At the 17th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference in Southfield, MI, August 7-10, Eve Sweetser, Lorianne Fan (BA 2024), and Kim Grogan (University of British Columbia) will present a paper titled "Multimodal metaphor data and enrichment of corpus interpretation."
At the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Buenos Aires, July 14-18, Schuyler Laparle (PhD, 2022) and Eve Sweetser will present a paper titled "Projecting viewpoint: Material and immaterial discourse anchors." Eve Sweetser will also present a paper "PANDEMIC IS WAR metaphors: Multimodal blends with varied inputs and meanings."
Larry Hyman and John Merrill (PhD, 2018) will be presenting talks at the Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop (LLACAN, Paris) on May 22-23:
The workshop website contains the program and abstracts. The workshop is free for participants and attendees. You can register to confirm your in-person attendance or to receive the Zoom link to attend online.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2024, spring and summer 2025) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:
Congratulations, everybody!
News from the Script Encoding Initiative:
Helena Kansa is the Program Manager of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI). She is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and has a background in linguistics, anthropology, and foreign languages such as Italian and Arabic. In her role at SEI, Helena provides administrative and logistical support, oversees special projects like the script status database, and develops new initiatives like the upcoming SEI fieldwork fellowship. With a passion for advancing language accessibility, she is excited to assist SEI in promoting the digital representation of minority writing systems. As representative of SEI’s communications with the public, Helena hopes to cultivate new opportunities for collaboration with UC Berkeley students and the surrounding community. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, traveling, boxing, and working on her car. Helena welcomes anyone interested to reach out to her for any questions about SEI.
Please give her a warm welcome to the department. Helena is starting her role remotely, but will be around in person starting this summer. Feel free to drop by SEI's new office at Dwinelle 1224 to say hello!
There will be several presentations by current Berkeley linguists at this year's Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) in Minneapolis, May 15-17, 2025:
Anushah Hossain (Research Director, Script Encoding Initiative) will be speaking at two public events next week:
Tuesday, May 13 – "Character Building: Bridging Code and Culture through Unicode" at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Event details here.
Thursday, May 15 – "The Trailblazers that Made Bangla Computing Viable" at Adobe, San Jose, CA. Event details here.
Drop by if you find yourself in the South Bay, or catch the livestreams online.
The model that Gašper Beguš proposed in his 2021 Neural Networks paper will drive part of the Next Earth exhibition at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The opening night is May 10, 2025 at the Palazzo Diedo. More info is available here.
Maksymilian Dąbkowski has just published a new article on "Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination" in Proceedings of the 2023 and 2024 Annual Meetings on Phonology. Click here to read it.