News

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.

Congrats to Susanne Gahl who is a co-author on a paper just published in Behavior Research Methods: Yu-Ying Chuang, Marie Lenka Vollmer, Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan, Susanne Gahl, Peter Hendrix, and R. Harald Baayen. "The processing of pseudoword form and meaning in production and comprehension: A computational modeling approach using linear discriminative learning."

This weekend at FASL 29, Peter Jurgec (University of Toronto) presented his joint experimental work with Jesse Zymet in a talk entitled "Lexical propensities of Slovenian palatalizing suffixes are learned." Click here for the slides. Jesse adds:

The central results are on slides 20/21 & 29 (those are suffixes on the x-axis). They suggest that Slovenian language learners track triggering rates of palatalization that are specific to individual suffixes.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Phorum - Monday May 11 - Zoom - 12-1pm
  Raksit Lau (UC Berkeley): A Pathway to Tonogenesis: Shifting Language Dynamics in Kuy and the Perception-Production Link.

• Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday May 13 - Zoom link - 2pm

Karee Garvin and Hannah Sande (PhD 2017) have launched a new cross institution discussion group. The group focuses on phonology, welcoming presentations on any and all phonology and phonology adjacent topics. The group meets weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00 PDT. All are welcome to attend. To be added to the mailing list and to receive the Zoom link, email Karee.

Here are the details for the meeting on May 12:

Jack Merrill (Princeton; PhD 2018) and Nik Rolle (Princeton; PhD 2018): Tone triggers vowel-epenthesis and vowel-retention in Wamey (Konyagi).

We present a case of tone-conditioned ǝ-epenthesis in the Wamey language (Niger-Congo: Guinea, Senegal), based on data from Santos (1996). While vowel epenthesis to host an intonational floating tone is attested in a number of languages (Roettger 2017), it has been claimed that vowel epenthesis to host a lexical/morphological floating tone is unattested~impossible (de Lacy 2003, Blumenfeld 2006, Gleim 2019). Wamey presents the clearest case yet of exactly this phenomenon. [Full abstract available here.]

Edwin Ko writes to announce that he is organizing the 40th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference, which will be held virtually from Thursday, May 21 to Saturday, May 23. The conference program can be found on the website and anyone who is interested in attending should write to Edwin to obtain more information.

Congratulations to Edwin Ko, who has been offered a Berkeley Language Center Fellowship for the upcoming semester to investigate the role of stories and texts in language revitalization.

Congratulations to Alice Shen, who has landed a short-term contractor position at Facebook to while away the time between filing her dissertation this summer and starting her Visiting Assistant Professorship at Reed College in the fall. She will be working on data infrastructure for Natural Language Processing systems.

Congratulations to our undergraduate honors thesis-writers who successfully presented their research over Zoom on Monday!

Amelia Fineberg
Honors thesis title: "Semantics and Grammar: Gender in Hebrew Liturgy"
Faculty Adviser: Eve Sweetser

Karina Fong-Hirschfelder
Honors thesis title: "The Representation of Polysemy in the French-English Bilingual Lexicon"
Faculty Adviser: Mahesh Srinivasan

Sarah Roberts
Honors thesis title: "The Relationship between Gestural Viewpoint and Detail Retention"
Faculty Adviser: Eve Sweetser

A video recording of the event is available here. Unfortunately the recording did not start until part way through Amelia's talk, but her slides are available here.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday April 29 - Zoom link - 4-5:30pm
  Andrew Garrett (UC Berkeley): Text editions as inside-out grammars: Karuk texts from 1901-02.

Congrats to Isaac Bleaman, whose article "Implicit standardization in a minority language community: Real-time syntactic change among Hasidic Yiddish writers" has been accepted for publication at Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. The article will appear in the section Language and Computation as part of the research topic in Computational Sociolinguistics. Read the abstract here!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday April 22 - Zoom link TBA - 4-5:30pm
  Wesley dos Santos (UC Berkeley): A linguistic survey meets the Kawahiva communities.

A new article by Pius W. Akumbu (Fulbright Visiting Scholar, 2015-16), Larry M. Hyman, and Roland Kießling entitled "The segmental and tonal structure of verb inflection in Babanki" has just appeared in the online open access journal Phonological Data and Analysis. Congrats!

Congrats to Virginia Dawson, whose squib "Outscoping the directive force of imperatives" has been accepted for publication at Linguistic Inquiry!