News

"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."

Becky Jarvis, Tzintia Montaño Ramírez, and Zachary O'Hagan are in Berlin this week giving presentations and posters at Language Documentation and Archiving at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (pictured here with organizing committee member Kelsey Neely, PhD 2019; Amalia Skilton, PhD 2019; and Bernat Bardagil, postdoc 2018-2020).

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

• SSCircle – Friday, Sep 6 - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin! Join us at Amy Rose's house to discuss any tricky data that you've come across recently.
• Phorum – Friday, Sep. 6 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Introductions & round robin!

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Monday, September 9, Dwinelle 1229, 3-4pm
  Join us for the first-ever meeting of the Ladino Working Group! In this beginner-friendly conversation hour, we will be introducing ourselves in Ladino and sharing some family background (no matter where we are from). There will be snacks!

• LRWG – Wednesday, Sep. 11 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm

  Fernando Márquez Duarte (UC Riverside), Lorenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz, and Alejandro Maclis Valenzuela: Book presentation: a new language manual for Cucupáh

• Phorum – Thursday, Sep. 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
  Martin Krämer on "Sonority, markedness and the OCP" (Note the unusual time and place)
• Workshop on Phonological Domains and What Conditions Them – Friday, September 13 and Saturday, September 14
  Please register at this link if you plan to attend.
• SSCircle – Friday, Sep 13 - 3-4:30pm
  No meeting; attend the Phonological domains workshop instead!
• Linguistics department colloquium – Monday, Sep 16 - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Svenonius, Title TBA
  
  

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Julianne Kapner has accessioned a new collection of recordings and transcripts of word lists and oral histories from the ongoing Armenian Language in the Bay Area (ALBA) Project.
• Josefina Bittar (UCSC) has accessioned the Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción, 14 sociolinguistic interviews in Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní; Paraguay) and Spanish from 2015.
• Emanuele Fabiano, Joshua Homan, Manuel and Samuel Nuribe Arahuata, and Zachary O'Hagan have accessioned a new collection of audio and video recordings of interviews predominantly in Urarina (isolate; Peru) about the history of the Urituyacu River, especially the history of Omurano people, based on collaborative research from 2022.

Maksymilian Dąbkowski has been awarded the American Philosophical Society's 2024 Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research on "Stress and glottalization across lexical classes in A'ingae (or Cofán; Ecuador)." Congrats, Maks!

Professors Hannah Sande and Peter Jenks published a paper, co-authored with Malte Zimmermann (Potsdam) and Guébie community member Badiba Olivier Agodio, on definiteness in Guébie in the TripleA proceedings. The full citation information and link to the paper are as follows: Agodio, Badiba Olivier, Peter Jenks, Hannah Sande, and Malte Zimmermann. 2024. Indexed definiteness without demonstratives in GuébieIn Lecavelier, Jeanne, Niklas Geick, Mira Grubic, Prarthanaa Bharadwaj, Malte Zimmermann, eds. Proceedings of TripleA 10: Fieldwork perspectives on the semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian languages.

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques about their summer adventures:

• Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a talk on Laryngeal metrical feet in Cofán at Collegium Invisibile's Spring Camp, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He received the American Philosophical Society's Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research on Stress and glottalization across lexical classes in A'ingae (or Cofán; Ecuador). He also conducted five weeks of in-person fieldwork on A'ingae in the community of Sinangoé (Sucumbíos, EC), collected over 37 hours of audiovisual recordings (of which 9 hours fully transcribed and translated), spanning different genres, including autobiographies, family and community histories, shamanic stories, traditional activities, mythological accounts, as well as chants, songs, and instrumental music
• Amber Galvano attended ACAL 55 and LabPhon 19 to present on NC voicing dissimilation in Tonko Limba with Daniel Ibrahim Kamara (talk and poster, respectively), as well as ASA 186 to present on her QP2 on the sociophonetics of sexuality in spontaneous speech (poster). She also joined D-Lab for the Data Science for Social Justice Workshop, and will continue working with them this year as a Data Science Fellow, and worked for Lumiere Education as a mentor to two high-schoolers writing their first linguistics research papers.
• Lindsay Hatch, Becky Jarvis, Alexandra Pfiffner, and Katie Russell visited Côte d'Ivoire in July and August.  They conducted documentation work with speakers of Atchan (ISO: ebr; Lindsay, Becky, Alexandra, Katie), Nghwla (ISO: gwa; Lindsay, Katie, Alexandra), Guébié (ISO: gie; Katie), and Lobi (ISO: lob; Katie).  They met with their collaborator, Tchaman linguist Maxime Dido, and attended a Fachwe (generation celebration) and enthronement of a new chief in the village of Blockhauss.
• Julia Peck gave a talk (in the same session as Madeleine Strait!) titled At-Home Language Nesting for Ladino: Reflections on an Emerging Language Revitalization Strategy at the 10th Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment. She also walked 300 kilometers on the Camino de Santiago (del Norte) pilgrimage through Northern Spain and the Basque Country, raising funds for Gazan families' crowdfunding campaigns. She published an article in the Turkish-Jewish magazine Avlaremoz about a newly (re-)discovered mikvah/mikvé (Jewish ritual bath) in Galicia, Spain. The published version was translated into Turkish but the English original can be read here. She was the featured speaker in a 4-part video series by Ladino21, a Ladino revitalization Youtube channel. Here's one of the videos (they're all in Ladino!).
• Nafisa Rashid was awarded the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship to support her research and studies in Linguistics! She is honored to have received this prestigious graduate fellowship and is looking forward to starting graduate school at UC Berkeley this month. 
• Dakota Robinson presented a paper at the 12th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE) in Vienna, Austria: "Variation in Breton rhotics: Modelling social and psycholinguistic factors"
• Oliver Whitmore presented at the conference Minority Languages in European Societies: Documenting, safeguarding, planning in Turin & Bard, Italy. The presentation took place inside 19th century fortress! He was also interviewed by Cheminez about his revitalization work with Occitan. The interview is available (in French) at this link He has been invited to serve as the linguistics bibliographer for the journal Tenso.
• Marko Drobnjak, a Fulbright visitor to Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, successfully defended his dissertation at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana under his co-advisor Gašper Beguš. Congrats, Marko!
• Zach O'Hagan spent several weeks in Peru, first as CLA manager facilitating the return of historical photographs to the Kukamiria community of Achual Tipishca, then documenting the highly endangered Chamikuro language (Arawakan) with 99-year-old speaker Alfonso Patow Chota in Yurimaguas. (Lev Michael continued the collaboration a few weeks later.) In July, Zach represented the CLA in a roundtable titled "Interfering in Our Discipline: Working with Individual Anthropologists' Written and Audiovisual Legacies" at the annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Barcelona, followed by research time at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.

• Gašper Beguš's research was featured in several domestic and international press venues: Harvard Magazine (link), Inside Higher Ed (link), a French science magazine Epsiloon, the Croatian newspaper of record Večernji List, and the Slovenian magazine Outsider. He gave a talk on "Understanding humans and non-humans" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) in Rotterdam, Netherlands on "Basic syntax from speech: Spontaneous concatenation in unsupervised deep neural networks", gave an invited talk titled ``AI as a Tool for Discovery in Animal Communication'' at the Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species III workshop at the Simons Institute (video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tpbsKRgNw), gave an invited talk titled "Causal AI interpretability and sperm whale communication system" at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, gave an invited talk titled "AI Interpretability, neural processing of language, and animal communication'' at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Berkeley (video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2pPcUZiPdI), and gave an invited talk titled ``Understanding communication in non-human species'' at the Antikythera workshop in London, UK.

• Chris Beier and Lev Michael went to Peru late May. Lev gave two invited talks while in Lima: ‘La reconstrucción de la fonología del proto-nihagantsi [The reconstruction of Proto-Nihagantsi phonology]’ at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos; and ‘Las lenguas arawak peruanas: Su clasificación y dispersión geográfica [The Peruvian Arawakan languages: Their classification and geographical distribution]’ at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Also in Lima, Chris and Lev met with representatives of UNESCO to coordinate Iquito language revitalization activities. Earlier in the year, Chris had provided linguistic material and consultation for a UNESCO project to produce short videos intended to support Iquito language revitalization. In June, Chris and Lev traveled to the Iquito community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu, where they completed two 140-page Iquito revitalization textbooks in collaboration with Iquito speaker Jaime Pacaya Inuma, community members Marcelo Inuma Sinchija and Hilter Panduro Güimack, and the Peruvian Ministry of Education. These textbooks will be distributed by the Ministry of Education for use in the Iquito community schools. Lev also stayed on in the community to do additional research with speaker Jaime Pacaya. In July, Lev visited the Máíhùnà community of Nueva Vida for one week. During the latter part of July and early August, Lev traveled to Yurimaguas, Peru, to work with 99-year old Alfonso Patow Chota, who is probably the most fluent living speaker of Chamicuro, a minimally documented Arawakan language.

• Andrew Garrett's academic summer had five highlights: 1) At the end of May, Andrew participated in this year's Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, where he had a chance to learn from the many California language leaders, activists, teachers, and learners who came to the Berkeley campus to work with archival materials. 2) Throughout the summer, Andrew joined the Yurok Tribe language staff and summer interns for biweekly Zoom meetings on grammar, vocabulary, and texts. 3) In Berkeley, Andrew worked with Rhosean Asmah and Madeleine Strait on Yurok archival materials and with Kai Schenck on Yurok rhotic vowel harmony. 4) In early June, Andrew joined Victoria Carlson (Yurok Tribe language program manager) and Caroline Le Guin on the Klamath River, where Caroline returned three baskets that had been given more than a century ago to her grandfather Alfred Kroeber, who left them to his daughter Ursula K. Le Guin. Pictured below are Andrew, Caroline, Victoria, and Victoria's mother Noreen Jones (photo by Dewey Jones); at least one of the baskets was made by Victoria and Noreen's relative (and Kroeber's friend) Dr. Jennie of Sregon. 5) Among non-work-related adventures, in May in Danville, CA, Andrew raced in the USA Track & Field Masters 1 Mile National Championship. He was delighted to place 16th out of 21 in his age group.
• Nicole Holliday went to Leiden to present her research of AAE/Chicano English contact voice quality at Speech Prosody. She is also looking forward to attending Interspeech in Kos, Greece in a couple of weeks!
• Mairi McLaughlin published two co-edited books with Oxford University Press this summer. The first is The Oxford Handbook of the French Language which she co-edited with Wendy Ayres-Bennett. It is the first interdisciplinary English-language handbook of French and it offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research that is being done on French across multiple subfields. A total of 32 chapters are arranged into seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. With Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Mairi also published Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, a volume containing 18 chapters which showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics. There will be a book launch for this event online at 9am California time on 11/6 and everyone is welcome to attend! For more information and to register for the event, click here.
• Work by Prof. Nicole Holliday and former Berkeley Linguistics Prof. John McWhorter was features in this week's election-related news. See the stories in the SF Chronicle, New York Times, and Berkeley News.

Alfonso Patow and Zach O'Hagan in Yurimaguas, Peru, July 2024.

Current and past Berkeley affiliates having lunch at ACAL55 in Montreal. 

Elias (son of Prof. Hannah Sande) and Line (daughter of Prof. Isaac Bleaman) exploring the world together

Andrew Garrett with Caroline, Victoria, and Victoria's mother Noreen Jones

The 19th century fortress where Whitmore presented at a conference.whitemore

Book cover for McLaughlin and co-editors' "Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French"

We're thrilled to announce that Prof. Nicole Holliday will be joining the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics faculty as of July 1, 2024.

Prof. Peter Jenks will receive UC Berkeley's 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award. Given annually to a handful of faculty, this is the highest campus honor in recognition of sustained excellence in teaching.