Calques 3.19

February 5, 2016

Bling | BLS 42 | Newly published | Talks and events | Deadlines

Please send information and news of departmental interest to Andrew Garrett.

Bling

Berkeley Linguistics dissertations in bling were viewed 864 times and downloaded 470 times in January. Last month's most requested dissertation: Joseph Grady, "Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Stress" (1997).

Elsewhere in bling, the Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society were viewed 266 times and downloaded 63 times in January. The single most downloaded item last month: David Perlmutter, "Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis" (BLS 4, 1978).

42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society

BLS 42 starts today and runs through mid-day Sunday, with panels on a range of topics:

  • Austronesian Historical Linguistics & Pragmatics
  • Austronesian Semantics
  • Austronesian Syntax
  • Historical Linguistics & Pragmatics
  • Learnability
  • Phonetics
  • Phonology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Semantics
  • Syntax

There are five plenary addresses:

  • Joe Pater (UMass. Amherst), "Learning in typological prediction: Grammatical agent-based modeling"
  • Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), "Constructing meaning: A view from MEG"
  • Joey Sabbagh (U. Texas, Arlington), "Syntactic and prosodic adjunction in Tagalog"
  • Meghan Sumner (Stanford), "The benefit of idealized word pronunciations: How are forms we rarely hear understood so easily?"
  • Judith Tonhauser (The OSU), "Speaker commitment in English and Paraguayan Guaraní attitude reports"

Newly published

Proceedings of the Thirty Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 6-7, 2010, edited by Nicholas Rolle, Jeremy Steffman, and John Sylak-Glassman (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2016)

  • Special Session: Language Isolates and Orphans
  • Parasession: Writing Systems and Orthography

Sarah Lee (Berkeley) and Jonah Katz (West Virginia University), "Perceptual integration of acoustic cues to laryngeal contrasts in Korean fricatives", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, 605 (2016): DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4926435

  • This paper provides evidence that multiple acoustic cues involving the presence of low-frequency energy integrate in the perception of Korean coronal fricatives. This finding helps explain a surprising asymmetry between the production and perception of these fricatives found in previous studies: lower F0 onset in the following vowel leads to a response bias for plain [s] over fortis [s*], despite the fact that there is no evidence for a corresponding acoustic asymmetry in the production of [s] and [s*]. A fixed classification task using the Garner paradigm provides evidence that low F0 in a following vowel and the presence of voicing during frication perceptually integrate. This suggests that Korean listeners in previous experiments were responding to an "intermediate perceptual property" of stimuli, despite the fact that the individual acoustic components of that property are not all present in typical Korean fricative productions. The finding also broadens empirical support for the general idea of perceptual integration to a language, a different manner of consonant, and a situation where covariance of the acoustic cues under investigation is not generally present in a listener's linguistic input.

Talks and events

Deadlines

  • WAIL 2016: Workshop on American Indigenous Languages, UC Santa Barbara, May 7-8
    • Abstract deadline: February 14
  • 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting, Manchester, England, May 26-28
    • Abstract deadline: February 15
  • NAPhC9: 9th North American Phonology Conference, Concordia University, Montréal, May 7-8
    • Abstract deadline: March 1