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January 22, 2019

Long time, no Calques! What have linguists been up to over winter break? 

  • Andrew Cheng took the runner up award at the LSA's Five Minute Linguist competition with his talk Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. A video recording of the entire event is on YouTube, and this link directs you to Andrew's talk (starting at around 19 minutes). Andrew also prepared to move to Philadelphia for the spring semester to teach two courses at his alma mater, Swarthmore College. He will return to Berkeley in the summer or fall!

Andrew Cheng LSA 2019

  • Emily Clem took her paper Cyclicity in Agree: Maximal projections as probes on the road, with colloquia at the University of Leipzig (IGRA) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then traveled to NYC for LSA, where she gave a shorter version of the same talk (which won 3rd place for the Student Abstract Award) as well as a joint talk with Virginia Dawson on Feature sharing and functional heads in concord:

Clem and Dawson LSA 2019

  • Virginia Dawson, in addition to the talk just mentioned, also gave a talk entitled Lexicalizing disjunction scope, after giving a festive welcome to 2019 with Tessa Scott, Jack Merrill (PhD '18), Myriam LapierreZach O'Hagan, Emily Clem, and Nik Rolle (PhD '18)!
     Berkeley linguists 2019
  • Amy Rose Deal traveled to Cambridge, MA, to attend a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on "What is good and what is possible? Searching for an interdisciplinary language".
  • Karee Garvin worked on her QP, went to Chicago for Christmas, traveled NYC for LSA (at which she gave 2 talks, one depicted below, and organized a special session on Inside Segments with Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas), and wrapped up the break with a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam.

Karee Garvin talk LSA 2019

  • Dmetri Hayes spent part of his break skiing in France, and eating and walking around in Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm and Barcelona, and along the way spent some time thinking about a computational semantics project to better leverage morphological information. 
  • Larry Hyman wrote a new paper on Causative and passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto? and then turned to prepare the handout (and slides) for his Philological Society paper in London next month, entitled Functions of vowel length in language: Phonological, grammatical & pragmatic consequences. (Berkeley locals will get to hear a version of this work on February 11.) He then attended the LSA meeting in New York where he finished his final year on the Executive Committee and had a GREAT time hanging out with his most immediate former graduate students Florian Lionnet, Jack Merrill, and Nik Rolle, and crashing the Amazonianist dinner at a Brazilian restaurant organized by Myriam Lapierre.
    Larry Hyman Nik Rolle
  • Julia Nee traveled to Mexico to help with a language revitalization camp for kids in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. In the photo below, Julia works with students to read the book Beniit kon xpejigan ("Benita and her balloons") which was written collaboratively with Zapotec speakers Veronica Bazán Chávez, Trinidad Martínez Sosa, Isabel Lazo Martínez, Efraín Lazo Pérez, and Berkeley undergrad Celine Revzani who worked as an LRAP apprentice on the project in Spring 2018.

Julia Nee

  • Tessa Scott gave a poster on Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko at LSA!
    Tessa Scott
  • Eve Sweetser traveled to Japan to give a three-lecture series on Figurative Language at the Tokyo University's Komaba campus.

  Did we miss you in this winter break linguist round-up? Let us know for next week's Calques!

December 7, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

December 6, 2018

Kenny Baclawski will be traveling to Muenster, Germany, this week for the Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora (ISSLAC3) Workshop, where he will speak on Topic, Focus, and Wh-Phrases in Cham and Moken. Then he will travel on to the University of Geneva to give an additional talk there. 

November 29, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm 
    Zach O'Hagan: Two sorts of contrastive topic in Caquinte
  • SLUgS Linguistics Symposium - Saturday Dec 1 - Dwinelle 370 - 8:30am-5pm
  • Linguistics Holiday Potluck - Monday Dec 3 - Dwinelle 1229 - 12 noon
  • Linguistics Department colloquium - Monday Dec 3 - Dwinelle 370 - 3-5pm
    Carlos Gussenhoven (Radboud University Nijmegen): Between phonetics and phonology: Of the beast and the untamed savage
  • Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Dec 6 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM 
    Quirina Geary (UC Davis): TBA
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Dec 7 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm 
    Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin (UC Berkeley), Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), & Terry Regier (UC Berkeley): Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra 

November 28, 2018

This coming week Lev Michael will be in Florianópolis, Brazil, where he will be giving a plenary talk entitled Captive-taking and language contact in Amazonia at the 10th meeting of Associação Brasileira de Estudos Crioulos e Similares. Before the December 5 talk, he'll be giving a mini-course (Dec 3-4) at the same conference, entitled ''El contacto lingüístico en la Amazonía: Áreas, procesos y metodologías" (Language contact in Amazonia: Areas, processes, and methodologies).


In previous travel, talk and class news, on November 8 Lev gave a 'conferencia magistral' at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) entitled La gramaticalización impulsada por la cultura: el caso de las evidenciales reportativas en el idioma nanti (Culture-driven grammaticalization: The case of Nanti reportative evidentials), and on November 9 he gave a class for faculty members at UNAM and other affiliated universities entitled "Temas y metodologías en la lingüística antropológica" (Topics and methodologies in Anthropological Linguistics).

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) will be holding its 2018 Undergraduate Research Symposium this Saturday, featuring undergraduate researchers from across the country. The keynote speaker will be Keith Johnson. The symposium features presentations by Berkeley students Benjamin John PapadopoulosYvette Wu, and Rachel Arsenault. The program is available here. Congrats all! 

The department climate committee consists of Chris Beier, Emily Remirez, and Julia Nee. The committee has recently unveiled a new participatory bulletin board outside of Dwinelle 1303, including resources related to climate and well-being (which passers-by are welcome to take copies of), a space for sharing expressions of gratitude (to which contributions are invited), and a "community in action" section showcasing photos of Berkeley linguists (to which contributions are invited).  Here is the board in its current state: 

Climate bulletin board

Psycholinguist and professor emerita Sue Ervin-Tripp passed away earlier this month. Dan Slobin writes, "We have lost a major founder of both psycho- and sociolinguistics, a distinguished researcher, and a splendid human being.  She will be much missed." The campus news obituary can be read here.  

Open-access linguistics book publisher Language Science Press has just published an interview on its blog with Larry Hyman, the most prolific LangSci author to date! The interview can be read here

November 23, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Phorum - Monday Nov 26 - Dwinelle 1303 - 12-1pm 
    Simon Todd (Stanford): Word frequency effects in sound change: A listener-based exemplar model
  • QP Fest - Monday Nov 26 - Dwinelle 370 - 3-5pm
  • Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Nov 29 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM 
    Julia Nee: TBA
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle Friday Nov 30 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm 
    Zach O'Hagan: Two sorts of contrastive topic in Caquinte

November 22, 2018

QP Fest will be held on Monday, November 26, in Dwinelle 370, from 3-5pm. (Note the rescheduled date!)

The schedule is as follows: 

    • Introduction (3:10-3:15)
    • Tessa Scott: "Conjoint/disjoint in Ndengeleko: A head movement alternation" (3:15-3:35) 
    • Karee Garvin: "Positional effects on timing and coordination of segments within the syllable" (3:35-3:55) 
    • Yevgeniy Melguy: "Talker ethnicity and listener expectation in the perception of foreign-accented speech" (3:55-4:15) 
    • Mini-break (4:15-4:20)
    • Noah Hermalin: "Ambiguity and efficiency trade-offs in Sumerian cuneiform" (4:20-4:40) 
    • Myriam Lapierre: "A phonological analysis of Panãra" (4:40-5:00) 

November 21, 2018

Mairi McLaughlin (affiliated faculty of the Linguistics Department, and Associate Professor of French) writes to share news of recent talks and travels. McLaughlin is currently an Oliver Smithies Visiting Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford, in which capacity she has recently presented talks entitled Historical Newspapers and Language Change and Historical French News Discourse. She also recently spoke at Oxford on Anglicisms in Romance: A New Perspective (given as the Clara Florio Cooper Memorial Lecture), and at Cambridge on The Historical French Press and Language Change. The photo below is from a lecture given at Oxford.

Mairi McLaughlin lecture, Oxford

November 16, 2018

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and to impacts from wildfire smoke, there are no scheduled events for the upcoming week. 

Note that Phorum is cancelled for Monday Nov 19 due to the special campus closure, and that QP Fest has been rescheduled for Nov 26. 

November 15, 2018

The 2018 annual meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature is taking place this weekend in Denver.

November 13, 2018

In the days ahead Larry Hyman will be traveling first to the University of British Columbia, where he will present "In search of prosodic domains in Lusoga" and attend workshops on Kinata and Medumba, and then to Ghent University for the International Conference on Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar, at which he will present "Causative and Passive H tone: Spurious or proto?" 
Continuing the African languages theme, Larry also has three new papers in the newly published book East Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns, and verbs. The book is open access and can be downloaded in its entirety here. Larry's three chapters are entitled:
  • “Bantoid verb extensions”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns, and verbs, 175-199. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • “Third person pronouns in Grassfields Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 201-223. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • “More reflections on the nasal classes in Bantu”. In John Watters (ed.), Eastern Benue-Congo: Nouns, pronouns and verbs, 225-238. Berlin: Language Science Press.

November 9, 2018

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 9 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm 
    Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): I can't believe what's not butter: Deriving distributed factivity
  • Fieldwork Forum - Tuesday Nov 13 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5:30PM [note special time and place!]
    Haley De Korne (University of Oslo): 
    Language reclamation as a socio-political practice: Strategies of engagement in multilingual environments
  • Group in American Indian Languages (GAIL) - Thursday Nov 15 - 6pm [note: talk begins at 6]
    Kate Hedges and Leanne Hinton (UC Berkeley): Konkow Maidu language and texts
  • SLUgS - Thursday Nov 15 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm 
    SLUgS will be hosting a language exchange night for members to share information about languages they speak and learn about other languages.
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Nov 16 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-5pm 
    Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz) & Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): CP complements to D

November 8, 2018

New to the California Language Archive (CLA) this week is a collection of Nafaanra materials elicited by Karee Garvin. The collection can be accessed here

November 1, 2018

New to the California Language Archive (CLA) this week is a collection of Tiwa materials elicited by Virginia Dawson. The collection can be accessed here!

On-going this semester is a Learning in Retirement course, offered through the Berkeley Retirement Center, entitled The Origins and Nature of Language. The course lecture this week was delivered by Eve Sweetser, and next week's lecture will be given by Terry Regier: 

  • Eve Sweetser: Why are Languages so different?    Slides   Audio Link with Slides
  • Terry Regier: What are the consequences of linguistic diversity for perception and thought?
    Tuesday, November 6, 2018, 2-4 pm, Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Building

Congrats, Eve and Terry!