Summer summary 2020

Berkeley linguists have been engaged in many ways over the summer, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. We're happy to share the stories that were submitted to Calques during its summer hiatus:

• Andrew Cheng filed his dissertation, "Accent and Ideology among Bilingual Korean Americans," and accepted a one-year postdoctoral position at the Department of Language Science at UC Irvine. He will be working with Dr. Judith Kroll and Dr. Gregory Scontras on heritage bilingualism research and teaching a few courses in phonetics and sociolinguistics. In addition, he is excited to announce two organized symposia, one on language contact and change in Asian American/Asian Canadian communities, and the other on Asian representation and identity in the field of linguistics and in academe, both of which he will be moderating at the upcoming LSA meeting in (maybe virtual) San Francisco.
• Julia Nee wrote Calques to share:
  This summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about my teaching approaches. I re-designed Ling 155 (building on Rich Rhodes's syllabus and assisted greatly by Emily Remirez) to be based on learning objectives and following principles for equitable grading. If you'd like to learn more about that you can check out this best practices for assessment summary from the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program that features some of my course materials, or just ask me about it! I also participated in a panel discussion on the topic, which you can see here. In other fun news, a group of Cal linguists (me, Andrew Garrett, Martha Schwarz, Allegra Robertson, Meg Cychosz, and Amalia Skilton) completed an 80.1 mile relay run over 7 (socially distanced!) days to raise over $3000 for COVID-19 relief.
• Zachary O'Hagan was part of a virtual panel Archiving and Language Documentation for ABRALIN ao Vivo, with Ana Paula Brandão (U. Federal do Pará), Pattie Epps (UT), Susan Kung (UT), Denny Moore (Museo Goeldi), and Jorge Rosés Labrada (Alberta).
• Emily Remirez wrote Calques to share:
  This summer I collaborated with Julia Nee to teach Linguistics 155AC, including adapting a mixed methods, term-long research project for the remote, short summer term. Students were invited to reflect on their own experiences with language, linguistic discrimination, and other concepts from class. I am very proud of their projects! I also continued to work with Keith on writing a Python library implementing the Generalized Context Model for speech perception and presented on this work as a guest lecture for Andrew C and Geoff's Linguistic Data class. Outside of work, I stepped out of my comfort zone and launched an art-thing called third ear prints, and started taking pet portrait commissions!
• Isaac Bleaman's article "Implicit standardization in a minority language community: Real-time syntactic change among Hasidic Yiddish writers" has appeared in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
• Amy Rose Deal received word that her book A theory of indexical shift will be published in October!
• Susanne Gahl gave a talk at a LabPhon satellite workshop, "Us(e)Phon: Usage-based Approaches to Phonological Change," in July. The title of her talk was, "Which age-related changes in pronunciation are lexical? And why don't we already know?"
• Terry Regier wrote to share the news of two publications and one presentation:
  - Yang Xu, Emmy Liu, and Terry Regier. "Numeral systems across languages support efficient communication: From approximate numerosity to recursion." Open Mind. (This elaborates and extends an earlier conference paper of the same name.)
  - Francis Mollica, Geoff Bacon, Yang Xu, Terry Regier, and Charles Kemp. "Grammatical marking and the tradeoff between code length and informativeness." In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
  - Sonnet Phelps, Amit Millo, Kevin Holmes, and Terry Regier. "Categorical perception as inference under uncertainty: New evidence from color." Poster presentation at the (virtual) 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Leanne Hinton wrote with an update on the Breath of Life Institute:
  As usual, we (the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, plus Andrew and myself) started planning early in the year for our biennial Breath of Life Archival Institute for California Indian Languages (BOL). But by April it was clear we’d have to put it off – as of now, that would be to June 2021. But instead we held a series of six Saturday morning sessions on Zoom for everyone who had applied, made all the digital archival materials for the attending language groups available for the groups to research or download, had videos and live discussion by Kayla Begay (PhD 2017) and Crystal Richardson on linguistics, and a memorable panel by Stan Rodriguez and Loren Bommelyn. Participant projects were presented on the last day. One benefit of the virtual venue is that some of the Linguists who were experts on participating languages who lived as far away as Hawai’i or the East Coast, would not have been able to come in person, but were now able to work virtually as linguistic partners with the language teams. Many thanks to the staff at the Bancroft Library and to SCOIL, for their help in making this event work for everyone!
• Ernesto Gutiérrez Topete and Annie Helms presented talks at the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), hosted by UT Austin, which was entirely online this year. Ernesto's talk was titled "Frequency and efficiency in Spanish fixed expressions" and Annie's talk was titled "Sociophonetic variability in the production of Spanish /e/ by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Barcelona."
• Mairi McLaughlin shared the news that Michael Arrigo (RLL, Linguistics track) filed his dissertation entitled "Rumor Has It: The Press Conditional in French and Spanish" in August. His committee members were Professor Mairi McLaughlin (Chair), Professor Andrew Garrett, and Professor Richard Kern. Mike is now a lecturer in the French Department at UC Berkeley.
• Beth Piatote was invited to write a short story for the SF Chronicle series "The Throughline" about life after COVID-19. Her theme was "rewriting the rules," and here is her take on it!
• Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD 1986) wrote to share two new publications — one paper and one edited proceedings volume:
  - Ronen Tamari, Chen Shani, Tom Hope, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Omri Abend, and Dafna Shahaf. "Language (Re)modelling: Towards Embodied Language Understanding." In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
  - Tiago T. Torrent, Collin F. Baker, Oliver Czulo, Kyoko Ohara, and Miriam R. L. Petruck (eds.). Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet.
• At the end of June, Paula Floro retired as Department Manager after almost 24 years at Berkeley Linguistics. At the same time, Paula started a new "full-time, lifetime job": helping to raise her first grandchild, Arabella!