News

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.

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