News

All News

November 17, 2020

Davidson publishes in Languages

Congratulations to Justin Davidson, whose article "Asymmetry and Directionality in Catalan-Spanish Contact: Intervocalic Fricatives in Barcelona and Valencia" has just appeared in the open-access journal Languages.

November 16, 2020

Survey updates

Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • We've catalogued new paper materials related to Q'anjob'al (Mayan; Guatemala, Mexico; item 2016-01.048 and above) that derive from the department's 1986-1987 field methods course, with speaker Rafael Pascual and instructor Leanne Hinton. The course was followed by an undergraduate course on K'iche' (Linguistics 175) in fall 1987, and a combined undergraduate-graduate seminar (Linguistics 198/298) on Mayan languages in spring 1988, both taught by Prof. Hinton.

November 13, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Nov 13-20, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Memorial for Gary Holland - Sunday Nov 15 - Zoom - 11am-2pm
    Click here to register. The Zoom room opens at 10:45am.
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Nov 18 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
    Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia): How experimental should we be?
  • Phorum - Friday Nov 13 - Zoom - 3-4pm
    Chantal Gratton (Stanford): The vowel space as an interactional and affective resource.
    Email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.
  • Phorum - Friday Nov 20 - Zoom - 3-4pm
    Claudia Valdivia, Alex Aabedi, and Ben Lipkin (UCSF Brain Tumor Center): Convergence of cross-modal lexical retrieval in the lateral prefrontal cortex.
    Email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 13 - Zoom - 3-4:30pm
    Justin Royer (McGill): Binding and coreference in Mayan: Evidence for object raising.
  • Zoom Phonology - Thursday Nov 19 - Zoom - 9-10am
    Laura Downing (University of Gothenburg): Testing typologies of laryngeal contrasts in stop inventories: The view from Africa.
    For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology Mailing List, contact karee_garvin@berkeley.edu

November 9, 2020

Memorial for Gary Holland

A Zoom memorial event for Gary Holland will be held 11-2 (Pacific time) on Sunday, November 15. Department community members are welcome. To attend, you need to register in advance here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting; the room will open at 10:45.

November 6, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Nov 6-13, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

November 5, 2020

Rouvier receives Most Impactful Paper Award at ICLDC

Congrats to Ruth Rouvier, whose paper "Emotion and Motivation in Language Reclamation" has been accepted for presentation at the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) and selected for a Most Impactful Paper Award, which comes with a cash prize. The conference will be held virtually March 4-7, 2021.

November 4, 2020

Beguš speaks at UC Davis PhonLab

Gašper Beguš will be speaking at the UC Davis PhonLab on Friday, Nov 6 at 10AM on the topic "Encoding linguistic meaning into raw audio data with deep neural networks."

November 2, 2020

Goldstein colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, Nov 9, with a talk by David Goldstein (UCLA), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Correlated grammaticalization: The rise of articles in Indo-European," and the abstract is as follows:

One of the central empirical goals of historical linguistics is to distinguish probable from improbable changes. This includes not only singleton developments, but also interactions among multiple changes. That is, does one linguistic change become more (or less) likely given the occurrence of some other change? Investigations of this question have been hampered by methodological issues, not the least of which is how exactly correlations between changes should be measured. In this talk, I take up the question of the relationship between the grammaticalization of definite and indefinite articles in Indo-European. Did the emergence of one type of article facilitate (or inhibit) the rise of the other? Using methods developed for the study of correlated evolution in biology (Pagel 1994, 2006), I argue that indefinite articles became more likely to emerge in the wake of the grammaticalization of definite articles. The history of articles in Indo-European is thus an example of correlated grammaticalization. More generally, my results provide further evidence for the view that grammaticalization is not solely a matter of universal principles (e.g., van Gelderen 2011, 2019), but is also crucially conditioned by pre-existing linguistic structure (e.g., Kiparsky 2012, Goldstein 2019).

October 30, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Oct 30-Nov 6, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30PM
    NELS practice talks:
    - Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): 3-on-3 restrictions and PCC typology
    - Khanin Chaipet (Stony Brook) and Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley): Names as complex indices: On apparent Condition C violations in Thai
    - Edwin Ko (UC Berkeley): Feeding agreement: Anti-locality in Crow applicatives of unaccusatives
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Nov 4 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm.
    Ignacio Montoya (University of Nevada): Reflections on Numu language (Northern Paiute) classes at the university level: Decolonial strategies within a colonial context and implications for language revitalization theory
  • Zoom Phonology- Thursday, November 5th- Zoom - 9:00-10:00am PDT
    Larry Hyman (Berkeley): Tone in Runyankore Verb Stem Reduplication
    For the zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology Mailing List, contact karee_garvin@berkeley.edu
  • Phorum - Friday Nov 6 - 3-4pm
    Ana Lívia Agostinho (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil): Word-prosody in Lung’Ie: One system or two? (Collaboration with Larry Hyman)
    Email Anna Björklund or Dakota Robinson for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.

October 28, 2020

Syrett colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, Nov 2, with a talk by Kristen Syrett (Rutgers), held via Zoom from 3:10-4:30. The talk is entitled What partial objects tell us about context in nominal semantics, and the abstract is as follows:

Becoming a proficient speaker requires recognizing that the context in which we deliver our utterances affects meaning, even at the lexical level. This influence of context is well known for indexicals like now or pronouns like I or you, gradable adjectives such as big, or predicates of personal taste such as fun, which encode context directly into their semantic representation. Chierchia 2010, Landman 2011, and Rothstein 2010 have proposed that context also plays a key role in the interpretation of count nouns. These proposals not only have implications for lexical representations, but also for the process of language acquisition: what does it mean for children to know that nouns like cup and ball—which are among the earliest words a child comprehends and produces—are context-dependent, and what are the observable consequences? To date, no systematic experimental work has targeted this position on the semantics of nouns or the developmental implications, despite a growing body of work targeting these other context-dependent expressions.

I present a set of studies from an ongoing collaboration with Athulya Aravind (MIT) targeting children’s and adults’ treatment of partial and whole objects as means to probing nominal semantics. We take as a starting point two separate lines of research, investigating and extending them in parallel. The first is a well-known and oft-replicated finding from Shipley & Shepperson (1990): when young children are presented with a set of partial and whole objects (like forks) and are asked to count or quantify them, they count the partial objects as if they were wholes. The second is experimental research on gradability in the adjectival domain (Syrett, Kennedy, & Lidz, 2010). Integrating our results, we argue that while some researchers have taken children’s non-adult-like counting and quantifying behavior with discrete partial objects to signal either a shift in conceptual development or a lack of knowledge of lexical alternatives that implicates pragmatics, the results are consistent with children’s developing understanding of how nominal semantics shrinks or expands the domain of application, and where children diverge from adults is in the ability to identify speaker intentions in a discourse context. Moreover, while nouns may depend on the context, they do so in a way that is distinctly different from relative gradable adjectives—which encode a context-dependent standard—instead align with absolute gradable adjectives. Taken together, the findings indicate that even the most basic count nouns depend on the discourse context for interpretation. While adults seem to know this, it is something that children gradually come to recognize, as they become increasingly sensitive to the goals of communication.

October 21, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Oct 23-30, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

October 19, 2020

Stanton colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, October 26, with a talk by Juliet Stanton (NYU), held via Zoom from 3:10-4:30. The talk is entitled Rhythm is gradient: evidence from -ative and -ization, and the abstract is as follows:

The rhythmic constraints *Clash and *Lapse are commonly assumed to evaluate syllable-sized constituents: a sequence of two adjacent stressed syllables (óó) violates *Clash, while a sequence of two stressed syllables, separated by two stressless syllables (óooó), violates *Lapse (see e.g. Prince 1983, Gordon 2002 for *Clash; Green & Kenstowicz 1995, Gordon 2002 for *Lapse). In this talk I propose that *Clash and *Lapse can be evaluated gradiently: speakers calculate violations off of a phonetically realized output representation. The closer the two stressed syllables, the greater the violation of gradient *Clash; the further away the two stressed syllables, the greater the violation of gradient *Lapse. Evidence for this claim comes from patterns of secondary stress in Am. English -ative and -ization: in both classes of forms, the inner suffix (-ate and -ize) is more likely to bear stress the further away it is from the rightmost stem stress. Time permitting, we will discuss other sources of evidence for gradient rhythm, including Am. English post-tonic syncope (Hooper 1978), the rhythm rule (e.g. Hayes 1984), and secondary stress in Russian compounds (Gouskova & Roon 2013).

October 16, 2020

Sande joins the faculty
We are delighted to announce that Hannah Sande will be joining Berkeley Linguistics in January 2021! Hannah will begin teaching classes in Fall 2021, and will spend spring semester advising (remotely), and doing research.
Linguistics events this week (Oct 16-23, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

October 15, 2020

Bardagil publishes in Linguistic Variation

Congrats to researcher Bernat Bardagil, whose article Number morphology in Panará has just appeared in Linguistic Variation 20:2!

Survey updates

Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

October 9, 2020

Linguistics events this week (Oct 9-16, 2020)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

October 8, 2020

Bacon joins Google

Congrats to Geoff Bacon, who recently filed his dissertation Evaluating linguistic knowledge in neural networks and has just taken up a position as a computational linguist at Google!

Berkeley @ NELS 51

The program for the 51th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (to be hosted virtually by the Université de Quebec à Montreal) has just been released, promising the following presentations by current department members and recent alumni:

  • Amy Rose Deal: 3-on-3 restrictions and PCC typology
  • Peter Jenks: Names as complex indices: On apparent Condition C violations in Thai
  • Laura Kalin and Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): Deconstructing subcategorization: Conditions on insertion vs. position
  • Edwin Ko: Feeding agreement: Anti-locality in Crow applicatives of unaccusatives

Congrats all!

Nichols colloquium

The 2020-2021 colloquium series kicks off this coming Monday, October 12, with a talk by Johanna Nichols (UC Berkeley), held via Zoom. The talk is entitled Proper measurement of linguistic complexity (and why it matters), and the abstract is as follows:

Hypotheses involving linguistic complexity generate interesting research in a variety of subfields – typology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, cognition, neurolinguistics, language processing, and others. Good measures of complexity in various linguistic domains are essential, then, but we have very few and those are mostly single-feature (chiefly size of phoneme inventory and morphemes per word in text).
In other ways as well what we have is not up to the task. The kind of complexity that is favored by certain sociolinguistic factors is not what is usually surveyed in studies invoking the sociolinguistic work. Phonological and morphological complexity are very strongly inversely correlated and form opposite worldwide frequency clines, yet surveys of just one or the other, or both lumped together, are used to support cross-linguistic generalizations about the distribution of complexity writ large. Complexity of derivation, syntax, and lexicon is largely unexplored. Measuring the complexity of polysynthetic languages in the right terms has not been seriously addressed.
This paper proposes a tripartite metric---enumerative, transparency-based, and relational---using a set of different assays across different parts of the grammar and lexicon, that addresses these problems and should help increase the grammatical sophistication of complexity-based hypotheses and choice of targets for computational extraction of complexity levels from corpora. Meeting current expectations of sustainability and replicability, the set is reusable, revealing, reasonably granular, and (at least mostly) amenable to computational implementation. I demonstrate its usefulness to typology and historical linguistics with some cross-linguistic and within-family surveys.