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October 27, 2023

Hyman publishes new chapter on Luganda tone

Larry Hyman and Francis Katamba have published a new chapter on "Tonology of the Luganda noun phrase" In Achiri Blasius (ed.), The Bantu NP: Issues and perspectives: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003254188/bantu-nou...

October 26, 2023

Kavitskaya speaks at UChicago

Darya Kavitskaya gave two talks at UChicago this week:  a colloquium on Oct 26th on "Functional factors in contrast preservation and loss: Evidence from Slavic” and a talk for Language Variation and Change group on Oct 27th on "Dialects of Crimean Tatar: Fieldwork and its challenges”.

Translation event at Cal

Mairi McLaughlin and Timothy Hampton are delighted to announce the first of what we hope to turn into a series of events about translation at UC Berkeley. This first event is called Translation: Literalism, Lateralism, Letteralism and it will involve two round tables featuring 12 speakers representing a wide range of languages and disciplines. The event will be held in the Geballe Room at the Townsend Center from 2-5 on Wednesday 11/1 and it is open to the public.

Beguš presents two talks

Gašper Beguš gave two invited talks this week, one at Stanford NLP Seminar (https://nlp.stanford.edu/seminar/details/gasperbegus_2023.shtml) and the other at the Linguistics Colloquium at UC Davis. 

Linguistics events this week (Oct 27-Nov 3)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 27 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Niko Webster (UC Santa Cruz): "On the argument structure of eventive nominals in Korean"
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 27- Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): Automated vs Traditional Approaches to Patwin Intonation
  • SLaB - Tuesday, Oct 31 - Dwinelle 5125 - 3:30-4:30pm: Spooky SocioStudyHall! There'll be Halloween-themed treats to accompany our work session; costumes welcome but not required.
  • Language Revitalization Working Group (LRWG) - Wednesday, Nov 1 - Dwinelle 1303 or  Zoom(link is external) (password: lrwg23) - 3-4pm: Fototeca Tuzik' (México) "Aproximación a la revitalización del maaya t'aan desde la representatividad y las artes." Evento en español.
  • SSCircle - Friday, Nov 3 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): Two case puzzles in Kalaallisut
  • Phorum - Friday, Nov 3 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Emily Grabowski (UC Berkeley): Acoustic Measurement in Phonetics: Current Practices and Future Directions
CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

October 20, 2023

Regier awarded honorary doctorate

Congratulations to Terry Regier, who has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gothenburg.

October 19, 2023

CLA updates

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

  • Raksit Lau-Preechathammarach (PhD 2022) has accessioned a new collection of materials related to Kuy, Thro, and So Thavung (Austroasiatic), based on work with several dozen speakers in Thailand beginning in 2018. The materials consist mainly of audio recordings of elicitation of lexical items, conversations, and anonymized data from a production study consisting of target words embedded in a carrier sentence.
  • Bernat Bardagil (postdoc 2018-2020) has accessioned a new collection of materials related to Mỹky (isolate; Brazil), based on work with 18 speakers beginning in 2022. (Materials from earlier in their project are archived with the Endangered Languages Archive.) The materials mainly consist of audio and video recordings of stories, songs, and elicitation.
  • We've accessioned a new collection of materials related to the 2022-2023 Berkeley graduate field methods course on Lobi (Gur; Burkina Faso, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire), with consultant Sansan Claude Hien and instructor Hannah Sande.
  • Hannah Sande and Katherine Russell have added dozens of items to the Guébie Fieldwork Collection (see 2014-15.224 through 2014-15.257), based on remote and in-person work from March 2022 to the present with Abie Esmel Kokolou, Boris Azie, Gnakouri, Juliette Kadja Abalé, Olivier Agodio, and Serikpa Emil.
Linguistics events this week (Oct 20-27)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • SSCircle- Friday, Oct 20 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Akshay Aitha(link is external) (University of Chicago): "A Case Study in Nominal-Clausal Parallelism: The View from the Telugu Oblique"
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 20 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: NO MEETING (AMP)
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday, Oct 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3:10-4:30pm: Maks Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley) and Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley): Round-table discussion about incorporating theory into grammatical descriptions, dealing with variation between groups of speakers and between individuals, and deciding on the scope of a grammar
  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 27 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Niko Webster (UC Santa Cruz): TBD
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 27 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley): Automated vs Traditional Approaches to Patwin Intonation

     

October 12, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Oct 13-20)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Delaney Gomez-Jackson (UC Santa Cruz): "Questions and indefinites in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec"
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 13- Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: AMP 2023 practice talks: Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination", Katie Russell: "Reduplication in Atchan as prosodically conditioned morphological doubling"
  • SLaB - Tuesday, Oct 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm: SocioStudyHall
  • Language Revitalization Working Group (LRWG) - Wednesday, Oct 18 - Dwinelle 1303 or  Zoom (password: lrwg23) - 3-4pm: Pa Vue (UC Berkeley) "The Affordances and Challenges of Teaching an Endangered Language on Instagram"
  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 20 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Akshay Aitha (University of Chicago): TBD
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 20 - NO MEETING (AMP)

October 11, 2023

Open House on Unicode
A free, virtual "open house" question and answer session on Unicode character and script encoding will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2022 at 11 a.m. (Pacific). Come ask two Unicode experts any questions you may have about getting characters into Unicode. (The session will be recorded. It is organized by Debbie Anderson.). For further information (with a list of resources and the speakers), see https://www.unicode.org/events/ Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vd-GhpzMvHtX4Y_eL0NvwvBUpLVv... If you have questions, please contact Debbie Anderson dwanders@berkeley.edu.

October 5, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Oct 6-13)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Yaqing Cao (UC Santa Cruz): "Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin"
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): "A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: The case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin"
  • SLaB- Tuesday, Oct 10 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm: NWAV Practice Talks, Part 2. Noah Macey: "A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: the case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin", Naitian Zhou: "Artificial accents: assessing phonological variation in voice cloning software", Aurora Martinez Kane: "Social perceptions of Traditional New Mexican Spanish paragoge across communities"
  • Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Oct 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom (password: fforum) - 3-4:30pm: Hossep Dolatian (Stony Brook): "Documentation of Iranian Armenian: A pandemic grammar"
  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Delaney Gomez-Jackson (UC Santa Cruz): "Questions and indefinites in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec"
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: AMP 2023 practice talks: Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination", Katie Russell: "Reduplication in Atchan as prosodically conditioned morphological doubling"

October 2, 2023

Sande publishes in Phonology

Hannah Sande published an article "Is grammatical tone item-based or process-based?" in Phonology: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675723000106.

September 28, 2023

Linguistics events this week (Sep 29-Oct 6)

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

  • SSCircle - Friday, Sep 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Emily Clem (UC San Diego) & Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Dependent case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi"
  • Phorum - Friday, Sep 29 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Alex Elias (UC Berkeley): "Just because you can doesn’t mean you should: Two analyses of Jao’s phonemic inventory"
  • SLaB - Tuesday, Oct 3 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 3:30-4:30pm: NWAV Practice Talks, Part 1. Julianne Kapner, "Ne-omission in Ivorian French celebrity interviews on YouTube"; Riley Van Meter, "Quantifying grammaticalization via translation: The position of Lo Cunto de li Cunti’s Neapolitan on the Romance grammaticalization cline"; Baichen Du, "Visible articulatory variation as a cue to sound change: Lip rounding and lip protrusion variability in the Mandarin sibilant merger"
  • SSCircle - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm: Yaqing Cao (UC Santa Cruz): TBD
  • Phorum - Friday, Oct 6 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm: Noah Macey (UC Berkeley): "A dynamic neural model of the interaction between social and lexical influences on speech production: The case of retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin"
Hyman publishes in Phonology

Larry Hyman and Hildah Kemunto Nyamwaro have published an open-access article "Grammatical tone mapping in Ekegusii" (a Bantu language of Kenya) in Phonology 39(1), a special issue on Grammatical Tone edited by Nicholas Rolle (Berkeley PhD, 2018), Florian Lionnet (Berkeley PhD 2016) and Laura McPherson: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675723000118

September 26, 2023

Beguš speaks at U of Arizona

Gašper Beguš gave an invited colloquium talk on "Modeling Language as a dependency between the latent space and data" at the University of Arizona's Department of Linguistics on September 22, 2023. The abstract can be found here: https://linguistics.arizona.edu/events/modeling-language-dependency-between-latent-space-and-data

Rebecca Jarvis wins first place in Alameda 5k!

Congratulations to Glottal Non-Stops superstar Becky Jarvis, who ran the Alameda "5k" (actually ~5.5k) race on Sunday, September 24, 2023 and was the #1 woman (out of 170) and #12 overall (out of all 285 runners).

Galvano publishes in the Journal of Linguistic Geography

Amber Galvano and several co-authors from the University of Michigan have just published their article "Perceptions of regional origin and social attributes of phonetic variants used in Iberian Spanish" in the Journal of Linguistic Geography.

Jenks and Michael publish volume on language documentation and description

A new volume of papers on language documention edited by Berkeley linguistics faculty members Peter Jenks and Lev Michael includes a paper by

September 22, 2023

Dabkowski publishes in NLLT

Maksymilian Dabkowski published a paper on "Two grammars of A’ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase" in NLLT. You can read the paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-023-09574-5.