Mairi McLaughlin's book La Presse française historique: Histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue has just been published by Classiques Garnier. The book presents the results of the first major study into the history of language in the French press. It has a dual aim: to shed light on the history of the genre of journalism and to explore what the study of historical periodicals can bring to our understanding of the history of language.
Congratulations, Mairi!
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Congrats to Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who will be presenting at the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (Thursday, March 4, at 3:45pm ET). The title of his talk is "Evidence of accurate logical reasoning in online sentence comprehension" and it is a collaboration with Roman Feiman.
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
Julia Nee will be giving a talk at the Berkeley Language Center's Found in Translation (FIT) working group on Wednesday, February 10, 2021, from 2 to 3pm:
Using Long-Format Speech Environment Recordings to Understand the Full Range of Zapotec Learners' Language Abilities
Zoom link (Meeting ID: 961 6335 9441, Passcode: 555992)
In addition to requiring exposure to the language, one common barrier to language revitalization is the presence of an “ideology of contempt” towards a language (Dorian, 1998), and language revitalization projects will not be successful in the long run if negative language attitudes are not addressed (Dauenhauer & Dauenhauer, 1998). In Teotitlán del Valle, Mexico, ~35 children participate in Zapotec language revitalization camps for children 6-12 promoting positive Zapotec language ideologies and encouraging Zapotec use at home. This study addresses the gap in our understanding of naturalistic language use and development of language attitudes in such an endangered language context by addressing three key questions: (1) What do long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings suggest about children's language use and attitudes in Teotitlán?; (2) How do patterns in LFSE data compare to other measures of language use?; and (3) What methodological challenges are presented in collecting LFSE data from children ages 6-12? I show that LFSE recordings provide evidence that Zapotec learners’ exposure to and abilities in Zapotec are greater than suggested by other measures, including reported language use and observations of classroom language use. Furthermore, participants’ recordings suggest that learners have acquired significant abilities in Zapotec, and that providing supportive contexts for language use can increase learner investment and result in greater Zapotec use (cf. Riestenberg & Sherris, 2018).
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Here's the latest from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Practice talks for ICLDC 7
Ruth Rouvier: Emotion and motivation in language reclamation.
Julia Nee & Rosita Jiménez Lorenzo: Emergent multilingual identities among children learning Zapotec.
Beth Piatote writes to announce a new DE cohort in Indigenous Language Revitalization and a welcome event on February 19. Congrats, all!
We are delighted to welcome a new cohort of outstanding graduate students into the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. We are especially excited about the diversity of fields represented and the dynamic growth of the DE. We welcome Emily Drummond, Linguistics, working with Nukuoro, a Polynesian-Outlier language spoken in Micronesia; Cristina Mendez, Education, working with Mam-speaking diasporic Guatemalan communities in Oakland; Everardo Reyes, Music, interested in creating music- and arts-based materials for language revitalization, with background in Raramuri and Nahuatl; Tessa Scott, Linguistics, teaching Mam as a second language in Oakland; Gabriel Trujillo, Integrative Biology, focusing on STEM-related Indigenous knowledge, particularly related to plants and environment; Oliver Whitmore, Romance Languages—French, working with Occitan, an endangered minority language of regions in France, Spain, and Italy. This group joins Julia Nee, Linguistics; Edwin Ko, Linguistics; Esther Ramer, Classics; Nate Gong, Education; Ataya Cesspooch, Environmental Studies, Policy, and Management.
We invite all to join us in a celebratory gathering to share more about our Language Revitalization goals and joys at 4 p.m. on February 19. Come and be inspired! For a link to the party contact Line Mikkelsen.
Many thanks to Belén Flores for her valuable administrative support of the DE.
Stay tuned for future DE events this spring, co-sponsored with the Language Revitalization Working Group.
— Beth Piatote on behalf of the DE Core Faculty: Line Mikkelsen, Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, Christine Beier, Lev Michael, Andrew Garrett, Leanne Hinton
A new article by Lev Michael, "The classification of South American languages," has just appeared in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Congrats, Lev!
Calques is saddened to report the passing of colleague and Berkeley Linguistics PhD alumnus Tucker Childs. We are forwarding the announcement sent out to students in Applied Linguistics at Portland State:
With heavy hearts, we are writing to tell you that Professor Tucker Childs passed away yesterday, January 26, 2021. As many of you know, he was admitted to the hospital at the beginning of January. Unfortunately, Tucker was not able to overcome the complications of legionella. He passed away peacefully with his wife and daughter at his side.
If you would like to offer Tucker's family your condolences or help celebrate Tucker's life by sharing a fond memory of your time with him , please visit his memorial page: https://www.inmemori.com/tchilds-u42cg
We will be in touch about memorial events for the department community soon. Even before that, please don't hesitate to reach out to each other and to faculty as we all grieve the loss of our professor, mentor, and colleague. This sad time is even harder since we can't come together physically, but we can still be a community. [...]
In lieu of sending flowers, please consider donating to the Sherbro Foundation—a non-profit dear to Tucker, which empowers rural Sierra Leone through education and agriculture development. Tucker was also a great supporter of the Nattinger Scholarship in our department. You can make a donation in his memory through the PSU Foundation.
Our hearts go out to Tucker's family and to all who knew Tucker. He will be greatly missed.
The Faculty and Staff of Applied Linguistics
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
Congrats to Wendy López Márquez, whose paper 'Headless Relative Clauses in Sierra Popoluca' has appeared in the new Oxford University Press book Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages!
Congrats to Gašper Beguš on the publication of his chapter "Segmental Phonetics and Phonology in Caucasian Languages" in the new Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus, edited by Maria Polinsky. (A free preprint is available here.)
In and around the linguistics department in the next week:
The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Friday, Jan 22, with a talk by Martin Haspelmath (MPI-EVA Leipzig), held via Zoom from 8-10am. The talk is entitled "Variable argument marking and the difference between general and particular linguistics," and the abstract is as follows:
In this presentation, I will discuss a range of variable argument marking patterns, such as inverse marking in Ojibwe (Rhodes 1994), variable dative marking in Wolof (Becher 2005), person-based split ergativity in Nez Perce (Deal 2016), variable accusative case marking in Moro (Jenks & Sande 2017), among others.
In a recent paper (Haspelmath 2021a), I have proposed that many argument-marking splits fall under the following high-level generalization:
The role-reference association universal
Deviations from usual associations of role rank and referential prominence tend to be coded by longer grammatical forms if the coding is asymmetric.We will see how many of the well-known patterns of variable argument marking are instances of this, and I will summarize the explanation that I propose, in terms of the efficiency theory of asymmetric coding (Haspelmath 2021b). One of the earliest general statements of (a version of) this explanation is found in Hawkinson & Hyman (1974).
In a second step, I will highlight the importance of the distinction between g-theories and p-theories (general theories of Human Language and of particular languages, respectively), which has often been neglected (Haspelmath 2021c). I will argue that if we make this distinction, we will gain a much better understanding of some of the persistent disparities between different methodological orientations in the field of general grammar. My claims are restricted to g-theories, and I make no p-theoretical claims, so there may be less tension between my proposals and those of others than might appear initially.
References
Becher, Jutta. 2005. Ditransitive Verben und ihre Objekte im Wolof: Positionsregeln und Kombinierbarkeit. Hamburger afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere (HAAP) 3. 13–27.
Deal, Amy Rose. 2016. Person-based split ergativity in Nez Perce is syntactic 1. Journal of Linguistics. Cambridge University Press 52(3). 533–564. (doi:10.1017/S0022226715000031)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021a. Role-reference associations and the explanation of argument coding splits. Linguistics (ahead of print) doi: 10.1515/ling-2020-0252 (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004047)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021b. Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form-frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of Linguistics, to appear (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004531)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021c. General linguistics must be based on universals (or nonconventional aspects of language). Theoretical Linguistics, to appear (https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005158)
Hawkinson, Annie K. & Hyman, Larry M. 1974. Hierarchies of natural topic in Shona. Studies in African Linguistics 5(2). 147–170.
Jenks, Peter & Sande, Hannah. 2017. Dependent accusative case and caselessness in Moro. Proceedings of NELS, vol. 47.
Rhodes, Richard A. 1994. Agency, inversion, and thematic alignment in Ojibwe. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 20, 431–446.
The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages is very happy to announce that Zachary O'Hagan (PhD, 2020) is joining the Survey, effective immediately, for a two-year stint as a Postdoctoral Scholar (and de facto Archive Manager) working on a project to archive language materials from the work of Leanne Hinton, Margaret Langdon, Frank Lobo, and Pamela Munro with a variety of California (and other) Indigenous communities. (The project is funded by an NEH grant through the NEH-NSF Documenting Endangered Languages program.) Congrats, Zach!