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October 11, 2019

Linguistics events this week (Oct 11-18)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 11 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Round 1 of NELS practice talks, featuring: Virginia Dawson: Disjunction is not Boolean: novel evidence from Tiwa; Schuyler Laparle: At the syntax-pragmatics interface: a quantitative study of aspect in locative inversion; Amy Rose Deal: Interaction, satisfaction, and the PCC
  • Phorum - Monday Oct 14 - 1229 Dwinelle - 12-1pm
    Alice Shen (UC Berkeley) - Switch costs in Mandarin-English bilingual auditory comprehension
  • Special information session - Monday Oct 14 - Dwinelle 370 - 3-4pm
    Adam Politis (NIH): Careers in Speech Language Pathology
  • Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Oct 17 - 1303 Dwinelle - 3:40-5pm
    Zachary Wellstood (UC Berkeley): Developing the next generation of researchers investigating Khoisan languages
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Round 2 of NELS practice talks, featuring: Emily Clem (UC San Diego), Nicholas Rolle (Princeton) & Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley): Post-syntactic altruism; Emily Drummond & Zachary O'Hagan: Morphological person restrictions and the pressure to realize local persons; Tessa Scott: Pronominal licensing in Mam (Mayan)

October 10, 2019

Berkeley @ AMP

The 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place this weekend at Stony Brook. Berkeley is represented by two talks by current dept members and recent alumni:

  • Karee Garvin, Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz and Sharon Inkelas: Modeling Vowel Quantity Scales in Q Theory
  • Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Florian Lionnet (PhD '16): Phantom structure: A representational account of floating tone association

Congrats all!

Berkeley @ ASA 2019

The programhas just been released for the upcoming Acoustical Society of America (ASA) meeting in San Diego. The department will be represented by the following talks (thanks to Emily Remirez for compiling these):

  • Andrew Cheng - 'No' versus 'Aniyo': Back vowel diphthongization in heritage Korean
  • Meg Cychosz - Novel acoustic measures of coarticulation reveal morphological planning in child speech
  • Emily Grabowski - Effects of pitch height and contour on duration perception
  • Emily Remirez - Phonetic cues influence judgment of syntax

Congrats all!

October 9, 2019

Grad students win GROW grant

Berkeley Linguistics graduate students were recently awarded a campus GROW grant, in support of wellness activities for grad students, and participated in a screen printing workshop last Friday. Students printed posters, tote bags, and t-shirts with designs by Julia Nee and Emily Remirez. Pictured at the workshop and with its results are Allegra Robertson, Edwin Ko, Meg Cychosz, Julia Nee, and Emily Remirez.

Allegra Robertson, Edwin Ko Meg Cychosz, Julia Nee, Emily Remirez

October 5, 2019

Rouvier receives grants

Congrats to Ruth Rouvier, who has recently received two grants in support of her dissertation fieldwork -- one from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research and one from the The International Research Foundation for English Language Education under their Research Priority on Revitalization of Endangered Indigenous Languages. In June Ruth also co-presented a paper at the Linguistic Research With Diaspora Communities workshop (associated with the LSA institute at UC Davis) entitled "Ideologies of language purity in healthcare interpreting", with co-presenters  Alma Caravarin (Southeast Asian Assistance Center) and Sanam Janamian (Language World Services).

October 4, 2019

Linguistics events this week (Oct 4-11, 2019)

The 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology is taking place this weekend at Stony Brook. Berkeley is represented by two talks by current dept members and recent alumni:

  • Karee Garvin, Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz and Sharon Inkelas: Modeling Vowel Quantity Scales in Q Theory
  • Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) and Florian Lionnet (PhD '16): Phantom structure: A representational account of floating tone association

Congrats all!

October 3, 2019

Inkelas named LSA fellow

Congrats to Sharon Inkelas, who has been named a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Fellows are chosen in reflection of distinguished contributions to the discipline. Sharon and her fellow new LSA fellows will be formally inducted at a ceremony at the upcoming LSA Annual Meeting.

Berkeley @ LSA 2020

The program for the upcoming 2020 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America has been released, promising at least the following presentations by current department members (apart from those in special sessions):

Congrats all!

September 26, 2019

Piatote colloquium

The 2019-2020 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, Sept 30, with a talk by Beth Piatote (Berkeley). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Nez Perce word for shark, and the abstract is as follows:

In this talk Prof. Piatote will share some pieces of an essay collection that she is working on that deals with translation and language revitalization. The title of the manuscript (and the talk) is Nez Perce Word for Shark. She will also share excerpts from her forthcoming short story collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), that engage Nez Perce language and aesthetics, and discuss movements within Indigenous Language Revitalization to use creative writing in language work.

In memoriam Gary Holland

We are sad to report that emeritus professor Gary Holland passed away earlier this week. Gary earned his PhD in Linguistics from Berkeley in 1980 and spent the rest of his career here. He became an Emeritus Professor just last year. One of the world’s foremost experts on the Rig Veda, he was a remarkably interdisciplinary scholar, with connections (teaching or research) in Scandinavian Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Celtic Studies, and Classics, among others.  He was also a remarkable servant of the Department of Linguistics and of the University of California.  He served as the Head Graduate Advisor in Linguistics, and in many campus-wide positions in the Academic Senate.  In fact, just this semester he was recalled to work in the Division of Undergraduate Studies.  He won the College of Letters and Sciences “Distinguished Service Award” in 2014.  He shared his love of music and good cheer with many friends in the department and the wider Berkeley community, and will be missed by all.

Linguistics events this week (Sept 27-Oct 4, 2019)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

September 22, 2019

Bardagil travels
Postdoc Bernat Bardagil has had a busy few months. This week he is serving as an external examiner in the doctoral qualification for Edson de Freitas Gomes at the UFPA (Universidade Federal do Pará), for the dissertation Aspectos morfossintáticos em mẽbengokre: transitividade e marcação de argumentos. Earlier in September, he took part in the AGGREGATION Working Meeting at the University of Washington, with Emily Bender's project. Over the summer, he ran the first Escola de Língua Manoki Watjuho Ja'a in the village of Cravari, where a team kick-started a process to revitalize Manoki among a large group of young people in the community. He also more generally did fieldwork over the summer with Mỹky-Manoki, will continue to do some more with the same language and with Panará during the fall.
WSCLA 23 proceedings published

The Proceedings of WSCLA 23 (Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas) have recently been published, containing the following papers by department members and recent alumni:

Congrats all!

September 21, 2019

BLS workshop call for papers

Calques is pleased to note that the call for papers for the 2020 Berkeley Linguistic Society Workshop has now been issued and abstracts are now being accepted! The workshop will take place February 7-8, 2020, with the theme of  "Phonological Representations: At the Crossroads of Gradience and Categoricity".

Abstract submission info be found here. Abstracts are due November 1, 2019.

Describing the nature and behavior of the sounds of language is a central concern in linguistics. Topics such as categoricity vs. gradience, the information included in representations, and the place of abstraction in the larger linguistic system are central to many theoretical debates. This workshop aims to bring together different approaches to capturing the behavior of speech sounds by fostering discussion among researchers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

Invited Speakers:

Katie Drager (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
Bruce Hayes (University of California, Los Angeles)
Stephanie Shih (University of Southern California)

For questions, please email blsworkshop@berkeley.edu.

September 20, 2019

Linguistics events this week (Sept 20-27, 2019)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Phorum - Monday Sept 23 -  1229 Dwinelle - 12-1pm
    Khalil Iskarous (USC): The Space of Optimality Theories
  • Linguistics Dept Colloquium - Monday Sept 23 - 370 Dwinelle - 3:10-5pm 
    Khalil Iskarous (USC): The Dynamics of Linguistic Development: The Unfolding of Skill Interaction
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley (SLaB) - Tuesday, Sept 24 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3:30-5PM
    Practice talk(s) for NWAV 48
  • Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Sept 26 - 1303 Dwinelle 
    Edwin Ko (UC Berkeley): Northern Pomo language revitalization: The function of digital technology
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 27 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Emily Drummond (UC Berkeley) & Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): Secondary number agreement in Karuk

September 19, 2019

Berkeley @ NWAV 48

Berkeley sociolinguistics will be represented at the upcoming conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48 by:

  • Isaac Bleaman: Linguistic prescriptivism, social conservatism, and phonetic drift in language maintenance communities
  • Justin Davidson, Joseph Roy, and Gyula Zsombok: Workshop: Creating interactive shiny dashboards to showcase sociolinguistic research: Seeing the forest and the trees

Congrats all!

Iskarous colloquium

The 2019-2020 colloquium series kicks off this coming Monday, Sept 23, with a talk by Khalil Iskarous (USC). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled The Dynamics of Linguistic Development: The Unfolding of Skill Interaction, and the abstract is as follows:

Recent work on the development of production, perception, and phonological skills in children has shown a remarkable amount of interaction between these skills, so that it is difficult to understand each separately from its relation to the others. This talk will introduce a predictive dynamical systems-based model of linguistic development that tries to capture these fundamental interactions between the skills. The goal is not to partake in the seemingly eternal zero-sum theoretical debate between nativist and empiricist outlooks, but to show how an explicit dynamical account can integrate linguistic input, architectural properties of a learning system, and a developing grammar, together with an articulatory action system and a perceptual system that allow a child to participate in their world through language. Some of the phenomena to be accounted for are Vihman’s articulatory filter and templatic regression, as well as the influence of phonetic practice on early phonological/lexical patterning.

Berkeley @ SSILA

The program for the upcoming 2020 winter meeting of SSILA, the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, has just been released. SSILA will meet concurrently with the LSA. The program promises the following presentations by current department members and recent alumni:

  • Brady Dailey (Boston University), Ethan Rimdzius (Boston University), Julia Nee (Berkeley), Edwin Ko (Berkeley), Jimmy Sbordone (Boston University), Erica Carson Jr. (Redwood Valley Rancheria; Pomo/Wappo), Catherine Connor (Boston University): Web-based Stories and texts promote learning engagement in language revitalization
  • Zachary O'Hagan: Complex Temporal Relations in Caquinte: The Case of =ta and =ja
  • Richard Rhodes: On the phonetic nature of Proto-Algonquian *θ
  • Emily Clem (PhD '19): Distinguishing switch-reference and relativization in Amahuaca
  • Amalia Skilton (PhD '19): Co-speech pointing gestures by Ticuna speakers: A corpus study

Congrats all!

Deal in Toronto

In the days ahead Amy Rose Deal will be traveling to the University of Toronto to give a colloquium talk entitled Interaction, satisfaction, and the PCC, as well as a semantics talk on a recent manuscript entitled Uncentered attitude reports.

Spring 2020 colloquium schedule announced

Calques is pleased to announce the colloquium schedule for spring 2020 -- mark your calendars! All talks are 3:10-5pm in Dwinelle 370.

  • Monday, March 16, 2020:  Johanna Nichols (Berkeley)
  • Monday, March 30, 2020: Kristen Syrett (Rutgers)
  • Monday, April 13, 2020:  Zenzi Griffin (UT Austin)
  • Monday, April 20, 2020:  David Goldstein (UCLA)
  • Monday, April 27, 2020:  Juliet Stanton (NYU)