News

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

• Aishwarya Jayadeep (BA 2023) will be starting an MS in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley this fall.
• Chelsea Tang (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT this fall.
• Calvin Quick (BA 2023) will be starting the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Toronto in September 2023.
• Cid Bryan (BA 2022) is currently working as a substitute teacher and is getting ready to apply to graduate programs in the near future.
• Dara Gaeuman (BA 2022) will be starting the master's program for clinical Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University in September 2023.
• Cecilia Elena Bachmann (BA 2023) will begin working as the Emerging Adult Workforce and Education Coordinator for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles. She also has plans to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2024.
• Noah Boihem (Linguistics BA, Computer Science BA 2023) will be attending Nuclear Power School to become a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy starting in October 2023. He will be assisting in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab until then.
• Corina Chen (BA 2022) will be starting her M.Ed. at Stanford in June 2023 and is looking forward to becoming an English secondary school teacher in the SF Bay Area.
• Gunjan Anand (BA 2023) will be starting her PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the fall.

Congratulations, everybody!

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), taking place June 12-14, 2023, at the University of Connecticut:

• Franco Liu and Shweta Akolkar: "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference and Focus Fronting in Lobi"
• Shweta Akolkar and Franco Liu: "Morphological rɛ́-flex of focus in Lobi"
• Anna Macknick: "STAMP as Asymmetric Negation in Lobi"
• Katherine Russell: "Two types of negation in Guébie"
• Amber Galvano and Sansan Hien: "Quantifying the Lobi vowel space"
• Rebecca Jarvis: "Relative clause derivations and subject displacement in Atchan"

Gašper Beguš published a paper titled "Articulation GAN: Unsupervised modeling of articulatory learning" in proceedings of ICASSP 2023 (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing) with Alan Zhou, Peter Wu, and Gopala K. Anumanchipalli. The paper is available here.

Video of the presentation scheduled to be given at the conference in Rhodes, Greece on June 9 is available here.

Research on biological and artificial neural computation of speech by Gašper Beguš is featured in Berkeley News. Read it here!

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

• Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium 2023 - Monday May 1 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 3:10pm
• Language Revitalization Working Group and Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday May 3 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (password: lrwg22) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Leanne Hinton, Zach O'Hagan, Tzintia Montaño-Ramírez, Alex Elias (UC Berkeley): "Through their eyes: A panel discussion on fieldwork and revitalization at Berkeley."
  The panel will be followed by a reception in Ishi Court from 4:30-6 p.m. Please RSVP to inform us of your attendance and accommodation or dietary requirements (if applicable).
• Phorum - Friday Apr 28 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Christopher Cox (Aarhus University & University of York): "Exploring the Active Role of the Infant & Caregiver-Infant Feedback Loops in Language Development."
• WCCFL Practice Talks - Tuesday May 2 - Dwinelle 3401 and Zoom - 12:30 (sharp)-3pm
  - 12:30-1pm: Amber Galvano, "A Q- and Exemplar-Theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production"

  - 1-1:30pm: Becky Jarvis, "Subject movement in Atchan relative clauses: A two-probe, mixed A/A'-account"
  - 1:30-2pm: Shweta Akolkar, Sansan Claude Hien, & Franco Liu, "Nominal licensing without T: Switch reference and wh/focus fronting in Lobi"
  - 2-2:30pm: Amy Rose Deal & Justin Royer, "Mayan animacy hierarchy effects: A dynamic interaction approach"
  - 2:30-3pm: Maddy Bossi, "Two types of 'say'-complementation in Kipsigis"

On Friday, April 28, Line Mikkelsen will deliver an invited talk at the Chicago Linguistic Society on "Hyperraising in Kalaallisut." Click here for the program.

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• On Monday and Tuesday of this week, 10 Wintu people, led by Michelle Radcliff-Garcia, visited the California Language Archive (CLA). Anna Macknick (GSR) was responsible for the conceptualization and coordination of the event, which they carried out in conjunction with Chelsi Sparti, drawing new connections among the CLA, the American Indian Graduate Program, the Native FEWS Alliance, and the Student Technology Equity Program (STEP), all of which provided financial and/or logistical support; STEP fully donated several laptop computers to the group! The group also spent time at the Bancroft Library, at the Native Community Center (Anthony Hall), and with Prof. Beth Piatote here in the department, in her capacity as head of the Arts Research Center, which houses the Indigenous Poetics Lab. Alex Elias and Måsi Santos also provided valuable assistance, including as part of a workshop on using FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx).
• Rebecca Jarvis, Julianne Kapner, and Katherine Russell have accessioned the new collection Materials of the Atchan Language Project (Kwa; Côte d’Ivoire), based on a collaboration with Jeanne Doko, Léocadie Guebeapo, Timothée Kouadio, Evelyne Koutouan, and others. Materials include audio recordings of elicitation sessions, oral narratives, and sociolinguistic interviews; field notes; and time-aligned TextGrids. The project has been conducted both in person in Côte d’Ivoire and remotely on Zoom.

The Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), hosted by McGill University in Montréal, is taking place April 28-30, 2023, and features talks by the following Berkeley linguists:

• Tessa Scott: "Reduced pronouns in San Juan Atitán Mam"
• Amy Rose Deal & Justin Royer: "Mayan animacy hierarchy effects: A dynamic interaction approach"

Click here for the full program.

Please join us for

The Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Monday, May 1, 2023 at 3:10pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

(Zoom link for remote guests: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/92112030060)

Student Presenters

• Cecilia Elena Bachmann
  Honors Thesis Title: "Language: A Multidimensional Tool in Higher Education between Achievement and Oppression"
  Faculty Advisor: Isaac Bleaman (Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Justin Davidson (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Andres Sanchez
  Honors Thesis Title: "Accented Speech Recognition Disparities in Digital Voice Assistants: Addressing Spanish-Accented English"
  Faculty Advisor: Terry Regier (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Justin Davidson (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Aishwarya Jayadeep
  Honors Thesis Title: "From āṭutan̠ to khalbə: Examining the Heart of Liquid Adaptation in Malayalam’s English and Arabic loans"
  Faculty Advisor: Andrew Garrett (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Darya Kavitskaya (Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures)
• Cor Zanda
  Honors Thesis Title: "Parallel Morphological Changes in the Polynesian Thematic Suffixes"
  Faculty Advisor: Andrew Garrett (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Readers: Emily Drummond (PhD candidate, Department of Linguistics) and Peter Jenks (Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics)
• Bryce Wallace
  Honors Thesis Title: "The Vaccine Holocaust: The Rhetorical Use of Metaphor in Anti-vax Discourse"
  Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Lori Dorfman (Adjunct Professor, School of Public Health)
• Calvin Quick
  Honors Thesis Title: "Syntactic Variation in Early Modern Welsh Poetry: An Optimality Theoretic Approach"
  Faculty Advisor: Eve Sweetser (Professor, Department of Linguistics)
  Second Reader: Myriah Williams (Lecturer, Celtic Studies)

The week before last, Karuk language teacher Florrine Super visited the campus with eight of her Karuk language students on a college preparedness trip. As part of the visit they talked about their work with the Karuk language in Line Mikkelsen's freshman seminar on linguistic diversity in California.

That same week, Karuk cultural practitioners Dixie Rogers and Claudette visited Linguistics 55AC ("The American Languages") to share their experiences learning the Karuk language in the context of material culture, as well as an introduction and demonstration of Karuk basket weaving.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 26 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Rachael Samberg (UC Berkeley): "An introduction to privacy & ethics in linguistics research."
• Phorum - Friday Apr 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Georgia Zellou (UC Davis): "The perception of vowelless words in Tashlhiyt."
• Phorum - Friday Apr 28 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Christopher Cox (Aarhus University & University of York): "Exploring the Active Role of the Infant & Caregiver-Infant Feedback Loops in Language Development."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Yining Nie (San José State): "Causatives and ambiguity in French and Italian" (joint work with Fabienne Martin, Chiara Dal Farra and Silvia Silleresi).