News

Larry Hyman(link is external) 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(link is external)

Gašper Beguš(link is external) gave a virtual invited hall titled Modeling language from raw speech with GANs” at the CHAI: Chat about AI colloquium at the School of Data Science and AI, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Guwahati) on September 13, 2023.

Two (former) Berkeley affiliates presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Johanna Nichols(link is external) presented on "Reconstructing prehistoric sociolinguistics from modern grammatical evidence" and Anna Berge(link is external) (PhD 1997, now a professor at the University of

The 2023-2024 colloquium series begins on Monday, September 18, with a talk by Wesley Y. Leonard(link is external) (UC Riverside), rescheduled from last fall. The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom(link is external) (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. The title of the talk is "Engaging Native American Protocols for Decolonizing Linguistics Pedagogy," and the abstract is as follows:

Although there is an increasing focus on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in the field of Linguistics, members of Native American and other Indigenous communities remain underrepresented—and often report feeling unwelcome. A recurring concern is that Linguistics, despite a strong disciplinary interest in Indigenous languages, is not accountable to Indigenous histories, protocols, and ways of experiencing language. A wider issue is that colonization is endemic, and academic norms (including whose worldviews guide curriculum) have developed accordingly. For both points, a question emerges about what linguists can or should do in response.

In this colloquium, I examine this question through the norms of how Linguistics is or could be taught, focusing in particular on introductory courses—those in which students are most likely to learn about the field for the first time—and how these courses can engage Native American worldviews and protocols, such as a focus on relationships (relationality) and protocols of honoring those relationships (relational accountability). I argue that doing so when framing core concepts, selecting and presenting examples, and discussing social issues such as language endangerment, naturally supports JEDI for members of Native American and other Indigenous communities, while also improving linguistics pedagogy in general.

Peter Jenks(link is external) is giving a talk (via Zoom) at the 4th meeting of the Definiteness across Domains DFG network this Sunday at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The talk is entitled "Anaphoric bare nouns without indices". The program is available here: https://www.definiteness-across-domains.org/4th-meeting/(link is external).