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March 7, 2023

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.

March 3, 2023

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

March 1, 2023

Two Berkeley linguists will be speaking at Yiddish Language Structures (YiLaS) 3, taking place in-person at University College London, March 27-29, 2023. Isaac Bleaman will be giving an invited keynote on "Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Sociolinguistic Variation in Yiddish," as well as a talk on "Definiteness Type as a Predictor of Preposition-Determiner Interactions in a Yiddish Corpus" co-authored with Georg Höhn (Georg August University of Göttingen / Humboldt University). Chaya Nove will be speaking on "The Hasidic Approach to Language in the Past and Present" and chairing a session on Hasidic Yiddish.

For the 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, taking place August 7-11, 2023, at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, a session in memory of the late Gilles Fauconnier (UCSD) has been accepted, including papers by Eve Sweetser (a session organizer) and Berkeley alums Iksoo Kwon and Seiko Fujii:

Session on Mental Spaces, Blends and Viewpoint, in memory of Gilles Fauconnier

  • Barbara Dancygier (University of British Columbia) and Lieven Vandelanotte (Université de Namur): “Be like” internet memes: discourse spaces, stance-stacking and viewpoint blends
  • Seiko Fujii (University of Tokyo): Embedded viewpoint and embedded insubordination constructions in Japanese and English
  • Iksoo Kwon (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies): Space embedding and epistemic stance: A Mental-space approach to I promise and I guarantee constructions
  • Anna Bonifazi (Universität Köln): A mental-space account of embedded viewpoint for anaphoric constructions countering coreference rules
  • Todd Oakley (Case Western Reserve University): Scalar Reasoning in Macroeconomics: The Rhetorical Oddities of Even
  • Lumi Kang and Iksoo Kwon (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies): What Happened to My Body My Choice?: Viewpoint Stacking and the Construal of Picket Signs
  • Terry Janzen (University of Manitoba), Barbara Schaffer (University of New Mexico), and Lorraine Leeson (Trinity College Dublin): Blended spaces in simultaneous interpreting: Signers' and gesturers' subjective representations of speakers' texts
  • Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley): Blending spaces to compose speech–and-gesture meaning
  • Tiago Timponi Torrent (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora) and Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University): Persistence of the base
  • Darren “Daz” Saunders (Université de Québec à Montréal): Mouth actions in blended spaces
  • Riccardo Ginevra (UCSC Milano) and Anna Bonifazi (Universität Köln): Mental space compression and viewpt in I-E texts
  • Jose Sanders, Kobie van Krieken, and Linde van Schuppen (Radboud University, Nijmegen): Viewpoint Embedding in the life-stories of people with schizophrenia
  • Kimberly Grogan (University of British Columbia): Blending for persuasive shock: Climate change activism
  • Kelsey Wilson (University of British Columbia): Reconciling layers of discourse in Dungeons & Dragons through the Discourse Viewpoint Space

February 27, 2023

An article by Andrew Garrett, titled "'The Correct Way of Writing the Indian Language': Juan Dolores at the University of California," just appeared in Boom California, an online journal published by UC Press.

Gašper Beguš gave two invited colloquium talks recently, one at the CLIP colloquium at the University of Maryland and one at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

February 24, 2023

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."

February 22, 2023

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.

February 21, 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.

February 17, 2023

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

February 16, 2023

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."

February 10, 2023

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

February 3, 2023

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

February 1, 2023

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!

January 31, 2023

The first two volumes of Amazonian languages: An international handbook were officially published on January 30. Edited by Patience Epps and Lev Michael, these two volumes present grammatical descriptions of all reasonably well-attested linguistic isolates of the Greater Amazonian region. Volume I covers Aikanã to Kandozi-Shapra, and Volume II covers Kanoé to Yurakaré. (A chapter in Volume III will summarize what we know about the more poorly-attested isolates and small language families known only from colonial-era materials.)

Linguists currently or formerly affiliated with Berkeley contributed significantly to these volumes:

Introduction (freely available online): Patience Epps (UT Austin) and Lev Michael

Aʔɨwa: Christine Beier and Lev Michael

Cholón: Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus (University of Amsterdam) and Kelsey Caitlyn Neely (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme; Berkeley PhD 2019)

Muniche: Lev Michael, Stephanie Farmer (Berkeley PhD 2015), Greg Finley (Meta, Berkeley PhD 2015), Karina Sullón Acosta (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), Christine Beier, Alejandrina Chanchari Icahuate (Munichis, Peru), Donalia Icahuate Baneo (Munichis, Peru), and Melchor Sinti Saita (Munichis, Peru)

Mỹky: Bernat Bardagil (University of Groningen; Berkeley postdoc 2017-2020)

Omurano: Zachary O'Hagan (Berkeley PhD 2020)

Taushiro: Zachary O'Hagan

Warao: Andrés Romero-Figueroa (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello) and Konrad Rybka (University of Leiden; Berkeley postdoc 2015-2018)

In addition, Zachary O'Hagan was the editorial assistant in the first several years of the project.

The next volumes in the series will focus on the small language families of Greater Amazonia, and the final volumes, on the large language families of the region.

January 27, 2023

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

  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 1 - Zoom (password: fforum) and Dwinelle 1303 - 3:10-4pm
    Gilles Polian (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology): "The Tseltal Multidialectal Dictionary."
  • Phorum - Friday Jan 27 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Mykel Brinkerhoff (UC Santa Cruz): "Testing the Laryngeal Complexity Hypothesis: Evidence from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec."
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 3 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Aglaia von Götz (UC Berkeley): TBD.

January 25, 2023

Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, Katie Cugno (SF State), and Annie Helms on the publication of their article "Medium-shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews" in Language Variation and Change! The article is available in Open Access here.

January 23, 2023

In the last days of 2022, the Diccionario Iquito-Castellano was published by Editorial Abya Yala, a publisher devoted to works related to the Indigenous peoples of Latin America. This dictionary was compiled by Lev Michael and Christine Beier and documents the lexical, cultural, and grammatical knowledge of Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma. This edition of the dictionary was prepared with the Spanish language assistance of Jaime Montoya Samamé.

Copies of the dictionary were delivered to the Iquito community of San Antonio last week, and last Friday, the dictionary was presented to the community at a long-anticipated ceremony. Each family present received a copy of the dictionary, and Lev and Chris have been continuing to distribute copies as families that were out of the community at the time drop by the Iquito language center to get their own copies. Photos and further details about the dictionary presentation ceremony are available here.

January 22, 2023

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Shweta Akolkar has accessioned the new collection Bishnupriya Manipuri Language Documentation Materials (Indo-Aryan; India, Bangladesh), based on a collaboration with Uttam Singha and other speakers. The collection represents a kind of archival collection that has come to exist originally due to the COVID-19 pandemic, consisting of audio and/or video recordings of Zoom calls where notes are shared onscreen and later bundled with the same recording files as PDFs.

January 20, 2023

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

  • QP Fest - Monday Jan 23 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-4:35pm
    Rescheduled from fall 2022. Please click here for the schedule of talks.
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Jan 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
    Margarita Martínez Pérez (Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas): "¿Ser investigadora desde adentro es más fácil?: Experiencias de colaboración en el trabajo de campo para la documentación lingüística comunitaria."
  • Phorum - Friday Jan 20 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Sarang Jeong (Stanford): "The relation between perception and production in an ongoing sound change: A pilot experiment on the younger group's perception of Korean three-way stop contrast."
  • Phorum - Friday Jan 27 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
    Mykel Brinkerhoff (UC Santa Cruz): "Testing the Laryngeal Complexity Hypothesis: Evidence from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec."
  • Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Jan 23 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
    Discussion of Vida-Castro 2022.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Jan 20 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): "Hyperraising to object in Kalaallisut."