News

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• We've accessioned a small new collection of audio and video recordings from Nicholas Evans's course "Grammar and Social Cognition" at the LSA Linguistic Institute held at Berkeley in 2009. With the assistance of Simeon Floyd, the class collaborated with three speakers of Imbabura Kichwa (Quechuan; Ecuador) -- Gladys, Augusto Oyagata, and Mariana Chuquín -- who collaborated as consultants with the graduate field methods class the following year.
• We've collaborated with the Mineral King Preservation Society and a team of cultural advisors in their curation of a new exhibit "Native Voices" at the Three Rivers Historical Museum in Three Rivers, California. The exhibit, which debuts Saturday, features an audiovisual panel, pictured here courtesy of Lisa Monteiro, with a recording of Cecile Silva speaking in Wukchumni (Yokutsan; California). The recording was made in 1973 by Geoffrey Gamble (PhD 1975).

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach (PhD 2022) has accessioned a new collection of materials related to Kuy, Thro, and So Thavung (Austroasiatic), based on work with several dozen speakers in Thailand beginning in 2018. The materials consist mainly of audio recordings of elicitation of lexical items, conversations, and anonymized data from a production study consisting of target words embedded in a carrier sentence.
• Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020) has accessioned a new collection of materials related to Mỹky (isolate; Brazil), based on work with 18 speakers beginning in 2022. (Materials from earlier in their project are archived with the Endangered Languages Archive.) The materials mainly consist of audio and video recordings of stories, songs, and elicitation.
• We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the 2022-2023 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lobi (Gur; Burkina Faso, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire), with consultant Sansan Claude Hien and instructor Hannah Sande.
• Hannah Sande and Katherine Russell have added dozens of items to the Guébie Fieldwork Collection (see 2014-15.224 through 2014-15.257), based on remote and in-person work from March 2022 to the present with Abie Esmel Kokolou, Boris Azie, Gnakouri, Juliette Kadja Abalé, Olivier Agodio, and Serikpa Emil.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• SSCircle - Friday, Sep 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Emily Clem (UC San Diego) & Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Dependent case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi"
• Phorum - Friday, Sep 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Alex Elias (UC Berkeley): "Just because you can doesn’t mean you should: Two analyses of Jao’s phonemic inventory"
• SLaB - Tuesday, Oct 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm: NWAV Practice Talks, Part 1. Julianne Kapner, "Ne-omission in Ivorian French celebrity interviews on YouTube"; Riley Van Meter, "Quantifying grammaticalization via translation: The position of Lo Cunto de li Cunti’s Neapolitan on the Romance grammaticalization cline"; Baichen Du, "Visible articulatory variation as a cue to sound change: Lip rounding and lip protrusion variability in the Mandarin sibilant merger"
• SSCircle - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Yaqing Cao (UC Santa Cruz): TBD
• Phorum - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): "A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: The case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin"

Gašper Beguš gave an invited colloquium talk on "Modeling Language as a dependency between the latent space and data" at the University of Arizona's Department of Linguistics on September 22, 2023. The abstract can be found here: https://linguistics.arizona.edu/events/modeling-language-dependency-between-latent-space-and-data