News

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the winter-spring 1980 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lakota (Siouan; US), with consultants Eva (Martin) Brown (1909-1996), previously a consultant for the 1974-1975 course, and Mary (Afraid of Enemy) McDaniel (1917-1992), and instructor Wallace Chafe (1927-2019). Mrs. McDaniel was a granddaughter of Solomon Afraid of Enemy, who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890; she was also the great-granddaughter of the Oglala Sitting Bull (d. 1877). The single notebook in the collection was recovered at an estate sale at the former home of Knud Lambrecht (PhD 1986) in Alameda in 2019!

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 13 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego): "Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How."
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 15 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Michael Everdell (UT Austin) and Gabriela García Salido (UNAM): "Evidentiality as the source of discourse-genre: Evidence from O'dam (Durango, Mexico)."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Amber Galvano (UC Berkeley): "A Q-theoretic approach to cross-dialectal <st> Spanish production."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 17 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Simon Todd (UC Santa Barbara): "Building implicit linguistic knowledge through passive exposure."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Shweta Akolkar & Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference & Focus Fronting in Lobi."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): "Topic and focus in Tira."

The 2022-2023 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 13, with a talk by Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. His talk is entitled "Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How," and the abstract is as follows:

Headless Relative Clauses have been sadly neglected in linguistics — fortunately, not so by languages across the world and their speakers. Rarely mentioned in descriptive grammars and largely ignored by typological investigations, Headless Relative Clauses have received only limited attention in theoretical syntax or formal semantics, mainly based on the usual "language" suspects (i.e., some Germanic and some Romance). In this talk, I aim to vindicate them. I introduce and define varieties of Headless Relative Clauses, present a methodology to study them across languages, and highlight the insights they bring to the investigation of the crosslinguistic syntax/semantics interface, and also to the study of logical words, and fieldwork, typology. I hope to provide what is needed for those who want to study Headless Relative Clauses in whatever language they choose from whichever linguistic corner they prefer, starting from this last sentence, which contains 4 examples of a total of 3 different kinds of Headless Relative Clauses.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 8 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Lucero Flores Nájera (Institute of Anthropology, University of Veracruz): "La documentación lingüística en comunidades nahuas de Tlaxcala y Veracruz."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Mar 8 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm (note different time)
  Hilaria Cruz (University of Louisville): "Crowdsourcing endangered language children's books."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Julia Swan (San José State): "Monophthongal /ow/ among Nordic Americans in Puget Sound: A Case of Functional Reallocation."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Amber Galvano (UC Berkeley): "A Q-theoretic approach to cross-dialectal <st> Spanish production."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 6 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Bruyèl-Olmedo & Juan-Garau 2015 paired with a workshop on Linguistic Landscape analysis -- with pizza (RSVP).
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Jiayi Lu (Stanford): "An adjunction analysis of clause chaining in Turkish."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Shweta Akolkar & Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): TBA.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 1 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Danny Law (UT Austin): "The Historical Comparative Semantics of Mayan Positional Roots: Developing a fieldworker's guide."
• Phorum - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Nay San (Stanford): "Improving access to language documentation corpora using self-supervised models for speech."
• Phorum - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Julia Swan (San José State): "Monophthongal /ow/ among Nordic Americans in Puget Sound: A Case of Functional Reallocation."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 27 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Lindberg et al. 2022.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Augustina Owusu (Boston College): "Definitely a question: definiteness markers in Akan ex-situ questions."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Jiayi Lu (Stanford): "An adjunction analysis of clause chaining in Turkish."

Congrats to Becky Jarvis, who will be giving a presentation titled "Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" at the 33rd meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 33) hosted at Yale from May 12 to 14, 2023.

Congrats to Larry Hyman, whose article "Deverbal nominalization in Runyankore" has just appeared in Studies in African Linguistics (though published as part of the last issue from 2022). Click here for the PDF.

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 22 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Tracy Burnett (UC Berkeley): "Is there an easy way to archive materials that makes them easy to learn from in the future?"
• Phorum - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Nay San (Stanford): "Improving access to language documentation corpora using self-supervised models for speech."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 17 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Grishin (MIT): "Clause size(s) in Passamaquoddy."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 24 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Augustina Owusu (Boston College): TBA

Zachary O'Hagan is in Austin to attend the 22nd meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society February 17-18, giving a keynote presentation titled "The Ashaninka Archival Collection of Gerald Weiss: Value in Legacy Documentation and Priorities in Preservation."

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

• Phorum - Friday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Reiko Kataoka (San José State): "Effects of Lexical Frequency on Phonetic Recalibration."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin.

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

• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Feb 8 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm (note different time)
  Maura Sullivan (Tulane): "Redefining our Record: Chumash Inquiry in Smithsonian Archives."
• Phorum - Friday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Reiko Kataoka (San José State): "Effects of Lexical Frequency on Phonetic Recalibration."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Feb 6 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Becker et al. 2022.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Aglaia von Götz (UC Berkeley): "How to count to one and a half."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 10 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin.

Congrats to Berkeley PhD alumni Nicholas Rolle (2018) and John T. M. Merrill (2018) on the publication of their article "Tone-driven epenthesis in Wamey" in Phonology!