In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
The 41st meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) will take place May 5-7, 2023, at UC Santa Cruz and features work by a number of Berkeley linguists!
The full program is available here.
Calques is happy to pass on this message from Gabriella Licata:
The Language as Social Justice Working Group (Berkeley Language Center) is hosting a free virtual conference April 6-7 titled "Visibilizing raciolinguistic ideologies across cultures, languages, and systems." Our keynote speakers are Clara Vaz Bauler (Adelphi University) and Ian Cushing (Edge Hill University). You can see program information and register here on our conference site.
This past weekend, several Glottal Non-Stops participated in the Oakland Running Festival (running the 10k & half marathon)!
Larry Hyman was honored by Resulam, which promotes ancestral mother tongues, in a 2-1/2 hour Zoom session on Saturday, March 18, organized by the Cameroonian Bamileke community in the diaspora which chose the occasion to thank Larry for his contributions to the Fè'éfè'ê language. Larry's speech in Fè'éfè'ê-Bamileke can be heard here. The full meeting video is posted here. Matt Faytak (Berkeley PhD 2018) also attended and spoke.
Larry spent 6 months in Bafang in 1971 doing his dissertation research when he received a Certificate in Nufi (the Fe'fe' literacy program) and a title of nobility nzɑ᷆ and read a speech in Fe'fe'. The highlight of the Zoom event for Larry was when one of the women present spoke and said that as a little girl she had been at the huge event of several hundred people in the middle of the town when Larry gave his speech.
Isaac Bleaman and Ronald Sprouse have published a tutorial on speaker diarization at the Linguistics Methods Hub. The process allows researchers to automatically generate ELAN or Praat files for audio recordings with speech segments marked off on the appropriate speaker tiers — an important first step in the transcription workflow.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Keith Johnson will be a keynote speaker at the 47th Penn Linguistics Conference, taking place March 18-19, with a talk on "Vowels in the Brain."
Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy who has just been awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language with Arthur Samuel and Clara Martin.
Emily Drummond has received a research grant from the Firebird Foundation to document and revitalize Nukuoro oral histories and traditional knowledge. This research will be conducted alongside collaborators Johnny Rudolph and former Berkeley undergraduate Margaret Asperheim (University of Hawaii) and will train several Nukuoro community members to continue the documentation of traditional knowledge.
Congrats to Larry Hyman on the publication of two articles:
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Big Give is an online fundraising tradition that began in 2014, giving alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends the chance to come together on one day to support the Berkeley campus community. This year you can show support for the Department of Linguistics, the California Language Archive, and the Society of Linguistics Undergrad Students (SLUgS). Big Give starts at 9 pm on Wednesday, March 8, and continues through 9 pm on Thursday, March 9, 2023. Watch for our emails around that time — you might even be able to help us win extra money in the hourly contests!
On Wednesday, March 15, at 11am PDT, Leanne Hinton will be one of the speakers in an online event in Sweden to present the Swedish translation of her edited book Bringing Our Languages Home. [Flyer] [Press release]
Edwin Ko will be speaking (virtually) on the topic of "Migrating and Digitizing Materials" at the Language Vitality Initiative's Language Reclamation Landscapes, an educational series on language reclamation topics by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Administration for Native Americans.
Gašper Beguš will offer a course on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech" at the ESSLLI summer school in Ljubljana, Slovenia (July 31 to August 11, 2023). Click here for the program and here for the course syllabus.
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:
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.