Linguistics Department News (Calques)

Prof. Lily Wong Fillmore passed away on Monday, October 26, at the age of 92. The Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education, Emerita, at the Berkeley School of Education, and a long-time friend of our department (e.g., as the invited commencement speaker at the 2017 Linguistics graduation ceremony), Prof. Wong Fillmore was a leader in the field of second-language acquisition. Her interest in this area went back to her own childhood experiences in school as a Cantonese speaker in post-Depression Watsonville. While raising her own children in the 1950s, she volunteered to teach in a California migrant labor camp, and then became an advocate for immigrant rights. She joined the Berkeley faculty after finishing a 1976 Stanford PhD in linguistics with a dissertation on cognitive and social strategies in second-language acquisition. Among other publications, her "What teachers need to know about language" (2000, with Catherine Snow) is a classic.

At Berkeley, Wong Fillmore long worked in support of student diversity and inclusive educational practices. She was active in supporting the undergraduate American Cultures requirement in 1989. She helped create a program that brought Indigenous language educators from Pueblo communities in the US southwest as PhD students in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She herself worked in Pueblo communities and in Yupik communities in Alaska, and in 1998 testified as an expert witness against Proposition 227, which greatly reduced bilingual education in California public schools. We will miss her sharp, funny, and generous presence.

(Written by Andrew Garrett. 2014 photo by Alex Madonik.)

Berkeley alum Jeff Good (PhD 2003), now a professor at the University at Buffalo, will receive the Linguistic Society of America's 2027 Kenneth L. Hale Award, which "recognizes scholars who have done outstanding work on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken."

Madeleine Strait has accepted a position in the de Young Museum as Assistant Curator, NAGPRA for the Coalition of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Congratulations, Madeleine!

Congratulations to Isaac L. Bleaman and co-author Georg F.K. Höhn on the publication of their article "Preposition-determiner interactions in a Northeastern Yiddish corpus" in the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics!