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October 8, 2018

New SSILA Archiving Award

A new SSILA Archiving Award has been inaugurated, the award committee for which is chaired by Andrew Garrett.  The society says that "this award highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities.

October 5, 2018

Linguistics events this week (Oct 5-12, 2018)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: 

  • Workshop on Pronouns and Interpretation de se - Thursday Oct 11 - 10:15-11:15, 2-5
    Join us 10:15-11:15 for a talk by Pranav Anand (UCSC), Perspectives for Pronouns and Reflexives, in Dwinelle 6307 [Celtic seminar room]. We reconvene 2-5 in Dwinelle 3401 for talks by Amy Rose Deal, A puzzle about reflexives of res-movement verbs, Pritty Patel-Grosz and Patrick Grosz (Oslo), The role of pronominal strength in interpretation, and Peter Jenks, Weak pronouns and variable binding.
  • Fieldwork Forum - Thursday Oct 11 - Matrix Conference Room (Barrows Hall 8th Floor) - 4-5:30pm 
    Screening of Dizhsa Nabani - Living Language, followed by a Q-and-A session with faculty and students in the Indigenous Language Revitalization Designated Emphasis
  • Dissertation Defense - Friday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 1229 - 10:10-1
    Kelsey Neely: The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru) 
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Oct 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm 
    Round robin

October 4, 2018

Cheng, Clem recognized by the LSA

Fifth-year grad students Andrew Cheng and Emily Clem were each recognized by the LSA this week in connection with the upcoming annual meeting in New York City.  Andrew was named a finalist for the Five-minute Linguist event, which features short, informative, engaging, and accessible talks about linguistics research on a variety of topics. Andrew's presentation is entitled Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Emily has been named as the third place winner of this year's Student Abstract Award, recognizing "the three best abstracts submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at Annual Meeting". Emily's prize-winning abstract is entitledThe cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes. 

Congrats, Andrew and Emily! 

Gahl named Mercator Fellow

Congrats to Susanne Gahl, who has just been named a Mercator Fellow by the DFG (German Research Foundation)! The fellowship lasts for three years and will support a collaboration with Ingo Plag and others at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf.  

October 3, 2018

Hyman festscrift published

Newly published with CSLI is the long-awaited volume Revealing Structure: Papers in Honor of Larry M. Hyman (eds. Eugene Buckley, Thera Crane and Jeff Good)! The book features numerous contributions by alumni, faculty, emeriti, and former visiting scholars, including: 

  • Jeff Good (Ph.D. 2003), Eugene Buckley (Ph.D. 1992)  & Thera Crane (Ph.D. 2011): Revealing Structure in Languages and Grammar
  • Jean-Marie Hombert (PhD 1975) and Rebecca Grollemund: Phylogenetic Classification of Grassfields Languages
  • Sharon Inkelas: Overexponence and Underexponence in Morphology 
  • Joyce T. Mathangwane (Ph.D. 1996): On Tones in Chisubiya (Chiikuhane) 
  • Johanna Nichols: A Direct/Inverse Subsystem in Ingush Deictic Prefixes
  • John J. Ohala: The Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint and its Phonological Implications  
  • Imelda I. Udoh (former visiting scholar): Compounding in Leggbó 
  • Alan C. L. Yu (Ph.D. 2003):  Laryngeal Schizophrenia in Washo Resonants

Congrats, Larry, on the celebratory volume, and congrats to the editors and authors!

Berkeley semantics in Sinn und Bedeutung 21 proceedings

The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21 have just been published, containing four papers by faculty, students, and/or alumni: 

  • Pranav Anand & Maziar Toosarvandani (Ph.D. 2010)
    Unifying the canonical, historical, and play-by-play present. pdf
  • Amy Rose Deal & Julia Nee
    Bare nouns, number, and definiteness in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. pdf
  • Peter Jenks, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, & Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso
    On the lexical semantics of property concept nouns in Basaá. pdf
  • Peter Sutton & Hana Filip (Ph.D 1993)
    Restrictions on subkind coercion in object mass nouns. pdf

Congrats all! 

Dawson publishes in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung

Congrats to fifth-year grad student Virginia Dawson, whose paper A new kind of epistemic indefinite was recently published in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22!

Conference double-header!

This weekend features two conferences at which Berkeley Linguistics will have a major presence, one each in the east and the west:

  • The Annual Meeting on Phonology, at UC San Diego, features work by faculty Larry Hyman and Jesse Zymet, along with alumni Nik Rolle (PhD 2018, now at Princeton), Hannah Sande (PhD 2017, now at Georgetown),  Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008, now at UCSD), Alan Yu (PhD 2003, now at Chicago),  and Eugene Buckley (PhD 1992, now at Penn).
  • NELS 49, at Cornell, features presentations by graduate students Emily Clem, Schuyler Laparle, and Tessa Scott, along with alum Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010, now at UC Santa Cruz). 

Congrats all!

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2019

The program for this year's LSA annual meeting has been released, and Berkeley linguistics will be represented in 14 talks and posters (plus an organized session) by students, faculty, and very recent alumni: 

Congrats all!

September 28, 2018

This week @ Berkeley linguistics

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: 

September 27, 2018

Baclawski publishes in Asia-Pacific Language Variation

Congrats to grad student Kenneth Baclawski Jr. whose paper Diglossia and change from below in Eastern Cham has just been been posted online in the latest issue of the journal Asia-Pacific Language Variation!

September 26, 2018

Baby Chen

Ian Chen, son of I-Hsuan Chen (PhD '15) and Tim Chen, was born on Sept. 12. Welcome, baby! 

September 21, 2018

This week @ Berkeley linguistics

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: 

September 20, 2018

Linguists at the ballgame

A group of students, faculty, alumni, and friends of Berkeley linguistics were on hand this Wednesday evening to cheer the Oakland A's to a 10-0 victory over the visiting LA Angels!

Berkeley linguists at the ballgame

Johnson colloquium
The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, Sept 24, with a talk by Keith Johnson. Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Four phonetic discoveries: How I spent my sabbatical “vacation”.

September 18, 2018

Petruck book, Brazil visit

Alumna Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD '86) writes to share news of her edited book MetaNet, recently published by John Benjamins. The book contains contributions by Miriam and fellow alumni Karen Sullivan (PhD '07),  Elise Stickles (PhD '16), Oana David (PhD '16), Ellen Dodge (PhD '10), and Jisup Hong (PhD '12), along with faculty member Eve Sweetser and emeritus faculty member George Lakoff. 

David to Google

Congrats to alumna Oana David (PhD 2016), who has just taken up a new position as an Analytic Linguist at Google!

September 13, 2018

This week @ Berkeley linguistics

In and around the linguistics department in the next week: 

  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 14 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Ryan Bochnak (Universität Konstanz):  Combining coordination and focus: Towards an analysis of alternative questions in Washo
  • Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Sept 17 - Dwinelle 370 - 3:10-5 pm
    Jesse Zymet (UC Berkeley): Lexical propensities in phonology: Corpus and experimental evidence, grammar, and learning
  • Phonological Reading Group - Thursday Sept 20 - Dwinelle 1226 - 11-noon 
    From Matthew Gordon's book Phonological Typology, we will be reading Chapter 3: Phoneme Inventories.
  • SLUgS - Thursday Sept 20 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-7pm
    Join us for linguistics-related games! 
  • Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 21- Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
    Sabrina Grimberg (Stanford): Between Economy and Recoverability: The Case of Subject Doubling in Colloquial Finnish

And coming up at Stanford (Saturday, Sept 22): Analyzing Typological Structure: From Categorical to Probabilistic Phonology

Calques on the web

We're excited to announce that Calques is transitioning to a blog format! The new Calques blog is integrated with our department webpage, and gives us the opportunity to share photos and department news to an even wider community. Email lovers, fear not: thanks to the hero of this transition, Ron Sprouse, you will still receive an email digest every week. 

Click here to visit us on the web!

September 12, 2018

Calques goes visual

Taking advantage of the visual possibilities afforded by the new Calques format, we present some recent evidence of Berkeley linguists out and about. Send your photos of linguistics-in-action to Calques!

 Berkeley linguists at LabPhon

The Berkeley Crew at LabPhon16:  Yao Yao (PhD 2011), Charles Bond Chang (PhD 2010), Grant McGuire (former postdoc), Keith Johnson, Matt Faytak (PhD 2018), Myriam Lapierre, Jeremy Steffman (BA 2016), Hannah Sande (PhD 2017), Alice Shen, Andrew Cheng and Alan Yu (PhD 2003)

Berkeley semantics at Sinn und Bedeutung

The Berkeley Crew at Sinn und Bedeutung 23: Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Peter Jenks, Rachel Rudolph, Ruyue Agnes Bi

Nik Rolle and Jack Merrill

Two new doctors in celebratory gear: Jack Merrill (PhD 2018) and Nik Rolle (PhD 2018)