News

 Two talks will feature Berkeley linguists at the upcoming workshop on Understanding Obviation at McGill (https://obviationworkshop2024.wordpress.com)

"Various diagnostics have been identified to determine whether a complex predicate, such as a causative structure, involves a single clause or two. The diagnostics pick out clausal properties of subparts of the predicate, for example an agent or a distinctly modifiable event description is sometimes understood as a sufficient condition for clausehood, and if the subordinate part of a complex predicate has one of these things independently of the superordinate part, the complex predicate is deemed to be biclausal. This sometimes holds even when the predicate is considered to consist of a single word (as with Japanese indirect causatives, as argued by Shibatani and Kuno in the 1970s; see Matsumoto 1996 CSLI for discussion and references).

However, there are striking limits on biclausal single words, which reveal constraints on the architecture of grammar and the interface between grammar and the lexicon. First, restrictions on the conceptual content associated with listed lexical roots mean that certain kinds of information can only be expressed in syntactically complex forms. Second, functional structure is constrained --- I argue that the constraints follow from a certain conception of extended projections, which are responsible for a sharp difference between what can be expressed with and without embedding of one extended projection in another. This leads to motivated definitions of mono- and biclausality."

Becky Jarvis, Tzintia Montaño Ramírez, and Zachary O'Hagan are in Berlin this week giving presentations and posters at Language Documentation and Archiving at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (pictured here with organizing committee member Kelsey Neely, PhD 2019; Amalia Skilton, PhD 2019; and Bernat Bardagil, postdoc 2018-2020).

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• SSCircle – Friday, Sep 6 - 3-4:30pm
  Round robin! Join us at Amy Rose's house to discuss any tricky data that you've come across recently.
• Phorum – Friday, Sep. 6 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Introductions & round robin!

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Monday, September 9, Dwinelle 1229, 3-4pm
  Join us for the first-ever meeting of the Ladino Working Group! In this beginner-friendly conversation hour, we will be introducing ourselves in Ladino and sharing some family background (no matter where we are from). There will be snacks!

• LRWG – Wednesday, Sep. 11 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4pm

  Fernando Márquez Duarte (UC Riverside), Lorenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz, and Alejandro Maclis Valenzuela: Book presentation: a new language manual for Cucupáh

• Phorum – Thursday, Sep. 12 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
  Martin Krämer on "Sonority, markedness and the OCP" (Note the unusual time and place)
• Workshop on Phonological Domains and What Conditions Them – Friday, September 13 and Saturday, September 14
  Please register at this link if you plan to attend.
• SSCircle – Friday, Sep 13 - 3-4:30pm
  No meeting; attend the Phonological domains workshop instead!
• Linguistics department colloquium – Monday, Sep 16 - 3-4:30pm
  Peter Svenonius, Title TBA
  
  

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Julianne Kapner has accessioned a new collection of recordings and transcripts of word lists and oral histories from the ongoing Armenian Language in the Bay Area (ALBA) Project.
• Josefina Bittar (UCSC) has accessioned the Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción, 14 sociolinguistic interviews in Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní; Paraguay) and Spanish from 2015.
• Emanuele Fabiano, Joshua Homan, Manuel and Samuel Nuribe Arahuata, and Zachary O'Hagan have accessioned a new collection of audio and video recordings of interviews predominantly in Urarina (isolate; Peru) about the history of the Urituyacu River, especially the history of Omurano people, based on collaborative research from 2022.