News

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.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Nov 9 - Zoom - 3:10-5pm
  David Goldstein (UCLA): Correlated grammaticalization: The rise of articles in Indo-European.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Nov 11 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm
  Katie Sardinha (Independent Scholar): A fieldworker’s reflection on the psycholinguistics of language and aging.
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Nov 10 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Discussion of Cheshire 2019. Please email Annie Helms for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Phorum - Friday Nov 13 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Chantal Gratton (Stanford): TBA.
  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 12 - Zoom - 9-10am
  Chris Green (Syracuse): On the tonal system of Mbat (Jarawan).
  For the Zoom link or to be added to the Zoom Phonology Mailing List, contact karee_garvin@berkeley.edu

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.

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."

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).

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.

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.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 23 - Zoom - 3-4:30PM
  Phuong Khuu (UC Berkeley): Tự /tɨ˨/ - Lexical realization of Reflexive Voice⁰ in Vietnamese
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Oct 27 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Discussion of Sóskuthy & Stuart-Smith 2020. Please email Annie Helms for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.  
  
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Wednesday Oct 28 - Zoom - 3-4pm
  Eric Wilbanks (UC Berkeley): Twitter Data Basics for Linguists (workshop).
  Please email Isaac Bleaman for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the SLaB email list.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 28 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm.
  Amalia Skilton (UT Austin; Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics): TBA
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 30 - Zoom - 3-4:30PM
  NELS practice talks by Amy Rose Deal, Peter Jenks, and Edwin Ko
  Amy Rose Deal: 3-on-3 restrictions and PCC typology
  Peter Jenks: Names as complex indices: On apparent Condition C violations in Thai
  Edwin Ko: Feeding agreement: Anti-locality in Crow applicatives of unaccusatives

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).

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 9 - Zoom - 3-4:30PM
  Wesley dos Santos (Berkeley): Raising, EPP, and Long-Head Movement in Kawahiva
• Language Variation and Change Working Group - Tuesday Oct 13 - Zoom - 3-5pm
  Invited talk by Naomi Lapidus Shin (3-3:45pm), followed by general Q&A session. The title of her talk is "The ontogeny of grammatical variation" (abstract). Please email Annie Helms for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the bCourses site.
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 14 - Zoom - 3:10-4pm.
  Alex Elias (UC Berkeley): TBA.
• *dhworom - Friday Oct 16 - 12-1pm
  Brian Joseph (Ohio State) will be joining us for a conversation about his 2000 paper entitled Is there such a thing as “grammaticalization?”.
  Please email Edwin Ko for the Zoom link and/or to be added to the mailing list.
  
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 16 - Zoom - 3-4:30PM
  Tamisha Tan (Harvard): TBA

Updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

• Isabel Lazo Martínez, Efraín Lazo Pérez, Trinidad Martínez Soza, Julia Nee and Celine Rezvani publish Beniit kon xpejigan: Te libr ka didxza kon dixtil le’enin te rului’in dnumbr ('Benita and Her Balloons: A Book Written in Zapotec and Spanish that Teaches Numbers'), the second in our new series Publications in Language Maintenance and Reclamation. (Interested in contributing? Write to us at scoil-ling@berkeley.edu.)
• New materials from the winter-spring 1971 and 1979 graduate field methods classes on Cochabamba Quechua are available (here and here). The first was taught by James Matisoff, with consultant Jaime Daza; the second was taught by Leanne Hinton, with consultant Ditri Daza. (See here for a summary history of field methods instruction in our department.)
• We've digitized two manuscripts by Joseph Davidson, Jr. (PhD 1977), his 'special field statement' (1974) and On the Genetic Relationship of Aymara and Inka, indigenous language families of the Andes. Dr. Davidson's dissertation was A Contrastive Study of the Grammatical Structures of Aymara and Cuzco Kechua.
• Monica Macaulay (PhD 1987) has archived over 1,150 pages of original field notes and 43 cassettes of sound recordings (from 1992) of Chalcatongo and other varieties of Mixtec (Oto-Manguean, Mexico). We added most of the notes to her paper collection, where they join more than 500 pages of typed versions of some of the same notes (everything now scanned and available online), and the recordings to her audio collection, where they join earlier ones done on reel-to-reel tape (from 1982). The remainder of the field notes, which span the period 1981-1992, we added to a new collection documenting the Berkeley field methods classes on the language in 1981 and 1982, with speaker Nicolás Cortés and instructor Leanne Hinton, which were the impetus for Prof. Macaulay's fieldwork in Oaxaca in 1982, 1985, and 1992, primarily with speakers Margarita Cuevas Cortés and Crescenciano Ruiz Ramírez. Sound recordings from the 1985 field trip, done with Prof. Hinton, are in this collection. Macaulay's dissertation was titled Morphology and Cliticization in Chalcatongo Mixtec. The students in the first field methods class were Mariscela Amador-Hernández (PhD 1988), Claudia Brugman (PhD 1988), Nicholas Faraclas (PhD 1989), Gerd Fischer, and Martha Macri (PhD 1988).