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August 16, 2020

Congratulations to Drs. Cheng, Cychosz, Dawson, and Shen who have recently completed their dissertations!

  • Andrew Cheng: "Accent and ideology among bilingual Korean Americans”
    Andrew will be starting in a post-doctoral research position at UC Irvine in September.
  • Meg Cychosz: "Phonetic development in an agglutinating language"
    Meg started a post-doctoral research position at the University of Maryland in August.
  • Virginia Dawson: "Existential quantification in Tiwa: disjunction and indefinites"
    Ginny is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University.
  • Alice Shen: "Costs and cues in the auditory comprehension of code-switching"
    Alice spent the summer working at Facebook and will be teaching at Reed College during 2020-21.

The dissertations are all available on our departmental website.

August 15, 2020

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Emily Drummond has archived a new collection of materials on Nukuoro (Polynesian, Micronesia). This is a diverse set of 125 file bundles beginning in 2015 and including audio recordings of elicitation sessions, oral narratives, and conversational texts; field notes; transcriptions; and photos and videos documenting cultural and other practices. The primary speaker contributors are Mina Lekka, Johnny (Soni) Rudolph & Ruth (Analidele) Rudolph, with many others.
  • Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016), now a faculty member at Princeton, has archived a new collection of materials on Cèmuhî, Nemi, and Paicî (Kanak, New Caledonia). This is a collaboration with consultants Anna Gonari, Hélène Nimbaye, Moïse Pwaili, Michel Tutugoro, Jean-Claude Vaiadimoin, and Aman. The collection includes sound recordings and associated ELAN/TextGrid files of phonological elicitation on tone and coarticulation, and for measurements of oral and nasal airflow.
  • We released linguistic materials on Cupeño (Uto-Aztecan, California), made by Berkeley alum (BA 1960) and anthropologist Jane Hill (1939-2018) in collaboration with speakers Roscinda Nolasquez, Frances Bosley, James Brittian & Venturo Leir, primarily during fieldwork from 1962 to 1964 for Hill's PhD dissertation A Grammar of the Cupeño Language (UCLA 1966). Divided into five series, the core of the collection is 11 scanned notebooks filled with elicitation on grammar and vocabulary and with transcriptions of texts, alongside 11 digitized reel-to-reel tapes. Some of the recordings were copied to cassettes that accompanied Hill & Nolasquez's (1973) Mulu'wetam: The First People: Cupeño Culture, Mythology, and Cupeño Language Dictionary.
  • We released a new collection of materials on Falam Chin (Kuki-Chin, Myanmar), from the 2007-2008 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Ni Luai Thang, the instructor was Alice Gaby, and students were Amy Campbell, David Kamholz, Dominic Yu, Heather Todd, Justin Spence, Michael Ellsworth, Ramón Escamilla & Russell Rhodes.
  • We released a new collection of materials on Garifuna (Arawakan; Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua), from the 2011-2012 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Dr. Philip Timothy Palacio, the instructor was Lev Michael, and students were alums Chundra Cathcart, I-hsuan Chen, Emily Cibelli, Shinae Kang, Eric Prendergast, Christine Sheil, Tammy Stark & Elise Stickles.
  • We released a new collection of materials on Turkmen (Turkic; Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), from the 2013-2014 graduate field methods course. The consultant was Nazik Aytjanova, the instructor was Dasha Kavitskaya, and students were Sarah Bakst, Antony D'Avirro, Matt Goss, Herman Leung, Auburn Lutzross, Jonathan Manker, Orchid Pusey & Katie Sardinha.
  • We released new collections of materials on San Pedro Necta Mam & Todos Santos Cuchumatán Mam (Mayan, Guatemala), from the 2018-2019 graduate field methods course. The consultants were Wendy Ruiz (San Pedro Necta) & Brenda Calmo Jerónimo, Gerardo Gerónimo Lorenzo & Rudy Pablo (Todos Santos), the instructor was Lev Michael, and students were Martha Schwarz, Schuyler Laparle, Tyler Lemon & Wesley dos Santos.

June 13, 2020

The Faculty of the Berkeley Linguistics Department issued a statement on the George Floyd killing.

https://lx.berkeley.edu/statement-george-floyd-killing

June 12, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday June 17 - Zoom - 2pm
    Anaruth Hernández: Language Revitalization Matters: Exploring the loss of a language.

June 11, 2020

In connection with the campus celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University of California, the linguistics department has made a web page honoring some of the many women who have contributed to our work over the last 120 years:

https://lx.berkeley.edu/women-berkeley-linguistics

This may expand or evolve in the coming days and months. The committee that put the page together (Madeline Bossi, Margaret Cychosz, Andrew Garrett, Zachary O'Hagan, Emily Remirez, and Tessa Scott) is very grateful to the many contributors who wrote thoughtfully and shared pictures.

June 5, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday June 10 - Zoom - 2pm

June 4, 2020

In response to the presumed COVID-19-related death of one of the last speakers of Omagua, Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima, on May 10 in Iquitos, Peru, Zach O'Hagan was interviewed by freelance journalist Barbara Fraser for a piece in the New Humanitarian (English) about the role of the Catholic church in the local health response and the effects on indigenous people. He was also interviewed by Juan Francisco Ugarte of Salud con Lupa for a series of obituaries -- one for doña Amelia (Spanish) -- that outlet is doing in response to COVID-19. Zach wrote an obituary for Amelia of his own (Spanish & English) and a reflection on the perseverance of Omagua people since 1542 (Spanish).

June 3, 2020

On June 2, Leslie Francesca Hyman married Matthew Cascardi, son of Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts and Humanities, in an intimate and joyful Zoom ceremony, courtesy of Oakland City Hall. As Larry has been saying all along, "I'm not losing a daughter, I'm gaining a dean!"

Congratulations to the happy couple and their families!

Hyman Cascardi wedding ceremony

June 1, 2020

Congratulations to our colleagues Zack Bekowies and Mairi McLaughlin on the publication of their chapter in a new edited volume available from Oxford University Press:

Bekowies, Zack, and Mairi McLaughlin. 2020. "The Loss of Clitic Climbing in French: A Gallo-Romance Perspective," in Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar, ed. by Sam Wolfe and Martin Maiden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

May 28, 2020

Congratulations to Nina and Gašper Beguš on the birth of their son Emil!

May 23, 2020

Our alum Jenny Lederer (PhD, 2009) has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of English Language and Literature at San Francisco State University. Congratulations, Jenny!

May 22, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Fieldwork Summer Meeting Group - Wednesday May 27 - Zoom - 2pm

May 21, 2020

Very recent PhD graduate Virginia Dawson will be giving a (remote) talk at the NYU Semantics Group this Friday, May 22, at 10:30 am Pacific. The title of her talk is "Deriving obligatory narrow scope disjunction." Please email Ginny for the Zoom link.

May 20, 2020

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • Teresa McFarland (PhD 2009) has archived a new collection of field notes, sound recordings, and photographs related to Filomeno Mata Totonac (Totonac-Tepehuan; Veracruz, Mexico), from dissertation fieldwork spanning 2003 to 2009, with additional interviews done by Berkeley undergrads in 2015. We digitized 95 minidiscs (about 135GB), which document a rich research project on many aspects of phonology and morphosyntax, alongside many texts. Each file bundle represents a day, and includes page number references to the field notes and indications of transcriptions of texts.

May 15, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Zoom Phonology - Tuesday May 19 - Zoom (email Karee Garvin) - 12pm
    Caitlin Smith (Johns Hopkins University) and Charlie O'Hara (USC): Learnability of derivationally opaque processes in the Gestural Harmony Model.

May 14, 2020

We are delighted to announce that Gašper Beguš will be joining Berkeley Linguistics next year!

He writes to say: "I'm absolutely thrilled to join such a wonderful department, meet all the people, and start my research and teaching at Berkeley. Nina is super excited for her CSTMS and Rhetorics appointments as well."

He'll be working remotely in fall 2020 (advising, lab building, and committee service) and then move here to begin teaching in January 2021.

Congratulations to Richard A. Rhodes, Tom Güldemann (Humboldt–Universität zu Berlin), and Patrick McConvell (Australian National University, Canberra) on the publication of their edited volume The Language of Hunter-Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 2020)! Click here for the table of contents.

May 13, 2020

Congrats to Susanne Gahl who is a co-author on a paper just published in Behavior Research Methods: Yu-Ying Chuang, Marie Lenka Vollmer, Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan, Susanne Gahl, Peter Hendrix, and R. Harald Baayen. "The processing of pseudoword form and meaning in production and comprehension: A computational modeling approach using linear discriminative learning."

May 12, 2020

Congratulations to Charles B. Chang (PhD, 2010) who has been awarded tenure at Boston University!

A new article has been published based on Emily Cibelli's 2015 Berkeley dissertation. Congrats, Emily!

Cibelli, E. (2020). Articulatory and perceptual cues to non-native phoneme perception: Cross-modal training for early learners. Second Language Research.

Rumor also has it that Dr. Cibelli is moving back to the Bay Area.