News

Gašper Beguš (with Alan Zhou and Christina Zhao) published a paper titled "Encoding of speech in convolutional layers and the brain stem based on language experience" in Scientific Reports, available to download through Open Access.

Dear colleagues,

We are sad to announce that our past student, colleague, co-author, and friend William (Bill) F. Weigel passed away suddenly a few days ago.

Bill came to Linguistics later in life than most, having first had a career as an attorney. His papers in Linguistics were few but always interesting and sometimes influential. He was an erudite linguist, with immense knowledge of many topics and languages. His dissertation, Yowlumne in the Twentieth Century, was a beautiful study of the language better known to linguists as Yawelmani Yokuts — a combination of a grammar, a study of language change, and a critique of linguistic methodologies used in past Yawelmani studies (specifically the creation of contrived, unattested forms) that played such a big role in the evolution of generative grammar. His 2013 article "Real data, contrived data, and the Yokuts canon" should be required reading for anyone who engages with the results of earlier documentation.

After his PhD, Bill worked with Yokuts communities and individuals on their efforts toward language revitalization, supported by the Owens Valley Career Development Center Nuumu Yadoha Program, providing workshops on Yokuts grammar, storytelling, strategies of documenting endangered languages and dictionary-making. He also taught Linguistics 55AC for many years, at first in the Linguistics Department and later at University Extension.

In recent years, with COVID restrictions and declining health, Bill's geography became smaller, and he became a regular patron of coffee shops along Shattuck Avenue near his apartment. With his big heart and friendly attitude, he became well-known to both vendors and street people, a real "town and gown" guy. We and his other friends often sought him out there for a conversation. We'll miss that, and him, a great deal.

Leanne Hinton, Andrew Garrett, Carly Tex, Johanna Nichols, and Rich Rhodes

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

• Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium - Saturday Apr 15 - Dwinelle 5125 - 10am-5pm
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm
  Anna Belew (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and Endangered Languages Project): "'I don't feel alone anymore': Building relationships of support and solidarity through language revitalization mentoring."
• Phorum x SSCircle - Friday Apr 14 - Dwinelle 1229 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Laura Kalin (Princeton): "On the (non-)transparency of infixes that surface at a morpheme juncture."
• Phorum - Friday Apr 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Georgia Zellou (UC Davis): "The perception of vowelless words in Tashlhiyt."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Cheryl Yin (UC Berkeley): "When Cambodians Don’t Know How to Talk to Buddhist Monks."
  We will also be providing food from Gordito Amigos! Orders can be placed here.
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Yining Nie (San José State): TBA.

Starting in July, Gabriella Licata (Spanish & Portuguese) will be a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Latino and Latin American Research and Studies Center at the University of California, Riverside. She will be working at the intersection of linguistics, education, and anthropology in the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab under the supervision of Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza.

On Monday, May 1, Mark van de Velde and Peter Jenks will co-host a small workshop on Definiteness in the Niger-Congo Noun Phrase.

Participants include Pius Akumbu (LLACAN), Dmitry Idiatov (LLACAN), Larry M. Hyman (Berkeley), Augustina Owusu (Boston College), and Hannah Sande (Berkeley). The workshop will take place in the O'Neill Room at the Berkeley Faculty Club. Please let us know if you are planning to attend by filling out this short form: https://forms.gle/6yMJsXxk2KeyeoYX9.

The workshop is generously funded by grants from the France-Berkeley Fund and the Center for African Studies.

Workshop: Definiteness in the Niger-Congo Noun Phrase

8:45-9:10am Breakfast
9:10-10:20am Where are the stage 1 articles? Dmitry Idiatov and Mark van de Velde
10:20-10:30am Coffee Break
10:30-11:15am Implications of Tiania and Bantu Noun Phrase Structure, Larry M. Hyman
11:15-12:00pm Demonstratives and definiteness in Babanki, Pius Akumbu and Peter Jenks
12-12:45pm Lunch
12:45-1:30pm On the strong-weak status of the Akan definiteness marker, Augustina Owusu
1:30-2:15pm Definiteness marking in Guébie, Peter Jenks, Hannah Sande, and Malte Zimmermann

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 10 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Laura Kalin (Princeton): "On the nature of linearization: Insights from infixes and infixation."
• Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium - Saturday Apr 15 - Dwinelle 5125 - 10am-5pm
• Phorum - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Marie Tano (Stanford): "Stancetaking and the construction of Black American identities in the United States."
• Phorum x SSCircle - Friday Apr 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Laura Kalin (Princeton): "On the (non-)transparency of infixes that surface at a morpheme juncture."
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Nicoletta Biondo (UC Berkeley): "Bridging theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience: Fine-grained linguistic differences do matter during online language comprehension."

On Thursday, April 6, Julia Peck gave a talk at Spanish in the US/Spanish in Contact with Other Languages at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The talk was titled "Ladino in Contact: Morphosyntactic Integration of Turkish and French Lexical Borrowings in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish."

Several current and former UC Berkeley linguists will be presenting at TripleA 10 in Potsdam in June:

• Rebecca Jarvis: "Movement and quantifier interpretation in West African internally-headed relatives."
• Peter Jenks, Hannah Sande, and Malte Zimmermann: "Definiteness marking in Guébie (Kru)."
• Virginia Dawson (PhD 2020): "Inclusive plural marking in a 'general number' language."

The TripleA workshop series was founded in 2014 by linguists from Potsdam and Tübingen with the aim of providing a platform for researchers conducting theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork that investigates meaning. Its focus is particularly on under-represented languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.

The Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium is on Saturday, April 15th from 10am to 5pm in Dwinelle 5125 (Spanish and Portuguese Library). Talks range from ASL phonology, colonial language policy, epicene pronominalization, abbreviations, thematic suffixes, Native American English perception, and more! Come meet and engage with the next generation of linguists!

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

• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4pm
  Deborah Anderson (UC Berkeley) with Craig Cornelius (Google) and Kamal Mansour: "Language Preservation and Documentation with Unicode: Character encoding, keyboards and fonts."
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 5 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (p/w lrwg22) - 2:10-3pm (note different time)
  Yan García (CSU Long Beach and Tlahtoltapazolli): "Community Nahuatl Teaching in Los Angeles."
• Phorum - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1229 - 3-4:30pm
  Marie Tano (Stanford): "Stancetaking and the construction of Black American identities in the United States."
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Lorenzo García-Amaya (Michigan): "Investigating the impact of long-term bilingualism on filled-pause production and fluency patterns in Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals" (remote talk).
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 7 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Nicoletta Biondo (UC Berkeley): "Bridging theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience: Fine-grained linguistic differences do matter during online language comprehension."

Congratulations to Andrew Cheng (PhD 2020) who has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Hawai'i to start in August 2023! Andrew also has a new paper out in the Journal of Linguistic Geography titled "A comparative study of English vowel shift and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions."