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February 20, 2020

Congrats to Julia Nee, whose paper Creating Books for Use in Language Revitalization Classrooms: Considerations and Outcomes will be coming out in the Spring 2020 edition of L2 Journal! You can access the paper here.

Congrats to Susanne Gahl, who has been voted into the Board of Directors of the Aphasia Center of California!  The Aphasia Center is a resource and community for people with aphasia, built on the principles of the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/leader.FTR.05032000.4 ).

February 14, 2020

First-year graduate student Alex Elias has assisted in the last few weeks in scanning two Berkeley linguists' field notes on five different languages:
  • George Foster's 13 notebooks on the culture and language of the Yuki people of northern California, dating from 1937 (Oswalt.007.001 through Oswalt.007.013). Foster (1913-2006) received his PhD under A.L. Kroeber in 1946, and was later Professor of Anthropology, until 1979. His wife, Mary LeCron Foster (1914-2001), received a PhD from this department in 1965, and the campus's anthropology library is named after them. The notebooks were originally given to Robert Oswalt (PhD 1961). Consultants were Charlie Doorman, Cecilia Logan, George Moore, Ralph Moore, Eben Tilletson, and Old Toby.
  • George Foster's 3 notebooks on Huchnom (Yukian; CA) culture, also dating from 1937 (Oswalt.007.014 through Oswalt.007.016). The consultant was Lula Johnson.
  • George Grekoff's 3 notebooks on the Clayoquot dialect of Nuu-chah-nulth, a Wakashan language of British Columbia, dating from 1966 and 1967 (Grekoff.002.001 through Grekoff.002.003). Grekoff (1923-1999) was a student of Mary Haas in this department. He did not complete the PhD, but later taught at the University of Washington. Consultants were Hyacinth David, Winifred David, and Odelia Hunter.
  • George Grekoff's 5 notebooks on Skagit, a Lushootseed variety (Salishan; WA), dating from 1964 to 1967 (Grekoff.002.004 through Grekoff.002.008). The consultant was Louise George.
  • George Grekoff's notebook on Southeastern Pomo (Pomoan; CA), dating from 1957 (Grekoff.002.009). The consultants were Effie and John Kelsey.

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

February 11, 2020

Raksit Lau, Wendy López Márquez, Alice Shen and Edwin Ko will present a short course at Splash on Sunday, March 8th.

Splash brings over 400 high school students to Berkeley's campus for "a day of unlimited learning". 

Mystery Language! Introduction to Linguistic Analysis

February 7, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

February 4, 2020

January 31, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

January 30, 2020

Congrats to Meg Cychosz, first author of another new article just accepted:

Cychosz, M., Erskine, M., Munson, B., & Edwards, J. (to appear). A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition. Journal of Child Language. [preprint]

January 29, 2020

Now that 2019 is in the books, congratulations to our 2019 PhD alumni!

Zach O'Hagan sends the following update from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • We archived a new collection of sound recordings and transcriptions of Kupang Malay (West Timor), which derive from the spring 2013 undergraduate field methods course (Linguistics 140) taught by Sarah Cutfield, with language consultant Adriana Tunliu. Sarah was a lecturer at the time, having just finished her PhD in 2012 at Monash University (Australia) with a dissertation titled "Demonstratives in Dalabon: A Language of Southwestern Arnhem Land."

January 27, 2020

Amy Rose Deal will be in New York City this week to give an NYU colloquium on Interaction, satisfaction, and the PCC.

January 26, 2020

Gabriella Licata of Romance Linguistics writes to share that her quantitative work on language attitudes towards Genoese and Italian is in the Ligurian news. The article, by Andrea Acqarone of the newspaper Secolo XIX, sums up her results (in Genoese) for a nonlinguistic audience, explaining how gender can condition the way we speak and perceive language.

January 24, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

January 23, 2020

Congrats to Meg Cychosz, first author of a new paper to appear:

Cychosz, M., Romeo, R. R., Soderstrom, M., Scaff, C., Ganek, H., Cristia, A., Casillas, M., de Barbaro, K., Bang, J., Weisleder, A. (to appear). Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ah37c

Here is a link to the Open Science Framework ethics repository created for the article.

The proceedings of NELS 49 are now in print, featuring a paper each by Schuyler Laparle and Tessa Scott:

  • Laparle, S. 2019. Locative inversion without inversion. In NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 2, eds. Maggie Baird & Jonathan Pesetsky, 199-208.   [preprint]
  • Scott, T. 2019. Clitic placement in Mam (Mayan) requires a host requirement. In NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 3, eds. Maggie Baird & Jonathan Pesetsky, 117-126. [preprint]

Congrats both!

January 22, 2020

Postdoc Bernat Bardagil has recently learned that he has been awarded a Rubicon grant by the Dutch funding agency NWO for a postdoc at Ghent University with Jóhanna Barðdal. The project is entitled The subject in the Amazon. Grammatical relations in indigenous Amazonian languages. Congrats, Bernat!

January 21, 2020

A new article by Lev Michael and Natalia Chousou‐Polydouri on Computational phylogenetics and the classification of South American languages has just appeared in the journal Language and Linguistics Compass. Congrats Lev and Natalia! 

January 20, 2020

Zach O'Hagan sends the following update from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

  • In December we published the first Survey Report in five years, Jane and Kenneth Hill's 1473-page magnum opus "Comparative Takic Grammar," which covers a wide range of topics related to this branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family in incredible detail. Jane Hill, born in Berkeley in 1939, received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA in 1966, with a dissertation titled "A Grammar of the Cupeño Language." She went on to become Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona beginning in 1983, retiring in 2009. Sadly, Jane passed away in November 2018, as Ken writes in the preface, shortly after the completion of the first draft of this monograph.

January 17, 2020

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: