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September 26, 2024

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

Larry Hyman and Johanna Nichols, together with several co-editors, have published a volume on "Language change for the worse" with Language Science Press. The full citation is below. Congrats!

Enke, Dankmar W., Hyman, Larry M., Nichols, Johanna, Seiler, Guido, Weber, Thilo & Hölzl, Andreas (eds.). 2024. Language change for the worse. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 33). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5116353

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Andrew Garrett's essay "Remembering Anna Morpurgo Davies" has appeared as part of "Anna Morpurgo Davies, 10 years on", a collection of memorial essays published by the Philological Society on the tenth anniversary of the death of Anna Morpurgo Davies (1937-2014), whose career included stints as a Be

September 25, 2024

Larry Hyman presented a paper "Latent high tones in Limba (Tonko dialect; Sierra Leone)" at a workshop on Pertinacious Phonology & Morphology, 
organized by Aditi Lahiri (Oxford University), held September 23- 25, 2024 at Ettington Park Hotel. Congrats!

September 24, 2024

 Two talks will feature Berkeley linguists at the upcoming workshop on Understanding Obviation at McGill (https://obviationworkshop2024.wordpress.com)

September 23, 2024

Mairi McLaughlin gave a keynote presentation called "Variation, varieties, variants: the role of the media" at the 14th Kongress der Frankoromanistikverbands in Passau, Germany on September 26th. Congrats!

Hannah Sande will give a colloquium talk on Discontinuous Harmony in Guébie at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign on Monday, October 7.

September 19, 2024

Eve Sweetser will be making a keynote presentation, "MetaNet: its current status and future directions," in the workshop on Figurative Language and Large Language Models, at the 21st EURALEX conference in Cavtat, Croatia (Oct. 8-12, 2024).

September 18, 2024

Gašper Beguš is giving a talk at the linguistics department at Harvard University on Friday, September 20 (https://linguistics.fas.harvard.edu/blog/week-sept-16). The title of the talk is "Building realistic models of language with deep learning". Congrats!

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

  • SSCircle – Friday, Sep 20 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley) on "Case discrimination, Agree, and the theory of features"
  • Phorum – Friday, Sep. 20 - 4-5pm
    Niko Schwarz-Acosta (UC Berkeley) on “Al Cʉɐntu da Penuchu”: Perceptual Learning of a Vowel Shift in Mexican Spanish
  • Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group – Monday, Sep. 23 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Rachel Bortnick (Ladinokomunita/American Ladino League) on Ladino language revitalization efforts and her own life
  • LRWG – Wednesday, Sep. 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
    Beth Piatote (Berkeley) with a workshop/talk on writing and creative expression in language revitalization
  • SSCircle – Friday, Sep 27 - Dwinelle 1303 -- 3-4:30pm
    Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley), Title TBA
  • Phorum – Friday, Sep. 27 - Zoom - 4-5pm

    Alexia Hernandez (Stanford) on "The role of experience on the cognitive underpinnings of linguistic bias: An interdisciplinary investigation of Miami-based Cuban American speech"

September 17, 2024

Andrew Garrett has published a short essay, "Four decades in historical linguistics", as part of the continuing "40@40" series in Diachronica. (A prepublication version is here.) Congrats!

Rebecca Jarvis gave a poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 29 on Tuesday (https://sub29.unime.it/il-convegno/).

September 16, 2024

Isaac Bleaman will be giving a colloquium talk for the Program in Linguistics at Brown University on Thursday, September 26. The title of his talk is "Social dimensions of variation in Yiddish: Historical perspectives and new insights."

September 12, 2024

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • On Wednesday began the first visit supported by the new CLA Community Research Grant, a group of Cucapah community members and allies coming from Mexicali, Mexico. They consulted documentary materials on the language in the CLA (pictured just below) and the Bancroft Library, and presented the "Manual de lengua Cucapáh" at Language Revitalization Working Group, co-authored by Fernando Márquez Duarte (UC Riverside; second from left) and elder Margarita Valenzuela Portillo, whose son Alejandro Maclis V. is pictured second from right.

CLA community research grant recipients

Zachary O'Hagan was in Lyon, France earlier this week participating in the workshop Classifiers in the Arawakan Languages at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage. He presented on "Distinguishing Classifiers from Inalienable Nouns in Caquinte".

September 6, 2024

Colloquium: Peter Svenonius (Tromsø), "When can a single word by biclausal? Word structure and the limits of monoclausality"
Monday, September 16, 3-4:30pm in 370 Dwinelle (with reception to follow).
Abstract: 


"Various diagnostics have been identified to determine whether a complex predicate, such as a causative structure, involves a single clause or two. The diagnostics pick out clausal properties of subparts of the predicate, for example an agent or a distinctly modifiable event description is sometimes understood as a sufficient condition for clausehood, and if the subordinate part of a complex predicate has one of these things independently of the superordinate part, the complex predicate is deemed to be biclausal. This sometimes holds even when the predicate is considered to consist of a single word (as with Japanese indirect causatives, as argued by Shibatani and Kuno in the 1970s; see Matsumoto 1996 CSLI for discussion and references).

However, there are striking limits on biclausal single words, which reveal constraints on the architecture of grammar and the interface between grammar and the lexicon. First, restrictions on the conceptual content associated with listed lexical roots mean that certain kinds of information can only be expressed in syntactically complex forms. Second, functional structure is constrained --- I argue that the constraints follow from a certain conception of extended projections, which are responsible for a sharp difference between what can be expressed with and without embedding of one extended projection in another. This leads to motivated definitions of mono- and biclausality."