Phorum

Spring 2025

January 31

Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives

I describe and analyze the phonological form and historical trajectory of nominal derivatives in A’ingae (ISO 639-3: con), an underdocumented Amazonian isolate (Dąbkowski 2021). Some words historically derived with otherwise preglottalized nominalizers have lost their glottalization over time. I propose that these “exceptions” are reflexes of originally glottalized words, which underwent semantic shift and lost glottalization due to contamination from the plain (i.e., non-glottalized) majority. This paper thus documents a rare case in which non-productive morphological patterns represent innovation rather than retention.

February 7

Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): Local nasalization in Atchan, a language without nasal consonants

In this talk, I investigate patterns of local nasalization in Atchan (ISO: ebr), a Kwa language spoken by the Tchaman people in and around Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Atchan displays a typologically unusual phonemic inventory: the language has three phonemic nasal vowels, but lacks underlying nasal consonants altogether (Bôle-Richard 1984, Russell 2023). Nasalization is pervasive in Atchan, at the level of the syllable as well as across syllable and morpheme boundaries, resulting in surface nasal consonants as allophones of sonorant consonants. I present phonetic and phonological data collected through recent primary fieldwork with Atchan speakers in Abidjan, including measurements of nasal and oral airflow. In this talk, I also discuss implications for representations of nasality and diachronic considerations for how such a system may have originated.

February 14

Anna Macknick (UC Berkeley): Teaching Phonetics in Introductory Linguistics Using Universal Design for Learning

Phonetics and phonology units of introductory courses are frequently students' first experiences with the field of Linguistics. This content can pose particular challenges due to its reliance on exclusively auditory content at times, and exclusively visual content at others. In this talk, I use the framework of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to consider how accessibility can be built into the curriculum itself. I highlight access barriers from previous iterations of the LING100 course and propose ways to minimize these barriers before the semester even begins. I argue that such changes can improve student experiences and reduce the gatekeeping effect of introductory coursework.  

February 21

Julianne Kapner (UC Berkeley): Ի՞նչ ու եւ ինչո՞ւ ("Which 'u', and why"): Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian

This talk, based on my second qualifying paper, presents results from the first study of the Armenian language as spoken in the Bay Area, focusing on acoustic sociophonetic analysis of the vowel system. I find that Eastern and Western Armenian speakers exhibit generally similar vowel spaces; instead, gender is a more significant predictor of the placement of certain vowels. This is also the first statistically robust analysis of variation in Western Armenian speakers’ production of /ʏ/. I find that speakers’ choice of variant is predicted by a combination of linguistic and social factors, including the nature of their multilingualism: speakers with more dominance in English use [ʏ] less frequently, while speakers who also know Turkish are more likely to use [ʏ]. Finally, this study uses the metric of Formant Trajectory Length to explore diphthongization in Bay Area Armenian as a potential effect of extended contact with English, finding no evidence for this. Overall, this study points to the Bay Area Armenian population as a promising context to explore vocalic variation and uncover variables that have not yet been widely explored.

February 28

Exploring Boundaries practice talks:

March 14

Cooper Bedin (UC Santa Barbara): Towards participant-driven analyses in sociolinguistic studies of gender and sexuality

In this talk I present two new analyses of data originally collected for my Berkeley undergraduate thesis (Bedin, 2022). This data includes production data (recordings of 14 speakers reading aloud a list of sentences) and perception data (presenting these recordings to 23 listeners and asking them to numerically evaluate how “queer/gay” the speaker sounds to them).

In the first analysis, I examine the role of listener variation in perception of gay-sounding speech. I use hierarchical clustering to identify groups of speakers based on how they were perceived by different listeners, as well as groups of listeners based on how they perceive different speakers. I argue that a productive route to resolving inconsistent results in this line of research thus far (cf. Campbell-Kibler and miles-hercules, 2021) is to attend to variation in listener behavior, and to speakers of non- gay and straight sexualities.

In the second analysis, I approach the production data only, and test statistical models that measure the relationship between speaker self-identified gender and /s/ center of gravity—a sociophonetic variable whose indexical field is frequently linked with gender and sexual orientation (e.g., Calder, 2021). I argue that it is not speakers’ demographic categories (‘male’, ‘nonbinary’, etc.) that best explain /s/ variation, but the attitudes they show towards these categories in how they describe their genders.

Both of these analyses prioritize bottom-up categorization of speaker participants driven by how they described themselves in open-response questions on demographic forms. By approaching the data in this way, I was able to determine results that were more informative than by considering only normative identity categories such as “gay,” “straight,” “male,” and “female.” Ultimately, I aim to call into question the perceived dichotomy between inclusive research practices and effective quantitative analysis.

March 21

Rhosean Asmah (UC Berkeley):

April 4

John Harris (University College London):

April 11

Yi Ting Huang (University of Maryland):

April 18

Irene Yi (Stanford):

April 25

Antón de la Fuente (Stanford):

May 2

Max Kaplan (UC Santa Cruz):