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December 14, 2022

Zachary O'Hagan is in Austin, Texas this week giving a talk titled "Interaction of Causative and Antipassive in Caquinte" at the 14th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

December 12, 2022

Congratulations to Wesley dos Santos, whose manuscript "Asymmetries among person indexes in Kawahíva" was accepted for publication at the International Journal of American Linguistics! The manuscript can be read here (requires Berkeley credentials).

December 11, 2022

Lev Michael, Fernando de Carvalho, Thiago Chacon, Konrad Rybka, Andrés Sabogal, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri (PhD Environmental Science 2014), and Gereon Kaiping recently published "Deriving calibrations for Arawakan using archaeological evidence" in Interface Focus.

December 7, 2022

Isaac Bleaman and Chaya Nove will be giving a research talk at the 54th annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, held in Boston, December 18-20. Their talk is titled "The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe: A new resource for language research and pedagogy," and it is part of a panel on "Jewish Corpus Linguistics and Language Documentation."

December 6, 2022

Congratulations to Erik Hans Maier, who recently filed his doctoral dissertation:

"A Treebank of the Karuk Language"
Committee: Line Mikkelsen (chair), Peter Jenks, Beth Piatote

Katie Russell gave a talk on Monday titled "The development of subject negation marking across Eastern Kru" at the Third AMC Symposium: Change in syntax and phonology: The same or different? in Edinburgh.

December 5, 2022

Congratulations to the Berkeley linguists who will be presenting at the 2023 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Denver:

  • Isaac L. Bleaman and Georg F.K. Höhn (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen & Humboldt): "Three-way preposition-determiner interactions in Yiddish: A corpus-based investigation"
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Postlabial raising and paradigmatic leveling in A'ingae: A diachronic study from the field"
  • Wesley dos Santos: "A nominalizer account of =a in Kawahíva (Tupí-Guaraní)"
  • Emily Grabowski and Jennifer Kuo (UCLA): "Comparing k-means and OPTICS clustering algorithms for identifying vowel categories"
  • Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete and Jesus Duarte (UCLA): "Perception of acoustic cues of voiced coronal stops by Spanish-English bilinguals"
  • Edwin Ko and John Huelsenbeck: "Internal and external borrowing and their effects on linguistic phylogenies: A simulation study"
  • Gabriella Licata: "A semiotic analysis of right-wing surveillance of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's communicative repertoire"
  • Chaya R. Nove: "Regional distinctions in the length contrast of Central Yiddish vowels"
  • Katherine Russell: "Variability in Paraguayan Guaraní nasal harmony: Interactions with morphosyntax"
  • Myriam Lapierre (Washington; PhD 2021) and Katherine Russell: "Opposite directionality in [+/–F] agreement: The case of Tupí-Guaraní nasal harmony"

Please let us know if any presentations are missing from this list, so that we can update this story on our departmental website.

December 3, 2022

Both Michael Arrigo (graduate of RLL's Linguistics track, current lecturer in French) and Mairi McLaughlin (French) just had articles published in the latest edition of Synergies: Pays riverains de la baltique: http://gerflint.fr/Base/Baltique15/baltique15.html (dated 2021 but only just released!)

Michael's article is titled "L’incertitude à double sens: le conditionnel journalistique et la construction de l’objectivité et de la subjectivité dans les textes journalistiques," and Mairi's article, co-authored with Eva Havu, is titled "Le discours rapporté et l’agentivité du journaliste dans les dépêches d’agences de presse."

December 2, 2022

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

December 1, 2022

In the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast series, James McElvenny conducted an interview with Andrew Garrett about Alfred Kroeber and the forthcoming book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, 2023). Click here for more information.

November 30, 2022

Dr. Zachary O'Hagan has accepted an academic staff position in the Department of Linguistics as Manager of the California Language Archive, effective January 1, 2023. In that role, Zach will be responsible for collection acquisition and preservation (including cataloging and digitization), managing general operations (including student employees), and access and outreach in California and beyond. Congratulations, Zach!

Congrats to Hannah Sande and Madeleine Oakley, whose article on the perception and phonological patterning of implosives has just been published in Language and Speech! Click here to read it.

November 29, 2022

The following statement in solidarity with the striking academic workers at UC was recently unanimously approved by the voting faculty members in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley:

We share the serious concerns about compensation that have animated the ongoing strike at UC. The cost of living here is high, and the graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in our department, who are central to academic life, are straining to cover living costs. We urge that these concerns be taken seriously, and we hope that an agreement that addresses them can be reached quickly.

November 17, 2022

Due to the ongoing strike, QP Fest 2022 will not take place on November 21 as previously announced. It will likely be rescheduled for the spring semester.

November 16, 2022

Jhonni Carr and Marguerite Morlan presented their research at I Congreso internacional sobre Paisaje Lingüístico: El entorno urbano y rural hispánico (1st International Conference on Linguistic Landscape: Hispanic urban and rural environments). Jhonni's talk was titled "Come work from Mexico, it’s truly magical: la gentrificación en el paisaje lingüístico de Mazunte," and Marguerite's was "Language choice and identity in the transgressive linguistic landscape of Catalonia."

November 13, 2022

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • In the last month, we've hosted three visits by Indigenous researchers: Richenda Ervin and Jonathan Geary (Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians), who visited twice (photo here); and Anthony Macias, Jessica Chaves, and Kim Carver (Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of Stewarts Point Rancheria; photo here).
  • We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the 1974-1975 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lakota (Siouan; US), with primary consultant Ruby (LaPointe) Swift Bird (1927-2004) and Eva (Martin) Brown (1909-1996), both Oglala women from Pine Ridge (South Dakota), and instructor Wallace Chafe (1927-2019). The materials -- donated by Kenneth Whistler (PhD 1980), a student in the class -- include extensive in-class and secondary notes, compiled term papers, and lexical file slips. This course had a strong impact on other enrolled students, such as Robert Van Valin, whose dissertation became Aspects of Lakhota Syntax (PhD 1977).
  • Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for other kinds of updates!

November 11, 2022

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

Note: Both of the above events will be canceled in the event of a UAW academic workers strike on Monday.

November 10, 2022

Please join us on Monday, November 21, for Qualifying Paper (QP) project presentations by graduate students in linguistics! The event will take place in Dwinelle 370, with a Zoom option.

QP Fest | November 21, 2022 | 3:10-4:35pm

3:10pm | Katherine Russell
Morpheme-specific nasal harmony in Atchan

3:25pm | Maksymillian Dąbkowski
Two grammars of A'ingae glottalization

3:50pm | Mingyu Yuan
An information-theoretic approach to language decline

4:05pm | Tzintia Montaño Ramirez
Status of the patient subject in the Garifuna passives

4:20pm | Rebecca Jarvis
Relative-clause structures in Atchan

November 9, 2022

Calques is happy to pass along this message from the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS):

Are you interested in Phonetics? SLUgS invites you to join us in a tour of the PhonLab in the linguistics department, headed by Professor Keith Johnson! Tour the lab and see what phoneticians do in person and see experiments in action. Tour is Nov 17th at 5pm, meeting at Dwinelle 1229!

November 8, 2022

Congratulations to Edwin Ko on the publication of a new article, "On the origins of multiple exponence in Crow," in the journal Diachronica.