In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday April 15 - Zoom link TBA - 4-5:30pm
Nicolas Arms (UC Berkeley): Coordination and omnipredicativity in 'Weenhayek: Some preliminary notes.
Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday April 15 - Zoom - 2-3pm
Developing Pedagogical Materials (Discussion of Yamada 2011 and Hornberger & de Korne 2018, led by Emily Drummond)
Congratulations to Allegra Robertson and recent post-doc Konrad Rybka , whose article "A grammatical description of Warao imperatives: Formal brevity and morphological complexity" was published this week in Cadernos de Etnolingüística. Read it here!
Alice Shen has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. Congratulations, Alice!
The National Endowment for the Humanities, through its "Documenting Endangered Languages" grant program (in collaboration with the National Science Foundation), announced today that it will fund a project to be administered by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (PI Andrew Garrett, $332,762): "Archiving legacy documentation from southern California and the southwest: Toward a new collaborative model."
This two-year project will catalog, digitize, and describe sound recordings and paper materials assembled over many years by Berkeley professor emerita Leanne Hinton, Margaret Langdon (Berkeley PhD 1966), Frank Lobo, and Pamela Munro, making them accessible where appropriate in the California Language Archive. A key element of the project is collaboration with several Indigenous communities to create a model of co-curation and community-based description of materials we catalog. The grant will support a full-time postdoctoral position in the department to coordinate and supervise all the work.
Andrew Garrett channeled some of his pandemic-induced stress into a creative work written over spring break: a short satirical edition of poems minimally adapted from the ancient Greek poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus in the form of a book of poems by his and Leslie Kurke's cats, also named Sappho and Alcaeus, together with full scholarly apparatus. Primarily of interest only to classical philologists, Poetarum lesbiorum carmina pestilentialia ("Plague poems of the Lesbian poets") can be read as a lovely printed book or in proof here.
Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
Augmenting our activities with work that can be done from home, we've digitized 120 color slides from Harvey Carlson's 1984 fieldwork on Aikanã (isolate; Brazil). We also redigitized over 100 prints scanned at higher resolution. Carlson (d. 1994) received a BA from our department and also worked for many years in the Berkeley Language Center, whose recording studio is named in his honor. He was inspired to do fieldwork in Rondônia after taking a seminar titled Indian Languages of South America from visiting professor Aryon Rodrigues in the winter 1983 quarter.
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Fieldwork Forum: Wednesday April 8 - Zoom link TBA - 4-5:30pm
Ruth Rouvier (UC Berkeley): Exploring emotion in Yurok language reclamation
An Iquito-English Dictionary was recently published by Ediciones Abya Yala and Cabeceras Aid Project, compiled by Lev Michael and Christine Beier on the basis of the linguistic and cultural knowledge of Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma. Ronald Sprouse played a key role in preparing the dictionary manuscript by further developing a script originally created by Berkeley grad Greg Finley to generate a LaTeX file from the FLEx XML database file. A blurb is available on the Calques site.
Congratulations to Mairi McLaughlin (Department of French), whose article "La représentation de l'oral dans la Gazette d'Amsterdam à la fin du XVIIIe siècle" (On the representation of spoken language in an historical French-language newspaper) has just appeared in Langages. Read it here!
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Fieldwork Forum: Wednesday April 1 - Zoom link: TBA - 4-5:30pm
Alternative summer arrangements amidst COVID-19
Congrats to Hannah Sande (PhD 2017), Peter Jenks, and Sharon Inkelas, whose article "Cophonologies by Ph(r)ase" has just appeared online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Read it here!
Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
Alice Shen presented a talk at the CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, which was entirely online this year. The title of her talk was "Asymmetric processing costs in the auditory comprehension of Mandarin and English bilingual sentences." You can read more about it here.
A paper by recent Berkeley Linguistics post-doc Konrad Rybka and Lev Michael, entitled A privative derivational source for standard negation in Lokono (Arawakan), has appeared in the pages of the Journal of Historical Linguistics. Congrats!
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday March 20 - Zoom (link) - 3-4:30pm
Zachary Wellstood (UC Berkeley): Ellipsis ˀinAkɰanón: Preliminary Insights
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Belatedly, welcome Katherine Hilton!
Dr. Katherine Hilton has joined the linguistics department this semester as a temporary lecturer teaching Ling 100 “Introduction to Linguistic Science”. Dr. Hilton earned her PhD in 2018 from Stanford, and now lives in Berkeley. Her dissertation was entitled “What does an interruption sound like?” (committee: Rob Podesva, Penny Eckert, and Meghan Sumner), so she might be paying close attention if she hears you interrupt someone. She has an impressive teaching history at Stanford both as a TA (Phonetics, AAVE, and Language and Society), and as an instructor of record (Intro to Linguistics, Language and Society, and Discourse Structure).
You’ll see her holding busy office hours in Dwinelle 1224.
Welcome Katherine!
Congrats to Edwin Ko, who has just been awarded a Foundation for Endangered Languages grant for his project entitled Development of Northern Pomo language revitalization camps!