Larry Hyman and Ana Lívia Agostinho, who was a visiting scholar in the department (2019-2020) from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, have authored a new chapter together:
Ana Lívia Agostinho & Larry M. Hyman. 2023. Interpreting non-canonical word prosody in Afro-European contact. In Jeroen van de Weijer (ed.), Representing phonological detail, 151-169. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
On Thursday, April 6, Julia Peck gave a talk at Spanish in the US/Spanish in Contact with Other Languages at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The talk was titled "Ladino in Contact: Morphosyntactic Integration of Turkish and French Lexical Borrowings in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish."
Several current and former UC Berkeley linguists will be presenting at TripleA 10 in Potsdam in June:
The TripleA workshop series was founded in 2014 by linguists from Potsdam and Tübingen with the aim of providing a platform for researchers conducting theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork that investigates meaning. Its focus is particularly on under-represented languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania.
The Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium is on Saturday, April 15th from 10am to 5pm in Dwinelle 5125 (Spanish and Portuguese Library). Talks range from ASL phonology, colonial language policy, epicene pronominalization, abbreviations, thematic suffixes, Native American English perception, and more! Come meet and engage with the next generation of linguists!
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Congratulations to Andrew Cheng (PhD 2020) who has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Hawai'i to start in August 2023! Andrew also has a new paper out in the Journal of Linguistic Geography titled "A comparative study of English vowel shift and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions."
The 2022-2023 colloquium series concludes on Monday, April 10, with a talk by Laura Kalin (Princeton), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "On the nature of linearization: Insights from infixes and infixation," and the abstract is as follows:
How do abstract syntactic structures come to have a linear order? It is widely assumed in the generative literature that linearization follows the syntax (see, e.g., Chomsky 1995, Nunes 1999, 2004, Moro 2000, Berwick & Chomsky 2011). But, there is no consensus on the precise timing and nature of post-syntactic linearization, with proposals split along the following lines (among many others): (i) is linearization determined entirely by structural relationships?; (ii) does linearization within a word obey the same principles as linearization across words?; and (iii) does linearization of an affixal morpheme with respect to its stem take place prior to or simultaneous with (i.e., as part of) exponence? For some varying proposals, see e.g. Lieber 1992, Noyer 1992, Embick 2010, Arregi and Nevins 2012, Bye and Svenonius 2012, Idsardi and Raimy 2013, Myler 2017, Georgieva et al 2021, Felice 2022, Hewett 2022.
In this talk, I use infixes and infixation as a window into linearization and the post-syntactic component. In very brief, what I will propose is that basic linear order (for all morphemes) is established cyclically, from the bottom of a spelled-out structure upward, interspersed with exponence; at each terminal, linearization properly precedes exponence, and can be influenced by various non-structural factors. In addition, I will argue for one point of re-linearization which is also cyclic, but which takes place after exponent choice. The evidence will include and go beyond the type of case study considered in Kalin 2022.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Calques is happy to pass on this message from Gabriella Licata:
The Language as Social Justice Working Group (Berkeley Language Center) is hosting a free virtual conference April 6-7 titled "Visibilizing raciolinguistic ideologies across cultures, languages, and systems." Our keynote speakers are Clara Vaz Bauler (Adelphi University) and Ian Cushing (Edge Hill University). You can see program information and register here on our conference site.
The 41st meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) will take place May 5-7, 2023, at UC Santa Cruz and features work by a number of Berkeley linguists!
The full program is available here.
This past weekend, several Glottal Non-Stops participated in the Oakland Running Festival (running the 10k & half marathon)!
Larry Hyman was honored by Resulam, which promotes ancestral mother tongues, in a 2-1/2 hour Zoom session on Saturday, March 18, organized by the Cameroonian Bamileke community in the diaspora which chose the occasion to thank Larry for his contributions to the Fè'éfè'ê language. Larry's speech in Fè'éfè'ê-Bamileke can be heard here. The full meeting video is posted here. Matt Faytak (Berkeley PhD 2018) also attended and spoke.
Larry spent 6 months in Bafang in 1971 doing his dissertation research when he received a Certificate in Nufi (the Fe'fe' literacy program) and a title of nobility nzɑ᷆ and read a speech in Fe'fe'. The highlight of the Zoom event for Larry was when one of the women present spoke and said that as a little girl she had been at the huge event of several hundred people in the middle of the town when Larry gave his speech.
Isaac Bleaman and Ronald Sprouse have published a tutorial on speaker diarization at the Linguistics Methods Hub. The process allows researchers to automatically generate ELAN or Praat files for audio recordings with speech segments marked off on the appropriate speaker tiers — an important first step in the transcription workflow.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Congrats to Larry Hyman on the publication of two articles:
Keith Johnson will be a keynote speaker at the 47th Penn Linguistics Conference, taking place March 18-19, with a talk on "Vowels in the Brain."
Emily Drummond has received a research grant from the Firebird Foundation to document and revitalize Nukuoro oral histories and traditional knowledge. This research will be conducted alongside collaborators Johnny Rudolph and former Berkeley undergraduate Margaret Asperheim (University of Hawaii) and will train several Nukuoro community members to continue the documentation of traditional knowledge.
Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy who has just been awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language with Arthur Samuel and Clara Martin.
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive: