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August 16, 2021

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

  • Madeline Bossi archived a new collection related to her work on Kipsigis and Tugen (Southern Nilotic; Kenya) with speakers Linus Kipkoech and Robert Langat (Kipsigis) and Nicholas Kipchumba Koech (Tugen). A major portion of the collection consists of video recordings of elicitation sessions conducted on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • José Armando Fernández Guerrero archived a new collection of recordings, transcriptions, and translations of stories in the Ja'a variety of Kumiay (Yuman; Mexico, US) told by Yolana Meza Calles (some on Zoom). The stories were published as Ja'a Kumiay: Jwañow Tipey Aam in the Survey's Publications in Language Maintenance and Reclamation, together with a coloring book, Tipey Aam Awilk Tañorj.
  • Susan Steele archived a new collection of sound recordings of Luiseño (Uto-Aztecan; California) and Ichishkíin (Sahaptian; Pacific Northwest), together with over 2200 pages of field notes of Luiseño spanning the 1970s to '90s. Speakers Villiana Hyde (1903-1994, Luiseño) and Hazel Miller (c1917-1989, Ichishkíin) are featured.
  • We released a new collection related to the 2017-2018 field methods course taught by Lev Michael on the San Juan Atitán variety of Mam, with speaker Henry Sales. (See here for a summary of the department's field methods classes since its inception.)
  • Justin Spence (PhD 2013) added 185 new file bundles to the collection Materials of the Hupa Language Documentation Project (see 427-599, 1416-1429). The materials stem from a longtime collaboration with speaker Verdena Parker and others, and include sound recordings of elicitation sessions, (re-)transcription and translation of texts (many of them told by others and/or archived previously), discussions of cultural topics, and more.
  • Larry Hyman and Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016) archived a new collection of recordings, field notes, and a draft lexicon of Teke (Bantu; Congo, Gabon) from their work in 2016 and 2018 with speaker Christophère Ngolele.
  • Hannah Pritchett (MA 2009) archived a small new collection of recordings and photographs from an exploratory field trip in 2009 to work with speakers of Koho (Austroasiatic; Vietnam) and Chru (Austronesian; Vietnam).
  • We digitized papers from a graduate seminar that Leanne Hinton taught on Aikanã (isolate; Brazil) in fall 1992 (here and here). The course was based on the documentary materials collected by Harvey Carlson (1954-1994, BA 1985), who received a President's Undergraduate Fellowship to do fieldwork in Brazil in 1984, facilitated by visiting professor Aryon Rodrigues (1925-2014), who had taught a course on South American indigenous languages in winter 1983.
  • We digitized more of Series 1 and Series 2 of the Laura Buszard-Welcher Papers on the Potawatomi Language (Series 1: here and here; Series 2: here, here, here, and here), consisting of Buszard-Welcher's (PhD 2003) notes and Charles Hockett's transcriptions of Potawatomi (Algonquian; Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario) stories from the 1930s and '40s.
  • We digitized three volumes of papers on indigenous languages of the Americas written at Harvard and collected by Karl Teeter (1929-2007, PhD 1962) during his early years there (here, here, and here). Authors include Berkeley linguists such as Robin Lakoff and Alan Timberlake, among others such as Ives Goddard and the late Michael Silverstein (1945-2020).

August 15, 2021

An article featuring Zachary O'Hagan and the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages appeared in Berkeley News in late May 2021, just after Calques went on summer break. Click here to read it!

May 20, 2021

The 10th World Congress of African Linguistics, hosted by Leiden University and taking place from June 7 to 12, 2021, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

  • Karee Garvin, Katherine Russell, and Hannah Sande: "A typological survey of STAMP morphology in the Macro-Sudan Belt"
  • Katherine Russell and Hannah Sande: "The interaction of tone, segmental auxiliaries, and word order in Guébie TAMP morphology"

Congrats, all!

May 18, 2021

The 14th annual conference of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM14), hosted by the University of Vilnius and taking place online from June 23 to 26, 2021, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

Congrats, all!

May 14, 2021

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

May 13, 2021

The 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25), hosted by Sogang University and taking place online from May 28 to 30, 2021, will feature presentations by the following Berkeley linguists:

May 12, 2021

Congratulations to Karee Garvin who has just accepted a post-doctoral research position with Katie Franich at the University of Delaware, starting in January 2022!

The Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization invites applications for a new grant program that offers up to $250 to cover the cost of developing language materials for revitalization efforts. Grants will be awarded three times a year. The program is reimbursement-based; grantees must provide receipts and documentation for expenses up to the award amount.

This new grant program is open to all Berkeley students (undergraduate and graduate) who are working in language revitalization and seek reimbursement-based support up to $250 for teaching and other revitalization materials, with priority for funding to members of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Examples of eligible costs include photocopies, flashcards, art materials, books, games, digital tools, and other items used in language activities.

Funds can be requested for expenses from Jan. 2020 onward. Applications are due on May 21, 2021 for this first round.

Questions can be directed to Beth Piatote at piatote@berkeley.edu.

May 11, 2021

Maksymilian Dąbkowski will be giving a talk at the 28th Manchester Phonology Meeting on "A'ingae syntax conditions the representation of glottalization." The program schedule is available here.

Congratulations to Aurora Martinez Kane, who has received the 2021-2022 Mentored Research Award from the Graduate Division! More information on the fellowship is available here. Her research mentor on the award is Isaac Bleaman.

May 10, 2021

The 41st Annual Siouan & Caddoan Languages Conference, which is organized by Edwin Ko, will be taking place virtually via Zoom from May 20th to May 23rd. The conference program is available on the website. Please email Edwin Ko for the Zoom invitation link if you are interested in attending.

The Linguistic Society of America has just announced the following news related to Geoffrey Nunberg, who passed away last year:

The LSA is honored to be the recipient of a major bequest from the estate of the late LSA member Geoff Nunberg (1945-2020). The bequest was made to the LSA's General Fund, and will be used to support the basic mission of the Society: to advance the scientific study of language and its applications. We thank him for his generosity in remembering the LSA in his estate planning.

Geoff first joined the LSA in 1970, eventually becoming a Life Member. He was the recipient of the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public Award in 2001, and an annual contributor to the LSA's Leadership Circle donor program.

Geoff was an adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. Until 2001, he was a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, working on the development of linguistic technologies. He also taught at UCLA, the University of Rome, and the University of Naples.

Learn more about the LSA's planned giving program here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/donate/planned-giving

Read the In Memoriam notice published by the LSA last year.

May 9, 2021

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

  • We have updated our Languages of California page(s), thanks to the efforts over the course of this semester of Allegra Robertson, who is finishing a semester as Graduate Student Researcher in the archive. In this role Allegra has been instrumental in cataloguing and making publicly available collections related to Kawaiisu (Uto-Aztecan; California), Kiliwa (Yuman; Baja California), Lulamogi (Bantu; Uganda), Sereer (Senegambian; Senegal, The Gambia), and Tswefap (Grassfields; Cameroon), and in preparing other forthcoming collections related to Abo (Bantu; Cameroon) and Totela (Bantu; Zambia, Namibia).
  • On Monday and Tuesday of this week, 10 boxes of papers related to Gerald Weiss's study of Ashaninka (Arawak; Peru, Brazil) language and culture arrived at the Survey, in addition to some 75 tape recordings spanning the early 1960s to 1980 brought back by Zachary O'Hagan from Boca Raton last week. In addition to field diaries and lexical file slips, the papers include everything from notes on cosmology to transcriptions of recordings to detailed identification of biological specimens, alongside some 5000 slides and photographs. Here is an example of the good quality of one of the tapes, a song sung by an Ashaninka woman named Rosa circa 1963.

May 6, 2021

On Tuesday, May 4, this year's Linguistics Research Apprentice Program wrapped up with a Zoom meeting where mentors and apprentices spoke about the projects.

This year's cohort includes 7 graduate mentors with 8 projects: Wesley dos Santos, Emily Drummond, Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach, Schuyler Laparle, Ben Papadopoulos, Tessa Scott, and Eric Wilbanks. There were 29 undergraduate Apprentices: Kabini Achrekar, Margaret Asperheim, Cooper Bedin, Miranda Cheung, Char Juin Chin, Jesus Eduardo Durante, Julie Duran, Chandler Fliege, Kat Huynh, Matthew Ji, Samba Kane, Anjali Kantharuban, Jenkin Leung, Molly Pinder, Sophia Stremel, Nina Sirna, Lauren Szeto, Chelsea Tang, Tran, Melody, Xingyue Tu, Jay Eduardo Urbano Gonzales, Stacey Vu, Irene Yi, Crystal Wang, and Ivori White. Irene appears to be the winner of the "apprentice on most projects" prize, and Sophia gets the "longest work on one project" prize. A meeting screenshot is below and more information about the projects can be found here.

LRAP 2020-2021

May 5, 2021

Congrats to Ana Lívia Agostinho and Larry Hyman on the publication of their article "Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?" in Probus! The article has just appeared online.

Congrats to Isaac Bleaman and Dan Duncan (Newcastle University) on the publication of their article "The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the proposition that all tense /æ/s are created equal" in American Speech. Read it here!

May 3, 2021

A number of Berkeley linguists will be presenting at Amazônicas VIII, taking place online from May 31 to June 4. The full program is available here.

Congrats, all!

Alejandro Granados Vargas (BA 2013) was admitted into the PhD program in Education, with an emphasis on Human Development in Context, at UC Irvine. His research area will be in bilingual language development in language impaired children. Congratulations, Alejandro!

April 30, 2021

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

April 29, 2021

The Linguistics Department Honors Colloquium will take place on Monday, May 3, from 3 to 5 PM. The Zoom access code is 966 0052 6874.

The following students will present:

Teela Huff
Thesis title: LAMA: A Simple Tool for Sharing Audio-Linked Lexical Data
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Larry Hyman (Reader)

Sophia Stremel
Thesis title: The Syntax of English Parentheticals: An Adjunction Analysis
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Peter Jenks (Reader)

Stacey Vu
Thesis title: The Phonetics of Iquito Tone
Prof. Lev Michael (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Chris Beier (Reader)

Irene Yi
Thesis title: "Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Mandarin 然后用中文完成": Towards Sociolinguistically-Aware Computational Models of Codeswitching Using Classification and Regression Trees (CART)
Prof. Gasper Begus and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Faculty Co-Advisors)

Kevin Yu
Thesis title: Pragmatic Influences on Argument Word Order in Karuk Narrative Texts
Prof. Line Mikkelsen (Faculty Advisor)
Prof. Eve Sweetser and Prof. Isaac Bleaman (Readers)

Format: Each student will have 15 minutes to present and 5 for questions.