Calques 4.23

Calques 4.23 (March 10, 2017)

Newsletter, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

Celticity | Research News | Talks and Events

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

Celticity

The 39th California Celtic Conference will be held on the Berkeley campus from Thursday through Sunday, March 16-19, in Hearst Annex D-37. Linguistic talks include the following:

• Joseph Eska (Virginia Tech) "Laryngeal realism and issues of early Insular Celtic phonology and orthography"
• Michaela Jacques (Harvard), "Rewriting tradition: An early modern edition of the medieval Welsh bardic grammars"
• Carmel Ní Bhriain (NUIG), "Mapping TG4: Framing and reframing the Irish language"
• David Wallace-Hare (U-Toronto), "Epigraphic evidence of Hispano-Celtic bear worship in Roman Spain"
• "The Irish Language as Taught in Northern California: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel in Memory of Eddie Stack"

All are welcome; no registration is required.

Research News

Newly published: Amy Rose Deal, "Syntactic Ergativity as Case Discrimination", WCCFL 34, pp. 141-150

• Abstract: "A variety of languages with ergative case systems show a ban on A' movement of ergative subjects. Such bans are the most common type of syntactic ergativity. This paper advances an analysis of ergative extraction restrictions as case discrimination—the requirement that the probe driving movement Agree only with a goal bearing a certain case. This analysis puts together the idea that A' movement is driven by heads which bear [EPP] and Agree in an operator-feature with Bobaljik's (2008) proposal that Agree may be possible only for DPs with certain types of case. A ban on ergative A' extraction arises when the A' probe can agree only with unmarked DPs, not with DPs in dependent case. This account explains why some languages have syntactic ergativity only for certain types of A' movement, and correctly predicts syntactic ergativity in languages where ergative cannot be treated as an inherent case."

This week in Berlin: Susanne Gahl and Harald Baayen presented a plenary talk at CLARe3: Encounters in Language and Aging Research: 
Pragmatic Spaces, Longitudinal Studies and Multilingualism:

• "Twenty-eight years of vowels: An investigation of changes in vowel formants and vowel duration in the Up corpus"

Talks and Events

• Friday, March 10
  • 3–4:30: Tessa Scott (Berkeley), "Mechanisms of Resumptive Pronouns" (Syntax & Semantics Circle, 1303 Dwinelle)
• Monday, March 13
  • 12–1: Susan Lin (Berkeley), TBA (Phonetics and Phonology Forum, 1303 Dwinelle)
  • 2–3: SPREAD (Sociophonetic Research Exchange and Discussion, 1303 Dwinelle)
• Wednesday, March 15
  • 2–3:30: Chris Beier (Berkeley), TBA (Fieldwork Forum, 1229 Dwinelle)
  • 5–6: SLUgS meeting with guest speaker Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley), "What goes postverbal in a verb-final language? Syntactic categories, information structure and headedness in Karuk" (Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students, 1229 Dwinelle)
  • 5–7: Andrew Garrett (Berkeley), "Linguistic and Ethnographic Sound Recordings from Early 20th Century California: Optical scanning, digitization, and access" (Digital Humanities at Berkeley, Barrows 356, D-Lab convening room)
• Thursday, March 16
  • 12:30–2: discussion of .nex files and MrBayes (*dhworom, 1229 Dwinelle)
• Friday, March 17
  • 12–1:30: Oana David (UC Merced), TBA (CogNetwork, 1229 Dwinelle Hall)
  • 3–4:30: Lidia Mazzitelli (Köln), TBA (Syntax & Semantics Circle, 1303 Dwinelle)