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).
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April 21, 2021
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.
April 16, 2021
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 21 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada (U Alberta): Using pre-existing collections for fieldwork training. - Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday Apr 19 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Discussion of Kim & Wong 2020
Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site. - Phorum - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Natasha Warner (with collab. from Seongjin Park) (U Arizona): Perception of all English sound sequences: The roles of probability and duration. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm
Workshopping a manuscript by Emily Clem (UCSD): Toward a unified account of inverse marking and the Person-Case Constraint.
(Please email Tyler Lemon or Maddy Bossi to get a copy of the manuscript!) - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Vera Hohaus (Manchester): Composing meanings with alternatives: A case of no variation? - Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Apr 21 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Jen Smith (UNC Chapel Hill): Productivity and naturalness in loanword phonology.
For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.
April 13, 2021
Congrats to Yevgeniy Melguy and Keith Johnson on the publication of their article in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America!
Melguy, Y.V and Johnson, K. "General adaptation to accented English: Speech intelligibility unaffected by perceived source of non-native accent," Acoust. Soc. Am. 149 (4), April 2021, 2602-2614. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0004240.
April 12, 2021
Isaac Bleaman consulted for a feature story on the Hasidic community and COVID-19 published in The Atlantic last week. Click here to read the article.
April 11, 2021
Join us for the 2021 virtual Cal Week, taking place from April 24 to 30! Each year we enjoy meeting alumni, prospective students, and friends at Cal Day — to introduce ourselves or renew old acquaintances. We hope to return to this tradition of meeting face-to-face next year (not least so we can send the kids away with an ultrasound image of their tongue, or a spectrogram of their voice). This year, though, we are happy to highlight Prof. Peter Jenks's video on "What is Linguistics" and Prof. Larry Hyman's video on "Language Myths - the Freshman Seminar." Check them out here!
April 9, 2021
Matt Faytak (PhD 2018) reports that, after a 2 year post-doc/lecturer position at UCLA, he has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo, and will start this August. Congrats, Matt!
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 12 - Zoom - 3:10-5pm
Susan Lin (UC Berkeley): Looking inward: reflections on the role of articulatory research. - SLUgS' Fifth Annual Undergrad Linguistics Symposium - Saturday-Sunday, Apr 10-11 - Zoom - 10am-3:45pm
Register here. - Fieldwork Forum and Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Apr 14 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm (note special link)
Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez (NYU): Deconstructing 'standard' in a minority language: Variation in Chanka Quechua. - Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday April 12 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Daniel Erker (Boston U): How social salience can illuminate the outcomes of linguistic contact: Data from Spanish in Boston [abstract]
Talk from 11:10-12pm, followed by Q&A session until ~12:45pm. Email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link. - Phorum - Friday Apr 9 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Maho Morimoto (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics): Consideration of gestural complexity in Japanese /r/. - Phorum - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Natasha Warner (U Arizona): TBA. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 16 - Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm
Workshopping a manuscript by Emily Clem (UCSD): Toward a unified account of inverse marking and the Person-Case Constraint.
(Please email Tyler Lemon or Maddy Bossi to get a copy of the manuscript!)
April 8, 2021
Myriam Lapierre will start a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington in fall 2021. Congratulations, Myriam!
The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) is excited to invite you to our Fifth Annual Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium that’s taking place on April 10 and 11 (Sat & Sun) from 10am to 3:45pm PT! The conference will feature undergraduate researchers in linguistics from across the country, who will be presenting on a range of topics from third language acquisition of Hindi, the syntax of English parentheticals, to glottal stop production in Yemba. We are also honored to feature a keynote presentation by Professor Eve Sweetser – you definitely don’t want to miss out!
Everyone is welcome regardless of major and background! You’ll be able to join the meeting via https://tinyurl.com/berkeleysymposium21. Hope to see you there!
April 7, 2021
Read a new blog post co-authored by Tessa Scott and Henry Sales Hernandez for the Center for Latin American Studies, describing their efforts to teach Mam in Oakland!
Tessa Scott was accepted to present at Move and Agree: Forum on the Formal Typology of A'-agreement. The forum is taking place online from May 31 to June 4 and is being co-hosted by McGill and UBC. Also scheduled to give invited presentations are Amy Rose Deal on "How agreement works, with special reference to A'-features" and Nico Baier (PhD 2018) on "On the nature of complex A/A'-probes." Congrats, all!
This weekend a number of Berkeley linguists are presenting at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 51-52). Current affiliates who will be presenting include Hannah Sande, Maddy Bossi, and Katie Russell. Congrats, all!
April 5, 2021
The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, April 12, with a talk by our very own Susan Lin, held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Looking inward: reflections on the role of articulatory research," and the abstract is as follows:
Many of the oldest and most fundamental works in the history of the field of phonetics were articulatory studies. Yet at present, articulatory phonetics accounts for a relatively small fraction of the research published in the most influential phonetics journals. We are in a time when the field is, rightly, reviewing the scientific rigor, ethical standards, and public safety of its research methodologies. It is therefore reasonable to ask what novel contributions articulatory phonetics research can still make, so as to warrant its continued or even renewed use. In this talk, I share phonetic and phonological insights that have resulted from articulatory research. All of these findings point to evidence at the articulatory level that is otherwise hidden from view; these are insights that could not have otherwise been gleaned from acoustic or perceptual data. Some of these findings were the product of targeted investigations and controlled experimentation, while others were incidental findings from other studies, and as such I also argue for the continued value of basic exploratory articulatory research.
Larry Hyman has received notification from French Ambassador Philippe Etienne that he has been appointed Chevalier (Knight) in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. As Ambassador Etienne explains, "this honor reflects the French authorities' gratitude for [Larry's] efforts to promote French language and culture" and culminates a span of over 50 years in which Larry has studied abroad in Bordeaux, held visiting research positions in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, and received other invitations in France. He is also known for hosting many French visitors in Berkeley. Along with his French colleague, Clément Sanchez of the Collège de France, Larry has served as Director of the France-Berkeley Fund since 2010. More information is available here. Congratulations, Larry!
April 2, 2021
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 7 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Regan Anderson, Joana Jansen, Twálatin (Gregory Sutterlict) (Northwest Indian Language Institute): Language in relation: Sɨ́nwit ttawax̱tpamá. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 2 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Practice WCCFL talks (part 2)
Emily Drummond: Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches.
Wesley dos Santos: Long head movement is A-bar movement: the case study of Kawahíva.
Rebecca Jarvis: Presuppositionality and syntactic nominalization in finite clausal complements. - Phorum - Friday Apr 2 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Karee Garvin (UC Berkeley): Syllabification, stress, and gestural diagnostics in English. - Phorum - Friday Apr 9 - Zoom - 3-4pm
Maho Morimoto (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics): Consideration of gestural complexity in Japanese /r/.
March 30, 2021
Ever Reyes, member of the DE in Indigenous Language Revitalization and graduate student in the Department of Music, published a blog post on language revitalization for the Center for Latin American Studies.
March 29, 2021
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
- We released a new collection of many hours of video recordings of Kawaiisu (Uto-Aztecan; California), featuring siblings Luther Girado (1941-2021), Betty Hernandez (1944-2014), and Lucille Hicks. In the videos, their team -- with Julie Turner, Laura Grant, Jon Hammond, and others -- is usually headed somewhere, talking about land and history, or doing something, like making elderberry jelly. The videos were made between 2012 and 2014 as part of a project funded by an NSF DEL grant awarded to the Kawaiisu Language and Cultural Center.
- The Berkeley Language Center continues its digitization of their Linguistics Lectures collection, consisting of over 140 lectures given primarily as part of departmental colloquia between 1960 and 1985. The most recently digitized is a 24-part lecture course, "American Indian Languages," taught by Mary Haas. If you have information about the course (e.g., date, students enrolled), please write to scoil-ling@berkeley.edu.
March 26, 2021
Congrats to Isaac Bleaman, whose article "Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out" has just appeared online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Read it here!
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
- Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley): Diagnosing pragmatic bias: Kipsigis belief reports and polar questions. - Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 4:10-5pm
Screening and discussion of Bicycles of Nhanderu. - Language Variation and Change Working Group - Monday Mar 29 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Discussion of Sneller 2020
Please email Ben Papadopoulos for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site. - Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
Matti Marttinen Larsson (Stockholm University): Incipient probabilistic grammar change in real time: Language-internal effects on changing functions of locative constructions in European Spanish.
Please email Isaac Bleaman to be added to the email list. - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 2 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Practice WCCFL talks (part 2)
Emily Drummond: Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches.
Wesley dos Santos: Long head movement is A-bar movement: the case study of Kawahíva.
Rebecca Jarvis: Presuppositionality and syntactic nominalization in finite clausal complements. - Zoom Phonology - Wednesday Mar 31 - Zoom - 11am-12pm
Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): Progressive nasalization in Paraguayan Guaraní: Interactions with loanword morphophonology.
For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology mailing list, contact Karee Garvin.
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