Summer summary 2021

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:

• Isaac Bleaman received faculty fellowships from the Hellman Fellows Fund and the Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowships program. The title of his project is "Documenting the linguistic diversity of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors," and funds will support a postdoctoral researcher during 2021-2022. He also gave a public lecture (in Yiddish) at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research titled "Standardization in contemporary Yiddish: Case studies from Hasidic Jews and Yiddishists." A recording is available here.
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a talk titled "A'ingae syntax conditions the representation of glottalization" at the 28th Manchester Phonology Meeting; gave a lightning talk (presented a poster) titled "Complex left periphery in A'ingae" at the 25th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas; presented an asynchronous poster titled "Morphological domains and idiosyncrasies in A'ingae stress" at the phonological symposium of Amazônicas VIII; presented a poster co-authored with Roman Feiman titled "Evidence of accurate logical reasoning in online sentence comprehension" at the 47th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology; and published an article titled "A'ingae (Ecuador and Colombia) ― Language snapshot" in the journal Language Documentation and Description 20.
• Justin Davidson was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
• This summer, through the magic of Zoom, Amy Rose Deal shared work on Agree(ment) in three continents without leaving Berkeley -- a mini-course at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a tutorial (slides) at the McGill/UBC Move/Agree Forum (alongside a great talk on Agree by Tessa Scott), and an invited talk titled Without uninterpretability at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar.
• Karee Garvin, Katherine Russell, and Hannah Sande will present at the 5th American International Morphology Meeting, August 26-29. Their talk is entitled "There is no unified generative analysis of STAMP morphs."
• Jorge Hankamer (UCSC) and Line Mikkelsen are co-authors of a new article, "CP complements to D," published in Linguistic Inquiry. Read it here!
• In collaboration with Ivoirian linguistics student Timothée Kouadio, Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis have begun remote fieldwork on the Ebrié language, a highly understudied Kwa language of Côte d'Ivoire. They hope to travel to Côte d'Ivoire to work with the Ebrié community in person in the future.
• Myriam Lapierre's article "A phonological analysis of Panãra" has been accepted for publication at the International Journal of American Linguistics.
• Gabriella Licata (Romance Languages and Literatures) passed her QEs in May and had a paper accepted for publication at the Journal of Language and Discrimination entitled, "Sorry, not sorry. A critical and pragmatic analysis of Ted Yoho’s non-apology." She also had a Teacher's Perspective published in the L2 Journal, "A Raciolinguistic Perspective on the Structure of Language Programs and Departments," which will be presented at the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium in September.
• Julia Nee has spent the summer working for the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership at the Berkeley Haas school of business, where she's developing guidance for tech companies looking to use more inclusive language, particularly as they develop AI tools. Some of these resources will be publicly launched at an event in October, so stay tuned for more!
• Zachary O'Hagan spent time with linguist friends in San Diego, Hollister, Vic (Catalonia), and Berlin, where he was part of a widely acclaimed remake of Nimoy's (1987) Three Men and a Baby with two Berkeley alumni. In addition to managing the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, Zach reviewed two articles; co-organized the general session at AMAZONICAS VIII, presenting on Caquinte voice alternations at AMAZONICAS VIII (slides); published an academic obituary of anthropologist Gerald Weiss (Spanish version in press; English pre-print here); and participated in biweekly Salinan (isolate; California) language meetings. He spent time in the Bancroft Library creating new metadata for the Margaret Langdon [PhD 1966] Papers as part of the Survey's current NEH grant related to Yuman and Uto-Aztecan languages, and traveled to Carmichael and Reno to retrieve archival materials from anthropologist Allen Johnson (UCLA) and linguist Heather Hardy (UNR) related to Matsigenka (Arawak; Peru) and Tolkapaya Yavapai (Yuman; Arizona), respectively. He also received a grant from the Endangered Language Fund for a project titled "Documenting Omurano through Urarina Oral Narrative."
• Miriam R. L. Petruck (PhD 1986) is a co-author, together with Michael Ellsworth and Collin F. Baker, of "FrameNet and Linguistic Typology," appearing in Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 61–66, June 10, 2021, Association for Computational Linguistics. She and Kyoko Ohara also organized a panel at the International Pragmatics Association (Winterthur, Switzerland & online, June 27- July 2, 2021), entitled "Interactional Frames and Language Resource Development." The two also contributed a paper to that panel entitled, "Interactional Frames in a Literary Work: Multiple Levels of Interaction."
• A paper by Hannah Sande and Taylor Miller (SUNY Oswego) was published in Languages in May: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/6/2/100
• Tessa Scott visited the highlands of Huehuetenango, Guatemala this summer to immersively learn Mam language and culture. Her research with co-author Henry Sales titled "The spell out of Mam subject enclitics" was accepted to be presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics VI (FAMLi 6) in Chiapas, Mexico this November. Their Mam language and culture classes at Laney College start Aug 28th for the Fall semester; it will be their 6th time teaching Mam together.
• Noah Usman presented the results of a remote speech study of Majhi Panjabi speakers at the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, under the title "Voicing Contrasts and Prosody in Majhi Panjabi," supervised by Keith Johnson and Emily Remirez. He also published the op-ed The Official Language: A Case for Structural Reform in the Summer 2021 issue of U-Lingua, the Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain (p.16). Since May, Usman has also served as Project Lead for the Jewish Languages Documentation and Revitalization Project at Wikitongues, and published the following articles for the American Pakistan Foundation based on the sociolinguistic issues involved: We Can't Take Urdu for Granted, and Linguistic Diversity in Pakistan.
• What If Babel Was Just a Myth?, a new film by Sandrine Loncke featuring Florian Lionnet (PhD 2016) and the Láàl-speaking community in Southern Chad, has been released. A trailer is available to watch here.

Congrats, all!