News

In and around the linguistics department in the next week -- it's RRR week AND: 

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 3 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30 
  Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley): Paths to exceptional wide scope: Choice functions in Tiwa
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday May 8 - 1303 Dwinelle - 11am-12:30pm  
  Raksit T. Lau (UC Berkeley): TBA
• GAIL - Thursday May 9 - talk begins at 6pm 
  Chris Beier (Berkeley) & Lev Michael (Berkeley) will speak on tone in Iquito. 

Help us digitize Linguistics lectures from the past!  This year's Big Give helped us raise about half of the funding needed to digitize 275 reel to reel tapes that were recently found at the BLC.  The 140 recordings were made between 1960-1985.

So far six lectures have been digitized -- you can access them at the links below:

• Wallace Chafe (1962), [American Anthropological Association lecture]
  
• Noam Chomsky (1964), Prerequisites of Language Acquisition
  
• John Gumperz (1964), On the Ethnology of Linguistic Change
• Abraham Halpern (1962), The Reconstruction of Proto-Pomo
• Larry Hyman (1973), Principles of Historical Phonology
• Roman Jakobson (c1961), The Problem of the Interrelationship between the Study of Poetry and the Study of Language

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday April 26 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm  
  Discussion of binding and variable-free semantics (Reading: Ch 15 of Jacobson 2014, Compositional Semantics)
• Phorum - Monday April 29  - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm 
  Daniel Silverman (SJSU): Evolution of the speech code: Higher order symbolism and the grammatical Big Bang
• Honors Colloquium - Monday April 29 - 370 Dwinelle - 3-5pm  
  
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday May 1 - 1303 Dwinelle - 11am-12:30pm 
  Bernat Bardagil-Mas (Berkeley): The language of the Manoki
• GAIL/FForum - Thursday May 2 - 5:30pm
  Eugene Buckley (UPenn): Change and contact in Pomoan stress patterns 
• SLUgS - Thursday May 2 - 1229 Dwinelle - 5-6pm 
  End-of-semester potluck! Attendees are encouraged to bring linguistics-themed foods.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 3 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30 
  Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley): Paths to exceptional wide scope: Choice functions in Tiwa

Coming up on Monday is the annual Honors Colloquium, featuring the work of undergraduates writing honors theses in linguistics. The colloquium will be held in Dwinelle 370 from 3:10-5. This year the presenters will be:

Congrats to Larry Hyman, who will be delivering the 14th Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture at Harvard next week. Larry's talk is entitled The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu.

Congrats to Ruth Rouvier, who has received a fellowship from the Linguistic Society of America to attend this summer's Linguistic Institute at UC Davis! 

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday April 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm  
  Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley) & Michael Diercks (Pomona College): V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling 
• Phorum - Monday April 22  - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm
  Yulia Oganian (UCSF): A temporal landmark for syllabic representations of continuous speech in human superior temporal gyrus
• Linguistics Colloquium - Monday April 22 - 370 Dwinelle - 3-5pm  
  Lenore Grenoble (Chicago): Documenting contact and change in Siberian multilingual contexts
• Special Anthropology lecture/workshop - Tuesday April 23 -  223 Moses Hall - 3-6pm
  Denise Arnold & Juan de Dios Yapita: De-ontologising Andean landscapes: some reflections for Qaqachaka Marka
• Fieldwork Forum - Thursday April 25 - 3401 Dwinelle - 4-5:30PM  
  Adam Benkato (Berkeley): A new copula in an Arabic dialect & fieldwork as a heritage speaker 
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday April 26 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm  
  Discussion of binding and variable-free semantics (Reading: Ch 15 of Jacobson 2014, Compositional Semantics)

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, April 22, with a talk by Lenore Grenoble (Chicago). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Documenting Contact and Change in Siberian Multilingual Contexts, and the abstract is as follows:

Multiple indigenous languages in Eurasia are undergoing change and loss as speakers shift to Russian. The language ecologies of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) provide an excellent testing ground for hypotheses about the causes and effects of contact-induced language change. The Sakha language (Turkic) is spoken by a (slim) majority of residents of the Republic, with an estimated 500,000 speakers; several minority indigenous languages are spoken as well. All are undergoing language shift, to varying degrees. Russian, although not the language of the ethnic majority in Sakha, is pervasive with its status as a national language, and as the language of higher education and media. Although we might predict that the use of Sakha supports use of areal features, but that does not appear to be the case today. In this talk I discuss a large, ongoing project that uses mixed methods to document contact and change. Here I focus on the use of experimental methods, with particular attention to word order several Altaic languages: Sakha (Turkic) and Even and Evenki (Tungusic). All three languages show changes from inherited patterns to more Russian-like morphosyntax, including a shift from SOV word order to SVO and word order driven by information structure and changes in clause-combining strategies, as well as some evidence of contact effects in the varieties of Russian used by Sakha speakers. Preliminary work suggests that these changes take place sporadically in the speech of of Even and Evenki speakers, and that language shift probably impedes them from becoming grammaticalized. This hypothesis needs more systematic testing with a combination of experimental and sociolinguistic field data. More research is also needed to see if the innovations are diffusing across speakers of Sakha and whether these changes are indicative of imperfect learning and language shift rather than contact-induced convergence.

Congrats to Zach O'Hagan, whose paper Restructuring of Proto-Omagua-Kukama Kin Terms has appeared in the latest issue of Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas!

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Environmental Engineering Seminar Series - Friday April 12 - 534 Davis Hall - 12-1pm
  Chris Beier (Berkeley): Problems, problem-solvers, and local impacts: A view from Peruvian Amazonia
• Special lecture - Friday April 12 - 1303 Dwinelle - 2-3pm 
  Craig Cummings (unicode.org): Adding Languages to Computers and Mobile Devices
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday April 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm  
  Eva Portelance (Stanford University): Verb stranding ellipsis in Lithuanian: verbal identity and head movement
• Phorum - Monday April 15  - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm 
  Meg Cychosz (UCB): The Lexical advantage: Kids learn words, not sounds
• Linguistics Colloquium - Monday April 15 - 370 Dwinelle - 3-5pm  
  Matt Goldrick (Northwestern): Integration and Segregation in Bilingual Sound Structure Processing
• SLUgS - Monday April 15 - 1229 Dwinelle - 5-7pm 
  David J. Peterson: TBA
• Ling 208 Guest Lecture - Tuesday April 16 - 1303 Dwinelle - 12:30-2pm  
  Matt Goldrick (Northwestern):  TBA
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday April 17 - 1303 Dwinelle - 11-12:30PM 
  Chris Beier (Berkeley): TBA
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday April 19 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm  
  Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley) & Michael Diercks (Pomona College): V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling

Congrats to Hannah Haynie (PhD '12), who has accepted a tenure-track position in the linguistics department at the University of Colorado Boulder!