Linguistics Department News (Calques)

The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) will be hosting an open house next week on Tuesday, Sept 22, from 5-6pm in Dwinelle 3401. (Please enter via the entrance in the link if you do not have office wing access after 5pm.) Come learn about SEI's interdisciplinary research on writing and technology and about opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage in over the coming year. There will also be copies of The World’s Writing Systems posters and other goodies on hand.

RSVP preferred, here!

Former lecturer Alexandra Pfiffner and Baichen Du (former visiting undergraduate student) have published an article in Laboratory Phonology, titled "The co-variance of acoustic cues and lip gestures in the production of the Mandarin sibilant contrast." Check it out!

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to welcome Miquel Simonet (University of Arizona), who will give a talk on Friday, Sept 11 at 12:00pm in the Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125). The talk is titled “Vowel sandhi processes in Catalan and Spanish: Investigating the phonetics-phonology interface.”

Abstract: This presentation reports on the findings of three acoustic-phonetic studies examining the production of vowel sequences across word boundaries in Spanish and Catalan. The first two studies focus on Spanish and investigate the realization of the vowel sequences /ea/, /ae/, /eo/, and /oe/ across words, as in casa enorme and mono enano. The first project examines Castilian Spanish, the variety spoken in north-central Spain, while the second analyzes Southern Arizona Spanish. Traditional impressionistic descriptions have proposed differences in the phonetic realization of these sequences across the two varieties. A central goal of these studies is to determine whether such descriptions accurately reflect the acoustic-phonetic facts. The third study focuses on Majorcan Catalan, specifically the realization of stressed {/i a u/} + schwa sequences across word boundaries, as in argentí elegant and català enigmàtic. Impressionistic phonological accounts assume that the schwa is categorically deleted in these contexts, leaving only phonetic traces associated with the following vowel. Using acoustic evidence, this study evaluates the validity of these claims. Across the three projects, I ask whether impressionistic phonetic descriptions, used in subsequent phonological analyses, are corroborated by instrumental phonetic data. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for our understanding of phonologization and of the phonetics-phonology interface.

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Friday Sept 4 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Round table: Research over summer, introductions
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sept 4 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Round robin
• FForum - Wednesday Sept 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Round robin catch-up of summer fieldwork and research. All are welcome!
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Sep 11 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3:10-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal and Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley): Donkeys, bishops, and the distinction between weak and strong definites