News

All News

December 8, 2021

Dąbkowski and Sande present at BCGL 14

Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Hannah Sande will be giving a talk at the 14th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL) on Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 6:50AM Pacific. Their talk is entitled "Phonology-syntax interleaving in Guébie focus fronting." [abstract] [handout]

Berkeley linguists published in PNAS

A new article has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by four current and former Berkeley linguists (the middle four authors). Congrats, all!

December 7, 2021

Berkeley linguists in WCCFL 37/38 proceedings

The Proceedings of WCCFL 37/38 (both corresponding to talks given in early March 2020) have just been published, with six papers by Berkeley folks:

Congrats all!

Beguš receives Project CETI grant

Congratulations to Gašper Beguš, who has received a grant "Machine Learning and Linguistics for Project CETI" in the amount of $684,000 from Project CETI. A scientific roadmap paper for the project is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08614

December 6, 2021

Hyman speaks at Cal State Fullerton

Larry Hyman will give a Zoom Linguistics Colloquium talk at California State University, Fullerton on Friday, December 10, 2:30-3:45 pm. The title of his talk is "Deverbal nominalizations in Runyankore." Click here for the abstract and registration link.

December 3, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Dec 3-10, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

December 1, 2021

Nee files dissertation

Congratulations to Julia Nee, who has filed her doctoral dissertation:

"Participatory Action Research in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec Language Revitalization"
Committee: Andrew Garrett, Leanne Hinton (co-chairs), Chris Beier, Beth Piatote

November 30, 2021

Kavitskaya presents at Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology

Darya Kavitskaya will have a co-authored poster at the 5th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology (on Zoom) on December 6, at 7 am PST. Here is the link to the conference site: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/symposium-on-historical-phonology/eshp5/, and to the program: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/symposium-on-historical-phonology/pdf/eshp5-final-prog.pdf

November 29, 2021

Licata published in Journal of Language and Discrimination

Congrats to Gabriella Licata (Romance Languages & Literatures), whose article "Sorry, not sorry: Ted Yoho's infelicitous apology as reification of toxic masculinity" was published in the Journal of Language and Discrimination.

Beguš gives two invited talks

Gašper Beguš recently gave two invited talks—one at SRPP at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and the other at Kuhl Lab Forum, University of Washington—both titled "Interpretable comparison between auditory brainstem response and intermediate convolutional layers in deep neural networks."

November 26, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Nov 26-Dec 3, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

November 19, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Nov 19-26, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

November 16, 2021

Helms, Licata, and Weiher accepted at Journal of Experimental Phonetics

Annie Helms, Gabriella Licata, and Rachel Weiher's article "Influence of orthography in production and perception of /b/ in US Spanish" has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Experimental Phonetics. Congratulations!

Petruck published in LAW-DMR

A paper by Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD 1986) and co-authors Ayush Pancholy and Swabha Swayamdipta, entitled "Sister Help: Data Augmentation for Frame-Semantic Role Labeling," has just been published in Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop. Congrats!

November 15, 2021

TABLE Colloquium Series: Bax

TABLE: Toward a Better Linguistics Environment, a colloquium series taking place this fall, concludes on Monday, November 22, with a presentation by Anna Bax (CSU Long Beach), held via Zoom and in person in Dwinelle 370 (hybrid) from 3-4:30pm. Those who would like to attend, including Berkeley linguists, need to register for the event regardless of mode of attendance (Zoom registration; in-person registration). The presentation is entitled "Teaching linguistics for social transformation," and the abstract is as follows:

In this presentation, I show how linguistics pedagogy can function as a “liberatory practice” (bell hooks) and pathway toward social transformation, especially for students who are themselves linguistically minoritized. I begin by outlining some lessons learned from my initial pedagogical training in sociolinguistic justice during my 5 years spent teaching in UC Santa Barbara’s SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) program, including the limits of an individualistic "error-correction"/"mythbusting" approach to linguistics education. We will then discuss an undergraduate Language and Social Justice course that I taught for the first time in Fall 2020, at a moment when students (and I) were reeling from multiple overlapping social crises. I recount the decision-making process behind my choice to redesign the course around the linguistic aspects of these ongoing crises: language access and healthcare for d/Deaf communities and users of minoritized spoken languages during COVID; the linguistic components of police brutality against Black and Indigenous communities, d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, and non-English speakers; and the roles of media discourse and metaphor theory in the rise of far-right populism, among others. By bringing linguistics scholarship into conversation with topics not typically discussed in a linguistics classroom, such as transformative justice and abolitionism, mutual aid, and direct action, the course is structured to guide students away from despair towards activism and social change. I conclude by laying out several necessary considerations for those interested in incorporating a social justice approach in their own linguistics pedagogy, including ways to weave these issues throughout the linguistics curriculum.

QP Fest 2021

Please join us on Monday, November 29, for Qualifying Paper (QP) project presentations by graduate students in linguistics! The event will take place in Dwinelle 370.

QP Fest | November 29, 2021 | 3:10-4:50pm

3:10-3:22 | Alexander Elias | FETAS: A novel methodology for visualizing dialect chains and linkages
3:22-3:34 | Aurora Martinez Kane | Gender, status, and solidarity: social perceptions of Traditional New Mexican Spanish across communities
3:34-3:46 | Dakota Robinson | Indexing authenticity within and between speech communities: Variation in Breton rhotics
3:46-3:58 | Zachary Wellstood | Sluicing licensed by head-based identity in Aklanon

3:58-4:03 | Break

4:03-4:14 | Allegra Robertson | Gradient vowel weight in Yanesha': Contrast and mora preservation
4:14-4:26 | Wendy Liz Arbey Lopez Marquez | Internally and Externally Headed Relative Clauses in Nuntajɨɨyi
4:26-4:38 | Phuong Khuu | The third type of definites in Vietnamese
4:38-4:50 | Anna Bjorklund | Typology of word prosody in Patwin

November 14, 2021

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Hannah Sande, with the assistance of Julianne Kapner, has archived a new collection of materials related to Nobiin (Nile-Nubian; Egypt, Sudan), stemming from the Georgetown field methods course she taught in the spring of 2018. The collection consists of sound recordings of elicitation sessions and texts, with accompanying transcriptions, glossing, and translations of sessions. Hannah has also added 32 file bundles of sound recordings of elicitation sessions and texts to her collection related to Guébie (Kru; Côte d'Ivoire) from fieldwork in 2015, 2016, and 2017 (see 049-080). More is forthcoming!

November 12, 2021

Linguistics events this week (Nov 12-19, 2021)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

November 9, 2021

Beguš publishes in TACL

Gašper Beguš's paper "Identity-Based Patterns in Deep Convolutional Networks: Generative Adversarial Phonology and Reduplication" has just been published in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). It is available as an Open Access download here.

The paper was also presented at EMNLP 2021. The talk is recorded here.

Congrats, Gašper!

Jenks speaks at WECOL

Peter Jenks is an invited speaker at the 2021 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) at Fresno State, taking place this weekend (November 13-14). His plenary talk is called "Rethinking the distinction between argument and wh-movement: Evidence from Tira." The conference is on Zoom and all are welcome to attend. The program is available here.

Congrats, Peter!