All News
May 10, 2021
The Linguistic Society of America has just announced the following news related to Geoffrey Nunberg, who passed away last year:
The LSA is honored to be the recipient of a major bequest from the estate of the late LSA member Geoff Nunberg (1945-2020). The bequest was made to the LSA's General Fund, and will be used to support the basic mission of the Society: to advance the scientific study of language and its applications. We thank him for his generosity in remembering the LSA in his estate planning.
Geoff first joined the LSA in 1970, eventually becoming a Life Member. He was the recipient of the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public Award in 2001, and an annual contributor to the LSA's Leadership Circle donor program.
Geoff was an adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. Until 2001, he was a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, working on the development of linguistic technologies. He also taught at UCLA, the University of Rome, and the University of Naples.
Learn more about the LSA's planned giving program here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/donate/planned-giving
Read the In Memoriam notice published by the LSA last year.
May 9, 2021
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
- We have updated our Languages of California page(s), thanks to the efforts over the course of this semester of Allegra Robertson, who is finishing a semester as Graduate Student Researcher in the archive. In this role Allegra has been instrumental in cataloguing and making publicly available collections related to Kawaiisu (Uto-Aztecan; California), Kiliwa (Yuman; Baja California), Lulamogi (Bantu; Uganda), Sereer (Senegambian; Senegal, The Gambia), and Tswefap (Grassfields; Cameroon), and in preparing other forthcoming collections related to Abo (Bantu; Cameroon) and Totela (Bantu; Zambia, Namibia).
- On Monday and Tuesday of this week, 10 boxes of papers related to Gerald Weiss's study of Ashaninka (Arawak; Peru, Brazil) language and culture arrived at the Survey, in addition to some 75 tape recordings spanning the early 1960s to 1980 brought back by Zachary O'Hagan from Boca Raton last week. In addition to field diaries and lexical file slips, the papers include everything from notes on cosmology to transcriptions of recordings to detailed identification of biological specimens, alongside some 5000 slides and photographs. Here is an example of the good quality of one of the tapes, a song sung by an Ashaninka woman named Rosa circa 1963.
May 6, 2021
On Tuesday, May 4, this year's Linguistics Research Apprentice Program wrapped up with a Zoom meeting where mentors and apprentices spoke about the projects.
This year's cohort includes 7 graduate mentors with 8 projects: Wesley dos Santos, Emily Drummond, Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach, Schuyler Laparle, Ben Papadopoulos, Tessa Scott, and Eric Wilbanks. There were 29 undergraduate Apprentices: Kabini Achrekar, Margaret Asperheim, Cooper Bedin, Miranda Cheung, Char Juin Chin, Jesus Eduardo Durante, Julie Duran, Chandler Fliege, Kat Huynh, Matthew Ji, Samba Kane, Anjali Kantharuban, Jenkin Leung, Molly Pinder, Sophia Stremel, Nina Sirna, Lauren Szeto, Chelsea Tang, Tran, Melody, Xingyue Tu, Jay Eduardo Urbano Gonzales, Stacey Vu, Irene Yi, Crystal Wang, and Ivori White. Irene appears to be the winner of the "apprentice on most projects" prize, and Sophia gets the "longest work on one project" prize. A meeting screenshot is below and more information about the projects can be found here.
May 5, 2021
Congrats to Ana Lívia Agostinho and Larry Hyman on the publication of their article "Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?" in Probus! The article has just appeared online.
Congrats to Isaac Bleaman and Dan Duncan (Newcastle University) on the publication of their article "The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the proposition that all tense /æ/s are created equal" in American Speech. Read it here!
May 3, 2021
A number of Berkeley linguists will be presenting at Amazônicas VIII, taking place online from May 31 to June 4. The full program is available here.
- Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "The morphophonology of A'ingae lexical stress"
- Myriam Lapierre: "A previously unattested weight scale in Panãra: CVC >> CVː, CV"
- Wesley Nascimento dos Santos: "Alignment change in Tupi-Guarani: The development of nominative in Kawahiva"
- Stephanie Farmer, Rosa Vallejos & Martine Bruil: "A comparative study of the morphosyntax of Western Tukanoan noun classifiers"
- Zachary O'Hagan: "Caquinte voice alternations and cumulative exponence"
Congrats, all!
Alejandro Granados Vargas (BA 2013) was admitted into the PhD program in Education, with an emphasis on Human Development in Context, at UC Irvine. His research area will be in bilingual language development in language impaired children. Congratulations, Alejandro!
April 30, 2021
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Honors Colloquium - Monday May 3 - Zoom - 3-5pm
Presentations by Teela Huff, Sophia Stremel, Stacey Vu, Irene Yi, and Kevin Yu. - Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
Melissa Campobasso: Hearts Gathered Waterfall School: A Salish Montessori Immersion School. - Phorum - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Yuni Kim (University of Essex; PhD 2008): Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone. - Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Peer-editing NWAV abstracts. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Pied-piping by Cyclic Agree. In defense of feature percolation. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Monday May 3 - Zoom - 2-3pm
Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley): English non-manner how-clauses as answers to deficient questions (SALT practice talk). - Zoom Phonology - Wednesday May 5 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Katie Franich (Delaware): Syllabification of N in NC 'prenasalized' sequences in Medʉmba.
For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.
April 29, 2021
The Linguistics Department Honors Colloquium will take place on Monday, May 3, from 3 to 5 PM. The Zoom access code is 966 0052 6874.
The following students will present:
Teela Huff
Thesis title: LAMA: A Simple Tool for Sharing Audio-Linked Lexical Data
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Larry Hyman (Reader)
Sophia Stremel
Thesis title: The Syntax of English Parentheticals: An Adjunction Analysis
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Peter Jenks (Reader)
Stacey Vu
Thesis title: The Phonetics of Iquito Tone
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Chris Beier (Reader)
Irene Yi
Thesis title: "Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Mandarin 然后用中文完成": Towards Sociolinguistically-Aware Computational Models of Codeswitching Using Classification and Regression Trees (CART)
Prof. Gasper Begus and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Faculty Co-Advisors)
Kevin Yu
Thesis title: Pragmatic Influences on Argument Word Order in Karuk Narrative Texts
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Eve Sweetser and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Readers)
Format: Each student will have 15 minutes to present and 5 for questions.
April 28, 2021
Isaac Bleaman will be giving an invited research talk (in English) and leading a workshop (in Yiddish) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 2-3, as part of a graduate research seminar on "The Yiddish Object." The title of his lecture is The Yiddish sentence: Social meaning reflected in grammatical variation and it is open to the public. The title of his workshop is Borokhovs yidishe filologye un di legitimkayt fun der yidisher shprakh 'Borokhov's Yiddish philology and the legitimacy of the Yiddish language.'
April 27, 2021
This Saturday at LSRL 51 (Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages), Mairi McLaughlin (French) and Justin Davidson (Spanish and Portuguese) will be presenting a joint paper entitled "Translator style as a sociolinguistic variable: Variation in news translation from English to Romance."
April 26, 2021
Supplementing last week's list of updates from our graduating seniors, we've received the following news:
- Cecelia Di Mino, who graduated in December 2019, will be starting an Ed.M. this fall at the Harvard School of Education, studying 'Human Development and Education.'
April 25, 2021
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
- Zachary O'Hagan is in Boca Raton, Florida (April 29-May 3) to inventory and retrieve portions of a large linguistic and ethnographic archival collection deriving from the fieldwork of anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1932-2021), who worked in Ashaninka (Arawak; Peru) communities beginning in 1961.
- Uriel Weinreich's (1966) lecture Current Questions in Semantic Theory, delivered at Berkeley the year before his death, is now available as part of the ongoing digitization of the Linguistics Lecture collection. The collection consists of over 140 lectures given primarily as part of departmental colloquia between 1960 and 1985.
- We released a new collection of materials on Sereer (Senegambian; Senegal, The Gambia), from the 2012-2013 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Malick Loum, the instructor was Peter Jenks, and students were Nico Baier, Kayla Begay, Oana David, Erin Donnelly, Matthew Faytak, Jevon Heath, Jack Merrill, Kelsey Neely, Melanie Redeye, and Vivian Wauters.
- We released a new collection of materials on Shanenawa (Panoan; Brazil), from Prof. Gláucia Vieira Cândido's research with speakers Maria Iraci Brandão and Militão Brandão. Wesley dos Santos, who was Prof. Cândido's student at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, facilitated the delivery of tapes, slides, and negatives for digitization in 2019.
April 23, 2021
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 26 - Zoom - 3:10-5pm
Gabriela Caballero (UC San Diego): Lexical-grammatical tone interactions in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological representation and orthographic implications. - Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Gladys Camacho Rios (UT Austin): L1 insights on South Bolivian Quechua language documentation. - Phorum - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Yuni Kim (University of Essex; PhD 2008): Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone. - Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech) and Aaron Dinkin (San Diego State): We THOUGHT we knew a LOT about New Orleans English (oh)... But we did NOT. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Vera Hohaus (Manchester): Composing meanings with alternatives: A case of no variation? - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Pied-piping by Cyclic Agree. In defense of feature percolation. - Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Apr 28 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Arto Anttila (Stanford) and Adams Bodomo (University of Vienna): Downstep in Dagaare.
For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.
April 22, 2021
A new online Iquito-English Dictionary was recently published by Lev Michael, Christine Beier, Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma in Dictionaria, an open access journal dedicated to disseminating digital dictionaries in CLLD format. This new dictionary is basically a digital version of the dictionary published by Abya-Yala press in 2019, with an expanded grammar sketch and corrections of minor errors.
Calques is happy to share the following updates from some of our graduating seniors in linguistics!
- Alexandra Butler will be starting her MA in Linguistics at UC Davis in the fall.
- Teela Huff will be starting her PhD in Linguistics at UCLA in the fall.
- Sophia Stremel will be starting her PhD in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz in the fall. She intends to specialize in syntax and its interfaces.
- Irene Yi will be working as a postbaccalaureate researcher in the Historical Linguistics Lab at Yale.
Congratulations, all!
April 21, 2021
Tabitha Bell, a linguistics major at UC Berkeley, is receiving Honorable Mention for the KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize for her work to create a better future for children and youth. She will be honored at an award ceremony hosted by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Wed., April 28, from 4-5:30pm. The event will feature a keynote by Donald K. Tamaki, Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP: "Am I an American or Not? The Perils to Democracy When Racism Shouts Louder Than Facts, the Rule of Law, and the Constitution." Click here to register. More details on the event and Tabitha's work are available here. Congratulations, Tabitha!
Congrats to Gašper Beguš on the publication of his article "CiwGAN and fiwGAN: Encoding information in acoustic data to model lexical learning with Generative Adversarial Networks" in Neural Networks! Click here to download the article (Open Access).
April 19, 2021
The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, April 26, with a talk by Gabriela Caballero (UC San Diego), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Lexical-grammatical tone interactions in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological representation and orthographic implications," and the abstract is as follows:
There has been a long tradition of documentation of the highly complex and diverse tonal systems of Mixtec language varieties (Oto-Manguean; Mexico) since Pike’s (1944, 1948) seminal work. But while most previous research has focused on lexical tone, interactions between lexical and grammatical tone in these languages have been relatively understudied in comparison (cf. Palancar et al. 2016 on Yoloxóchitl Mixtec). Based on ongoing research conducted with Claudia Juárez Chávez, Michelle Yuan and students (UC San Diego), this talk presents an analysis of the tone system in San Juan Piñas Mixtec (SJPM), a previously undocumented variety, focusing on lexical-grammatical tone interactions. We analyze SJPM grammatical tone as involving concatenation of floating tonal morphemes in a layered hierarchical structure, where tonal overwriting/avoidance of lexical tone by grammatical tone results from dominance properties of tonal exponents (Rolle 2018) and general tonal processes. We argue lexical tone in SJPM involves three tonal primitives (/H/, /L/, and /M/) and that lexical-grammatical tone patterns contribute evidence for tonal representation: some, but crucially not all, surface [M] tones are underspecified. This contrasts with analyses of other Mixtec varieties where [M] is uniformly analyzed to be underspecified as /∅/ (Daly & Hyman 2007, Carroll 2015). Finally, grammatical tone patterns may also be determined by the tonal representation of root morphemes, as evidenced by a pattern of non-local tone association in roots that sponsor floating tones. This talk concludes by considering the implications that the tonal analysis of SJPM has for the orthographic representation of the language in the development of resources for language reclamation led by Claudia Juárez Chávez, our native speaker collaborator.
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