processes in the Gestural Harmony Model.

We are delighted to announce that Gašper Beguš will be joining Berkeley Linguistics next year!

He writes to say: "I'm absolutely thrilled to join such a wonderful department, meet all the people, and start my research and teaching at Berkeley. Nina is super excited for her CSTMS and Rhetorics appointments as well."

He'll be working remotely in fall 2020 (advising, lab building, and committee service) and then move here to begin teaching in January 2021.