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August 30, 2023

O'Hagan on a research trip in South America
Zachary O'Hagan spent seven weeks in South America this summer, presenting on focus in Caquinte (Arawak; Peru) at AMAZONICAS IX in Bogotá and on 17th-century Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní; Peru) toponyms at SALSA XIV in Leticia, Colombia, followed by four weeks in Iquitos, Peru. There he worked with speakers of Urarina (isolate) and Taushiro (isolate), presented preliminary results from the California Language Archive's recent acquisition of Urarina legacy archival materials to Urarina school teachers (with Emanuele Fabiano, in nearby Nauta), was a panelist at the Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos's second conversatorio "¿Qué Amazonía Queremos?" and rekindled relationships with school teachers and others at a meeting in San Joaquín de Omaguas for the revitalization of Omagua.
Scott's research featured by UCB Social Science Matrix
Recent Berkeley Linguistics PhD Tessa Scott and her work with the Mam language community (spoken in Guatemala and diaspora communities in Mexico and the US) are featured in this article from the Social Science Matrix: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/language-revitalization-in-.... Congrats, Tessa!

August 24, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Aug 25-Sep 1, 2023)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

August 16, 2023

Ko files dissertation

Congratulations to Edwin Ko who recently filed his dissertation on "Studies in Crow Linguistics". He is beginning a position in Yale's Linguistics Department starting this month.

Dabkowski receives NSF grant
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski who was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant entitled Nominal and deverbal morphology in an endangered language (i.e. A'ingae).
Summer summary 2023

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques during the summer break:

Scott files dissertation

Congrats to Tessa Scott on her dissertation Pronouns and agreement in San Juan Atitán Mam, filed in May! Tessa has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Berkeley Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellowship Program starting in September. She will be working in the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science on undergraduate education policy and advising. In this position she will also continue her research and work on Mam.

Bossi files dissertation
Congrats to Madeline Bossi, who has just filed her dissertation Epistemic modality across syntactic catergories in Kipsigis! Starting in mid August, Maddy will be working as the Programs Data Manager for DREAM Charter School in New York City. She'll be running data collection and analysis for all of the school’s extracurricular programs, as well as leading UX research on the products that the data team uses and creates to make sure they’re working as user-friendly as possible.
Sande receives NSF CAREER Award

Congratulations to Hannah Sande; who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! The project is entitled Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages.

May 11, 2023

Updates from our graduating seniors 2023

We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:

  • Aishwarya Jayadeep (BA 2023) will be starting an MS in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley this fall.
  • Chelsea Tang (BA 2022) will be starting her Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT this fall.
  • Calvin Quick (BA 2023) will be starting the Linguistics PhD program at the University of Toronto in September 2023.
  • Cid Bryan (BA 2022) is currently working as a substitute teacher and is getting ready to apply to graduate programs in the near future.
  • Dara Gaeuman (BA 2022) will be starting the master's program for clinical Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University in September 2023.
  • Cecilia Elena Bachmann (BA 2023) will begin working as the Emerging Adult Workforce and Education Coordinator for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles. She also has plans to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2024.
  • Noah Boihem (Linguistics BA, Computer Science BA 2023) will be attending Nuclear Power School to become a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy starting in October 2023. He will be assisting in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab until then.
  • Corina Chen (BA 2022) will be starting her M.Ed. at Stanford in June 2023 and is looking forward to becoming an English secondary school teacher in the SF Bay Area.
  • Gunjan Anand (BA 2023) will be starting her PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the fall.

Congratulations, everybody!

May 10, 2023

Pfiffner conference talk and travel grants

Alexandra Pfiffner will be giving a talk with co-author Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba) at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association on June 1. She has also been awarded an International Phonetics Association travel grant and a Professional Development Fund grant from Berkeley to sponsor her summer conference travel.

Berkeley linguists @ ICPhS 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), taking place in Prague in August:

  • Amber Galvano: "Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change"
  • Emily Grabowski: "Methodological trends in acoustic phonetic analysis"
  • Keith Johnson: "Individual differences in Speech Production: What is 'Phonetic Substance'?"
  • Yevgeniy Melguy: "Mechanisms of generalization for phonetic learning of accented speech"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Julian Martinez-Garcia (BA 2023): "Spirantization of word-final plosives in Standard Dutch"
  • Alexandra Pfiffner and Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba): "Stop voicing in two settler communities on the Canadian Prairies"

May 9, 2023

Berkeley linguists @ ACAL 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), taking place June 12-14, 2023, at the University of Connecticut:

  • Franco Liu and Shweta Akolkar: "Nominal Licensing without T: Switch Reference and Focus Fronting in Lobi"
  • Shweta Akolkar and Franco Liu: "Morphological rɛ́-flex of focus in Lobi"
  • Anna Macknick: "STAMP as Asymmetric Negation in Lobi"
  • Katherine Russell: "Two types of negation in Guébie"
  • Amber Galvano and Sansan Hien: "Quantifying the Lobi vowel space"
  • Rebecca Jarvis: "Relative clause derivations and subject displacement in Atchan"

May 8, 2023

Beguš in ICASSP 2023

Gašper Beguš published a paper titled "Articulation GAN: Unsupervised modeling of articulatory learning" in proceedings of ICASSP 2023 (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing) with Alan Zhou, Peter Wu, and Gopala K. Anumanchipalli. The paper is available here.

Video of the presentation scheduled to be given at the conference in Rhodes, Greece on June 9 is available here.

May 4, 2023

Jarvis gives practice SALT talk

Becky Jarvis will be giving a SALT practice talk titled "Movement and interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" on Monday, May 8 at 1pm. The talk will take place in 1303 Dwinelle and over Zoom (password sscircle).

O'Hagan publishes in Cadernos de Linguística

Zachary O'Hagan, with co-authors Ana Paula Brandão, Patience Epps, Susan Smythe Kung, Denny Moore, and Jorge Rosés Labrada, published an article "Archiving and Language Documentation" in Cadernos de Linguística.

May 3, 2023

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Tessa Scott, Lucrecia Carrillo, and Henry Sales have accessioned a new collection, Documentary Materials on Mam, a Mayan language of Guatemala, Mexico, and the Bay Area. The collection consists of audio recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation, subtitled video recordings of narrative texts (with the assistance of Kenneth Gallanosa), typed field notes, and PDF scans of handwritten field notes. It spans multiple varieties of Mam, as spoken in the following towns in Guatemala: San Antonio Ixchiguán, San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán, San Juan Atitán (majority), San Rafael Petzal, and San Sebastián Huehuetenango.
Grabowski attends Data Science Leadership Summit

Emily Grabowski will be attending the 2023 Data Science Leadership Summit next week in Boston, MA. Her travel is sponsored by the Academic Data Science Alliance.

Berkeley linguists in LSA proceedings 2023

Congrats to the Berkeley linguists featured in the latest Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (Vol. 8, No. 1)!

May 2, 2023

Beguš in Berkeley News

Research on biological and artificial neural computation of speech by Gašper Beguš is featured in Berkeley News. Read it here!